The state of the world 2021

It is hard to believe but the world is in a worse state than last year.

 

The United Nations declared 2021 as the International Year of Peace and Trust, the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development, the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, and the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour. There were no declarations concerning genicide in China, Burma, and East Africa. And no declarations regarding the mental illness of several national leaders.

Putin in Russia silencing all dissenters and rewritting history. Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus is importing migrants to flood eastern Europe, pandering to his Russian boss. Bolsonaro in Brazil is destroying the rain forest and denying there's a pandemic. Dr. Death, President Bashar al-Assad, is hanging on for dear life in Syria. His country is in tatters, the Turks are destroying the North and Vlad the Impailer is taking care of the rest and, the US intend to carry on destabilize the whole region. In China, citizens are reaping what they have sown, the city of Xi'an has been completely locked down, its 13 million people have been told not to go out, even for essentials. The authorities say supplies are adequate, hungrey citizens tell a different story.

Taken by surprise?

The Biscuit Committee at the Bank of England joined the stooges of the European Central Bank and the US Fed in being surprised by inflation. Across the globe supply-side problems are the source of the inflation. Someone needs to tell Turkey's Erdugan that cutting interest rates wont fix it. Like other emerging markets, Turkey has been borrowing dollars against future profits, markets are becoming dubious about these countries' ability to repay their debts.

 

December 2021

Johnson stops lying

23/12/21

The Prime Minister admitted talks over Northern Ireland were not close to reaching a resolution. Frost, his Brexit man, existed stage left so that he could join the campaign to oust Johnson. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has been given the poison Protocol chalice. Johnson said:

“As things stand neither Northern Ireland nor the UK more broadly gets any say on the way EU legislation is imposed on Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, the negotiations are not yet close to delivering outcomes which can genuinely solve the problems presented by the Protocol.”

The Farmers did for Johnson

18/12/21

Well, actually it was also fisherman, and disappointed Brexit voters. Johnson hasn't got Brexit done and voters in Shropshire noticed. They are still waiting for Frost to sort out Northern Ireland, the farmers are still waiting for, not so Priti, Patel to sort out their immigration problems. The Tulips are dying in the fields, the turnips are rotting in the ground, theirs no one to chop up the pigs and chickens. In Shropshire they culling the animals. And lockdown parties may have also played a part in the Tory by-election slaughter. Perhaps voters also noticed the £37bn wasted on test and trace.

Note: it was the Lib-Dems that won. The seat had been held by the Cons forever. Meanwhile, Labour did nothing. Labour's shadow Health person, Wes Streeting, was asked if Labour would be taking the same approach in a general election. Wes struggled to answer that one but said they would use their resources wisely.

A Marvelous Distraction

08/12/21

For the past few days the news media has devoted hours to Downing Street's partying last December. This was very bad under lockdown conditions. However, far worse is our woeful efforts to get our people out of Afghanistan, after Biden told the Taliban when the US was leaving. This gave Taliban a green light to take the country back. It should have given us several months to plan our exist. There was no plan, the foreign secretary, Raab went on a sunny holiday and the his top civil servant went for a longer holiday, while people in Kabul were hanging onto planes taking off. Dominic Raab says “no one saw this coming”. The Taliban did.

Whistleblower Raphael Marshall told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that the UK Foreign Office failed tens of thousands of Afghans after the Taliban swept to power. Raab, now Justice Secretary has told LBC that Pen Farthing's 'menagerie' of animals were not prioritised over getting more refugees out during the Afghanistan evacuation.

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
Another review will not fix a failed safeguarding system.

05/12/21

The six-year-old was tortured and killed by his father and stepmother. The father, Thomas Hughes got 21 years for manslaughter, his partner, Emma Tustin was jailed for 29 years for murder and child cruelty. Nadhim Zahawi says: "We will not rest until we have the answers we need." He was announcing  "…a single, national review of Arthur's death to identify where we must learn from this terrible case". Bullshit: he just needs to brush the dust of the report into Peter Connelly death in 2007.

Update: the Home Secretary will review the sentences.

 

November 2021

Following the science, all the way to the panic room

28/11/21

A new variant arose in the south. What shall we do, what shall we ever do? Well, panic, obviously. Think about another lockdown but say the word, lockdown. I mean, we don't want another run on toilet rolls, do we? Dr Angelique Coetzee, the lady in SA, who discovered the new Omicron variant says: that people she has seen with the variant display "very very mild symptoms" of Covid-19. In other words, we think that means that Whitty and chums need to out of the panic room and risk it with everyone else.
New Rules: everyone should wear a mask on transport and in shops from Tuesday. And too bad if you were coming home today from the New Red List countries - that will cost you dear, you will have to pay for 10 days in isolation. PS, we don't if Tory MPs will start wearing face masks in the Commons now.

Patel Uninvited

28/11/21

Following the death of 27 migrants on Wednesday (24/11/21) trying to reach our shores, dopey Boris decided to communicate with the Emperor Macron, via Twitter. The little man was not impressed and Ms Patel was ‘uninvited’ from a meeting with European Commission in Calais today. Johnson had offered to send a few of our bobbies over to patrol French beeches, just to help the Emperor’s less than useful gendarmerie. The offer was rejected. Patel said: "We will not shy away from the challenge we face, and next week I will continue to push for greater co-operation with European partners. It’s been a long push, this is not a new problem!

 

UN Sacks Whistle blower

16/11/21

Emma Reilly a human rights lawyer was fired by the United Nations after accusing the international body of handing China the names of Uyghur dissidents. She was effectively suspended for two years, Ms Reilly took the UN to its internal employment court, to no avail.
According to Emma, China had asked for the names of dissidents ahead of six human rights council sessions between March 2013 and October 2015. The UN says it does not give up names anymore, Emma says they still do.

 

No Jab No Job

13/11/21

Thursday saw the deadline for care workers to be double jabbed or leave the building. Well, actually Sajid Javid is doing what you’d expect, he’s quietly cut everyone a bit more slack. He’s told the CQC not to get tough until the 1st of January, really. We think he knows what a prat he’s being.

Tens of thousands of carers could be forced out of their jobs and lose their livelihoods, leaving care homes understaffed over winter. This week, Health Secretary Sajid also announced that the Government will seek to make Covid vaccinations mandatory for frontline NHS staff from April.

"It was moronically stupid."

05/11/21

That was the view from one Tory MP, on the Owen Paterson affair. The reputation of the Tories and Bonkers Boris was already in tatters, now it's in ashes.

The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Kathryn Stone judged that Paterson was a money-grubbing lobbyist and that he should face a 30-day suspension. This would have triggered a by-election. Paterson refused to accept his grubbing behaviour was against the rules.

Bonkers and his boys from under the stairs at No.10 decided that the Commissioner did not allow Paterson a right of reply, it was unjust, and other bullshit. So, they decided to oust the Commissioner and replace the Standards Committee, replacing it with a new one, that would allow money grubbing without penalty.

Upshot, one day after MPs voted to append the standards process, they U-turned and dumped Owen. Every newspaper in the land shouted Sleaze from their front pages (except the Torygraph.) Panic set in, too many votes at stake.  Hence, Paterson became one of the Expendables.

October 2021

World Beating

Test and Trace Shambles

31/10/21

Conservative peer Dido Harding, was in charge of test and trace, she was appointed by the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, he praised her “brilliant” work on the pandemic. Are we surprised that Hancock was clueless about facts like ‘only 14% of 691m lateral flow tests sent out had results reported’.

Unsurprisingly, a select committee report tells us that NHS test and trace “has not achieved its main objective to help break chains of Covid-19 transmission and enable people to return towards a more normal way of life”. According to Bonkers Johnson our test and trace system would be ‘world beating’ It should have been, given that £37 bn – has been wasted on hopeless consultants over two years.
Worryingly, test and trace is a key pillar of its “plan A” approach to autumn and winter, which ministers say is sufficient to avoid a crisis. Contractors are being paid an average of £1,100 a day. Some have been paid rates of more than £6,000 a day.

Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, said: “The national test-and-trace programme was allocated eye-watering sums of taxpayers’ money in the midst of a global health and economic crisis. It set out bold ambitions but has failed to achieve them despite the vast sums thrown at it.

Note: The report came from the Public Accounts Committee

 

Family Hubs?

Sure Start by another name
23/10/21

Sure Start was disappeared by Boy George Osborne a decade ago, apparently we couldn’t afford to take care our young families and their children. And on Wednesday next week Chancellor Sunak will be crowing about spending £500 million on a new Tory scheme to set up 75 Family Hubs around the country. Kate Green, Labour's shadow education secretary, said family hubs were "a sticking plaster for a fractured childcare and children services landscape". Boy George’s cuts led to the closure of a 1000 Sure Start centres. Chancellor Rishi said he "passionately" believed in giving children the "best possible start in life".
The Early Years Alliance tells us that since January that within the early years sector, specifically among nurseries, childminders and pre-schools, where almost 3,000 providers have closed down since January. Might be something missing from Rishi’s ideas on the "best possible start in life".

 

Will this nuttiness end?

16/10/21

Independent Loughborough Amherst School have told teachers to not stop describing pupil behaviour as good or bad. Teachers have been told to use skilful or unskilful instead. This action has been proposed to stop children becoming upset, resentful, angry and feeling guilty.

Across Tees Valley schools are being told they should not ask children to read out the word nigger in English lessons, when discussing books like Of Mice and Men. A campaign group wants to stop the negative impact n-word is having on black children.

Elsewhere, a gravestone honouring the Dambusters' dog, has been replaced. The black Labrador, Nigger, was the mascot of 617 Squadron. The RAF said it did not want to give prominence to an offensive term that went against its ethos. What fucking ethos, dropping bombs on people?
Comment from the West Ham website: Why don't they simply re-christen Gibson's dog "Blacky McBlackface"? The Mormons go around rechristening/baptising anything that's ever lived so can we get the dog on the list?

 

888

13/10/21

BT’s £50 million scheme is doomed, it’s a fandangled idea. You’ve started the 888 app, you’ve failed to arrive at your destination, you’ve been attacked, you need a policeman - You’re beyond help!
Confusingly, BT have suggested introducing a complementary service, running alongside their soon to be improved 999 service. The new service will be 888, termed a ‘walk-me-home’ app. Females walking home will put their home address into the mobile app. They would start the app before setting out. This will give the journey time and begin GPS tracking. The presumption is that failing to arrive on time will set in motion some kind of rescue action.
This scheme is all part our ineffective government’s ’seen to be doing something’ policy. Home Secretary Patel said: "This new phone line is exactly the kind of innovative scheme which would be good to get going as soon as we can. I'm now looking at it with my team and liaising with BT." The thing is, it is much easier to introduce a lame app than make the 999 system work properly and do something about male violence, the majority of which occurs in the home and the app will not help with that. The app also does nothing about the prevailing attitudes in the police service about women who have been assaulted. Only 1% of reported rapes result in a prosecution. Also, an app that does the same things as the BT innovation has been out there for the past six years. The app, Hollie Guard is free, and for a fee you can join the paid-for service will alert a 24-7 monitoring centre with staff who can contact the emergency services if needed.
And back to confusion, according to Chakra nutters, 888 is an angel number that signifies a lottery win or other financial gain is imminent. Also, 888 is an on-line casino. Do you get the connection?

 

The Web Takes another life

09/10/21

This week we learnt of an inquest into the death of Frankie Thomas. The coroner, Frances-Rose Thomas, said her school's failure to sufficiently monitor the internet activity of a 15-year-old autistic girl 'contributed' to her suicide. Accepting the school had a slack filtering system, it was a bit rich to blame the school for a company on the Net, i.e., Wattpad, that specialises in stories about suicide, self-harm and drug abuse, the site has over one billion such stories of woe. The signal fact is, Wattpad should not exist on the Net. Lax regulation by governments are responsible for Frankie’s death. The notion that you can leave content moderation to the money grubbers at Wattpad is laughable. PS. Wattpad has changed hands for $600m.

Note: Why did it take three years for the inquest to reach some conclusions?

Johnson outstandingly stupid

03/10/21

Boris appeared on the Andrew Marr show today and answered all Marrs' questions by referring to the achievements of his government. We could of course go the the Full Facts website and check on his lying but no need. The way he dealt with the shortage of slaughter men and abattoir workers and the impending pig cull was outstandingly stupid...

He told Andrew Marr,

“I hate to break it to you, Andrew, but I’m afraid our food processing industry does involve killing a lot of animals, that is the reality. Your viewers need to understand that. That’s just what happens.”

I'm sure the whole nation is thankful to Bonkers for that insight.

September 2021

Sodexo fails again
Baby dies on their watch

22/09/21

Failed sandwich maker, Sodexo Prison Services, have failed again. However, fear not they have taken on board the failures highlighted by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman – so that’s all right then. The PPO had finally got around to issuing its report into the death of a baby in HMP Bronzefield in September 2019. The baby’s 18 year old mother requested help several times but was ignored by Sodexo staff, she delivered the baby herself and had to bite through the umbilical cord herself. The baby died and all the people that ignored her were very sorry.

Unfortunately, Sodexo have a 25 year contract to run Bronzefild, the largest women’s prison in Europe. The contract doesn’t end until 2029.

The Third Man

22/09/21

Another Salisbury Novichoc killer has been identified. If you are now saying so what - you're right. Mob boss Putin is not going to give his killers up. Tom Tugendhat, the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee admitted to C4 that issuing warrants would not lead to anything. He made himself look a bit out of touch by crediting our spooks with identifying the third man. In fact, a team of investigative journalists from Bellingcat put Col Anatoliy Chepiga name in public domain.

No Hiding Place

18/09/21

There was no hiding place for Prince Andrew. Virginia Roberts, now Virginia Giuffre was not giving up. She had been wronged, and Andrew was going to pay for it. She was busy bringing a civil claim against him and he was wriggling like a slippery worm. Giuffre’s lawyers tried to serve papers at the Prince’s home but a policeman on the gate refused to accept any post. Andrew’s lawyers tried to use some arcane legal rules from the days of Noah's Ark to dodge being served. But a combo of judges here and in the US said he would served via his American lawyer... Gotcha! It gets better. If Andrew does not turn up after being served, he has to pay up.

Update: 24/09/21 Andrew admits he has now been served.

 

Aukus

19/09/21

Aukus, silly name for a deal between Australia, the US and UK to build some nuclear powered subs. Originally, the French had the multibillion pound contract but without notice the Australians cancelled it. The French are not pleased, they have recalled their ambassadors from the US. Apparently, the Chinese have decided that whole world now belongs to them, beginning with the islands of the South China Sea. So, it's important that democracies like Australia have the latest tech'. You know, so they can swim around for months on end under the water, keeping the world safe for us all.

 

Social Care Again

04/09/21

Boris told us he had a plan to fix the social care crisis. That was two years ago. He has done nothing. Now, he has to do something, something simple like putting up National Insurance. That will not fix anything but some people will think he has done something.

There is only one solution, the state should set up its own care structure, that is, care homes that charge fees on a non-profit making basis, in competition with the money-grubbing private cowboys. This will not be the same pathetic effort made when the NHS was set, when the social care part was passed to local authorities.  

If citizens want to pay £1500 a week to private equity firms then they can, after all choice is what Tories love. Meanwhile everyone else can pay a third of that in properly run and regulated public homes.

 

Pass the parcel on jabs

04/09/21

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) are not convinced that jabbing all 12 year + children is worthwhile: "the margin of benefit is considered too small to support universal vaccination... at this time". Poor Boris, may have to make a decision, he’s passed the parcel to Chris Whitty and Co.

 

August 2021

Betrayal in Afghanistan

28/08/21

Around 1500 Afghans have been left behind by the UK and the US as the regime changes run away from a job never done. A lunatic with a bomb killed 170 people at Kabul airport, so much for the Taliban handling the perimeter security. President Biden said: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” The final passenger flight took off today. Those left behind have been told to make it to a third country. Bonkers Johnson says he will “shift heaven and earth” during the second phase to get everyone out and the head of the armed forces, Gen Sir Nick Carter, said it was "heartbreaking" they had not been able to rescue everybody.

Update: Biden's revenge swung into action, a drone strike killed several innocent Afghan civilians, Sunday 29.

 

Raab on the line

20/08/21

Last Friday, with the Taliban just about to take Kabul, our Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, was too busy to speak to his Afghan counterpart, to ensure support for Afghans who have worked for UK forces. Yes, he was too busy on his sun lounger in Crete. One of his juniors was given the job but didn't make the call. The Foreign Office says it "was not possible" to arrange the call before the Afghan government collapsed. That meant, before they ran away. Boris and his crew have been dodging the fact that the Foreign Office should have been making phone two weeks ago. Since it was obvious that the Taliban were back for good, after all, Trump told the Taliban they could have it – he just forgot to tell the Afghan government about it.
Mr Raab has rejected demands from opposition parties to resign. Confusingly Raab keeps putting out pictures on social media of himself on the phone. We think he is attempting to reassure everyone that he knows how to use the phone. Clearly, this is a ruse, who in their right mind would want to talk to him?

Afghanistan Falls, is anyone surprised?

15/08/21

US military forces quit Afghanistan, leaving the Afghan forces to keep the Taliban at bay, without air support. The whole of the Nato cooalition combined could not keep the Talibs at bay without US air support. US intelligence assessment concluded that the Afghan government could fall within six months of the American military departure. So much for US intelligence, it took about six days.

Iraq, Lebonon, Afghanistan all left in a worse state following intervention from the West. What a waste!

Update: Dominic Raab says “no one saw this coming”. He was just back from his Greek holiday, he was on the beech when Kabul fell.

Olympic Games

08/08/21

Team GB returned with their medal haul of 65. A superb performance all round for our athletes. Sadly, British TV viewers were not able to enjoy the spectacle like previous games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) sold the TV rights to Discovery for £920m. Then Discovery made the games available via Eurosport, behind a paywall. You might think that with 206 nations participating in the games that there would be no need to involve companies like Discovery.

Talking of countries, why on earth did the IOC allow banned Russia, for drug abuse in previous games, to enter as ROC - which stands for Russian Olympic Committee, which is not a country. The drug ban on Russia, the country, will not be lifted until 2022.

July 2021

Infected blood inquiry

31/07/21

Lord Clarke appeared at the inquiry, doing a passable impersonation of Jabba the Hutt, that's him there. At one level his contribution was next to useless. At another level it was priceless. It demonstrated just how idle and irresponsible government ministers are in office. And how witheringly useless they become, once elevated to the House of Lords on £300 a day.

The infected blood inquiry was set up to investigate how thousands of people with the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia were given blood products by the NHS which were contaminated with the HIV virus and hepatitis C. Note, people undergoing operations were also given tainted blood and died as a result.
At least 4,689 British haemophiliacs are thought to have been treated with infected blood in the 1970s and 80s, so far, half have died.

The inquiry will try to figure out the exact number of people who have been infected, examine the impact the infection had on people’s lives, investigate whether there was any attempts to conceal details of what happened, and identify any individual responsibilities as well as systemic failures. (Source Guardian)
Ken Clarke was called in by the inquiry to answer questions on the scandal of treating haemophiliacs with Factor VIII blood plasma. Factor VIII was first approved for use in 1972. The UK could not meet demand and began importing the product from the US. By 1983 fears had been raised that the blood products contained hepatitis and HIV/Aids. The main source was the penal system in Arkansas, populated by drug addicts and HIV infected inmates. A single batch of factor VIII would include blood from up to 20,000 donors. If just one donor was infected, the whole batch would be contaminated.

Clarke’s performance at the inquiry was contemptuous, he just could not understand why anyone expected him to know what was going on the health department. Well, he was health minister from 1982 to 1985 and health secretary from 1988 to 1990. He said expecting him know anything was “pretty pointless”. I mean, he was concerning himself closing “old Victorian asylums” or getting rid of “old geriatric hospitals”. Why should he know anything about the health service poisoning its patients with contaminated blood products. He said: “Never does the minister personally start intervening and imposing a personal decision on what treatment the patients get.”
Really, in 1983, Clarke denied any threat was posed by Factor VIII. In one instance, on 14 November 1983, he told parliament: “There is no conclusive evidence that Aids is transmitted by blood products.” At a time when one of his colleagues, a minister at the DHSS, wrote to a constituent of his concerns over imported blood products. The government attempted to prevent that letter becoming public knowledge. Documents from the late 70s were also kept under wraps that expressed concern over blood products and “the singular lack of attention” the Department of Health had given to Britain’s blood products laboratory.

HIV screening for all blood donated in the UK only began on 14 October 1985. Yet, a World in Action programme exposed the fact that the contaminated products had been harvested on “skid row” in America, and asked why Britain was putting its haemophiliacs at risk by not producing enough of its own factor VIII concentrate.
By 1983, minutes from a meeting of the Committee on the Safety of Medicines recommended that factor concentrates undergo heat treatment to kill infection-causing viruses, but implementation was delayed because of the expense.

Official Secrets Review

28/07/21

Johnson was being interviewed by LBC radio on a range of policy topics. When it came to the Official Secrets Acts review he was clueless as usual. He new that stuff was happening, he said. He then proceeded to support the review he came up with this gem:

"You know as well as I do, some of the best and most important stories, whether they're Watergate or Thalidomide, come from tainted sources."

In both cases, there was no taint involved by those who uncovered the dire behaviour of government here and in the USA. He went on about info being put out in the public domain by journalists, that shouldn't be put out. Ah, so are there plans to increase the penalty from two years to fourteen years for breeches of the Act?

He said, the government was aiming to make sure they didn't do "anything to interrupt the operation of good journalism and bringing new and important works into the public domain."
"Whatever this thing is, I don't for one minute think it is going to interrupt the normal process."

Great to know he's no brighter than he was yesterday!

 

Covid Dodgers Scheme

18/07/21

The dodgers scheme is only available to politicians and civil servants. Selection for this scheme is a mystery. However, Johnson and Rishi Sunak were randomly selected. This meant that they could dodge self-isolation. This occurred a day after Saj, our health man, told us he had Covid. What a coincidence?

Once social media got to work on Johnson's scheme, it took only one hour and twenty minutes for the dodging duo to start isolating.

 

Rotten Business

13/07/21

Southern Water was found guilty of deliberately dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into the rivers and sea. The firm was fined £90m. The company admitted 6,971 illegal spills from 17 sites in Hampshire, Kent and West Sussex between 2010 and 2015. The judge identified Southern Water's board of directors as the culprits. This was the Environment Agency's largest ever criminal investigation, which began after shellfish were found to be contaminated with E. coli. The offences had been aggravated by Southern Water's "persistent pollution of the environment" which had led to 168 previous convictions and cautions.
It’s not only Southern doing the dumping, Thames Water were fined £20m in 2017 for their dumping activities. In fact, according to the Environment Agency, not one of the nine private water companies have managed to meet the targets set for them by water inspectors.

 

Euro Cup

11/07/21

England lost on penalties. The teams performance was below par. The Italian team, from the start of the second half onward out-performed England.

Policing at the event was appalling. The man in charge said there was no problem drunks and hooligans gate crashing the party. However, two days after the event police owned up they should have done much better.

 

Building Safety Bill

05/07/21

This bill is currently going through Parliament. It will supposedly bring far reaching changes to the way residential towers are built and managed. Housing secretary Robert Jenrick denied that it is a watering down of promises to get tough on building safety. The Bill introduces a Building Safety Regulator to oversee a tougher supervision system. Jenrick said,

“The new building safety regime will be a proportionate one, ensuring those buildings requiring remediation are brought to an acceptable standard of safety swiftly, and reassuring the vast majority of residents and leaseholders in those buildings that their homes are safe”.

 

June 2021

Mobile phones in schools
Just Another Tory Distraction

29/06/21

Gavin Williamson, education secretary and genius in his own front room, is telling schools to ban mobile phones. He has discovered that mobiles are at the heart of poor performance at school and generally making children disruptive and miserable. School leaders suggest that Gav focus on the disruption to education being caused by Covid. Currently, tens of thousands of children are at home, missing out on school. Where is Gav’s plan for “…an ambitious post-pandemic recovery plan, setting out how he intends to minimise educational disruption next term”?

 

Hallelujah
Hopeless Hancock Quits

26/06/21

Hancock told the world, via Twitter: "I have been to see the prime minister to resign as secretary of state for health and social care."I understand the enormous sacrifices that everybody in this country has made..." Midweek, the Sun, gave us pictures of Hancock clutching his squeeze, Gina Coladangelo in his office. There was outrage because he broke social distancing rules.

However, there more to this than a bit of rule breaking. Hancock and his doxy were up to something a bit more than a bit of slap and tickle.

Tories still dodging commitment on

Social Care

22/06/21

 

"The Prime Minister was due to meet with the Chancellor & the Health Secretary today to hammer out what could be afforded." BBC

Useless Hancock said a plan for social care will appear sometime this year. It was supposed to appear in the Queen's address, it did not. Bonkers Boris stood outside No.10 in July 2019, and told us he had a plan for social care, he was going to "fix the crisis in social care". According to the King's Fund, 1.9 million people made requests for social care in 2019.Keir Starmer told Johnson, following the Queen's address, "...657 days on from that promise what did we hear in this address? No legislation, no new funding, no details, no time scale," he added.

The government says it has put £1bn into care in the last year, but this is a sector which has faced years of under funding and increasing demand, leaving it with deep rooted problems - including a low paid, under-recognised workforce.

Lib Dems Take Chesham and Amersham

18/06/21

Ed Davey said the Chesham and Amersham result "sends shockwaves through British politics". He went on to tell us that the Tory Blue Wall across the south of England was crumbling.

  Sarah Green (Liberal Democrat): 21,517
Peter Fleet (Conservative): 13,489
Carolyne Culver (Green Party): 1,480

An astonishingly nice BBC reporter described Labour’s 622 votes as “astonishingly low”. It was not low for a party led by a Ghost called Keir. Sadly, Labour's New Manager lost the deposit, now that's what you call low.

 

More Police Corruption

16/06/21

Priti Patel, our Home Secretary, says she was "deeply alarming" by the report into the murder of private investigator, Daniel Morgan. That would be the report that she never wanted to see the light of day because it reveals how the police were and are institutionally corrupt.

Interestingly, those people charge with producing the report took eight years to do the job. They say they had to wade through over a million documents of supposed evidence, produced over 20 plus years since Morgan's killing. Chairman Baroness Nuala O'Loan also criticised a lack of co-operation from Met during the inquiry.

Shoot to kill, Cressida Dick apologised for failure to catch Daniel Morgan's killer. She added: "It is a matter of great regret that no one has been brought to justice and that our mistakes have compounded the pain,"

There have been five separate police inquiries over 20 years, no one has been convicted of the murder. And never will there be a conviction, all the evidence has been disappeared. What would expect from a corrupt outfit like the Met.

 

Indian variant rampant

14/06/21

Thanks to Johnson's stupidity in delaying India's addition to the Red List, thousands of travellers retuned from India to spread the variant nationwide.

This spread brought about delaying the planned Road Map full opening on June 21. So called "Freedom Day" is now 19 July.

 

Mr Rab in pole position....
for the Teapot Prize

13/06/20

The BBC tells us: "Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab says it is "offensive" that some EU figures characterise Northern Ireland "as somehow a separate country" to the UK."

Well, the thing is Mr Rab, (there's only one A, he added the other one himself), if you had bothered to read the Northern Ireland Protocol, you would know that NI is still a member of the EU and little England is a 'third country'. There's an invisable border in the Irish Sea, you dope. You know the border that Bonkers Boris said would never be there.

 

The Final Insult For the 96

04/06/21

The wrongful exercise of lawful authority, that's what the justice system calls 'misfeasance' in public office. It does not matter how they dress up the lying and deceit by two police forces a crime has occurred for which no one has been punnished. South Yorkshire Police caused the mayhem and West Midlands Police failed to honestly investigate the cover up of their South Yorkshire colleagues.

Both forces have apologised to the families of the dead and come up with a compensation scheme. No amount of money will cover up the criminal behaviour of the police in this case.

May 2021

They think it's all over, it is now!

26/05/21

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hillsborough match commander, David Duckenfield, was in court arguing he was not responsible for the deaths of 95 football fans, due to gross negligence. You'll be pleased to hear that his request for legal aid has been denied. In fact, his past legal aid bill had already amounted to £7.4m. However, Duckenfield was found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter in November 2019. Prior to that Sir Norman Bettison, a chief inspector in 1989, was accused of trying to blame Liverpool fans for the disaster, charges were dropped in 2018 due insufficient evidence.

Today, two retired police officers and an ex-solicitor accused of altering police statements after the Hillsborough disaster have been acquitted. They had denied perverting the course of justice during giving evidence to the Taylor inquiry in 1990. Mr Justice William Davis ruled they had no case to answer. Judge Davis seemed to be saying since they were supplying information to an inquiry, not a court, perverting the course of justice did not come into it?

Gupta Taking Liberties

26/05/21

Sanjeev Gupta is the current owner of Liberty Steel. He is also the owner of GFG Alliance, which he is in the process of refinancing. He is also the owner of Wyelands Bank. The bank has a problem, it is being investigated by that genius at the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, and it looks likely that Wyelands will be liquidated. Oddly, the BoE supplied GFG with a a loan of £46m. Gupta’s biggest lender was none other than the now gone bust Greensill Capital. He also has problems with Tata, he is in their debt for his purchase of their specialist steels division, he has been missing his repayments. GFG is also in trouble with Credit Suisse, for extremely big money. Gupta’s strategy, sell up, and wash your hands of the problems you’ve created by operating on fresh air. Thousands of jobs are at stake and our business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng says the UK steel mills that are up for sale are "good assets" which are likely to find buyers. Who would that be Kwasi, the Chinese? If it’s all so good, renationalise.

Note: GFG stands for Gupta Family Group

 

Comic Turn at Grenfell Inquiry

 

18/05/21

 

Rock Feilding-Mellen, the former Conservative councillor and deputy leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea at the time of the Grenfell fire, brought his best mad cap routine to the inquiry. He was in charge of the refurbishment to the tower. Although, listening to him at the Grenfell inquiry he seemed more like an disinterested passer-by. He never questioned the safety of the cladding, he left that to the supposed experts he was employing, his only concern was the colour of the cladding. He was sent a "councillor guide on fire safety for use during estate visits", by the fire service but he never used it.

 

 

Getting Old in England

11/05/21

 

Someone once said that the degree to which a country might be considered civilized could be judged by the number of people it had in prison. A better measure would be the way a country treats its elderly citizens.

What's required is a National Care Service for the Elderly but the Tories do not have any plans for that. In fact, they have no plans. Boris Johnson told us in his first speech as PM in July 2019: “We will fix the crisis in social care once and for all - with a clear plan we have prepared.” He went on to say the plan was "oven ready" - and there it is on the right.

Gove said today that the plan was still being prepared, it will be ready for the oven around 2025.

 

 

Ghost takes responsibility for Hartlepool failure at the polls.

09/05/21

The Ghost of Hartlepool, Keir Starmer, said he would take full responsibility for Labour’s poor showing. Starmer must be kidding since he did nothing. How can he take responsibility for doing nothing? He sacked Angela Rayner as Labour’s party chair and national campaign coordinator. So it seem that ‘the Ghost’ wants to lay off some of the blame. He also went on to sack Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds, what she did, no one knows?

According to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, “by-elections… are often moments when voters remind the administration of the day who is really in charge.” Standing around outside Parliament is obviously having an effect on her ability to make sense.

The Tories romped home with a 7000 majority. Leaving the Labour Party looking a trifle unwell. Questions were being asked about the Ghost's lack of competence. Why choose a Remain candidate, when during the Brexit Referendum 10,000 Hartlepool voters chose leave. Experts are guessing that the leavers jumped on the Tory ticket this time. The vaccine bounce played a major part in the Tory success.

 

Lag B'Omer festival Crush

02/05/21

Lag B'Omer is a Jewish festival that celebrates two Rabbis from the 2nd century. Tens of thousands came to sing and dance and dozens got crushed because they were herded into a passage way that did not allow the numbers to pass through safely. The situation echoes Hillsborough, and the frequent crushes at the Hajj in Mecca. The latter has led to research into safe crowd management, using computer models, available free on YouTube. Although, what would the ultra-Orthodox want with computer models?

 

Covid-19 in India out of breath

02/05/21

Hospitals and crematoriums overwhelmed, widespread shortages of oxygen and medicines, that sums up the state of India. Eight months ago a plan was put in place to set up 160 oxygen plants, only 37 have so far been realised. That sums up India's key problem the abysmal performance of its managers, first among them, the dreadful Modi. That performance leaves Modi clueless on how many people are dying in the villages of India. The ones who do not have the wherewithall to taxi from one hospital or another looking for a bed or some oxygen.

 

April 2021

"Let the bodies pile high"

27/04/21

No one could ever accuse Boris Johnson of having an original thought... although the nitwit says he didn't say it.

Grass

By Carl Sandburg
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                                          What place is this?
                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.
                                          Let me work.

Johnson does however have a large store of gall, yesterday, the stupid man said he was working overtime to get Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe back home from Iran. It was this idiot who got her locked up in the first place because he was too lazy to read his notes.

 

Boris, a case of failed evolution

21/04/21

Johnson is like some Roman emperor, so completely mad that he ends up marrying his horse. Our political class are supposed to adhere to the "Nolan Principles". Integrity is a key principle, Johnson has none. There he was in his new media room, that cost £2.6 million, spouting forth, when he got a question from the Huffington Post.

Integrity

"Do you agree with the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) which in its review of your links with Jennifer Arcuri concluded, and I quote, 'It would have been wise for Mr Johnson to declare this as a conflict of interest and a failure to do so could have constituted a breach of the Nolan Principles'.
"And those principles include acting with honesty and integrity. Do you believe you acted with honesty and integrity in your relationship with Miss Arcuri, who claims you conducted your affair in your marital home?” Long silence, and then, "Yes". Boris departed the his new media room and had the door locked. There would be no more briefings. His media guru, Allegra Stratton will now become a spokesperson for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26. Allegra said she was delighted?

Refurbishment

Johnson was in his newly refurbished 4 bedroom flat above No.11, plenty of room for him and the horse to move around. Now, the interesting thing is, the price of the refurb, a mere £200,000. The work was done by some high-end Mayfair person with a silly name. Carrie Symonds contributed to the bill by choosing £100 a roll wallpaper. Boris only had £30k in his back pocket and there’s a suggestion funds were contributed from the Conservative Party till. If that did occur then it would represent a breaking of the rules. Clearly, something did occur because Lord Brownlow made a hasty donation to the Party till of £60,000. The Electoral Commission are investigating. We still want to know where Boris got the rest of money, he was planning to do some crowd funding.

Dyson

Just when Boris thought the storm clouds were lifting they came back again. The BBC gain access to texts exchanged between Singapore based wise guy James Dyson and Boris concerning the manufacture here of ventilators. Wise guy James did not want to pay tax on work done here. The rules were changed so that during the pandemic so that days spent in the UK between 1 March 2020 and 1 June 2020 would not count in the 90 day tally if they were spent working on Covid projects - such as ventilators. In one text Boris clearly states “I will fix it…”. According to Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden: "In the middle of a national emergency, we had to move fast...that's what the prime minister did in this instance." Actually, they did not move fast enough to keep Dyson interested, he did not make any ventilators to save us all.

Prince Phillip

16/04/21

Last weekend the BBC decided to shut down their TV output on BBC 1 and 2 with wall to wall coverage of the Prince's death. Mainly, coverage was repetitive and then some, peppered with anecdotes from those who witnessed first hand the Prince's great works. The BBC received over 100,000 complaints from viewers being denied their favourite shows. The BEEB claimed it was all about showing respect for the great man and his great works. Whatever, their coverage did what it was designed to do, it persuaded many that this man's life was not a pointless waste of time and without him our lives would have been less full of joy and, the Queen, would not have been such a flaming light to guide our nation.

Johnson's Race Report

A Fatalistic Narrative

05/04/21

The Prime Minister set up the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in July 2020, the  report was published last Friday. However, parts of the report were leaked to the press and they made the most of it. Institutional racism was everywhere, rampant, there were no opportunities for black people.  The Commission were depicted as racism deniers, slavery apologists and worse. However, all those shouting about racism in Britain missed the point. The purpose of the report was to present a hopeful picture, a picture of progress, not a picture of victimhood and discrimination.  Not a "fatalistic narrative". All those shouting about how badly they are being treated in Britain may not realise that they are not actually winning any converts.

 

 

 

March 2021

Recycling Delusion

31/03/21

Researchers, seeking to discover how widespread plastic pollution had become, tracked ants from across the globe. Every ant had plastic additives on their skin. It is not just ants who are walking around full of plastic, so are we. Micro and nano deposits of plastic molecules is found in all our food and even our bottled water. The long-term effects as yet are unknown.

Companies that make plastic are not responsible for their product. The companies that use the plastic to make or package their own products are not responsible. The cost of collecting, sorting, and recycling plastic is borne by taxpayers.

All the companies do is produce messaging campaigns, to correct consumer habits concerned with household recycling. These messages create the Recycling Delusion by encouraging us to separate our waste into re-use plastic and land fill rubbish. We are encourged to stop using single use plastics, to shop with ‘bags for life’ and take our own cup to the coffee shop, instead of using their non-recyclable cups. Company messaging makes plastic pollution an individual problem, which is nonsense.

Only 9% of all plastic produced gets recycled—this may be a gross overestimation. In the UK the majority of household recycling is burnt or sent overseas. However, poor countries are getting fed up with the rich ones treating them like dustbins. China stopped in 2018, the US and European states were caught napping when the plastic started to pile up. Incineration is no solution, all it produces is cancer-causing air pollution.

In 2019, virgin plastic became cheaper to buy than recycled plastic for the first time. virgin plastic is so cheap that there is no financial incentive for companies to use recycled plastic in their products. In short, plastic recycling is a myth—and always has been.

New plastics is the result of how cheap it is to make it, buy it, and use it as an industrial material. The fossil fuel industry has for decades been receiving indirect subsidies by being allowed to pollute without paying for the clean-up. The big oil and gas companies are increasing plastic production as revenue falls from obvious polluters like petrol. Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon are on the record planning to switch to greater plastic output.

Of all the plastic produced, 40% is made to be used once, much of it in the form of packaging that serves a function for six months or less and then thrown away. Except you cannot throw plastic away, it is indestructible.  

At every stage in its life, plastic contributes to climate change. They found that all plastics continuously released ethylene and methane, potent greenhouse gases, as they weathered and aged.

Cameron and Sheep

21/03/21

Shock horror, Cameron texted Sunak, lobbying for his masters at Greensill Capital. What else would we expect a sheep loving Bullingdon Boy to do, after he ran away from all the problems he created whilst PM. Cameron is hopeless embarrassment. He was begging Sunak for loans to stop Greensill sinking without a trace. They say Sunak never replied to Cameron but we know that his masters were given special access to Treasury tea boys, over and above normal for a local shop keeper. We also know that in the past Greensill had been helped out by the public purse, and some serious rules were broken.

 

A Message for Raab

14/03/21

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has appeared in court in Iran, a week after her ankle tag was removed, having served five years in prison. It looks likely that they are busy cooking up another charge. Britain still has not paid back the £400 million it owes Iran. Nazanin was in prison because Boris Johnson was too lazy to read his brief, when he was Home Secretary and stupidly told the Iranians that Nazanin was a journalist. Raab should be told this. Raab should also remove one those a's in his name, afterall, he wasn't born with it - people may think he's a liar like Boris.

Calls for Cressida Dick to Resign

14/03/21

A vigil planned by Reclaim These Streets in Clapham on Saturday evening was been cancelled following discussions with police. The police banned the vigil on the grounds it would unsafe due to Covid.

The vigil was inspired by the murder of Sarah Everard as she walked home at 9pm on 3 March, near Clapham Common. Subsequently, a police officer has been arrested and appeared at the Old Bailey charged with her murder.

The police ban was ignored and things turned nasty, with a number of women being taken away in handcuffs. The said they decided to take action when people started throwing things at them. A picture of one woman being pinned to ground by several policeman appeared in all the newspapers. She later said the police were lying about people throwing things, to cover up their poor handling of the situation.

There were calls for Cressida Dick to resign since she must have known via her Gold commander what the police were intending to do. Here at Blast It we think Shoot To Kill Dick should have gone after the shooting to death of carpenter Jean Charles de Menezes.

Dick did not go, she got promoted.

 

Royal racists

08/03/21

On Monday, Meghan and Harry gave an extended money spinning interview to billionaire Oprah Winfrey. The world stopped, 19 million viewers watched in the UK. Elsewhere, the interview was syndicated to 70 countries. There are one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week and TV and radio commentators used everyone of them to comment. For two hours the ex-royals shared their suffering and anguish but one comment made Oprah gasp. The couple had been asked what shade of off white their child might be? The Mail said it was the end of the Royal family. Let's hope so!

 

February 2021

Nurses only worth a 1% pay rise.

03/03/21

Nurse unions to ballot for strike action, after a pay rise of 1% is suggested for nurses. One union wants folks to engage in a slow hand clap next Thursday. However, such a gesture will be about as worthwhile as every time Keir Starmer opens his mouth, and nothing meaningful comes out. The Labour party are 13% behind the Tories in the poles, after the Covid disaster of 2020 and this recent announcement disregarding the efforts made by our nurses. Starmer was asked how much he would award, given that the main nurses union have asked for 12.5%. Starmer would not give a figure, saying it was complicated. The NHS pay-review body will take more evidence and make a final decision on nurses pay in May

Note: The Department for Health and Social Care submitted a 155 page document to the pay-review body. Really, 115 to justify 1%?

 

 

Patel should pay the bill for her bullying

05/03/21

Last year Home Secretary Priti Patel was judged to be a bully by PM Johnson’s adviser on the ministerial code Sir Alex Alan. Johnson had asked Alan to investigate asking reports of bullying by Patel came to light. The upshot: Alan found that Patel was a bully, Johnson back Patel and Alan resigned. Patel had broken the code governing ministers' behaviour. She should have resigned!

This week Sir Philip Rutnam, Home Office permanent secretary, attempted to get Patel to change her bullying attitude and received of a "vicious and orchestrated" briefing campaign that forced him out of his job. Upshot: he received a pay out of £340,000 and had his legal fees paid by the tax payer.

Patel admitted "there are no excuses" for her conduct, adding: "I've clearly upset people." Then in typical Patel fashion, she took it all back saying: "...any upset I have caused was completely unintentional".

 

 

Fire Safety Bill

25/02/21

Tories abandon thousands of leaseholders

Hilary Benn MP wrote on Labour List: “Their homes are now firetraps. They are worthless. They cannot borrow against them and they cannot sell them. This is a story of monumental regulatory failure - of flats being built as cheaply as possible, in many cases without even complying with the building regulations.”

He was talking about all the citizens that have been betrayed by the Tory government. He was hoping that the Tories in the Commons would allow an amendment to the Fire Safety Bill, preventing freeholders passing the historic costs of remediation for the removal of high-rise cladding (and other costs) to leaseholders.

His hopes were dashed. A ban on freeholders passing fire safety improvement costs on to leaseholders - went to a vote, it was beaten by 340 to 225.

Home Office minister Kit Malthouse said the Fire Safety Bill was "not the correct place for remediation costs to be addressed", as the legislation's only job was to "clarify" that fire safety orders apply to cladding and flat entrances.

Note: According to figures from the New Build Database, a national record of issues that affect homeowners, as many as 4.6 million properties, home to 11 million residents, could be affected by the cladding crisis.

 

The Hancock Cover Up

20/02/21

A lawyer told LBC, "Hancock broke the law but he did not commit a crime". Far too difficult for mortals to grasp? So he will not be going to jail and will collect £200 for passing go! A judge said the health secretary had "breached his legal obligation" by not publishing details within 30 days of PPE contracts being signed by the Health Dept.

And Labour said: the government's awarding of contracts was "plagued by a lack of transparency, cronyism and waste". Shall we sack Hancock, reporters asked Sir Keir, no, we are in the middle of a pandemic.

Campaign group the Good Law Project took legal action against the department over its "wholesale failure" to disclose details of the contracts agreed. And interestingly, the Government spent £200,000 on lawyers defending its indefensible cover up.

NASA ignores local opposition

20/02/21

In 2012 a £1.6 billion one-ton robot rover called Curiosity, the size of a small car, landed safely on Mars after one of the most daring and difficult interplanetary operations attempted. A small group of local protesters, anarchists and CND beatniks were on hand to welcome the rover, local Martians there to tell NASA to keep their curiosity to themselves. Unperturbed by local opposition the American space agency are at it again. This time the rover is called Perseverance. No one doubts that landing this beast was a phenomenal engineering feat but locals have not been taken in by the notion that the rover is there to search for signs of past microbial life.  I mean, as if Nasa cannot see the beatniks, with their banners saying

‘Piss off back to your own dying planet’.

Just another gesture

Taking the knee

20/02/21

Colin Kaepernick started the knee taking movement, his intention was to raise awareness of police brutality towards African Americans in the US. That happened in 2016, interestingly, Sky News seems to think that the death of George Floyd in 2020 was the catalyst for knee taking. It was the Black Lives Matter movement that was inspired by the death of Floyd. Taking the knee by sports personalities was given impetus by idiotic politicians like Don Trump, who suggested that anyone taking the knee should be shot. In fact, Trump and Co probably did more than Martin Luther King, going down on one knee at a civil rights march in 1965.

However, footballers here are beginning to question taking the knee, Crystal Palace star Wilfried Zaha said he felt taking a knee was "degrading" and suggested players "stand tall" in the fight to end racial inequality faced by black people. Let’s face it, it’s a gesture, just like clapping for nurses – gestures will not change a thing. Just ask the protesters in Burma, with their three finger gesture from the Hunger Games.

No “mismanaged” relaxation of Lockdown

19/02/21

A report by the Institute for Government thinktank warned that a repeat of last summer’s “mismanaged” relaxation – with schemes like chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out – would undermine recovery and risk forcing England into a fourth lockdown. The report said easing of controls must be based on “clear metrics” like numbers of cases, hospitalisations and vaccinations and the crucial R rate of virus reproduction.
Note: a metric is a system or standard of measurement, there are no "clear metrics" surrounding Covid 19.

 

Welcome Back!

14/02/21

Arrivals to the UK from 33 red listed countries will be forced to quarantine in hotels from midnight for 10 days and will have to pay £1,750 for their stay. Crown Commercial Service are being used to book the hotels, they have 16 lined up to take part in the scheme. People who run hotels and the workers unions are not happy with the governments planning. Air conditioning appears to be a big problem, most hotels here tend to have central systems, unlike the continent, where they tend to use individual systems. Also, in many hotels, the windows in rooms to do not open. There is also concern from the GMB union: “If you've got people getting off planes from the red list countries, then being crammed into areas with passengers who aren't going into quarantine – and staff as well - you've failed at the first hurdle.”

London Fire Brigade – "gravely inadequate"

14/02/21

The London Fire Brigade were issued with 25 recommendations from Grenfell fire inquiry. 16 months later they have only managed to deal with four of the suggested improvements. It did acknowledged “the scale of the changes needed”. Apparently, they recognised that there was “much more work to do”, particularly on training for fires at high-rise residential buildings. That’s encouraging but they have not carried out any training for fires in high-rise residential buildings in the past three years. The fire regulator described the brigades performance at Grenfell as "gravely inadequate".

 

A short sharp shock

09/02/21

The 1979 Conservative Policy manifesto promised that the party would "experiment with a tougher regime as a short, sharp shock for young criminals". And there he was, PM Johnson, following 8 fatal stabbings in London in the past few days, talking the same hollow nonsense. He pledged to do more to prevent young people from being "sucked in the nihilistic" gang culture. 'Absolutely everything' is being done to tackle violent crime. There was going to be 'tough policing policy response', tough sentencing and, he was going to make sure that kids had things to do?

On the same day a home grown teenage neo-Nazi terrorist was on trial for distributing a manual giving instructions on how to make bombs, Molotov cocktails, and building an AK47. He pleaded guilty, showed remorse and held his grandmother’s hand. The judge swallowed a load of guff about the young chap being 'susceptible to the influence of others'. In total he pleaded guilty to 12 offences and was given a 24-month youth rehabilitation order.

Note: There were 44,000 knife crime offences in England and Wales last year.

 

NHS: Government plans to reverse Cameron-era reforms

06/02/21

Unbelievably, the government is planning some real change to the running of the NHS since the mess introduced by the Con-Dem Coalition in 2012. The plan is that the NHS and local authorities will be left to run services and told to collaborate with each other. Hence the role for the private sector under competitive tendering will be reduced. However, the emergence of "cosy local monopolies" needs to be guarded against with a decent accountability mechanism. Clearly, any new legislation should make the Health Secretary and his ministers responsible for oversight.

Coronavirus in Tanzania: The country that's rejecting the vaccine

05/02/21

President Magufuli of Tanzania believes the Covid-19 vaccines could be harmful and has instead been urging Tanzanians to use steam inhalation and herbal medicines. The twit even had his health minister Dorothy Gwajima  (pictured) hold a press conference to demonstrate how to make a vegetable smoothie that she said, without providing evidence, would protect against coronavirus. Our friends at the World Health Organization said the smoothie treatment was not approved.

 

 

 

 

January 2021

Anne Sacoolas stays home free

28/01/21

The new Biden administration has no intention of allowing Anne Sacoolas to come back to the UK to face a trial over the alleged killing of Harry Dunn. Sacoolas left Britain, claiming to have diplomatic immunity, after she crashed into Harry on his motorbike near RAF Croughton, Northamptonshire, in 2019.

 

Keeping Covid Out

27/01/21

Boris Johnson said: "We have one of the toughest regimes in the world."
The UK now require a negative Covid test in the past three days for arrivals, and to exclude most foreign nationals coming from Brazil, Portugal and most of southern Africa.

We do not have a tough regime. Even the cabbage crunchers of Kazakhstan are ahead of us, what would Borat say about that.

Countries with tighter rules include Algeria, Australia, Argentina, Finland, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Mongolia, New Zealand, Philippines, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Vietnam and Venezuela.

Test and trace consultants on £1000 a day

25/01/21

Tory crony, Dido Harding, the woman in charge of the test and trace effort told MPs we are really lucky that private sector consultants had stepped in to help out the public sector. But, MPs asked, is their pay a tad excessive? No, she tells them, they are working for less than they normally would. They are only getting £1000 a day, on average. But, what are they doing for such high wages? No details of job descriptions was forthcoming. However, written details would be sent in later to the Public Accounts Committee. And could Dido explain why 60% of those traced were not self-isolating. No, they were bad and selfish people.
It would never occur to likes of Dido that poor people cannot afford to take time off work, if they want to keep their heads above water.

Knightsbridge Circle queue jumpers

24/01/21

This week, a wealthy couple flew from London to Dubai. They were picked up at the airport in a Bentley and taken to a luxury villa. The next day they taken to a private clinic for a Covid-19 vaccine. Three weeks later they will be given the second shot. This pair are £25,000-a-year members of Knightsbridge Circle. Members are taken care of by personal managers, who cater for their every need.

Week ending 23/01/21

In the US, it took 25,000 troops to safeguard, so called, democracy. Joe Biden was sworn in as the nation’s 46th president, and he wasted no time signing a raft of executive orders to undo Trumps madness. He said he might return in “some form”.

Here in the UK, there was a rumour doing the rounds that Bonkers Johnson overpromises and underdelivers. Someone must have told him because this week he stopped jumping up and down excitedly about injecting people against Covid 19. There seems to be some confusion about how long we can delay the second jab for maximum effectiveness. It may be that the current approach of delaying second jabs may be a very big mistake?

In Russia, Vlad Putin the Impaler, had Alexei Navalny arrested on his return to the country. Navalny had been recovering in Berlin, after Vlad tried to poison him. Vlad doesn’t like critics, and Mr Navalny is his biggest. This week saw protests across the frozen wastes of Siberia in temperatures of -50, Vlad’s riot police were on hand to crack a few heads. The question now is, how will Alexei avoid the FSB death squads whilst in the Gulag?

 

Watch This Space

17/01/21

Kwasi Kwarteng, Business secretary, says his department is examining EU protections but he is not suggesting the removal of the Working Time Directive. He said he wants to maintain our high working standards. Then he disappeared into La-La land, saying:  “I think we can be a high-wage, high-employment economy and a very successful economy. And that’s what we should be aiming for.” All very interesting when we learnt that he is consulting with business leaders, no mention of trades unions.

Update 28/01/21: Kwarteng has rowed back on his plans to review employment protections, saying: “The review is no longer happening within the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). I made it very, very clear to officials in the department that we’re not interested in watering down workers’ rights.”

 

Happy Fish

17/01/21

Another ‘visitor’ revealed himself in the Commons on Friday. Jacob Rees-Mogg told the assembled few: "The key is we’ve got our fish back. They’re now British fish and they’re better and happier fish for it." So never mind those complaining Scottish fisherman, who can’t get their fish to the Euro market due to the increased Brexit red tape.

 

 

Wi-Fi biggest upgrade for 20 years

16/01/21

“Wi-Fi is about to get a lot better. New phones, laptops, TVs, routers, and more will come with support for Wi-Fi 6E, a new upgrade to Wi-Fi that’s essentially like expanding your wireless connection from a two-lane road to an eight-lane highway.” (taken from The Verge)

Someone needs to ask the Wi-Fi Alliance why took them so long to make the changes?

 

Nil to mouth: Neoliberal support for food vouchers

14/01/20

Ben Bradley, Tory MP for Mansfield since 2017, keeps making a prat of himself, mainly because he is a prat. Here at Blast-it we prefer to view people like Bradley as ‘visitors’ from an alternate reality. That reality is governed by competition and those that fall behind in the race will be classed as losers. These losers may require help with their inability to cope, the private sector is best placed to supply such help.

Bradley made comments via Twitter that parents shouldn’t to be given food vouchers because they would trade them for drugs, rather than using them to feed their children. Vouchers came to the top of the news agenda when a mother twitted a picture of the food parcel she had received containing a very inadequate supply of food for her children. It soon became clear, following several tweets, that the private companies contracted to supply the food parcels were taking advantage of the public purse yet again.

The discontinued voucher scheme was reinstated hastily and Bradley removed his nonsense tweet and claimed that his tweet was “taken out of context”. The context was Bradley telling us, as ‘visitors’ will always do, that these poor types are programmed to take advantage of the help they are given. The actual context was the growth in the number of poor children after ten years of Tory government and a private sector chumocracy not adequate to the task.

 

What a Carry On

08/01/21

Yesterday Trump was praising the Capitol rioters as "people who love our country." Today he says: "you do not represent our country and you will pay." Meanwhile, democrats and republicans alike are calling for Trump to be removed immediately. No surprise there, these chumps have watched as Trump reduced US politics to a 1960s Carry On movie and things don't get worse than that.

UP

A recruiting advert for Special Forces

08/01/21

Back in October we were brought the news that stowaways had taken control of the oil tanker Nave Andromeda off the coast of the Isle of Wight. The captain and crew had locked themselves in and a call was made to the Hampshire Constabulary. More calls were then made, to the Home Office and Ministry of Defence. The decision was made to send in Special Boat Service commandos to retake the ship. This was obviously a hijacking. It took 9 minutes to do the retaking. It transpired that the hijackers were in fact asylum seekers from Lagos.

These asylum seekers were in court this week and the hijacking case against them was dismissed. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said, “There was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction and discontinued the case. They said this was the result of new expert evidence emerging."

I expect we will have to wait 30 years to discover what this new evidence was, or indeed if there was any new evidence. It’s likely that not a few people over-reacted.

 

A pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol

07/01/21

Trump had been whipping up his QAnon followers for weeks, by frequently mentioning the January 6 rally in his tweets. In one tweet he told them it would be wild. And it certainly was, four people were shot, one woman died and they wrecked the Capitol building. Trump sees QAnon activists as "people who love our country." Hardly surprising that he would think that, well, you wouldn’t expect one nut to identify insane behaviour in another nut as odd.

Oxford Dictionary Shock!

06/01/21

In the past few years the Oxford Dictionary have been designating an oft repeated word or term that represent preoccupations of the time, as word of the year. Oxford is just one among several dictionaries offering up their choices but most choices are based on Web obsessions. Since 2004, Oxford has always done better, then they gave us 'chav', used to describe an anti-social lower-class youth dressed in sportswear. Where did all the chavs go? In 2016, the Oxford suggested ‘post truth’, defined as: "Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In our current situation it seems that many prefer an emotional escape, probably due the difficulty of finding some objective facts. However, here at Blast-it we feel we need our word of the year, so we are designating ‘challenging’ as our word for 2020. Challenging can be inserted, as the Government does on a daily basis, when you don't have a clue what to do.

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The Captain's looking for a fair wind

05/01/21

Boris Johnson told the nation at 8.00pm last night that a another lockdown would be introduced at midnight. For some nutty reason this lockdown was referred to as Tier Five, meaning a few things like garden centres would be open but little else. The lockdown was blamed on the new variant of the Covid virus because it spread a lot quicker. Interestingly schools would be closed although Johnson said the morning before, on the Marr Show, that schools were completely safe. Oddly, pre-schools would remain open, as if they have been forgotten by Williamson, as Hancock forgot the care homes in the first last big lockdown. Captain Johnson was hoping for a fair wind, his hope was placed in the mass vaccination programme.

The only positive here is that they have not farmed vaccination out to their private sector buddies, like they did with the disastrous test, trace and trash scheme.

That reminds us, where's Dido Harding hiding, she was supposed to be running the world beating system?

Ship o' Fools lost at sea

01/01/21

First they lost their plastic sword, and had nothing to fall on, just for show.

Now, the Fools have lost their compass, adrift without a clue.

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Great start for Gavin Williamson

02/01/21

Great start to the New Year for Gavin Williamson. All primary schools, he told us, would go back to school at the start of term. No, wait, they will not be going back for a further two weeks. This chap certainly knows how to keep his job aboard the Ship of Fools. The fact is schools are not ready to start testing and neither is Gavin's roll out of the necessary resources. Also, doctors are saying the new variant strain is keen on small people, the teachers are not keen to enter rooms full of them.

Also, this was the headline posted on the BMJ website:

"Covid-19: Lateral flow tests miss over half of cases, Liverpool pilot data show."

And yet the regulator said it was good to go and teachers are being expected to believe that.

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Second jab delayed for three months

The jobs and chums of Vallance and Witty are also safe, following recent decisions on the vaccine roll out for Covid. Hancock has been pretending that we have acquired enough vaccine to start giving everyone the first dose. We were told that first in the queue would be the NHS staff and really old people with underlying conditions. This morning a chap of 83, with cancer, was told he would not getting his first dose. Ah, but those who have already had one dose would get another three weeks hence, no, Hancock, is now saying it will be three months to the next jab. Ah, but now we have two vaccines on offer, can't we mix and match to enable the three week second shots, that people were told they must have - sorry, opinion is divided. That's what clever people say, when they do not have a clue. Talking of clueless individuals, Nadhim Zahawi, a minister for business and industry, was made responsible for the vaccine roll out. The silence from Zahawi has been deafening, his job's safe as well.

Note: Infectious disease expert, Dr. Fauci “optimal time” for patients to receive the second vaccine dosage 21 days.

Another note: The Vaccine Taskforce was the brainchild of Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government's chief scientific advisor. Taskforce, sounds impressive; this lot don't miss a trick.

Empty Nightingale Hospitals

They tell us that they are not being used due to staffing problems. For instance, the currently mothballed NHS Nightingale Hospital London, would be able to accommodate 4000 - 5000 patients, this would require 16,000 workers to keep it running. With such statistics to hand, how come a room full of fools could not work out there would be staffing problems?

 

 

 

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