Recognising Russia’s suffering during WW2
News in UK is all about D-day. Russia suffered huge military and civilian casualties during WW2.
Just checking in
Just checking in. Brexit poll a week from today looks bad news if the opinion polls are accurate. Nigel “No more Mr. Nice Guy” Farage’s party of bigots and climate change enthusiasts may do well. Unfortunately he has the support of a lot of angry, misguided people who somehow genuinely believe that Brexit is in their interests. He plans to try yet again to join the “Westminster elite” which he condemns after seven failed attempts. There are many unanswered questions about Farage dealings, Trump (and the Clinton emails), Assange, Cambridge Analytica, Arron Banks, the dodgy Brexit campaign donation funnelled through Arron Banks’ dodgy offshore company …
Coming soon: the great universal credit deception
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After years of ministers pretending otherwise, Amber Rudd, the DWP secretary, now admits universal credit’s introduction has left people so short of cash that they have resorted to food banks. What Iain Duncan Smith hailed in 2011 as a transformation of welfare has turned into something grotesque, with massive delays and huge flaws both of administration and design, repeatedly damned by MP select committees. The independent National Audit Office judges that universal credit has neither saved public money nor helped people into work. But it has left thousands of vulnerable claimants penniless, while others starve and even lose their homes. In a House of Commons debate last summer the London Labour MP Catherine West recounted how one of her constituents had “fallen off benefits” and ended up “sleeping in a tent in a bin chamber” on a housing estate.
Such are the horrors whose very documentation by journalists the DWP letter dismisses as “unfair”. Rather than halt universal credit, as demanded by so many groups, the department’s managers now say they will respond “in a different way … very different to anything we’ve done before”.
What follows is an elaborate media strategy to manufacture a Whitehall fantasy, one in which the benefits system is running like a dream while a Conservative government generously helps people on the escalator to prosperity. It begins at the end of this month with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the Metro newspaper; inside will be a further four-page advertorial feature. This will “myth-bust the common inaccuracies reported on UC”. What’s more, “the features won’t look or feel like DWP or UC – you won’t see our branding … We want to grab the readers’ attention and make them wonder who has done this ‘UC uncovered’ investigation.”
Not only is this a costly exercise, with a Metro wraparound going for a headline rate of £250,000 (of your money, let’s not forget), but the Advertising Standards Authority will doubtless be interested in that description of the feature. Its guidelines stipulate that“marketers and publishers must make clear that advertorials are marketing communications”
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Under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) the state – probably the Home Secretary – could make secret orders which could never be revealed. That sounds familiar somehow. RIPA has since been replaced by the Investigatory Powers Act but I’m sure that similar laws still exist. It’s a way for the state to attack people while hiding. A hypothetical example – the state could interfere in a political activist’s affairs e.g. frustrating complaints, actually denying the activist’s human rights so that the activist would be consumed with pressing more personal issues and thereby distracted from the bigger political issues. People tend to change their jobs and move away in my experience. Isn’t that the obvious thing to do if you’ve been prevented from doing your job and prevented from discussing it with anyone under threat of imprisonment? I think that the way to deal with this nonsense is to carry on regardless so that many more people become aware of these actions against democracy (even if they can’t discuss it with anyone).
Do not use his name is the wrong response
This is an inappropriate response. Not using the name is a sign of respect reserved for gods.
We’ve seen a similar response in the UK where the paedophile Jimmy Savile has been purged from archives. We should instead see him often, point and name him as a prolific paedophile.
Spectacularly unsuccessful disgraced Neo-Con International Trade Secretary Liam Fox promised 40 trade deals would be ready for ‘one second after midnight’ on Brexit day.
https://leftfootforward.org/2019/02/liam-foxs-desperate-dash-for-trade-deals-is-in-absolute-tatters/
In March 2018 he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:
“We will have arrangements that we will be able to roll over from the European Union’s agreements, we hope to have around 40 of those. We hope we will have all of those in place by the time we go.
“There are about 70 countries and 40 agreements. We hope all of those ones will be ready because they are extensions of what we have at the moment. Of course we require the agreement of the countries involved. We have spoken to all 70 countries involved. They have all given agreement that they’d like to see that in place.”
He went onto say that he wanted the UK to take advantage of ‘being able to negotiate beyond the European Union’s borders’.
“We’ve got 14 working groups in place with 21 countries at the present time I’d hope to make as much progress as possible because we need to have a confident and optimistic agenda for Britain’s future,” he said. He told the BBC trade talks had begun with Australia, New Zealand and the USA.
Of course it was total hogwash. While Fox was busy racking up air miles and getting nowhere fast in negotiating these phantom trade deals, others were warning that the 40 countries would not just be rolled over – and why should they?
The UK was leaving the EU – and they would squeeze the UK for everything they could get. These countries would also want to see what sort of deal the UK struck with the EU.
Dr. Fox was given regular reminders by industry and unions that it took the EU over seven years to negotiate the EU-Canada deal (CETA). But he carried on ‘grandstanding’, to quote Labour’s shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner.
That was until last week, when he was forced to admit it was not going as well as expected. Fox had to admit that the government was significantly behind in securing the 40 free trade deals with only a handful agreed so far.
It appears only six of the 40 deals are likely to be in place by Brexit day: 30 deals that need to be ready are now considered ‘off-track’.
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The progress in replicating the EU free trade deals so far amounts to just £16bn of the possible £117bn the 40 agreements cover.
MPs mustn’t allow Fox free range to negotiate an ‘America first’ trade deal
[In] just over five weeks time, Fox can head to Washington to face the most experienced negotiating team in the world, determined to force Britain to accept chlorine-washed chickens and allow big business to get its hands on the NHS. This is not scare-mongering. We know precisely what US multinationals want because they told us last month: standard-slashing policies that includes allowing meat filled with antibiotics and steroids onto our shelves, as well as vegetables covered in chemical residues and milk with more pus in it. And less labelling on that food. It includes more expensive medicines, costing the NHS billions of pounds, and new data rules allowing Big Tech to use and abuse your data at will. It includes more GMOs, and worse chemical standards, and a corporate court which can be used by US multinational to challenge government decisions. By and large, the US administration agrees with this wish list.
The threat to the NHS is mostly that posed by the corporate court system. And it is not made up. Stewart Hosie pointed out how it might affect government decisions yesterday in parliament:
“In Scotland, when cleaning was contracted to the private sector, hospital-acquired infection rates went up. We then took a decision to bring back NHS cleaners, and hospital-acquired infection rates came down. Had that contract been won under the terms of one of these agreements, we could have been sued and challenged.”
He’s quite right, which is why many campaign groups launched a campaign against these awful courts, known as ISDS, this week. Such a system is already part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Fox wants the UK to sign after Brexit. The deal has been widely criticised by trade unions and campaign groups across the world for entrenching deregulation and liberalisation. Signing this deal would also move us away from the EU “precautionary” system of trying to prevent harmful products coming onto to the market, to one which says, “let’s not worry until something really bad happens”.
Most of this won’t concern Fox, who seems to know “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. His belief is that the free market will work its magic to provide us with cheaper goods, and that will be beneficial for consumers. No matter that consumers are largely also producers – and that some cheap clothes made in appalling conditions doesn’t make up for losing your job. Fox is full throated in his support of ISDS, and yesterday said that the EU-Canada deal CETA was a great basis for future UK deals. CETA also includes ISDS.