Labour to limit children under five to one hour a day TV access.

 

Drag Queen Story Hour

"One hour a day is your lot tots." Here we go again, Labour's puritanical nanny state, is always wanting to ban something or control us. They're now wanting to limit children under five to having access to TV for one hour a day. I should imagine that's going to be difficult.

I was brought up watching Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men, Four Feather Falls, Torchy the Battery Boy, Blue Peter, Stingray and the Man from Uncle, and I still managed to develop a vocabulary, to become toilet trained, socialised, read, and to use a knife and fork. Thankfully, we weren't exposed to politically correct dipsticks, drag queen story hour, LGBTQ+, 72 genders identities, and something called the "Trans Community."

I'm sure queer political ideology is going to produce level headed kids. We knew the difference between boys and girls and so did most British Prime Ministers.

Labour's obsession with bans is almost Puritanical.

 

I think the smoking ban in pubs that was introduced by the Blair New Labour government, was generally a good thing and I don't think there are many British people nowadays, who would like to see the ban revoked. If you were in a pub and you didn't smoke, breathing in somebody's cigarette smoke, was bloody awful. 

As a libertarian, I don't really care much for government bans and I don't really think they necessarily work. Alcohol prohibition in America was a total failure and led to an increase in boot legging, illegal drinking dens, and gang crime. 

When I growing up, the legal age for smoking was 16 and the legal age at which you could buy an alcoholic drink in a pub, was 18. None of us took much notice of those age restrictions and we took great delight in flouting the law and dodging the police. I have been a recusant for much of my adult life and deference isn't one of my strong points. A hatred of authority is something that I had knocked into me at secondary school. 

I think that Nigel Farage is right about one thing. The Starmer Labour government does have a stench of middle-class self-righteous Puritanism about it, and is always wanting to ban something. Like the Puritans, Labour is also obsessed with work. They now want to ban crossbows. It will be catapults next and the licensing of airguns. 

Labour's Online Safety Act, is meant to restrict children's access to certain websites and they now want to deny children under 16, from having access to the internet but want to give 16-year-olds the vote. Many young people in Britain have been using smart phones and tablets since childhood. Once the genie is out of the bottle it's very difficult to put it back and I'm pretty sure, that these young kids, will find some way of circumventing the bans. 

Free speech in Britain is also under threat with around 30 people a day being arrested by the thought police for comments they've made on social media. Some have been imprisoned. 

In Liberal Victorian England, there was no such thing as a drugs policy or a Firearms Act that restricted gun ownership and the age restrictions on the sale of alcohol, was raised from 14 to 18-years-old, in 1923, after a campaign by Lady Astor. British governments of that period generally thought that many of these matters should left to individual choice. If you wanted to drink and smoke yourself to death, that was your business. Likewise, you were also free to starve to death. 

The Puritans have been called the teachers of the English middle-classes and that's why a lot of British working-class people rather despise the middle-classes or make fun of them. The English aristocrat Lord Randolph Churchill, doesn't seem to have been keen on them either. He once said that he thought that the English aristocracy and the English working-class had two things in common - a love of blood sports and a liking for sexual depravity.

Britain's welfare state.

 

I don't think any of us alive today in Britain, have any real sense of how insecure life was for many people in Britain before the introduction of the welfare state. People could literally starve to death. 

In Mrs Gaskell's book Mary Barton, which is set in Manchester, there are references to people taking opium to alleviate stomach pains brought on by a lack of food. In the novel 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' by Charles Dickens, an old woman who smokes opium, says it "takes away the hunger as well as wittles." I believe that the English opium eater Thomas de Quincy first started taking opium to quell hunger pains. 

In his book 'The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' published in 1776, Adam Smith describes how three women died from starvation in 1763, in an empty house in Stonecutter Street, London. 

Although we associate the welfare state with William Beveridge, it was the Liberal governments of Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George that laid the foundations of the modern British welfare state. One early measure was the introduction of free school meals for school children in 1906 which many local councils objected to because they believed that it was the responsibility of parents to feed their own children and not the state. Pensions were introduced in 1908 and you qualified for pension at the age of 70. Average adult life expectancy in Britain in 1908, was 48. 

The workhouse ended with the introduction of Beveridge's welfare reforms which launched the NHS and promised to slay five giants - WANT, DISEASE, IGNORANCE, SQUALOR and IDLENESS.

Why are young university graduates in Britain finishing up on state benefits?

 

Theo dal Pozzo

A 23-year-old British man with a first-class postgraduate degree in computer science, who speaks four languages - English, Portuguese, French and Spanish, has been rejected by 500 British employers and is now on Universal Credit. 

Theo dal Pozzo, 23, completed a first-class postgraduate degree in computer science, specialising in machine learning from the University of Exeter in 2024. Since graduating, Theo, has found himself unemployed and on state benefits. He thinks that AI screening of job applications and his lack of work experience might be acting as a barrier to him getting a job. 

The Labour government of Keir Starmer, say that they're concerned about the number of young British people who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs), and are living on state benefits. 

In many countries in the west, including America, having an education and being highly qualified, has usually led to better jobs and better remuneration, but that seems to be in reverse in Britain. I know of very highly qualified people who have found it almost impossible to get a decent job in Britain and one man once told me, that he had been advised by his DWP Jobcentre adviser, not to disclose, that he had a university degree, because it might scare off potential employers. 

The problem that young people like Theo dal Pozzo face, is that the longer they're unemployed, the less attractive and marketable they become to potential employers. As the economist Richard Layard said, they become like "withering flowers." 

Scapegoating and scaremongering the malady of politicians & newspaper men.

 

The Scapegoat - William Holman Hunt

In Britain some people seem to excel at two things; scaremongering and scapegoating. It's a malady that is particularly acute among politicians and newspaper men. I'm expecting that very shortly, Keir Starmer, will impose a lockdown over meningitis, probably just before the May local elections. 

Although there have been about 35 reported cases of meningitis B, it's already being described as an "outbreak horror. " Some people have even tried to blame the outbreak on illegal migrants. The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has said that on average there are about 350 cases of meningitis in Britain each year. The disease does not spread like measles or covid but is passed on by close contact like kissing, sharing vapes or drinks, or living in a household with an infected person.

I watched GB News the other night, the so-called 'People's Channel'. The presenter was Patrick Christys. GB News isn't really a news channel it's a platform for Reform UK and conspiracy theorists. One of the people on the panel actually said that the reason why many people in Britain can't get to see a dentist, is because all the dental appointments are being taken by illegal migrants. 

Not long ago, I tried to register as an NHS patient with a local dentist. They told me that they would only take me on as a private patient even though the dental practice displayed an NHS sign outside. When I asked why they weren't taking on NHS dental patients, they didn't say it was because migrants and refugees had taken all the NHS appointments. they said we can't guarantee that we will get paid if we administer dental treatment to NHS patients because only so much money, is allocated for the treatment of NHS dental patients.  

The problem isn't migrants it's government policy. Dental services are no longer a part of the NHS. You can get a sex change on the NHS, but if you've got toothache, God help you.

The anarchist bus conductor, Arthur Moyse.

 

Arthur Moyse

I remember the anarchist, Arthur Moyse very well. He was a great bloke. He wrote a regular column in the anarchist publication Freedom and often drew cartoons that always had a little dog in them, stuck somewhere, in the corner of the cartoon. A London bus conductor, Arthur, was definitely a character and an eccentric. 

In a Guardian obituary to Arthur Moyse, written by David Peers in 2003, Peers writes that "a day out with Arthur was an event." I can certainly agree with that. I can remember a group of us being with Arthur in the Manchester pub, Tommy Ducks, when Arthur had us all in stitches. He told us that he'd once been a member of the Flat Earth Society and had been interviewed by BBC television about his belief in a flat earth. He said shortly before the programme went live; there had been a bit of rehearsal. He said about five minutes before the programme was broadcast, the interviewer suddenly turned to Arthur and said that he'd got one last question. He asked Arthur if he genuinely did believe that the earth was flat and Arthur replied rather abruptly, "of course I fucking do, do you think I'm some kind of nutter." 

Arthur described his time serving in the British army as "registered vandalism" because you could get way with almost anything. You don't seem to get eccentric characters like Arthur Moyse these days. 

Truth is the first casualty of war.

 

Tulsi Gabbard

They say that truth is the first casualty of war. Tulsi Gabbard is the United States Director of National Intelligence. She's in overall charge of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, so she should have an idea about Iran's nuclear weapons capability.

The U.S. intelligence chief, has just told a committee that Iran was not rebuilding its nuclear enrichment facilities prior to the Israeli/U.S. bombing of Iran, but she declined to say, if Iran posed an "imminent nuclear threat."

The U.S. bombed Iran last year (2025), and President Trump said the strikes had "completely and totally obliterated" Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities. A Pentagon assessment found that Iran's nuclear program was likely set back around two years. Trump then said that Iran was within two weeks of having the nuclear bomb so he launched the operation called 'Epic Fury' alongside Israel's campaign called 'Roaring Lion', to eliminate the threat.

Trump says he might continue to bomb Iran just for the fun of it.

 

Donald Trump

What is Keir Starmer's position on the Iran war? Watching Starmer is like watching a stoat jump about or watching a squirrel chase its tail. I think he's said the Israeli/American bombing of Iran is illegal and that America doesn't have any clear war aims in respect of Iran. Yet, American B 52 bombers are flying from RAF Fairford because Starmer has said they can do so for defensive purposes. 

Let's be honest about it. Britain isn't a country; it's a U.S. aircraft carrier. Are B 52 bombers really used for defence purposes? Trump has just told us that he might continue bomb Iran just for the fun of it and B52 bombers, are continuing to arrive at RAF Fairford, to be loaded with bombs. 

We now know that around 170 children were killed at a girls' school in Iran when they were hit by two U S. Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. According to the Financial Times (FT), fragments of the American missiles were found in the debris. The FT report claimed that Iranians don't possess Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. The FT report concluded that the school was probably bombed because of faulty intelligence.

Could Farage's close relationship with Donald Trump, spell disaster for Reform UK?

 

Donald Trump & Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage doesn't seem to be able to cope with the pressure of politics. He stopped attending PM's Question Time in the House of Commons because MPs were taking pot shots at him.

Most people don't really know what Reform UK's policies are but they see Reform UK as tough on immigration and proudly patriotic, because they dress themselves up in the Union Jack flag. Farage is that far up Donald Trump's arse that if he did become the UK Prime Minister, he would turn Britain into the 51st state of America. He seems to spend more time in the U.S. than he does in his constituency of Clacton-on-Sea.

Only recently he was calling for Britain to join in the Israeli/American illegal bombing of Iran and then did a U-turn. He now says that if Britain can't defend a British military base on Cyprus, then it ought to keep out of wars.

Farage has said that Reform UK are prepared to considered any alternative to the NHS and a compulsory American-style insurance scheme in Britain that funds health care. That sounds like an invitation for far more involvement of U.S. private health companies in the delivery of healthcare in Britain.

Why did Muslims in Gorton & Denton vote for a progressive party led by a gay Jew?

 

Green MP - Hannah Spencer

White people in the constituency of Gorton & Denton are not an "ethnic minority" as claimed by the Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin. White people still make up a majority of the population. 

There's a big Muslim/Asian population in the west of the constituency and they do speak and understand English, perfectly well; it's in their interests to do so. In four of the wards in the west of the constituency, those closest to Manchester city centre, around 40 per cent of the constituents are university graduates or university students. 

The Green Party did target the British Asian vote but if support for the Green's was orchestrated by 'family voting' or the 'Biradari' (brotherhood/caste), why did Muslims vote for a progressive party led by a gay Jewish person? I don't think it was down to the influence of George Galloway as Keir Starmer claimed, but probably down to the influence of the university educated young Asian people in the constituency. 

Reform UK are the Alf Garnett’s of British politics. They are an atavistic personality cult centred around their spiv leader, Nigel Farage. Some Reform UK MPs, like Sarah Pochin, talk like white supremacists. Pochin recently complained that there were too many black faces in British advertising and that this made her blood boil.

Parts of Gorton & Denton, are areas of high social deprivation and many people are on state benefits. Many young people feel they've been stuffed and abandoned by the mainstream political system. 

In remembrance of Dave Hallsworth.

 

Dave Hallsworth

I think I first met David Phipps Hallsworth, when I supported a strike at Intex Yarns, in Ashton-under-Lyne, in the early 1970s. In all my years spent in the British trade union movement, I have rarely met a person whose was more dogmatic and less tolerant of other people's opinions, than David Hallsworth. He literally smashed people into the ground.

For Dave, there was only one point of view, and that was his point of view. Yet, he was one of best militants that I have ever known and he wasn't lacking when it came to having guts. That's why I attended a memorial event to Dave Hallsworth at the Palace Hotel on Oxford Road, Manchester, in September 2007. Both Mick Hulme and Frank Furedi of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), spoke at that memorial event which was well attended.

I remember the strike at Laurence Scott Electromotors in 1981. The firm had been acquired by an asset stripper called Arthur Snipe of 'Mining Supplies'. An ex-miner, Snipe, closed the factory and sacked all the workers. This led to the men taking industrial action. Dave told me how he admired the tenacity of Arthur Snipe. One-day Snipe turned up in his Rolls Royce at his firm in Doncaster and run all the picket chairs over. He then stood at the factory gates giving the pickets the V sign.

Dave Hallsworth played a leading role in that strike but he wasn't the shop steward. He told me that shop steward was called by the men the "shop stupid" and every time he stood against him for the job of shop steward, to Dave's dismay, the men always voted for the shop stupid. Dave was a member of the RCP but I wonder what he would make of his former comrades today? Clair Fox became a Baroness. Munira Mirza who used to write for Spiked Online and 'Living Marxism', co-authored the 2019 Conservative Party Manifesto and Brendan O'Neill has just come out in defence of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. I bet Dave Hallsworth is turning in his grave. 

Imperial blowback and WWI.

 

Gertrude Bell - The Queen of the Desert

Britain and France redesigned and redrew the boundaries of the Middle East after the end of WWI in 1918 with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. They basically carved up between themselves what was left of the Ottoman Empire. 

The English half spy and half archaeologist, Gertrude Bell, in her letters described walking through the desert after WWI, tracing the new boundary of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with her walking stick. Sir Percy Cox fatefully determined that a portion of Iraq, would henceforth, be known as Kuwait. Much later, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, fixed the frontiers of India and Pakistan, to carve out a Pakistani state. All these regions have experienced what George Monbiot calls "imperial blowback." 

At the time of WWI, most British people had no clear idea what they were fighting for on the Western Front in France. Millions were dying to grab a few hundred yards of land. They knew that Britain was fighting the 'Hun' but it was never a war aim of Imperial Germany, to invade Britain. There were calls for the British government to declare what their war aims were in continuing to propagate a war against Imperial Germany. The German Kaiser, wanted to build a railway line from Berlin to Baghdad and paid for the restoration of the tomb of Saladin. He also told the Muslim Arabs that Germany wanted to join a jihad against the infidel. 

After WWI the British invaded Mesopotamia/Iraq, to grab the oil fields and bombed and fought the Arabs. Imperial conquest and grabbing colonies were really what WWI was about.

Is Labour in danger of becoming irrelevant under Keir Starmer?

 

Sir Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer is typically evasive. He can’t shoot straight. What a wimp! Who are "those people" that he constantly refers to who want 'change'. It's such a nebulous term. These are the people that Starmer says he came into politics to help and will always fight for. Starmer is so amorphous that he's the ultimate plasticine man. He can be bent into any shape and bears the imprint of the last man who sat on him. 

The Labour Party was set up by the trade unions to represent the interest of the "working class" but he's afraid to use the term. All this Puritanical Labour Party nonsense about "working hard" and "hard working families" is depressingly Victorian. Most people undertake paid work to live; they don't live to work. People should be leading more fulfilled and diverse lives and not grinding away like some donkey on a treadmill, until they drop dead. Many people are going to lose their jobs to AI and automation and so we ought to be thinking about a post-work society and redistribution. 

When I was a kid in an English primary school in the 1950s and 1960s, the teachers used to talk to us about the "leisure society." We were told that when we grew up a lot of work would be done by machines giving people a lot more time for leisure. Those people who lose their jobs to AI and automation, what is to be done with them? 

The Green Party wants to introduce a citizens Universal Basic Income. This could be paid to people both in and out of work. Labour managerialism has nothing to offer. The Labour Party is well past its sell-by date and is in danger of becoming an irrelevance under Keir Starmer.

Blake & Jerusalem

 

William Blake

If there are three pieces of music that symbolise 'Englishness' for me, they're Elgar's Enigma Variations; Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Jerusalem, the unofficial national anthem of England. The music was composed by Sir Hubert Parry and the words are by William Blake.

The words come from 'Milton: A Poem' by Blake. Blake's lyrics are not meant to convey some kind of sentimental patriotism for England. For Blake, Jerusalem represents an ideal utopian society of Universal love, liberty and spiritual freedom; the antithesis of the 'dark satanic mills' and the restoration of a 'green and pleasant land'.

William Blake viewed the industrial revolution as destroying the English landscape and the human spirit. The 18^th century capitalist, Josiah Wedgewood, spoke of "making such machines of men, that cannot err." That would have appalled William Blake. As Blake wrote: "He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity's sunrise."

Why does Britain have such a big problem solving homelessness?

 

As a country Britain has gone to the dogs. What we see emerging is a kind of Victorian underclass. 

Last December, two men, Michael Heaton, 26, and Anthony Horn, 46, froze to death on the streets of Manchester in a city where the Labour Mayor, Andy Burnham, pledged to eradicate rough sleeping from the streets of Greater Manchester, when he was first elected. 

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I don't remember seeing rough sleepers or people begging in the street. I realise that it takes time to build housing, so why haven't the authorities resorted to building prefabs, to house people or provided some other kind of temporary accommodation? Private rents in Britain are completely out of sync with most people's incomes and there ought to be rent controls. Housing Benefit is also capped. 

The problem of homelessness isn't insoluble if there's the political will to do something about it. But some politicians like the former Conservative Home Secretary, Suella (Cruella) Braverman, would have us believe that homelessness is a lifestyle choice. I never met either Mr Heaton or Mr Horn, but I can't believe that they chose to freeze to death on the streets of Manchester, because it was lifestyle choice. Nor do I believe that if people can't get a job, a GP appointment, or an affordable rented home, it is somehow the fault of migrants. It has more to do with government policy. Some British politicians don't believe that it's the job of the government to provide people with affordable social housing. They think that's the responsibility of the individual to find their own accommodation. 

I am reliably informed that a country like Finland doesn't have a homelessness problem because homeless people are offered shelter and if they have problems with substance misuse, they get help and treatment. 

I remember all the brouhaha about the Bibby Stockholm that was moored at Weymouth naval dockyard to house asylum seekers. We had the ridiculous and farcical situation of homeless English people sleeping rough in doorways in Weymouth, while migrants were being housed. I gather that a number of the asylum seekers were undertaking voluntary work with the local homeless. Why weren't the rough sleepers in Weymouth offered a warm berth on the Bibby Stockholm or hotel accommodation? I was told that many of the rough sleepers in Weymouth, were former ex-servicemen in the British armed forces. 

Some British slum landlords have made millions out of housing asylum seekers and refugees after receiving taxpayers' money from the British government. 

Reform UK are the Alf Garnett's of British politics.

 

Reform UK are the Alf Garnett's of British politics. They're a kind of atavistic personality cult centred around their spiv leader, Nigel Farage. Most British people haven't much of clue what they stand for. They just know that they talk tough on immigration and wrap themselves up in the Union Jack flag. 

Matt Goodwin of Reform UK needs to make his mind up. He says that many people from ethnic minority backgrounds haven't integrated into the British way of life, but even if they do so, people with coloured faces can't be British. That sounds like there ain't no black in the Union Jack. Suella (Cruella) Braverman who is married to a Jew, says the same thing. 

The Reform UK MP, Sarah Pochin, is obsessed with the colour of people's skin. She sounds like a white supremacist. She recently complained that some schools in her constituency won't give her access because they don't want a racist on the school premises. She's also complained that there are far too many black faces being used in British advertising.