Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Blair the false moderate

Tony Blair is quoted as saying the Net Zero policy steered by Ed Miliband is ‘irrational, hysterical and doomed to fail.’

What matters is not the truth, which was obvious long ago, but the narrative. Blair has said these things with only a couple of days to go before Labour gets what Northerners call a ‘threaping’ at the polls in the local council elections.

Similarly Blair the senior statesman was advising Starmer last July to be ‘tough on immigration, crime and wokeism’ as Labour List reported it.

It’s only the resistance to those things that counts. The enemy is ‘the forces of conservatism’ or in other words, the ordinary British people; people who want peace at home and abroad, the rule of law and the chance to earn a living and raise their families.

He still wants the Revolution and to prevent the possibility of small-c conservatism ever resurging. He is just applying the brakes now to make the crash quite certain; to slow down our drive to destruction so his Party doesn’t frighten the populace into an uprising.

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Dimming the Sun pays dividends...

*NEW* The Government's plan to #DIMtheSUN has already inspired a Spanish tour company to market short breaks in the UK:
Image

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Never apologise, never explain - PMQs 23rd April 2025

In the movie ‘Alien’ the sole survivor discovers that the monster is hiding in her escape pod. She presses buttons to release one poisonous gas after another; at last she finds one that galvanises the alien into frantic escape action.

What triggered Sir Keir in PMQs was Kemi Badenoch’s demand for an admission that he had been wrong about gender; for an apology to Rosie Duffield MP, driven out of the Labour Party for her perfectly sane views on the subject, and to Kemi for the ‘transphobe’ abuse his myrmidons had hurled at herself.

Since the Supreme Court (a 2009 New Labour invention) determined last week that gender has a biological basis as far as the Equality Act is concerned, Starmer could not repudiate the ruling. A man whose political power depends on legal and procedural technicalities cannot defy the law. But to concede that he had previously been misguided on this, or about anything at all? Unthinkable!

Instead, the PM resorted to a panicky non-reply counterattack - Tory failures on the NHS, US trade deals and British Steel. He went for an advertiser’s copywriter-like slogan: ‘They are not Conservatives; they are a con.’ He spoke of people threatening Kemi’s position - ‘the shadow Justice Secretary, who is away plotting’ and ‘the hon. Member for Clacton [Nigel Farage] fighting over the bones of the Tory party.’

What a performance!

It’s not as though the PM is wedded to the trans issue - ‘He does not know what he actually believes,’ said Kemi. His approach to the truth is postmodern: what counts is the ‘narrative’, a principle that underlay Alastair Campbell’s successful manipulation of the public’s perception (Tory sleaze, Labour ethics) that gave us thirteen years of socialist misrule. Now the narrative is that Starmer is never wrong.

As for the Supreme Court, Peter Hitchens says it shouldn’t exist; it is one of the many Blairite cuts at Parliament’s supremacy. Now Labour finds itself hoist by its own petard. Nor is this the biggest problem the Court has presented: its just-delivered £44 billion compensation ruling on car finance is twice the size of Sir Keir’s favourite ‘Tory black hole’ and is an existential threat to the already beleaguered banking industry. Already the sky is darkening with compo-claim vultures gathering overhead.

PMQs these days are mostly a melancholy run-through of scripts. This session was briefly enlivened by Badenoch’s saying that Starmer ‘doesn’t have the balls’ to do the right thing - Quentin Letts says (in the online MailPlus version) she ‘flattened’ him, but also correctly calls the remark ‘coarse.’ It was perhaps inevitable that when TV first entered the Debating Chamber (1989) our representatives would end up playing to the groundlings.

It is a sad thing to see them fighting like rats in a Birmingham garbage sack, for we are in a multifaceted crisis that took decades to develop and for which both sides are responsible. Partly it is owing to the desire to stay in power at any cost - think for example how David Cameron led the unParliamentary applause for Tony Blair at the latter’s retirement from office and took ‘the Master’ as his model for electoral success.

But it is also down to preconceived ideas, plans that turned a blind eye to the key issues facing the country and instead focused on the obsessions of activists. When New Labour swept into Downing Street in 1997, followed by the BBC’s worshipping helicopter, it was on a tide of hope that our economy would be set right. Instead it put into effect a grand scheme of constitutional rearrangement based on policies developed following their 1987 General Election defeat, as Mark Bevir shows here. Yet “Labour Listens” was not really about consulting the general public; the sort of person who joins a party and participates in policy debates is obviously atypical.

The people themselves spoke emphatically in 2016. What did the Blues do then? What are the Reds doing now? As in the late eighteenth century, we begin to ask on what basis government has the right to rule.

Starmer’s arrival has brought in another detailed program smelling of the lamp, this time provided by the Brown Commission (at his request). The flaws of devolution exemplified in Scotland, London and Wales have not served to deter him from furthering what is in effect Blair 2.0. The Seventies generation that ran barefoot through Oxford’s streets and stencilled Ho Chi Minh’s image on college walls is seeing their destructive dream coming to fruition.

Is Sir Keir really so passive as to have his clothing and his policies arranged for him, his strategy from ‘the Master’, his Parliamentary replies written by assistants in a two-ring binder? Was his over-reaction to Badenoch’s barbs prompted by a fear of looking inside himself and seeing emptiness?

He apologiseth not, neither doth he explain. When Zara Sultana (Independent), a Gazan supporter, asked why he had ‘blocked the arrest of an unindicted war criminal’ (Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar) Starmer simply replied ‘I didn’t.’ He offered no elaboration, which might have involved the role of the Foreign Secretary in offering assurances to Sa’ar.

Otherwise there was the usual mixture of quibbling, begging and fawning.

The SNP is always a good foil: Scottish Labour’s Kenneth Stevenson ‘commended’ the PM for his achievements with respect to the NHS, contrasting them with the SNP’s waste.

Yet when the latter party’s Dave Doogan called Starmer an ‘incompetent-in-chief’ whose failures justified the eleven-point poll lead for Scottish independence, Sir Keir answered that ‘the electorate in Scotland answered that question in July of last year.’ Hubris tempts Nemesis: effectively, Labour won the General Election by default and has since made itself heartily detested in only nine months. The local elections on May the First will likely show that - to quote the Chinese curse - we ‘live in interesting times.’

Friday, April 25, 2025

FRIDAY MUSIC: The Incredible String Band, by JD

The Incredible String Band (sometimes abbreviated as ISB) were a British psychedelic folk band formed by Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron in Edinburgh in 1966. The band built a considerable following, especially in the British counterculture, notably with their albums The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, and Wee Tam and the Big Huge. They became pioneers in psychedelic folk and, through integrating a wide variety of traditional music forms and instruments, in the development of world music.

Following Palmer's early departure, Williamson and Heron performed as a duo, later augmented by other musicians. The band split up in 1974. They reformed in 1999 and continued to perform with changing lineups until 2006.

The Incredible String Band - Everything's Fine Right Now (1970)
The Circle Is Unbroken (2010 Remaster)
Incredible String Band - Creation (1969)
The Incredible String Band "1968": although composed in 1974 by Mike Heron, probably about his musical partnership with Robin Williamson which was coming to an end at that point, it has taken on very much a modern relevance, posing questions about a past of hope seemingly long gone but with a faint promise of it for the future. It's a shame that it was never recorded for an official release by their record company at the time. It was only performed acoustically on BBC radio by Mike & Robin. (= from the description alongside the video)
Retying the Knot: The Incredible String Band (1997) A profile of British psychedelic folk band The Incredible String Band. The Hippest band of the 60's and 70's as they prepare for a reunion gig.

Friday, April 18, 2025

FRIDAY MUSIC: Paco de Lucía, by JD

Paco de Lucía (1947 - 2014) was born Francisco Sánchez Gómez in Algeciras, in southern Spain. He was the youngest of the five children of flamenco guitarist Antonio Sánchez Pecino and Portuguese mother Lucía Gomes; his brothers include flamenco singer Pepe de Lucía and flamenco guitarist Ramón de Algeciras.

There are many 'reaction' videos on YouTube where a musician or a fan will listen to an artist or a single piece of music and then give his/her thoughts/opinion. One such reaction video is from a blogger called 'Arab Man Reacts' in which he is lost for words watching and listening to Paco's technique and says several times what Paco is doing is impossible. A comment below the video (Entre Dos Aguas, the first video of the five here) was this:
He played with Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin...In an interview, Al said "we learned a lot from Paco"...the interviewer asked "And what did he learn from you?"...Al: "to speak English."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paco_de_Luc%C3%ADa

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/memories-of-paco-instituto-andaluz-del-flamenco/mQUxq5VsZOvILQ?hl=en

Paco de Lucia - Entre dos aguas (1976) full video
PACO DE LUCIA , John McLaughlin , AL DI MEOLA
Paco de Lucía - El cafetal (rumbas) (directo Leverkusener Jazztage 2010)
Tangos. Paco y Pepe de Lucía. 1993

Saturday, April 12, 2025

Parliament and organised sexual abuse: weak ending

The House rose on Tuesday and will sit again on 22 April. The session ended badly.

Hansard’s record describes Jess Phillips MP as The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. More exactly she is the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. As a local councillor she did much good work for years helping women in a socially deprived part of Birmingham.

Today she was obliged to read out the Government’s further backtracking on investigations into the ‘grooming’ gangs that have long sexually abused an extremely large number of women and girls around the country.

The State has rejected the call for a fresh national enquiry - one that would have the power to compel witnesses. A reason given is that there has already been one such, looking into child sexual exploitation in broad terms, that reported in 2022.

However what concerns many of the public is the specific issue of wholesale organised abuse by groups of men largely of Pakistani heritage. It is felt that close examination would reveal that police, social workers and local politicians were aware of these outrages and chose to cover them up or even, in effect, help and abet them.

Rather than open a can of worms that threatens to embarrass the Labour Party, in whose areas of control much of the abuse went on, the Government has previously proposed local investigations in five authorities. These would not have the same legal powers and could be subject to influence from local parties that might have the ability and incentive to downplay and bury the bad news. Nevertheless a budget of £5 million was set aside to conduct these reviews.

Now, among announcements of what the Government plans to do in future about such abuses, Mrs Phillips had to tell the House that those millions are to be made available to the five councils not solely to drill down into collusion and cover-ups, but simply to use at their discretion to deal with related matters, such as therapeutic help for victims.

This must have been a very difficult speech for Mrs Phillips, given her long-time personal mission to serve vulnerable females. As ‘Spiked’ writer and former editor Brendan O’Neill observed in The Spectator, and also ‘Granniopteryx’ on her YouTube channel, the Minister’s body language and muttering clearly proclaimed her shame. At least one political commentator has suggested that Mrs Phillips should have resigned rather than allow herself to be used as the mouthpiece for an administration itself keen on minimising public attention to this matter, which has potential religious and racial aspects and severely challenges the narrative that ‘diversity’ is good for the nation.

Replying for the Opposition, Shadow Minister Katie Lam MP was ferociously critical of the Government’s revised approach and gave a shockingly explicit example of the abuse suffered by victims of the gangs.

Ms Phillips tried to re-broaden the scope: ‘I think it is a shame that she referred to only one sort of child abuse victim, when the statement is clearly about all child abuse victims… we are also talking about children raped by their fathers or raped in other circumstances, such as in children’s homes and institutions…’

This fire will not be put out so easily and Ms Phillips must feel torn between her principles and her loyalty to the Labour Party.

Evil is so often fostered by the ‘greater good’ argument: ‘Do this most regrettable bad thing now, because it helps the Party that stands for the people. In the long run it is all for the best.’ How many tyrannies have run on that basis?

We need the disinfectant of truth, not the strong perfume of distraction. Otherwise, ‘in the long run’, trust in authority will be further corroded and prejudices will fester. As the inscription above the Old Bailey says, ‘Defend the children of the poor and punish the wrongdoer.’ That is what is best for society.

Friday, April 11, 2025

FRIDAY MUSIC: Carole King, by JD

Since writing her first number one hit “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” at the tender age of 17, Carole King has arguably become the most celebrated and iconic singer/songwriter of all time.

Carole wrote “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” for The Shirelles with then-husband Gerry Goffin. The dozens of chart hits Goffin & King wrote during this period have become part of music legend, including “Take Good Care Of My Baby” (Bobby Vee, 1961), “The Loco-Motion” (Little Eva, 1962), “Up On The Roof” (The Drifters, 1962), “Chains” (The Cookies, 1962; The Beatles, 1963), “One Fine Day” (The Chiffons, 1963), “Hey Girl” (Freddie Scott, 1963), “I’m Into Something Good” (Herman’s Hermits, 1964), “Just Once In My Life” (with Phil Spector for The Righteous Brothers, 1965), and “Don’t Bring Me Down” (The Animals, 1966).

https://www.caroleking.com/

Carole King - It Might as Well Rain Until September
Carole King - Now and Forever (from Welcome To My Living Room)
One Fine Day - Carole King
Willie Nelson & Carole King - "Will You Still Love Me tomorrow"
Carole King - Tapestry - Live in Hyde Park 2016