Thoughts on the state of Britain right now

By TruePublica Editor: According to Survation for ITV’s Good Morning Britain, the Tories have a thumping 17-point lead over Labour in the Hartlepool by-election seat. This is a disaster. It is not a disaster for the politics of politics – but it is for decency, honesty and suitability for the role of high office.

Among the Hartlepool voters polled, 51 per cent viewed Boris Johnson favourably and 28 per cent unfavourably. And this is in a traditionally Labour-held seat.

What this means is that for all the lies, for the deception, the cronyism, nepotism and corruption now immersing government itself – the government of Boris Johnson has already been forgiven for their woeful handling of the pandemic that led to one of the West’s worst death tolls and economic downturns. This is a sad fact for Britain.

The Tories may win – but I doubt by that margin. We’ll see. And if they do, then you know Labour will have failed just as badly as Corbyn did – and that is a strong possibility given the mood of the country right now.

In the meantime, the government is getting on with the business of ensuring that the usual democratic tools of accountability are taken apart. Judicial review is just one of those tools.

In the context of today – Judicial review is how you and I get to challenge Government Ministers handing out public money to their friends. The FT reports that a consultation is underway to ‘overhaul’ judicial reviews (source). It is yet more evidence of the Conservative government’s contempt for our system of justice in the UK. Their intention is quite simple – to stop enquiries and legal challenge into how they manage Britain.

Prem Siki – an Emeritus Professor, points out that – “Judicial review changes will make UK government ‘untouchable’ – part of a much bigger attempt to put itself beyond scrutiny in the courts, in parliament and on the streets”. The Government will be able to prorogue the parliament of Britain without a legal challenge.” Siki goes on to say these are the actions of dictators (source).

It’s not just our system of justice that is under attack. The state broadcaster is now frightened to death of reporting anything too negative about the government. I hear from people working at the BBC that daily meetings are now being held to determine what can and cannot be said.

A good example is a video that has been viewed nearly 15 million times on Twitter (more than the latest police crime drama Line of Duty) that the BBC refuses to touch. That video has sparked questions in Parliament, inspired cross-party action to force the PM to correct his lies to MPs – and yet the BBC has gone nowhere near it on any of its many outlets (source).

And yet, staggeringly, the director-general of the BBC (another Tory stooge) has said that there is a “growing assault on truth” that “poses a real threat to societies and democracies all around the world” (source). It only goes to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the real world that we live in today.

Ironically, yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. It was reported all over the Western press, not so in Britain. With Europe’s most right-wing media – suppressing the truth is not something they like to promote is it? The government pays lip service to it (source) – then goes about its business of installing cronies to the BBC board and various other institutions that would point out their abuse of office. For instance, did you know the head of the media at the Met Police is a former executive of the Daily Mail? (source). For the thousands of PR experts that would have relished a role such as this – a crony decides what you need to know.

There’s a new dilemma to divide the country as if the terrible ‘Getting Brexit Done’ deal wasn’t enough. Boris Johnson has decided to pump billions of taxpayers money into upholding the union by bribing Scotland to stay (source). The only reason he is doing this is because he does not want to be the PM that goes down in history that oversaw its disintegration. Like it or not, the elections in Scotland are about independence. Brexiteers are apparently comfortable with that – obviously. Are they quite as keen to see their money burned in huge piles to save something they don’t give a toss about? And don’t let a single Brexiteer say they didn’t vote for Scotland’s independence – they did. And if they claim they did not know – then they were either deluded or continued to force their fingers in their ears to the calls of everyone trying to point that out in 2016. The Daily Mail, Sun and Express are promoting Johnson’s plan with all their might – as it is they who massively promoted the destruction of the union in the first place. It’s got Wales thinking too – while Northern Ireland burns.

Boris Johnson has presided over 127,000 Covid deaths in the UK but is under pressure to resign right now over an expenses scandal involving the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat. It says so much about the state of British politics and its compliant mainstream media lapdogs. Let’s call this out. Johnson is out of control both in his personal life – and from what insiders say – in government too (source). He’s completely out of his depth with many insiders saying he’s constantly conflicted by his own decisions. Just what we need right now.

After sacking that psycho-madman Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s latest appointment of the head of comms in Downing Street has had enough already. Rumours are swirling he’s on the brink of walking (source). What’s really concerning here is that Johnson’s lack of judgement is causing all sorts of problems. Good leaders can be idiots – but must get the right team around them – Johnson has chosen fawning boot-lickers. Trump did the same and look where that got him.

It gets worse though. Here we are, a country with more food banks than outlets of MacDonald’s (source) and the taxpayer is to foot the bill for a new Royal Yacht costing £200 million. Forget the arguments – it’s about priorities and principles. Should we feed our starving first or our super-rich princes on a freebie superyacht? I’ve nothing against the Royal family but they are billionaires at the behest of the taxpayer. They can feed themselves and buy their own boats with the millions they’ve stashed in offshore tax havens (source).

Is it bad enough to know that Rishi Sunak’s wife owns part of a firm that funnels money through Mauritius to avoid paying its taxes (source) – only to find out that she invested in a publishing firm that has also cost taxpayers dearly by going bust with taxpayer cash. In 2020, Rishi Sunak launched the Future Fund Covid-19 loan scheme. It is now alledged that only four months later the firm received a £1.3 million cash investment from the scheme; up to £50,000 a month. Last month it went into administration owing £16 million (source). You can’t actually call this corruption because no laws were seemingly broken (that we know of). But you know deep down that Sunak is as rotten as they come, don’t you? It’s simple for them isn’t it – they gamble with money that isn’t theirs, get bailed out or if it goes belly-up, there’s no actual financial loss to them. However, if you open a business – it’s a game of thrones gamble out there in the real world that literally puts your home on the line – not so for Sunak et al.

The latest diversionary tactics for the government is to focus on nasty Mr Xi Jingping of China and his sidekick Vladamir Putin of Russia. Let’s also call this out. They are both dictators. They are both geopolitical thugs. Both are malign states that have malign intent for not just democracy but everything that it means. Western democracies like Britain and America can never be taken seriously by these dictators until we confront our own hypocrisy on concepts like freedom of the Press (as aforementioned). The inhumane ordeal and illegal imprisonment of Julian Assange, Europe’s only political prisoner and the cruel exile of Snowden are reminders of that hypocrisy. If Johnson, Raab and Patel are to be taken seriously – then they need to make the right decisions, not ones dictated by America.

To impact on that statement further – if Iran’s treatment of British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe amounts to torture, as according to Dominic Raab, what does that make his government’s treatment of Julian Assange? There’s no logic being used here. The truth is that the government is using poor Nazanin’s awful situation purely for political point-scoring. They did the same with the killing of Harry Dunn, by giving an escape corridor to the American who killed him – and then only after she was safe from British justice – called for extradition that they knew they would never get.

If the government really does want to unite the country the very first thing it should do – is to start making decisions that are lawful, just and right, not self-serving, unethical and immoral. Venality always ends badly – it will for Johnson and his court of sycophants.

For anyone criticising this piece that somehow it is ‘doing down the country’ – please wake up from your propaganda-driven snooze. The mechanisms of calling these people out for their actions are being dismantled right in front of your eyes in real-time. Soon, you won’t know what’s going on because you won’t be allowed to know it – this is the reason why this government already has a censorship unit (a Michael Gove initiative) between the public and freedom of information requests. Still don’t believe it, try reading some home truths HERE HERE HERE and HERE.

After 11 years of the Tory’s, the country is fully disunited. The union is dissolving. Justice and press freedom are being attacked. Our beloved NHS is being corroded by one of the most corrupt of American so-called healthcare’ outfits that has already acquired dozens of local GP practices (source). China now owns well over £135 billion of British assets including the likes of critical infrastructure providers including Thames Water, UK Power Networks and Heathrow airport (source). At the click of a finger, foreign dictators could literally crash our economy or infrastructure functionality.

Don’t laugh at that statement, The Times report says – “It has not been possible to assess the true value of Chinese ownership in the UK (which) is likely to be far higher than the £135 billion found.”

The former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith said in the same article: “This demonstrates that successive governments have been asleep on the watch. This evidence today shows how dangerously we are sailing towards Chinese control of key aspects of our business”  (source).  IDS is as mentally challenged and deluded as fantasists usually are. Just in the last decade alone two-thirds of those assets were sold ‘on his watch’. He helped usher these deals through – and now even he can see the damage they’ve done.

The Tories must stop fixating on their ideological obsession with profit at all costs for their buddies. They must stop being dictated to by their own internal party divisions that has done immeasurable damage.

Don’t forget, Johnson now has nine (yes, 9) inquiries investigating him. He could face criminal charges. If he is found to broken even the most basic of parliamentary rules, Britain could be facing the embarrassment of its own PM being suspended. Also don’t forget that whilst it may be cynical to trivialise corruption by focussing on what donors have bought for Johnson – the real question was always – what Johnson was selling in return? The answer to that question is now being asked.

I don’t care who is in power – but whoever it is, they need to start focusing on what is best for our country, our economy and our people, an important goal that the Tories seem to have replaced with avarice and power. It is this that angers me so when thinking that the Tories will win in the all-important by-election at Hartlepool. Frankly, they deserve nothing but a sobering (hypothetical) smack in the mouth to wake them up too.

Digging ourselves out of the pandemic shows we have the ability when we apply ourselves. Britain could be doing so much better though. Johnson needs to go. Like so many, I’m fed up with a clown and his power-crazed girlfriend distracting the great task at hand with wallpaper and other personal petty nonsense.

 

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