Starmer and his rivers of blood
I wrote earlier in this post, Being a gosling chauffeur; Tumuli and White Horses; Birdwatch magazine and Lucky Dube vs Keir Starmer – Animal Wild:
“Talking of Keir Starmer, of “island of strangers” fame, inviting comparisons with Enoch Powell and his rivers of blood, isn’t it funny how governments can always find money for citizen control, the unnecessary and pointless Covid restrictions on our liberty for example, or their own bloated expense accounts for that matter, but not for renationalising the water companies which is way beyond urgent. Now he has found, somewhere and somehow after Rachel Reeves’ budget has totalled the economy, £4.7 billion to build three new prisons. Prison doesn’t really work most of the time – why not spend the money on education, rehabilitation, medical treatment and other more effective measures and solutions?”
The BBC later reported that “Downing Street also rejected the comparison and said the PM stands by his words and “the argument he was making [was] that migrants make a massive contribution to our country, but migration needs to be controlled”.” Why didn’t he say that instead then?
Hardeep Matharu, editor-in-chief of Byline Times, has written: “His suggestion that immigration is a key reason why we risk becoming an “island of strangers” is a cynical ploy: a hyper-real solution for people’s discontent, when those in power know it’s more complicated than that.”
Starmer’s speech occasioned one of the very few times I have actually shouted and sworn at a screen. Clearly it is indeed no more than a cynical attempt to scapegoat immigrants and appeal to the likes of those who respond avidly to the rabble-rousing rhetoric of Farage, Trump and their ilk. Someone I met the other week made the excellent point that it is very unnerving to have a prime minister who has absolutely zero feeling for language.
There’s a twist, which I am nervous to write about in case it sets off alarm bells at GCHQ, but The Times on Saturday included an article about an online training course from the government’s own website: “Believing the West is under threat from mass migration has been classed as a “terrorist ideology” that could merit intervention from the government’s anti-radicalisation programme … The course, hosted on gov.uk, states that “cultural nationalism” is one of the most common “sub-categories of extreme right-wing terrorist ideologies” alongside white supremacism and white ethno-nationalism.” This is not defined in law and there are understandable free speech concerns, but it does rather seem that Starmer should refer himself as someone susceptible to radicalisation. It’s bad enough when I hear nonsense like “Britain is full” in the pub, but from our prime minister? How dare he call immigration, especially of refugees, a “squalid chapter” in our history?
Reeves and the big spend
There’s more on Rachel Reeves too, who now plans to spend our money, which most of us would like used as a priority on nature and the environment and in particular on cleaning up our water in all its shapes and forms, on other things. £86bn on drug treatments, longer-lasting batteries and AI. Only the first of those seems remotely justifiable in current times. It will also go on “cutting-edge semiconductors that power devices such as mobile phones and electric cars”, which are hardly essential, and such appalling projects as the Sizewell C nuclear plant (which will almost certainly be a disaster for the RSPB’s flagship Minsmere reserve) and a new railway line between Liverpool and Manchester (let’s not learn anything at all from the HS2 debacle). The proposed education spend seems absolutely necessary, but £500m for HMRC to enable it to have AI take over enquiries? I have yet to find a corporate chatbot that hasn’t had me tearing my hair out in frustration at the circularity of the ‘conversations’. The banks are the worst. My best solution to date is to say “I need to speak to someone, I need to speak to a human being” over and over again, but it takes ages. It’s all about cutting corporate costs in the form of staff with the customers paying through getting ever-increasingly worse service. It was true of HMRC and may still be, at least it was when I last had reason to contact them when I was entirely wrongly accused of not paying PAYE for staff who had in fact not worked for me for over a year (yes, they had been informed), that they don’t really answer the phone at all but again this seems a strange priority. I think this makes me a “decel”.
Michelle Mone
I watched the BBC’s two-part documentary about the rise and fall of the shyster Baroness Michelle Mone of lingerie, bitcoin and PPE fame/fraud. It seems to have been her friendship with David Cameron which contributed most to her elevation. I was struck by the House of Lords induction process. There’s a detailed history of it here:
Introduction (House of Lords) – Wikipedia
What we have now is, unbelievably, a relatively recently modernised version. It still involves the Garter Principal King of Arms and probably also the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. The words are intoned by the Reading Clerk. I hope it isn’t his only job because he isn’t very good at it. For “present” he clearly says either “presence” or “presents” neither of which make sense in the context, but I am not sure very much of it makes sense.
“Elizabeth II by the grace of god of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland [so far so good] and of our other realms and territories Queen…” Whoa. Hang on a minute. The peculiar word order aside, do we still have realms? We do have overseas territories, a number of them hotly disputed, for which see here:
The Overseas Territories: An introduction and relations with the UK – House of Commons Library
They are:
” … know ye [“ye”, in 2025?] that we, of our especial grace [whose grace is so special exactly?], do by these present advance, create, and prefer our trusty and well-beloved Michelle Georgina Mone …” Again, hang on a sec. “Trusty” is a sick joke in this case and it can also be read as “right trusty” which sounds very odd, like being ‘right handy’ in a Guy Ritchie film, but that’s omitted for some reason.. “Mone …, officer of our Most Excellent Order of the British Empire…” [is there actually still an empire? No there isn’t.] “… to the state, degree, style, dignity, title and honour of Baroness Mone of Mayfair [her connection with which was what exactly?], in our City of Westminster, to have and to hold on to her for her life.” That last bit just seems weird and a little bit creepy.
For the Lords Spiritual the rules are different and the hereditaries are deemed to need no induction or introduction at all.
The modernisations happened not in the distant past but in the late twentieth century.
The king owns all the gold
I have also watched, also on the BBC, a programme about a sort of gold rush involving the mining of part of a Scottish national park. One can hardly blame the local people for wanting to benefit, but environmental concerns seemed to be at the forefront of no one’s mind. The couple who own the land are doing pretty well out of it from rent from the mining companies (there have been a number of failed attempts) but they do not own the gold. Guess who does. One guess. The Crown Estate. It turns out the king owns all of it, all the gold. Throughout the land. As if the foreshore, the seabed, and exploitation rights from those, and monies from all intestate estates were not enough. As I wrote in a previous post (Church & State – Animal Wild): “The royals do not just rake in money in this way from businesses but also schools, hospitals, prisons, councils, the RNLI, toll bridges, ferries, sewage pipes, pubs, churches, village halls and the military. [King Charles will earn £11.4m over fifteen years by charging the NHS for ambulance storage.]” Meanwhile the falsely accused post office people are being offered tiny proportions of what is due to them through a system designed to fail.
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