Friday 12 April 2019

It's not only Free Speech that is under attack...

Two contemporary court cases worry me. Jack Shepherd sentenced for  manslaughter after his date died in a speed boat accident on the Thames and Julian Assange who is going to be extradited to the United States on charges of revealing state secrets after Swedish charges of sexual assault against him were conveniently dropped. Now Assange faces the prospect of a prison sentence long enough that he likely dies in jail there.
First, Jack Shepherd was also on the boat when it sunk - and so was at equal risk of dying…so six years in jail does not seem appropriate – and he did voluntarily ‘turn himself in’ to the Georgian police after doing a runner while on bail…while Assange’s charges now related only to revealing US state secrets to the general public via WikiLeaks  – which should probably have been in the public domain anyway.
The significant thing these two men have in common is that they are very unpopular with the British tabloid press – and so a Tory government desperate for any good publicity is backing them while its present Home Secretary, Jeremy Hunt – now directly in charge of ‘common law’ should have been charged for a whole raft of misdemeanours’ including receiving secret payment from Rupert Murdoch while in charge of television policy…instead, just like what used to happen to priests in southern Ireland when they were caught sexually assaulting little boys, he was moved to another, better ‘parish’.
These two cases are not about the contestants in some popular daytime tv panel show – they are about the independence of our judicial system...

Thursday 11 April 2019

The dog's breakfast of brexit...!

This whole Brexit thing has become a dog’s breakfast because
it is now generally believed that we will not go despite the people's vote to leave the EU in 2016 - because those within the Westminster bubble, including most Tory MPs and their civil servants (about 80%) are committed to remaining in the EU no matter what the people say!
But this does not appear to include Mrs May, the Prime Minister, who was and is a Remainer but also seem genuinely determined to enforce the referendum decision of 2016, to leave the EU – so why do I, as a
complete outsider, from a distance of a thousand miles away in southern Spain, suppose that Mrs May is genuine in her efforts to leave the EU.
Simple! Just step back and look at all the desperate, often apparently pointless actions she’s taken to try to achieve this.  These could only have been the actions of a sincere but incompetent politician, trying to achieve exit from the EU while being obliged to cover up the fact that most of the other MPs in the Tory party, and most of their civil servants, have been assiduously sabotaging the UK exit from the EU.  
Mrs May cannot even acknowledge that this is going on as it would lead to the instant collapse of the government and her being replaced by Jeremy Corbyn, as Prime Minister – while in Brussels they do not want us to leave simply because they don’t want any EU’s nation states to leave…because such an event would probably lead to an implosion of the EU – and if we do manage to leave, they want to make it as economically and politically disastrous as possible for us – so as not to encourage other member states to follow…and maybe you wonder why she hasn’t been replaced? Simple, because to be Prime Minister at the moment is in effect political suicide.
And Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister would be unsuitable in so many ways.  First of all, he lacks the support of a majority of his own labour MPs – and he’s actually a communist throwback to the 1970s, who hates his own country, is endemically anti-Semitic and is a vocal admirer of each and every terrorist group that have the worst interests of Great Britain, Israel or the United States at heart.
I am not a Tory, have never been a Tory and can’t imagine any circumstances in which I would support a Tory government - but neither
am I a supporter of Corbyn or communism, being one of those pathetic, democratic socialist whose inspiration comes from the Peterloo massacre by way of Ramsay MacDonald, our first and fairly useless, socialist Prime Minister.
…and the reason I’m not a communist or a believer in Marxism is simple. Marxism has a deep faultline running through it in that it doesn’t allow for the impact of individual, human psychology!  Karl Marx a genius in many ways, assiduously wrote the Great Men of History out of History - treating individuals such as Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar and Napoleon as if they hadn’t mattered…but I've got to go now as Dad’s Army is coming on…