Author: stuartchannah

I always get my first news of the day from my bedside Echo Dot, so it was with a slowly waking brain that I heard the news that ‘The Donald’ had assassinated Iranian military leader Soleimani. Last time I looked, assassinations were considered state sponsored murder.

Has America really fallen so far that it must resort to this kind of behaviour? Soleimani was undoubtedly responsible for a great many deaths and much misery. However he was also of great help in fighting ISIS, for better or for worse. As with the Taliban during the 80’s, the USA has form when it comes to allying itself with groups and people that it later has to fight, or indeed become an enemy of the US.

My hope is that Iran takes the high ground and decides to take advantage of the fact that Donald Trump took this action without the backing of the rest of the American government and react with dignity. Of course we have seen the angry mobs on TV but the Iranian government could win a lot if support by reacting with caution.

The world does not need a war in the middle east and Trumps reckless action has risked such a war. We know that Trumps real intent is to ensure American influence in an oil rich part of the world but that kind of thinking is of the past as I hope will be the reliance on oil and oil producers in the not to distant future.

NOTE: since I started writing this post, Iran launched a very small scale retaliation and The Donald is talking in terms of ‘de-escalation, so hopefully Iran have decided to not take Trumps bait, however as I write, Sky news are reporting that the Ukrainian Airlines plane that crashed this week may have been shot down by an Iranian anti aircraft missile. Even if accidental, this could be another dangerous moment for all of us.

It surely cannot have escaped the notice of even the most ardent Brexit fan, that in the short time since Boris Johnsons election, major changes have started both within government, and the civil service.  Under the guidance of Dominic Cummings, Boris is all set to make changes that most definitely take back control, not for you and me, but for the Tory ‘elite’ which he claimed not to belong to.

The first sign of this was the fulfilment on one of Dominic’s long-term ambitions, the ability to fill government posts with un-elected people (is the irony starting to hit you yet?) simply by exploiting a little know rule (little known outside of Westminster) that allows life piers to hold ministerial posts.  Take for example Zac Goldsmith.  Defeated in the election and therefore rejected by the electorate, after a quick appointment of a life peerage, hey presto, he is now a minister.

Big Dom and BoJo now plan to do this as an on-going policy and have stated that they will ‘fill’ government with this kind of person. Unelected and unaccountable to you and me for whatever they inflict on us…..are you feeling in control yet?

The big new plan doesn’t stop at Downing Street, the same is about to happen to the Civil Service.  Now to be fair, the civil service is already an unelected organisation but one that has operated independently from any single political party, carrying out the wishes of whichever party is the government of the day, and yet Cummings now wants his choice of people running Whitehall, people more inclined to support the Tory governments policies.  This plan will remove any checks and balances that we have had to date, and removes the inherent protection for the less fortunate within society, who it has traditionally tried to protect, from government short termism.

I keep getting told to let it go, Brexit is done.  Well, as people like me keep saying and despite Boris’s bold statements, Brexit is a long way from being done, but that aside, being defeated in the fight to stay in the E.U, in no way removes our right and responsibility to highlight what this Tory government is doing.

Too many people are happy to bury their heads in the sand and just trust to hope that people who have been shown to be deceitful will suddenly decide to keep their promises, and do what’s best for the country.

Even with a small majority, the Conservatives have wreaked havoc on the U.K and especially its most vulnerable people, with an unassailable majority, things are unlikely to change for the better.

So, Boris is back at work and has had a few days to get his thoughts together, lets take a look at how it’s going.  Boris is to set in law, legislation that will prevent him asking for an extension to the Brexit negotiations. This means that there are three possible reasons for Boris to do this;

1. Boris has such an overinflated opinion of himself (he is a politician after all) and despite everyone in the E.U saying that there will not be enough time to complete a deal, believes that he can “Get Brexit Done”. 
2. Boris has been playing a long game and now he has a massive majority, he is going to throw the ERG and other extreme Brexiteers under the bus (as he did to the DUP) and actually go for Brexit light, meaning that he could negotiate a few sweeteners for Remainers (freedom to work and travel in Europe) whilst still being able to claim that he “Got Brexit Done”. 
3. He’s f***ing nuts and plans on a ‘No Deal’ Brexit which of course we spent £bns preparing for, and then scrapped the preparations for, so that we are not at all prepared for ‘No Deal’.  The last time parliament discussed this, Chris Grayling, Minister for being a useless Pratt, announced that there would not be checks on trucks coming in from Europe in order to avoid queues.  If you think illegal immigration has been bad so far, how bad will it be when the migrants near Calais discover that the trucks will go unchecked!

If it has to happen (and it does) option 2 please Bozza.

As much as it is a story of victory for falsehood, yesterdays election is a story of how good old fashioned partisan thinking and arrogance snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Many of us are in shock that a man like Boris Johnson could win a landslide victory in this election. Boris is a man who was too cowardly to face Andrew Neil, too scared to allow the MI6 report on Russian support of the Conservative party be published. A man so shameless that even in his victory speech, he repeated the nonesense about 50,000 extra nurses and 40 new Hospitals.

But what is important to remember is that this was an election that we didn’t need to have. Under the fixed term parliament act, Boris could not call the election without the support of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Those parties could have won a vote of no confidence again and if they had united under Corbyn, asked the queen to allow them to form a unity government. We could then have dealt with the issue of getting a second referendum so that young voters could finally have their say and not conflated the issue of Brexit with the issue of not having a government with a majority as we saw yesterday.

Instead in their arrogance, Jo Swinson and Jeremy Corbyn, pulled the trigger on an election that would be fought over Brexit and that cost them, and potentially the country, dearly. Even having called the election they could have united to get around our biased electoral system and rid the country, maybe not of the Tory party totally, but certainly some of its more unpleasant MPs such as Ian Duncan Smith.

But no, off they went, with Jo making daft statements about become Prime Minister, which even I as a Lib Dem member knew was impossible under first past the post. Meanwhile the awful Brexit party realised that what they needed to do was exactly what Labour and the Lib Dems refused to do and avoid splitting the vote by withdrawing candidates. I watched in horror as a clearly relieved IDS realised that the Liberal and Labour candidates had inevitably split the vote and handed the Tory party another seat and I saw this again and again throughout the night.

So thanks largely to Jo Swinson, soon to be ex leader of the Lib Dems, the possibility of a second referendum is dead.

Is there anything that can be seen as an upside to our inevitable journey to becoming ‘Little Britain’? Well, now he has a majority there is no hiding place for BoJo, he either delivers or is seen as a charleton. He is also no longer beholden to the extremes of the ERG Brexstreemists such as Jacob Reece Mogg, and when you remember that he wrote a pro remain and pro leave speech before the referendum, its possible that he is not inclined towards a hard Brexit.

In any case, large parts of the country, abandoned by successive Tory Prime Ministers and who are already seeing job losses because of Brexit decided that these same Torys where the only ones they could trust to deliver the Brexit that will finally crush any hope for the future of their young people.  Based on a dream of empire lost and the lies about E.U rules and immigration, I genuinely worry for them for, with the massive majority BoJo now commands, the storm is coming.

Not a post as such but as you go to vote I hope you will watch this first.

Stuart

So, its election eve and no doubt many people are trying to figure out which of the current crop of self interested buffoons they are going to give their vote to.

It’s a tricky decision without doubt, and the decision is yours and yours alone and you should vote with your consience and not the way your parents tell you or the way your family has always voted, or your community etc.  After watching various interviews with people in the street on TV last night, I do want to point out a few facts that seem to be either deliberately ignored or people just don’t want to accept the truth.

1. Boris Johnsons clever new ‘oven ready’  Brexit deal’ is the same as one of Teresa May’s proposed deals, a deal that was soundly rejected by the Conservatives and Boris is on record (video and in print) as saying “this is a deal that no Conservative Prime Minister could support”.
2. Boris has not cleverly solved the Irish border issue, he has put the border down the Irish sea (as in the previously rejected deal) and he is being deliberately misleading when he says there will be no customs checks between the mainland and Northern Ireland.  Think about it, N.I is now on the E.U side of a trade border.The E.U have stated that they will not allow goods to travel unchecked between a none E.U UK and the E.U so the only place these checks can happen is between England and Northern Ireland.  Even his Brexit minister says that this is the case yet Boris perisists with misleading everyone.
3. Brexit will NOT be done by January, we will simply enter the ‘transition phase’ described in his deal.  Let me say that again, ‘transition phase’.  We will as of January have ‘NO TRADE DEALS’ with any nation in the world….none! Please remember that Tory and former Brexit minister, David Davies PROMISED you that we would have many exciting trade deals in place when we left.  The Canada deal with the E.U took 7 years as an example of how long Brexit will continue to be part of our lives.No country currently trades on WTO rules because they were designed as an emergency fall back, not a first choice.  Of course the USA stands ready to do a deal and you can (and Trump has stated this is an aim of his) look forward to the removal of price controls for medicines.  Think that £8 is a lot to pay for a subscription?  Without price controls we will be like the average American who does not have private health insurance, going into debt to pay for treatments, now charged at ‘market’ value.
4. Boris is saying that they will put 20,000 more police on the streets, wonderful, this is still 2,000 less than we had before Teresa May as Home Secretary who with Johnsons support slashed police numbers.  How generous of you Boris.
5. Boris says that he will give us 50,000 extra nurses but has now been forced to admit that this number includes 18,500 nurses already in the NHS.  He justifies this propaganda by saying that they are included because he will ‘retain’ them and we would otherwise have lost them.  How stupid do you have to be to believe this nonesense?

All of the above is blatent cheating of the figures, bending the facts and in some cases just lies, and as you go to put your tick in the box remember this is not Boris Johnson’s first attempt to mislead the people of the UK.

Don’t forget the Brexit campaign when he talked about E.U rules that varifiably never existed such as straight bananas, remember that he had to admit that there would not be £350m per week for the NHS.  Remember that he was forced to admit that we are Nett beneficiaries of the E.U, meaning that we get more back than we put in, and finally remember that the E.U has never set rules about none E.U migration, the Tory’s failed to bring this down all by themselves .

As you bounce over the pot holes in your streets, as you stand on a train, crammed in like a refugee train in the third world and as you watch yet another stabbing reported on our ‘police free’ streets, just remember that the Torys have already been in power for just under 9 years.  All of our current woes are their fault and no one elses.

Now do you still trust Boris?