FRIDAY MUSIC: Classic Hits, Part 5, by JD

Mary Wells - My Guy

Frankie Ford "Sea Cruise"

Ronettes - Be My Baby (remastered audio)

Eddie Cochran - Twenty Flight Rock

The Clovers - Love potion number nine.

Little Darlin' - The Diamonds 1957

START THE WEEK: More NHS, what is to be done? by Wiggia

In the current climate with so much wrong or going wrong in the UK, it seems almost churlish to further criticise that ailing monolithic entity the NHS.

Since my brush with the four horsemen, see earlier entries, I have had plenty of time to analyse my recent appointments with the organisation. Clearl, in its current form it is largely not fit for purpose. So much is glaringly wrong that it is a question of where to start.

The obvious place is the GP surgery There is no doubt that a postcode lottery is part of the GP set up. Some people I know have a decent GP practice allowing same day appointments, phone calls and decent services all round.

My one falls into the ‘not fit for purpose’ category. Whilst they bombard you with requests to visit them for jabs and annual health checks for all and sundry the primary purpose of GP surgeries getting to see a doctor remains frustrating, time-consuming and if you are working nigh on impossible. The Blair contract was the start of a slide in service: he or his government gave the BMA all it asked for with no questions asked over the removal of weekend and after hours work. It became a five day 9-5 service with (in our case and many others) an hour for lunch.

Why was it allowed to fester and end up like this? The fact it is a ‘private’ though publicly funded entity is a part of the reason. GP surgeries use the private and NHS parts according to their needs not those of the patients; again not all but far too many do. The fact they are paid for the amount of patients on their books rather than those that they treat makes them the sole arbiters as to treatment and when it is administered, often it seems at their leisure.

You have the ridiculous case of the NHS bombarding people with adverts to go and see their GP with various serious ailments and then the same people not being able to get an appointment to have the problem analysed. This is plainly wrong and costly for the obvious reasons of delay in treatment and costs in treating the delayed treatment when in many cases the need has reached serious levels or cannot be treated at all.

Plus how come our GP surgeries have the information screens telling migrants they do not have to have any paperwork to get treated as our recently did? We pay for all this and we are not asked how our money should be spent. There is a mindset within the NHS that they know best on all matters, not universally but by enough to make the hairs on the back of your head stand up as happened to me at a routine health check a while ago when the nurse after being asked a simple question about a long wait for treatment smiled and said ‘it is free, you know.’ I did not dare say what I wanted to.

This early diagnosis and treatment which would save lives and money has been promised for years and little has happened. If it did happen there would be nowhere to put the patients anyway, there often isn’t now, as we have the lowest ratio of beds available to patients in Europe - Germany for instance has four times as many and France twice the number.

https://www.pgweb.uk/health/3546-comparing-uk-hospital-beds-with-other-countries

Some years ago the Conservative government decided to introduce a system that it hoped would see patients treated quickly and free up beds to save money. It has backfired spectacularly, with old hospitals like our local one being turned into flats and replaced by new ones with fewer beds. The crisis has been exacerbated by the rapid increase in the migrant population - our indigenous population has remained at the same level for some years, so the migrant problem has affected the NHS twofold: not enough capacity and not enough staff to cope with the increase.

Staffing is another issue and is as stupid as the lack of beds. The NHS employs more people than any other organisation in Europe yet those who manage it (if you can call it that) constantly clamour for more staff. Despite their constant denials it is clear something is wrong. Those that work on the front line will now tell you so - which they would not have done a few years ago, denying the NHS was anything other than the best in the world and saying they would defend it to the hilt! But now during my prolonged stay in hospitals and subsequent visits for myself and more recently my wife, they are much more forthcoming about the organisation’s shortcomings. The district nurse who treated my wife recently was one of many who having spent many years in all areas of nursing spoke of the multiple managers they now have compared with just one a few years ago. Again compared with the European counterparts there is a massive imbalance in the staff employed, something is badly wrong and again the patient/ taxpayer suffers.

The figures show we do indeed have a shortage of doctors, yet the system is not employing front line staff that are available. This is simply a case of lack of funds to employ them or so we are told, despite bringing in staff from third world countries that can ill afford to lose them. Something is very wrong here.

The infrastructure has been neglected for decades, Boris, he of the promises, said we were to build forty new hospitals; not one was built and now we have no money to build one. A local hospital, the Queen Elizabeth in King’s Lynn, has been falling down for decades and was recently voted the worst performing hospital in England. We now have almost permanent scaffolding and supports to keep some hospitals upright as well as having people sitting on the floor in A&E waiting. Truly third world status.

With cottage hospitals and convalescent homes a thing of the past there is no spare capacity so the shortage of beds crisis is now a problem all year round not just in winter.

There is no outside the box thinking with the NHS. On the Continent clinics built to provide short stay facilities and minor ops are very successful and take pressure off GPs and main hospitals. Many of our old cottage hospitals did provide those services but were subsumed into the big hospitals; we had a very well-used and successful one in Sudbury Suffolk when we lived nearby, but that was closed.

They are not the answer but would help, especially as main hospitals are suffering from bed blocking with elderly patients not being able to move as no suitable facilities are now available. With an elderly population this is a problem not going away anytime soon.

There is much made of the fact that the NHS are recruiting staff from the third world. Why this should be is a mystery, many qualified British nurses cannot get jobs yet are available and the folly of these decisions is the almost routine employment of expensive agency staff, all of whom left the NHS for better pay and conditions in the private sector in the first place.

One of the observations I made when in for my long stay was the difference in quality among nursing staff. Many of the supposedly qualified nurses from abroad are very much “one item at a time” people. They seem incapable of multi-tasking: a simple request made when passing is met with ‘I will see to that when I have finished this’ and the nurse is never to be seen again - quite a normal occurrence.

And the ward where I was sent before being discharged was full of them and also the same third worlders who took a literal age to do standard tasks. As an example we had the drugs nurse come round and he/she spent three and a half hours, yes really, to dispense to ten patients, starting at eight and finishing at half eleven. So importing staff creates problems as well as solving a few.

A common problem that many can relate to is the time taken to sort out what the problem is in the first place. Again here is a personal example: my wife started to suffer pain in her knee, it got worse and a doctor’s appointment was successfully obtained and the doctor sent her to a specialist at the hospital for diagnosis and X-rays. The result was not conclusive so another appointment with another specialist was made for two months later. All the time the pain was getting worse. The second diagnosis was also inconclusive and a few weeks later it was suggested another expert would have a look at it. This one actually knew what she was doing and thought the X-rays showed little and the problem was her knee. Fine but of course this required another X-ray appointment. That happened a couple of weeks later and lo and behold it was her hip, so back to the hospital for an assessment and the news that it needed a hip replacement. How long to wait? About a year, came the reply.

By now she could not walk but dragged herself around in increasing pain. No way could she go a year like that so with reluctance we went private.

As so many people are having to make the same decision the private hospitals also have a waiting list. On the day of the op it was discovered she had developed an infection in the leg and the op was cancelled. Six weeks later it finally happened, but the endless delays caused problems with further infections and it took an age to get her back on her feet such was the state of her legs after all the inactivity.

If the initial diagnosis and op had taken place quickly it would have been very beneficial to my wife and our bank balance as we are the most expensive in Europe if you go private. Even taking that route the delay was eight months which considering her condition was inexcusable, but we are are part of an army of patients in the same position. I could not imagine how she would have ended up if we could not have afforded to go private.

But the bottom line is what is to become of the NHS? For years any criticism was met with disdain, even up to Covid where the few were still banging pots and pans in appreciation of the few still working. In my area live many doctors of all types as we are near the main hospital. Most spent the whole period at home and the GPs in many cases never went back to a full week ever again.

In the mind of someone who has seen just a smidgen of the whole problem it is obvious that the long term strategy of the NHS needs to be laid out and big changes made. Advances in medical science means many more conditions can be treated and even eliminated, but at a cost. Can we afford it? In an ideal world we would say yes but we are not in an ideal world and we frankly cannot go on this route for ever.

So priorities have to assessed and approved. Many will like the outcome but it has to be done. The service has to be streamlined. Some services e.g. IVF cannot be seen as a God given right; those who want it must start to pay towards that and many similar elective procedures such as many forms of cosmetic surgery. I am sure readers can think of many other items to add.

The NHS is just that, a ‘national’ health service funded by British tax payers for use by British nationals. Where those CEOs of trusts get the authority to decide to treat the world’s illnesses I have no idea, but it is wrong. Nowhere else that I know treats outsiders for free, all have to pay - and if you are abroad you also have to pay for your own translators if you need one, they are not supplied for free.

The waste in the NHS from prescriptions to procurement is legion. As an example on a previous stay in the local hospital they had just been issued with new bleepers which worked rarely or not at all. It transpired that whoever purchased these never did in-house trials to see if they worked and the cost was £800,000. Again I am sure there are many who can give similar stories, a scandalous waste of other people’s money and it always is.

There is also the annual increase in compensation claims that have reached record levels. There will always be mistakes but is there an effort to reduce these often fatal errors? I recently had an acquaintance whose wife had a heart attack in hospital because no ultra sound was used before the procedure and the qualified doctor was absent when a camera was inserted which caught on a tear in the heart lining and caused an instant cardiac arrest. They have admitted liability for negligence but what of the young woman’s future?

Many of the NHS trust chiefs treat their charges as a personal fiefdom. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent trans decision ours recently announced she would not be complying with the ruling and the hospital would continue with trans women using women’s spaces. Just leave such stuff alone and get on with running a hospital! The rainbow flags on the roof and the PRIDE notices everywhere do not help anyone get better. Just stop it! There is no place for wokeism in hospitals or, as we have discovered, anywhere else.

There have been suggestions the current agreement with GP surgeries should be scrapped. They should be paid for the patients they see not those on their books, and maybe the whole ‘private’ make up of the GP set up should be scrapped and all of it should come under the umbrella of the NHS as an integral part. Anyone old enough to remember when doctors did home visits often at night knows what we are talking about. If the paperwork is weighing them down as claimed then change the set up along with the current failure in many sections of the NHS to inform other parts - they were still using fax machines until recently in some areas.

The NHS cannot fix everything. There is no health service anywhere that can fulfil the needs of all, and no amount of money can solve all the problems unless one wants a health service and no other public services. There simply isn’t enough money.

There was a glimmer of hope in some quarters when the current health secretary Wes Streeting made his first public announcements on the state of the NHS. He said no more money until reforms have been made. That lasted about two weeks when a delighted Wes was seen applauding in Parliament the giving of an extra £29 billion to the health service. As the leader of NHS England said most has already been taken up with wage demands. NHS England is to be disbanded over two years, long enough to find those sacked?

Another announcement, again from the health secretary is the listing of league tables as mentioned earlier. Why? We all know which local hospitals or medical services are good or bad, league tables will do nothing to change that and the poor patients have no choice in what they are given. The Brexit failure PM David Cameron promised, as they all do, that we would have choice in doctors hospitals and surgeries; as with everything else he promised nothing ever materialised.

There has been little to change the minds of those that believe the Conservatives were indeed heading towards a private health service. Only in the Tory Government’s dying moments was money put in to help slow down the decline, the classic “too little, too late,” and again there were no plans for any changes or reform. Perhaps they really did not want the NHS to survive.

And if this is an example of the ten year plan to fix the NHS we are in serious doo-doo:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/29/supermarkets-told-to-cut-100-calories-from-shoppers-baskets/

So either Wes Streeting steps up to the plate and actually makes some meaningful changes or we are screwed for even more tax payer funds to throw at a service that currently is not fit for purpose in many areas.

I’m not holding my breath.

Ambackador – PMQs 10th September 2025

News just in (11am on 11 September): Lord Mandelson has been sacked from his post as Ambassador to the USA.

Some may see it as a victory for Kemi Badenoch’s performance in this week’s PMQs, of which more in a moment. But isn’t it another example of what Dominic Cummings calls “narrative whiplash”: the flailing around of Government and Opposition in response to mainstream news? The Opposition may run around whooping with a fresh scalp in their hands, but what does that change?

We have always known that Mandelson toadies to money and power – see him here with Oleg Deripaska in 2012. He wrote some now media-splashed supportive messages to the well- and widely-connected Jeffrey Epstein in the years before that, yet no-one has suggested that he was ever personally involved in the entertainments allegedly provided by Epstein, both on- and off-shore.

Starmer has thrown Mandelson off the back of the troika – another one for the wolves! He himself is so unpopular that he might easily be next to bite the snow. So what? Someone else would take over the reins, and the journey would continue.

For Sir Keir is merely carrying out – completing – a programme that did not begin with him: the remoulding of the British Constitution, the fragmentation and devolution of Parliament’s powers. Until that is put right, our crisis will only deepen.

And so to PMQs, during which there were some tributes to the late HRH the Duchess of Kent.

The PM deplored the Israeli attacks on Hamas leaders in Qatar and reasserted that diplomacy was the only way to get the remaining Jewish hostages out of Gaza. He also said that Russian drones had invaded Polish airspace, while affirming his support for both Poland and Ukraine. Some may think he is wrong about both peace and war.

The Conservatives’ Dr Luke Evans twitted the PM with Cabinet difficulties over Ministers’ “integrity”, and was easily rebuffed with the Tory-era example of Ms Priti Patel, who unlike Ms Rayner last week, had remained in her post.

Scottish Labour’s Melanie Ward (who won her seat from the SNP last year) congratulated her Party over the Chancellor’s funding for the regeneration of Kirkcaldy High Street.

Ms Badenoch (Leader Of The Opposition, aka LOTO) asked whether Sir Keir had full confidence in HMG’s Ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, in view of the latter’s earlier dealings as Business Secretary with the late Jeffrey Epstein – even after Epstein had been convicted of child sex offences. The PM replied that Lord Mandelson had been appointed using the correct procedure; he said he had confidence in the Ambassador and would not be drawn on any documentation connecting Mandelson and Epstein.

The PM diverted the discussion to Labour’s achievements and projects. Distracted by this shifting ground, LOTO listed many other problems enmiring the nation, which she attributed to Starmer’s weakness; he replied with another list of claimed successes and then went ad hominem (or rather ad feminam), saying the Conservatives’ leadership contest was much more drawn-out than that for the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

The Mail’s Quentin Letts says he squirmed like a fresh-caught eel – but then, Starmer always does. The difference is that eels have a backbone. If Mandelson fell to this, it would not have been because of Badenoch’s wobbly hook. Perhaps the PM cringed at the thought of the scribblers having endless fun with Mandy. More fool he: leaving them to it would let him carry on with his deeper mission.

Labour’s Tim Rutland and the PM agreed on governmental progress with the NHS.

The Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey concurred with criticism of the attack in Qatar, then went on to raise the issues of suicide prevention and parental difficulties with officialdom as they try to care for their children. When he too asked about Lord Mandelson, he received the same dry reference to appointments procedure.

Labour’s Josh Newbury spoke of the restricted life of a severely disabled constituent and the PM promised him some ministerial meetings.

The SNP’s Stephen Flynn delivered an oratorical speech condemning the PM’s scheduled meeting with Israel’s President Herzog, without naming either the man or his role. Sir Keir repeated his two-state solution for the conflict in Gaza.

Bill Esterson (Labour) criticised fracking; Starmer said he would ban it “for good”, and professed shock at Reform’s policy of opposing the development of renewable energy resources.

Simon Hoare (Con) raised the issue of firefighting in rural areas; the PM promised further support.

Jon Trickett (Lab) bemoaned the high rate of unemployment in his Yorkshire constituency; Sir Keir generalised about increased national employment and celebrated the opening of Doncaster Sheffield airport.

For Bristol’s Greens, Carla Denyer lamented the presence of Israeli arms dealers at the arms fair in London this week, linking it to Gaza. The PM spoke of “strict rules” and “action taken”.

Straight afterwards, Welsh Labour’s Ruth Jones thanked Starmer for his condolences on the sudden death of a Senedd member, Hefin David, and welcomed Labour’s job-creating defence industrial strategy.

Andrew Rosindell (Con) criticised wasting police time on trivial incidents on the Internet, and called for the Public Order Act 1986 to be updated. Sir Keir replied that he had previously said and now repeated that he wanted the police to concentrate on “serious” crime and “crime that matters most to our communities in each of our constituencies”.

Labour’s Adam Jogee wanted more neighbourhood policing. The PM referenced the new Crime and Policing Bill – “which the Conservatives and Reform voted against” – without mentioning those Parties’ concerns, which (we understand) included potential criminalisation of behaviour under the civil ASB framework, and the need to protect freedom of speech and assembly regarding protests.

Mark Pritchard (Con) spoke of deaths in custody at HMP Stoke Heath; Sir Keir referred the matter to the Justice Secretary.

Dr Simon Opher talked about chickenpox vaccinations (which he welcomed) and condemned “false rumours” about vaccines. The PM agreed and castigated “the man who wrote Reform’s health policy” (Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist who at the recent Reform conference controversially linked the Covid vaccine to the King’s cancer). Again, the issue may see further debate: for example, the oncologist Professor Angus Dalgleish thinks that the vaccine may “turbo-charge” cancers. Perhaps sweeping statements should be avoided.

The Lib Dems’ Charlotte Cane asked for the “land use framework” to be consulted before granting permission for more solar farms. The PM repeated his support for renewable energy and promised that “we will follow process”.

Labour’s David Pinto-Duschinsky invited Starmer to expand on the government’s ending of the feudal leasehold system and the introduction of “commonhold”.

Dr Al Pinkerton (Lib Dem) advocated for a Bill to control the criminal cloning and abuse of Vehicle Registration Marks; the PM promised to look at it.

Labour’s Dr Rupa Huq passed on the wish of the Ukrainian community in Acton that the PM should ask President Trump to help find a just peace in Ukraine. Starmer reiterated his support for Ukraine and committed that he would “ramp up the pressure on Putin”.

Sarah Bool (Con) called on Sir Keir to “reset his relationship with our farmers and reverse the family farm tax”. Ignoring the latter, the PM rehearsed his points on the “farming road map”, the “deal with the EU” and the “£5 billion that we put into farming in our last Budget”. As in other matters, the Devil is in the detail – and there seems no desire to release Him in this public context.

Starmer’s PPS, Liz Twist, ended the session by calling on him to reaffirm Labour’s commitment to suicide prevention, which of course he did. But the second reading of the Assisted Dying Bill takes place in the Lords on Friday.

Reposted from Wolves of Westminster

FRIDAY MUSIC: Classic Hits (Part 4) by JD

More oldies but goodies.

The Crystals - Da Do Ron RonNorman Greenbaum - Spirit In The Sky (1970)Jimmy Jones - Good Timin' This track was a UK No.1 for three weeks in 1960, it reached No.3 in the US. Jimmy Jones (b. 1937 Birmingham, Alabama) is still highly regarded as an influential character on modern music. His use of falsetto voice in R&B/pop directly influenced Del Shannon, who in turn influenced The Bee Gees disco orientated tracks.Johnny Burnette - Dreamin`Dion & The Belmonts I Wonder Why 1958Sam Cooke - Bring It On Home to Me (Official Audio)
The backing singer is Lou Rawls, in fact it sounds more like a duet with Rawls' voice being an essential part of the song.

FRIDAY MUSIC: 50s/60s Third Helping, by JD

The Coasters - Yakety Yak

Ben E King - Spanish Harlem
Benjamin Earl King (born September 28, 1938), better known as Ben E. King, is an American soul singer. He is perhaps best known as the singer and co-composer of "Stand by Me," a U.S. top 10 hit in both 1961 and 1987 and a #1 hit in the UK in 1987, and as one of the principal lead singers of the R&B vocal group The Drifters.
Jerry Leiber & Phil Spector wrote Spanish Harlem. Released on the last day of 1960

The Marcels - Blue Moon

The Marvelettes - Please Mister Postman

The Valentinos : It's All Over Now
The Valentinos (also known as the Womack Brothers) was a Cleveland, Ohio-based family R&B group, mainly famous for launching the careers of brothers Bobby Womack and Cecil Womack, the former brother finding bigger fame as a solo artist and the latter finding success as a member of the husband and wife team of Womack & Womack with Linda Cooke. During their 22-year existence, the group was known for R&B hits such as "Lookin' for a Love", notably covered by the J. Geils Band and later a solo hit for Bobby Womack, and "It's All Over Now", covered by the Rolling Stones.

Poetry In Motion - Johnny Tillotson

The Disaster We Need? - PMQs 3rd September 2025

Before we begin…

We need a new approach to Prime Minister’s Prevarications.

According to Dominic Cummings Sir Keir can’t do the job and doesn’t want to which might explain why he contents himself with reading out the file prepared for him by the Cabinet Office (led by Sir Chris Wormald) which also scripts the ministerial meetings and conclusions in Number Ten.

I shall therefore redact the PM’s jargon-generator replies with his tedious reiteration of Labour aspirations and alleged achievements; also his “tu quoque” reminders of the failures of previous (faux) Conservative administrations. Since 1997 we have had fourteen years each of Red and (?) Blue and just look at us now. If France fails before we do the IMF may not have enough to bail us out.

Recently I asked a correspondent “has HMG ever actually averted a foreseeable catastrophe?” The latest he could come up with was Harold Wilson’s refusal to join in on the Vietnam debacle.

Maybe only calamity can save us; that is, force a fundamental reset rescuing our liberty and sovereignty. One blogger has suggested that Angela Rayner is “the disaster we need” though her Multiple Houses of Single Occupancy affair may have tarnished her. To a limited extent, that is: typical of the Government’s litigious approach to embarrassment is the court order conveniently preventing her from revealing all. At least it wasn’t a super-injunction like the 2023 (Tory) one covering up the import of 24,000 Afghans.

Who else might take over, other than Rayner? Not the Weeping Clown or the Mastermind Champion, surely. The Health Secretary is getting airtime at the moment (free speech post-Linehan, cracking down on Monster and Red Bull.)

Yet Streeting may be showing his hand too soon. The PM does not like the Westminster part of the job but there are always summits like Davos to stroke his ego. His mentor Blair once advised David Miliband “to go around smiling at everyone and get other people to shoot them;” watch out, Wes.

In fact it would be almost refreshing to hear direct from the organ-grinder if only Parliamentary etiquette would allow him to stand-in. It would also be a chance for ACLB to purge his contempt of the House when he assured MPs that Iraqi WMDs existed despite his not having any proof.

For now though we must make do with the self-styled “hard bastard” who could only bleat feebly when challenged in the Oval Office about free speech and his friend the Petulant Prince of London.

And so to our muttons, shorn of some deviation and repetition…

The PM responded to a question on the plague of gambling outlets by promising extra powers for local councils.

The Leader of the Opposition (acronym LOTO - like Lotto but with less chance of winning) asked about ‘Three Pads’ Rayner; the PM noted that the Deputy PM had asked the court to lift the confidentiality ruling in relation to her son (a “difficult decision”) and referred herself to the ethics adviser (”the right thing to do.”) He was “proud” to sit next to her.

On government borrowing he cited the UK’s “highest growth in the G7” (without adjusting for growth in debt.) To Ms Badenochs’s quoting the MPC’s judgment that “we are heading for an economic crash” he countered that she was “talking down the country.” Perhaps he should use his lawyerly powers to make bankruptcy illegal.

When LOTO spoke of the harmful effects of the PM’s economic plans he came back with how much more the Government was spending for working families, school breakfast clubs and nurseries.

Labour’s Paulette Hamilton loyally invited the PM to congratulate the success of a toy company in Birmingham and to boast of Labour’s “small business plan.”

Next up was the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey. He does not sport a conventional acronym but given what Google’s AI terms the “perception of inconsistency in Liberal Democrat policies between local and national levels” perhaps we should invent one for his party; say, ATTAM (All Things To All Men)? They now have a record 72 seats, well up from the minibus-filling fifteen before the last General Election; but largely they have the Conservative collapse to thank for that. How many more might they have scavenged had the two major parties not colluded to prevent the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the 2011 referendum?

Would Labour ever have become a major party at all if Lloyd George’s 1911 National Insurance Act had been allowed to flower into a sustainable Welfare State and our mad rulers had not declared war on Germany three years later, thus starting the prolonged and progressive wreckage of our economy? Now, the Lib Dems are usually a mere thumb-sized grumbling appendix in the body politic.

Mr Davey called on the PM to ask President Trump to help end the Gaza conflict (ignoring Hamas’ determination, as made clear in their 1988 Covenant and never since disavowed, to kill every Jew in Israel.) Starmer gave him a dose of "shoulda, woulda, coulda" by reminding ATTAM that he (Davey) had boycotted the State banquet for Trump. There, that was a helpful reply!

Later, Labour’s Bill Ribeiro-Addy spoke of the ‘Global Sumud flotilla’ and a British boat, both of which were prevented from breaking an Israeli blockade in their attempt to deliver aid. The PM’s reply was that land routes were the only way to deliver aid on the scale required; he nelected to say (see this claim) that huge quantities have already been sent that way; nor did he make reference to allegations that Hamas has long been stealing and withholding supplies and selling them to beleaguered civilians at extortionate prices. (Getting the truth - or at least, counter-narrative information - past our mainstream media seems such a challenge.)

ATTAM continued by asking the PM whether he would defy Reform’s and the Tories’ proposal to withdraw from the ECHR (which has been used so well by British lawyers in defeating our attempts to control mass immigration.) Starmer was dead set against withdrawal because it would encourage other countries to follow suit. Here he did not mention potential difficulties touching the Good Friday Agreement; but he also failed to remind us that Parliament has the power to override *in part* all other laws and conventions provided such an Act is sufficiently clear and specific.

If something is not done, it is simply because the will is lacking.

And so, only disaster can save us; if salvation is still then possible.

Richard Burgon (Lab) warned of the danger of electing “an extremist far-right Government”, giving the PM the opportunity to blackguard Reform’s “politics of grievance.” How dare the Oysters cry out to the Walrus and the Carpenter!

Sir Julian Lewis (Con) quoted Admiral Lord West as saying that the handover of Chagos was not, as the PM had claimed, “absolutely vital for our defence and intelligence.” Sir Keir’s reply? “I have the misfortune to disagree with him.” Why bother with reasoning when one can simply deny?

Roll on, disaster.

(Reposted from Wolves of Westminster)