Come Back Dominic All Is Forgiven by Les May

WHILST the strategy of attempting to argue that Mr. Cummings' conduct was within government guidelines is insulting and distressing to those who have made terrible sacrifices by staying indoors away from family, it also clears the "we're all in this together" smokescreen to reveal a political plane where different rules apply.

These are the words of Kirsty Brimelow QC in late May 2020. Whilst apologists like Boris Johnson, Grant Shaps and Matt Hancock took a different line these words are probably a good reflection of the feelings of a majority of people in this country.

On 6 January this year protesters at an anti-lockdown demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament were arrested. The day after, page 10 of the Daily Telegraph carried a large picture, 30x20cm, of an Asian lady being handcuffed behind her back by two police officers wearing surgical type masks. The male officer was wearing a body camera.

Above it was a six column wide article headed ‘Breach the rules and face fine, police warn’. Below it was another article also over six columns by Martin Hewitt who chairs the National Police Chief’s Council which included the words ‘… everyone should understand the rules in their area. We know, for example, that large gatherings should not be happening. Forces will continue to bear down on that very small minority who flagrantly and selfishly breach the regulations.’

Even the editorial in the Telegraph, which largely speaking opposes the lockdown, could not manage to produce an argument against this which went much further than complaining that it might penalise old people who might find the need to sit down on a convenient bench whilst taking their exercise.

On Saturday a bunch of women congregated on Clapham Common and four people were arrested for public order and coronavirus regulation breaches. They had gathered after an event organised by Reclaim These Streets was cancelled following talks with the Metropolitan Police, which said it would be in breach of coronavirus rules. In other words they knew exactly what they were doing and now are complaining they were badly treated, though it is difficult to see that they were being treated any differently to the lady at the demo on 6 January. As the character Fletcher said in the BBC TV series Porridge, ‘if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime’.

Let’s not confuse what happened at Clapham Common with the very real threat to our right to use our streets and open spaces to protest. Since the murder of Sarah Everard ego-centric women have exploited what, by its very rarity, the random killing of a young woman walking home after dark, is a devastating and momentous crime, in order to pursue their own agenda against men and trying to spread a of fear of us amongst women. Would it have been even a nine day wonder if it had been a young man killed in a similar circumstances?

If those who support the idea of making misogyny a ‘hate crime’ get their way the same force that is now watching calls for its Commissioner to resign for the way that the Clapham Common incident was was dealt with, will be handed the job of policing the interaction of men and women in London’s streets. Will there be similar outrage if men find themselves faced with on the spot fines, and being handcuffed if they get stroppy, for an overheard comment that a touchy woman takes exception to?

If we are going to swallow the story that the police were wrong to intervene at a gathering when the people there knew it was in contravention of coronavirus rules, then we should be prepared to say we are sorry for all the nasty things we said about Dominic Cummings. The same rules that apply to me apply to women!

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“We’re all in it together!” by Christopher Draper

ASDA was packed today – the woman on the till reckons it’s because we’re about to get the full lockdown treatment in Wales – “but at least we’re all in it together”. I beg to differ…

1) April 2020, Dominic Cummings visited Barnard Castle despite lockdown regulations

2) September, Tony Blair photographed leaving Mayfair restaurant in breach of compulsory 14-day quarantine on return from trip to USA

3) September, SNP Rutherglen MP Margaret Ferrier travelled from Scotland and back on public transport to speak in Parliament despite having covid. She also preached in St Mungo’s Church, Glasgow

4) March, Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon journeyed to father’s birthday party despite ban on all but essential travel

5) September, Jeremy Corbyn MP defied “rule of six” to attend larger dinner party

6) July, The Prime Minister’s father (and former MEP) Stanley Johnson defied travel ban to visit his holiday home in Greece. On return to England photographed entering shops without wearing mask

7) October 5th Parliamentary authorities confirm that MP’s (allegedly including Matt Hancock) continued drinking alcohol in Parliament bar after the 10pm deadline imposed on the rest of us. Parliament refuses to identify the guilty individuals.

8) April, Government Housing Minister, Robert Jenrick MP, defied lockdown and travelled 150 miles to his parents’ Herefordshire home

9) April, Dr Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer, ignored lockdown regulations and on two weekends travelled from Edinburgh to her Earlsferry holiday home

10) August 19th, EU Commissioner, Phil Hogan, defied ban on group meetings by attending a golf dinner in County Galway, along with other politicians and an Irish Supreme Court judge

None of the above individuals were prosecuted although tens of thousands of ordinary folk have been fined and on October 4th five Doncaster welders authorised to work on the Isle of Man Electric Railway were imprisoned for two weeks because they unwittingly breached regulations by visiting Tesco on their brief journey from the ferry to their hotel. Ironically they were singled out because they wore masks which aren’t required on the IOM.

As far as our political class are concerned, “Laws are evidently for the Little People!”

Christopher Draper, Llandudno

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How We Can Keep the ‘r’ As Low As Possible?

by Les May

WHILST talking on Sky News about the rallies being held in London today the presenter managed to convey the impression, inadvertently I hope, that we should vary our behaviour in accordance with the ‘r’ number, the average number of people that a person infected with the virus causing Covid 19 will themselves go on to infect.

This is a classic case of ‘putting the cart before the horse’ because it is OUR behaviour which will influence the ‘r’ value.  It is what WE do which will determine whether the number of infections will continue to fall or grows exponentially.  Exponential growth will follow even if the ‘r’ number only just creeps above 1.0.

For example if the ‘r’ number is only very slightly higher at 1.01 over a period of two months 1,000 infected people will result in more than eleven thousand new infections, but if it is very slightly lower at 0.99 the number of new infections each week will decline. If you have difficulty in appreciating how small is the difference between these two numbers think of having 99p in your pocket and having £1.01p.  Smaller ‘r’ values will result in fewer new infections and a more rapid decline in the numbers.  In the north-west of England we are balanced on such a knife edge because the ‘r’ value is estimated to be about 1.01.

Based on an analysis of about 20,000 people in 9,000 households it is estimated that in the two week period 17-30^th May, one in one thousand people (0.1%) in the non-hospitalised population were infected with the virus and potentially able to infect others.   In the previous fourteen day period 3-16^th May the estimate was 0.25% of the population.  We can interpret these figures to mean that if we meet one thousand people we can expect at least one of them to be infectious. But there is a ‘gotcha’ in viewing it like this.  We do not know if the infected person will be the first, second…. person we meet, or if we are that one infected person.

Keeping the ‘r’ number below 1.0, and preferably well below this figure, is a job for us. It cannot be palmed off onto Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock or anyone else, as someone who was billed as the shadow minister for health tried to imply in an interview with Sky News.

So what can we do to get and keep the reinfection rate below 1.0? Quite a lot if few are willing to make the effort. For the moment ‘making the effort’ means

not just sanitising hands and surfaces regularly, but also ensuring that we meet up with as few people as possible. That means anyone who we do not share a house with. If we are forced to come into contact with people we don’t live with then we can physically distance ourselves from them so that any spittle that comes from the mouth as they talk will not land on us and we can avoid eating, drinking or sharing utensils with them. Just in case we are the ‘one in a thousand’ who is infected and shedding virus particles we can wear a face covering. Even a home made mask will be effective in preventing your spittle reaching anyone nearby.  To steal a phrase I first heard used by the biologist Jared Diamond, we need to behave with ‘constructive paranoia’ in mind.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how-to-make-cloth-face-covering.html

Step by step instructions for making a cloth face mask can be found here:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how-to-make-cloth-face-covering.html

The survey results for 17-30^th May, and earlier, can be found at:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/latest#number-of-people-in-england-who-had-covid-19

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A Scots Take On The Johnson Cummings Love In

by Les May

BELOW are some extracts from an article by Mandy Rhodes the editor of Holyrood Magazine which appeared in The Sunday Post today.

‘Just over two months ago, we forged a very special agreement with our government when we signed away our freedoms.  Such was the trust that we invested in the democratically elected powers-that-be, that we did as we were told.  We complied, like sheep, on the understanding that the sacrifice was for the greater good.

'But Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s closest aide, has made us out to be fools.  He has humiliated us and opened my son’s eyes to the debasement of democracy and etched something into his brain about the ugliness of political motivation that will never heal.

'He has seen for himself the way the truth gets twisted, how easily elected politician are prepared to eschew honour, how government ministers willingly operate as sock puppets and he has seen a government prepared to mock its own people for their servility.  Cummings’ circumstance were not exceptional, they were ordinary.  He (Cummings) was blind to the fact that in this pandemic, his situation was no different, no more ‘tricky’ or ‘complicated that it is for the rest of us.’

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The Johnson Cummings Love-In

by Les May

WHEN the Tory party handed the keys of 10 Downing Street to Boris Johnson his first instinct was to avoid the scrutiny of Parliament by proroguing it.  This behaviour eventually found its way into the courts and Johnson was judged to have been a very naughty boy.

When the story emerged that an unelected ‘special adviser’ had driven someone suffering from Covid19 some 400km to another part of the country, when such actions were expressly forbidden by a law passed by his own government, Johnson’s first instinct was to behave in a way that would make it very difficult for any police force to investigate this matter, determine whether it was ‘reasonable travel’ and if necessary issue fines to both the driver and his passenger.  It is not for Johnson to decide whether Dominic Cummings’ actions fell within the definition of ‘reasonable travel’.

My understanding is that the Daily Mirror and the Guardian newspapers had approached Downing Street for comment before the story was published. The pair of them had plenty of time to ‘get their stories straight’.  First Johnson sought to exonerate Cummings by standing in front of the television cameras and saying that he ‘did not mark him down’.*   

Meanwhile Cummings was given to opportunity to get into ‘post facto rationalisation’ mode and prepare a long statement which he was then allowed to present to the assembled media over a 70 minute period in the Rose Garden of Number 10 Downing Street.  Take your pick of the excuses he gave for moving his Covid19 infected wife across the country; he was just being a good husband and father, he and his infected wife were likely to be ‘harassed’ if they quarantined themselves at their home address, it was all a ‘media plot’ anyhow.

What we are seeing here is Johnson using his power to subtly influence how the law operates. It will take a very strong minded senior police officer to insist on asking Dominic Cummings some pointed questions.  Fortunately they still exist. Johnson is not alone in this endeavour, Michael Gove tried to tell us that at the time the law was different from what the rest of us understood it to be.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/26/durham-police-open-investigation-into-dominic-cummings

The media have decided to concentrate on the ‘human story’ side of all this with accounts of spouses and children unable to be beside the bedside of a relative who died.   If the political parties take this line Johnson’s subtle abuse of power will go unnoticed and unchecked. Johnson and Cummings are well matched.  Spot the video clip where Cummings is using his thick black notebook to waft away the gaggle of reporters who are trying to ask him questions.   It rather reminded me of Hastings Banda and his fly whisk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings_Banda

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Nothing new about neglecting old folk

 by Brian Bamford

ON the 28th, April, Milton Pena placed the following comment on this NV Blog:

'It’s Gerineglicide Derek, it has been happening for more than a decade and it has worsened by the Pandemic.

'I read that the life span of the elderly have been shortened by TWELVE years as a result of becoming ill with this virus and dying of it.'

On the 29th, April, Blanco Posnet posted:  

'I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to wonder if that Bunteresque Johnson, and his sidekick, Dom Cummings, aren't exploiting this national emergency to kill off the elderly and the baby-boomer generation in order to cut the social security/pension bill. It may be a kind of “Shock Therapy”, disaster capitalism, approach to cutting public expenditure.'

Social Care is a poor relation! 

YET, what is happening in the social care sector is not new.  For donkey's years under different governments social care has been the poor relation of the welfare sector. You can call it 'Gerineglicide' if you like.  Or as I would prefer 'constructive manslaughter'.  
It is 'constructive manslaughter' and not murder, since the intent is not to kill the victim, the mens rea required for murder does not exist because the act is not aimed at any one person.  Rather it is systemic in that it is built into the procedure for looking after the people at the end of their lives.
Most government including the current one under Boris have promised to resolve the problems of tackling social care, but have yet to come up with a satisfactory plan.  The public have allowed this to happen partly because they are confused and think that their end of life care will be tackled by the NHS.

Clean plate club & one step nearer the grave!

People are closing their eyes to what's happening, and have been for ages.

Alan Bennett in his diary entry in 1995 describes events at a care home his mother was in, in Somerset:

'The turnover of residents is quite rapid since whoever is quartered in this room is generally in the late staged of dementia.  But that is not what they die of.  None of theses women can feed herself and to feed them properly, to spoon in sufficient mince and mashed carrot topped off with rhubarb and custard to keep them going, demands personal attention of a helper per person.  Lacking such one-to-one care, these helpless creatures slowly and respectably starve to death.'

A neighbour of Mr. Bennett's mother has some difficulty:

'Joined the clean plate club, Lily,' says the girl who is feeding Hilda, her neighbour.    'Aren't you a good girl?'

Mr. Bennett says Hilda doesn't want her sweet and 'it is left congealing on her the tray while tea in lidded plastic beakers is taken round, which goes untouched also.'  And he adds:  'So another mealtime passes and Hilda is quite caring and with no malice or cruelty at all pushed one step nearer the grave.'

Whose fault is it?

Not the government's surely?

 Alan Bennett says:  'Her own a little.  Her relatives, if she has relatives.  And the staff's of course.  But whereas a newspaper might make a horror story out of it, I can't.'

What would Milton Pena or Blanco Posnet do?  Or, come to think of it, Charles Charalambous and those who signed his Woke Manifesto for trade unionists and other lefties, do about this?**

Alan Bennett concludes:  'Demented or not, if Hilda were a child there would be a story to tell and blame attaching.  But Hilda is at the end of her life not the beginning.  Even so, were she a Nobel Prize winner, or not a widow from Darwen but the last survivor of Bloomsbury, yes, then an effort might be made.  As it is she is gradually slipping away, which is what this place is for.'

We need something better than slogans, rhetoric and virtue signalling to tackle these complicated questions.  Essentially the problem in this country with regard to elderly people is a largely cultural one, as Alan Bennett's considerations suggest.*  Milton Pena is a Chilean-born surgeon who arrived in Britain with his family in 1974 after being forced to flee General Pinochet’s brutal regime.  Being Chilean he will probably have found it hard to understand the English attitude to old people as expressed by Alan Bennett and all too deeply embedded in our Anglo-saxon attitudes.

* 'Untold Stories' [2005] by Alan Bennett 

** www.northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com Virtue Signalling & Petitioning Governments?

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Vital medical equipment is being shipped abroad despite NHS shortages!

Medical Equipment Being Exported Abroad Despite NHS Shortages

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to wonder if that Bunteresque Johnson, and his sidekick, Dom Cummings, aren't exploiting this national emergency to kill off the elderly and the baby-boomer generation in order to cut the social security/pension bill. It may be a kind of “Shock Therapy”, disaster capitalism, approach to cutting public expenditure.


Dominic Cummings is on record as saying  it's "too bad" if the elderly die of the virus, – he later denied saying this - and how else can you explain, the cack-handed way the Government have gone about dealing with this crises?


Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, told us on 23^rd January, that Professor Christopher John MacRae Whitty, the Chief Public Health Officer for England, had revised the risk of the UK population getting the coronavirus from "low to very low" and said that the country was well prepared and well equipped to deal with it.


Since then, tens of thousands of people have died of the virus (a thousand in one day), and NHS staff are complaining of a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and their difficulty in getting tested. There is also a shortage of respiratory equipment.


A week ago, Bill Gardner, of the DailyTelegraph, wrote that millions of pieces of PPE were being shipped from Britain to Europe despite the NHS shortages. He wrote:


“Last week five million surgical masks and more than a million respirators were packed onto EU-registered Lorries by one UK wholesaler …and shipped from British warehouses to Germany, Spain, and Italy, despite severe shortages in the UK.”


According to Gardner, UK firms had told him that they had “no choice” but to keep selling lifesaving gear abroad because their efforts of help had been repeatedly ignored by the British government.


Milton Pena, who was an orthopaedic surgeon at Tameside Hospital, for 17-years, told me recently that the failure to do widespread testing and not to count coronavirus deaths in the community was 'premeditated', i.e. deliberate government policy. According to MailOnline, No 10 abandoned widespread testing more than a month ago, so the true scale of Britain's outbreak is a mystery. And why is this country still exporting PPE to other countries, when NHS staff, are complaining of a shortage of it, which is putting their lives at risk?


What's also curious is why 15,000 air passengers a day, are still flying into British airports even from high-risk countries, and aren't being screened or quarantined or even observing rules on social-distancing. They just walk onto the streets of Britain, after being given a leaflet, advising them to self-isolate for two weeks, if they feel I'll after landing.


Public Health England have said that screening  is ineffective and the Foreign Office, maintains that there is no evidence that closing borders or travel bans, would have any effect on the spread of infection. Yet, many other countries have done the very opposite. Professor Gabriel Scally, of the Royal Society of Medicine, told the Financial Times:

"The UK is an outlier. It is very hard to understand why it (the British government), persists in having the open border policy. It is most peculiar."


And while this is going on, we're being told to stay at home, keep three metres apart, and risk fines and prosecution, if we infringe lock-down restrictions, much of which is of dubious legality. You couldn't make it up; it's like something out of a comic opera.

No 10 refuses to say if Boris Johnson thinks black people are 'mentally inferior'.

Andrew Sabisky

On 6 February, in  a 'Guardian Journal article entitled, 'Inside the Mind of Dominic Cummings, the English Literary critic, Stefan Collini, wrote:

"In Cummings's ontology, the world appears to be made up of an extremely small number of outstandingly clever individuals and a mass of mediocrities. 

David Cameron, who served as the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 2010 to 2016, called Cummings a "Career Psychopath", and other people have said even less flattering things of Cummings, who doesn't court popularity. 

Early in January, Cummings published a 3,000 word discursive rant that urged "Misfits and Weirdos" to come and help him to transform the government as Chief Special Adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Cummings declared that he didn't want to hire "confident public school bluffers" or "Oxbridge English graduates who chat about (French psychoanalyst Jacques) Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers..." 

Among the draft of  'misfits and wierdos' who applied for a job to become a special adviser to Boris Johnson, was 27-year-old, Andrew Sabisky, who joined the administration. The young thruster, who calls himself a 'super forecaster', soon began to attract attention because of his many Tweets. Sabisky has stated that he wants the young to undergo compulsory contraception to prevent a 'permanent underclass' and suggested that many black people are "close to mental retardation." In 2014, Sabisky wrote on Cummings's website:

"One way to get round the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass, would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty."

Among his more egregious comments, are that 'richer people are more intelligent' than the rest of us and that eugenics, is about 'selecting for good things.' He also argues for giving all children a drug called 'modafinil', a treatment for narcolepsy, to cut the need for sleep by two-thirds, even at the cost of "a dead kid once a year." Sabisky, has also said that women's sport is more akin to the Paralympics, the sporting event for  people who have physical impairments, than it is to men's sport. In one blog, he wrote:

"It is still unclear to what extent female genital mutilation represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic."

On May 1st, Sabisky tweeted: "It says something about how badly defence is regarded that we keeping getting proper morons as SecDef, Mordaunt somehow being even worse than Williamson."

Downing Street have declined to say which policy area Sabisky is working in, but confirmed he was a contractor working on specific projects. At a recent press conference the Prime Minister's deputy spokesman refused 32 times to say whether the PM, Boris Johnson, shared Sabisky's views on eugenics or if Johnson thinks black people are mentally inferior. He could only say Mr Johnson's views were "well publicised and documented."

Although Boris Johnson is being urged to sack Sabisky and other special advisers are saying they would refuse to work with him, there is nothing really original, astonishing or even remarkable, in what the 'super forecaster' has been saying. The clown is a waste of taxpayers money and so is Cummings. However  shocked people are by his comments, much of what he says, has been said well before he was born and even put into practice.

In the U.S., following the famous court ruling in Buck v. Bell in 1927,  which upheld the principle of applying compulsory sterilisation to the disabled teenager Carrie Bell, the Supreme Court voted eight to one for her sterilisation. The U.S. Supreme Court Judge, Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr, said during the hearing, "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The case set a precedent and over 60,000 compulsory sterilisations followed in the U.S. until the practice was abandoned in the 1960s. Many of those sterilised were poor Americans, epileptics, and those considered 'Feebleminded'.

However, one should be careful about what you wish for. Both the writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw and the academic Professor Harold Laski, were keen eugenicists and Fabians. Shaw's writings on socialism and Soviet Communism, included proposals to execute economic exploiters (capitalists), by poison gas, and Laski, a committed supporter of the Soviet Union, told his American friend Wendall Holmes, "Sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all fundamentalists."

Racial differences in intelligence and the underclass were discussed in the controversial 1994 book the 'Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life' by the psychologist Richard J Hernstein and political scientist Charles Murray, and the idea that the world is made up of a small number of talented individuals, who we 'mediocrity's', should all be indebted to for our conditions in life, has a long lineage.

In January 1958, Ludwig von Mises, the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, wrote to the novelist Ayn Rand about her pro-capitalist novel 'Atlas Shrugged'. He told her: "

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State."

To this day, the views and comments of Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand are shared by many Conservatives and those on the right, including Margaret Thatcher, who subscribed to this view. The book Atlas Shrugged was said at one time to be the bible of the U.S. Congress and  the U.S. Tea Party movement, and devotees of Ayn Rand, have included the former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, U.S. Congressman, Paul Ryan, and the former UK chancellor, Sajid Javid. 

A staunch believer in unfettered capitalism and individualism, Rand reviled welfare protection measures for the poor, who she considered parasites, but in old age she finished up on social security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Johnson and Cummings could face criminal charges as Met passes Vote Leave file to CPS!

Under Fire - Boris Johnson 

IT couldn't have come at a worse time for Boris Johnson. After being recently booed by medical staff at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge and being told by Donald Trump that his 'Withdrawal Agreement on Brexit' (WAB), will hamper any trade agreement with the U.S. and make a future trade agreement unlikely, he's now learned that the Metropolitan Police have just referred a file on 'Vote Leave' to the Crown Prosecution Service for 'Early Investigative Advice'. The evidence submitted by the police could result in criminal charges being brought against the pro-Brexit campaign that was led by Boris Johnson and his key advisor, Dominic Cummings.

Last year, the Electoral Commission found that Vote Leave had broken electoral law by overspending  during the 2016 European Union referendum. The commission found that the campaign had funnelled £675,000 to the campaign by using another pro-Brexit group as a channel to avoid spending limits. Vote Leave was fined a total of £61,000. Others involved in Vote Leave, include Michael Gove, Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Nigel Dodds, the D.U.P. MP for Belfast North.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas who is campaigning for a second Brexit referendum, said:

The 'Evil Svengali' - Dominic Cummings

"I'm pleased that the Metropolitan Police have finally taken action on this after sitting on the papers for 16 months. Vote Leave was the campaign fronted by the man who is now our prime minister, Boris Johnson, and his chief advisor, Dominic Cummings. It's hard to imagine a more serious matter for our democracy..."

Vote Leave have always denied any wrongdoing.

Hidden in Plain Sight

by Les May

NORTHERN VOICES does not have a ‘party line’ in spite of some people thinking it should adopt theirs.  But there are some discernible themes; a belief in Orwell’s dictum ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’, a reluctance to spray around like so much confetti words like, nazi, fascist, racist, sexist, anti-semite, islamophobe, homophobe etc and an unwillingness to inflate the importance of Tommy Robinson and his ilk.

Recent events have shown that it is not the streetwise rabble rousers like Robinson that we need to fear will move us along the road to a far right politics. It’s the respectable schemers who have managed to get themselves into 10 Downing Street and are working on ways of keeping themselves there in perpetuity, we should have been keeping a close eye on.

In this context it’s interesting to note the different reasons cited by MPs who have left the Tory party in the recent past and those who have left the Labour party. In a joint letter Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston described how the leadership had allowed a ‘hard-line anti-EU awkward squad’ to take over the Tory party. In other words their reasons for leaving were political differences about the EU.   In sharp contrast the MPs who have left the Labour party have claimed it to be ‘racist’ and ‘anti-semitic’, two vague and infinitely elastic notions. It seems that the Tory dissenters have been far more aware of where the real danger lies than some who claim to be ‘of the Left’.

During the weeks immediately prior to Johnson sliding into the position of Prime Minister, having first been crowned by Tory party membership,  I watched, three Labour MPs who at different times were contributors to BBC2’s ‘Politics Live’, launch their on attack Johnson by saying he was ‘racist’.  It was the Tory ‘grandee’ Chris Patten, last governor of Hong Kong, who launched his attack on Johnson by saying he as a ‘liar’, before saying a lot of other uncomplimentary about him.

Calling Johnson a racist on the slender evidence of remarks he has made is lazy. We should be able to expect some deeper political insights from our MPs.  One only had to listen to the MPs who are backing him to realise they were single mindedly determined to take the UK on their own terms. And behind them are a few Tory MPs who would not serve in his administration to make sure he does not waver and leave the EU with ‘a deal’.  Is he going to end up as their puppet?

The shape of things to come if Johnson wins the next election can be seen already.   Sajid Javid is said to be unhappy with Johnson’s spending pledges.  After he is safely in Number 10 these could be quietly dropped.  Bullying has become the order of the day.  According to The Times, Dominic Cummings who has been imported as Johnson’s enforcer told a meeting of special advisers, ‘If you don't like how I run things, there's the door. Fuck off.’ Johnson is threatening to withdraw the whip from Tory MPs who do not back him.

If we do end up leaving the EU without a deal and Johnson does win the next election, I hope the Labour MPs who have worked so assiduously to undermine Jeremy Corbyn are proud of themselves.

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CUMBERBATCH & BREXIT MADE SEXY

Review:  'Brexit: The Uncivil War' on C4
by Brian Bamford

Dominic Cummings

ON Monday the 25th, April 2016, Derek Pattison put a post up on the NV Blog entitled 'Vote Leaves' Campaign Director tells select committee: "Accuracy is for snake-oil pussies".'  It accused Dominic Cummings, the newly appointed to run Vote Leave campaigner, of being the 'Vote Leave silly Ass - Dominic Cummings'.  In last night's Channel 4’s drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, Dominic Cummings, as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch was presented as a genius.  So much so that this morning I took a closer look at Mr. Cummings's arguments for how he succeeded in his campaign against the EU, Cameron and Osbourne.

When asked Cummings claims that three things helped his Leave campaign:  immigration; the public's anger about the 2008 financial crisis; and the pubic awareness that the Euro was causing problems in other countries like Greece.

Indeed it was these three factors plus the NHS that perhaps did more than the MPs to help Leave win.  According to Cummings, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove came on aboard later after the campaign was in full swing.

Cummings had to keep the politicians, who he does not trust, at a distance from the core management of the operation.  Farage and the speculator Aron Banks are both sidelined, and left to run their own campaign dedicated more to resisting immigration.

Basically Cummings adopts the theme to 'Take Back Control' for the British public, both from Brussels and from the British establishment system itself.: that is the London elite who were perceived as having been responsible for the financial crisis of 2008.

The idea is to engage and energise that fraction of the public who do not normally vote in elections and to discourage those favouring the status quo of Remain.  This involve mathematical targeting based on algorithms and large-scale data analysis.  Then hit them on social media.

'Hit them with £350m and Turkey' proclaims Cummings, addressing his staff from the office table..

Elsewhere, Cummings has argued that the dominant mental model of the Left / Right axis is no longer valid and empirically false.  Particularly among swing voters who he says are both more Left-wing and at the same time more Right wing than most politicians.  Simultaneously they will support more money for the NHS and favour confiscation of property, while favouring harsher action against terrorism or crime than the vast majority of MPs would support.

In last night's Channel Four production Benedict Cumberbatch's Cummings realises that a monster has escaped out of the bottle when Joe Cox was murdered.  Somehow it seems that Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall, and British culture is now in pieces.  Cumberbatch's performance was both stunning and sexy.

Meanwhile, Cummings was right to avoid talking about the single market, as no one would understand that because in the end the Brexit vote was sociological rather than economic.  It wasn't a repeat of Clinton's 'It's the economy stupid!'.  It was about seizing control.

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