London’s Black Cab Drivers Give Their Opinions on Boris Johnson

And how very forthright they are! Here’s another video that puts a very well aimed boot into Johnson. It’s from Byline TV, a channel on YouTube which I think is probably connected to the alternative news site, Byline Times. It’s just a series of short comments by cabbies to their interviewer stating why they’re fed up with Johnson. Put succinctly: it’s because he’s corrupt, he’s a liar, he only thinks about himself, and it’s just one scandal after another. Nothing changes, despite all the promises to the contrary. The cabbies also make it plain that they’re sick and tired of the Tories’ arrogance and their taking for granted that they will win all the time. They resent the way Boris partied while people were separated from their dying loved ones by the lockdown. One man says that after 12 years of Tory government, it’s time for a change. And the very last comment from a cabbie about the wretched character of Johnson sums him up in sweary terms: ‘He’s f***king useless w***er’. Quite.

We Own It Email for Article and Podcast Supporting Energy Nationalisation

The pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It has organised a petition calling for the renationalisation of the energy industries, which I reposted here. On Friday I got this email from them thanking me for signing their petition and pointing to an article one of them had written calling for its renationalisation, and which was featured in a podcast by the Byline Times. The email included links to both. Here it is’

‘Dear David,

You’re gaining momentum.

In just two days, over 13,000 people have signed our petition demanding Rishi Sunak and Kwasi Kwarteng bring energy into public ownership now. 

Thanks to you adding your name, the call for a genuine fix for our broken energy system is getting louder. 

This week Cat published an article explaining why We Can’t Solve the Energy Crisis Without Public Ownership, and featured on the Byline Times podcast Power to the People. 

Together we’re starting to shape the conversation, making it clear that it matters who our energy system is working for, and who is picking up the cost.

Read Cat’s article

Listen to the podcast

You signed the petition because, along with 60% of the UK public, you believe energy should work for people and the planet – not profit.

With household bills set to rise by £700 in April while the Big 6 companies rake in billions in profits, there has never been a clearer moment for public ownership of energy. 

You know we need a real fix, not just temporary sticking plasters. Who owns and profits from our energy is at the heart of the issue, and together we’ll make sure politicians can’t avoid the question. 

THANK YOU for being part of the fight for energy that works for everyone, not just company shareholders. 

Solidarity 

Cat, Zana, Alice, Johnbosco, Jack, Matthew, Tom – the We Own It team

PS We’ll be in touch soon with the latest updates on the campaign to protect the NHS from the Health and Care Bill, and the fight against Channel 4 privatisation!‘

It should be becoming increasingly obvious that Thatcherism is a massive failure. It is true zombie economics, a decaying ideology that’s destroying industry, public services and creating nothing but poverty, hopelessness and unemployment. But it’s being promoted by that section of the super-rich that stands to profit from it immensely, as well as fanatical politicians like Starmer, who are so massively indoctrinated with Thatcherism that any alternative is literally unthinkable.

Get rid of Thatcher’s economic zombie corpse. Renationalise the utilities now!

Robin Simcox’s Racist and Anti-Semitic Links

Further respect to Zelo Street for adding a few more details about Robin Simcox and his membership of some very nasty right-wing organisations. Simcox is professional smirking slime-bucket Priti Patel’s choice for head of the Commission for Countering Extremism. I put up a piece about him yesterday, based on a piece about him in the latest issue of Private Eye noting that Simcox has some views himself that many might consider extreme. Like he’s a Neocon member of the Heritage Foundation, who backs sending terrorist suspect to countries where they can be tortured and further infringement on the rule of law. But that’s not all. According to Wikipedia, the Heritage Foundation denies the reality of climate change and is funded by the American oil giant, Exxon Mobil. It also promoted the false claims of voter fraud. This was done through Hans von Spakovsky, the head of the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Law Reform Initiative, who made such fears mainstream in the Republican Party. Von Spakovsky’s work, you won’t be surprised to hear, has been completely discredited according to Wikipedia.

The Heritage Foundation, according to the Byline Times, have on their board Rebekah Mercer and her father, Robert Mercer, who funded Breitbart News, which in turn supported Cambridge Analytica. And it was Cambridge Analytica that introduced Donald Trump to Steve Bannon, who founded Parler. But it was Simcox’s links to the racist extreme right that was more worrying to that authors of the Byline Times’ article. In 2019 Simcox spoke at a meeting of the Centre for Immigration Studies. The CIS has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. The CIS has for ten years circulated anti-Semitic and White nationalist materials, included articles written by supporters of eugenics and Holocaust deniers. According to Wikipedia, the CIS’ reports have been criticised as false or misleading and with poor methodology by experts on immigration. The Byline Times stated that in his work for the Heritage Foundation, Simcox promoted the work of several racist and anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists, including a supporter of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which has inspired many of the extreme right-wing terror attacks in recent years. He’s also been criticised for falsely equating British Islamic organisations with the Muslim brotherhood.

Simcox therefore has links to people, whose views could be described as genuinely Nazi. But as the Street notes, the self-appointed opponents of anti-Semitism are curiously silent about all this.

So who’s making their feelings known about this appointment? “Lord” Ian Austin? “Lord” John Mann? Wes Streeting? Stephen Pollard? John Woodcock? Margaret Hodge? Daniel Finkelstein? Crickets. If only Simcox had been pals with Jeremy Corbyn.

Zelo Street: Tory Anti-Semitism Link – No Problem! (zelo-street.blogspot.com)

Quite. But the above weren’t opponents of anti-Semitism per se. They were simply determined to destroy the Labour left and protect Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. And as Tony Greenstein has shown ad nauseam, Israel has no problem collaborating with real Nazis if it will serve its interests.

Scum Admits Today’s Death Toll Worse than Spain and Italy’s Worse Day

The Scum has put up this video of Matt Hancock reporting today’s death toll from Coronavirus. He also talks about how Boris Johnson is improving, and thanks his well-wishers. It also shows him stating that his aim is to get the NHS staff the PPE equipment they need, and appealing to people to stay home this Easter. I don’t want to show it on this channel, but if you want to see it, it’s at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5O81ijNfUw

Hancock nowhere mentions it in the video, but the Scum’s blurb for it makes it clear that today’s death toll is greater than that experienced by Spain and Italy on the days they experienced the worst fatalities from the disease. It runs

Britain’s coronavirus death toll has jumped by 980 in the last 24 hours – making it the biggest rise yet and more deadly than Spain’s worst day of their outbreak. The grim figures also reveal the total number of cases has risen to 70,272 – up from 65,077 infections the day prior. During Spain’s worst day of their coronavirus outbreak, 961 people died. The jump in deaths is also higher than virus-ravaged Italy’s worst day when 919 people died. The Health Secretary also announced that care homes and GP surgeries will be able to order masks from an Amazon-style NHS store that will deliver protective kit much faster.

This is an indictment of Johnson’s and the Tories’ complacency. Johnson, Cummings and the rest dragged their feet until the very last minute, spouting nonsense about herd immunity and trying to get away with doing the bare minimum until this became absolutely impossible. They were hoping they could let the disease take its course, killing the old, weak, poor and disabled, so that they wouldn’t have to worry about the economy, and could continue making the rich – including themselves – get richer. And according to Mike, they may still be doing this. He put up a post today reporting an article in Byline Times that states that the Tory plan may be too flatten the curve of deaths, but not stop it, so that the disease may eventually kill over a quarter of a million people.

If that’s true, Johnson and his cronies deserve to be tried and condemned as mass murderers.

Meanwhile, I find it remarkable that an arch-Tory paper like the Scum has reported this death toll and made comparison with the two European countries worst hit. And I wonder how long it will stay up. Because I think I saw a similar article yesterday on YouTube, at the moment it disappeared and replaced by something less damning.

See also: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/10/coronavirus-have-the-tories-told-a-big-lie-do-they-expect-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Private Eye on the Hedge Funds Supporting Boris Against British Prosperity

Yesterday Labour’s John McDonnell wrote to Cabinet Office Secretary Mark Sedwill requesting an inquiry into J. Peasemold BoJob’s connection to hedge funds. His request was based on statements by BoJob’s sister Rachel and the former chancellor, Jeremy Hammond, that Johson was being funded by currency speculators making money on shorting shares. This means effectively betting against the companies they invest in. These companies believe that Brexit will ruin the economy, which means that they, paradoxically, will make immense money from it. Boris’ connection to these financial interests and his determination to bring about Brexit whatever happens are thus highly suspect.

Inquiry demanded into claims Boris Johnson backers will profit from ‘no deal’ – and it can’t come soon enough

It isn’t only McDonnell, Rachel Johnson and Hammond, who are suspicious of the Boorish Generalissimo’s connections to the hedge funds. Private Eye has been discussing this issue in a series of articles since last year, when they first noticed that the hedge funds were heavily backing his campaign for the Tory leadership. Now that Boris is Tory leader, they’ve published several highly critical of his connection to them.

In their edition for 9th-22nd August 2019, the magazine published this article, ‘Shorts Story’ on page 7.

“The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts,” boomed Boris Johnson in his first prime ministerial speech. In fact the betters-against-Britain are the only true winners in Brexit Britain – as the new PM should know.

One big beneficiary is Johnson’s long-time supporter and funder, hedge fund manager Crispin Odey, whose latest gift was a £10,000 cheque for the leadership campaign last month and most of whose funds are domiciled in, er, Ireland, as Eye 1482 pointed out in November.

Odey was public about shorting the pound last year as the process hit Britain’s currency, then earlier this year reversed his position as the market bought into the idea that a no-deal Brexit would be avoided. (Odey’s funds are also profitably shorting major British names including Royal Mail, AA, Debenhams, Autotrader and shopping centre-owning Intu – hardly a vote of confidence in UK plc).

Now that Johnson’s “do or die” Brexit policy and outright rejection of the Irish backstop has sent the pound tumbling again, the short-sellers can cash in once more. As former Goldman Sachs banker and Treasury minister Jim O’Neill told a Radio 4 interviewer last week: “Foreign exchange and hedge fund-type people [are] probably looking at what’s being said coming out of the UK as almost close to a free lunch.” A government that is deliberately promoting the no-Brexit [sic] risk” has left the traders saying “thank goodness for Boris – he’s giving us a chance to make some money”.

In the days before Johnson’s win, and with his coronation looking secure, hedge funds’ bets against the pound rose to more than $6bn worth, according to Reuters. The ensuing fall will have benefited them to the tune of more than $100m. Somebody’s certainly losing their shirt – but it’s not those betting against Britain.

This fortnight’s Private Eye has another piece about the hedge fund’s connections to Boris, and how they are keeping part of their currency trading secret. The article’s titled ‘Crash and Earn’ and it’s on page 7. It runs

Good to see former chancellors and top former Treasury civil servants catching up with the Eye’s concerns over Tory backers profiting from Brexit-induced turmoil. Last year the Eye (issues 1482 & 1485) pointed out how Boris Johnson-funder Crispin Odey was trousering large sums from shorting stocks heavily exposed to the UK economy, and pound itself.

Last month the Byline Times added up the sums bet against UK stocks by hedge funds that had donated to either the prime ministers’s leadership campaign or to Vote Leave. Its finding that there was an “£8bn bet on no-deal crash out” was roundly pooh-poohed – with some justification, given the crudeness of the calculation and the host of other reasons for shorting shares. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t hnefarious motives in the cross-over between short-selling and political influence, as non-conspiracy theorists ex-chancellor Philip Hammond and now ex-Treasury permanent secretary Sir Nicholas Macpherson have observed.

“Mr Hammond is right to question the political connections of some of the hedge funds with a financial interest in no deal,” tweeted Macpherson last weekend. “They are shorting the £ and the country, with the British people the main loser.” Alas, as the Eye put it last year, “there may be rules against rigging the financial markets, but not if the move is big, brazen and political enough.”

Nor is it possible to find out who is placing bets through currency trades, where the political/economic link is most direct. Post-financial crisis, significant share short-sales are publicly disclosed, but currency trades remain secret. Surely time to change this, and for more disclosure of the real financial interests behind those filling Boris Johnson’s boots.

Given the immense profits these people stand to make from the desperate misery and chaos that will follow a no-deal Brexit, it’s perfectly justifiable to call Johnson a traitor, and his backers economic saboteurs. McDonnell is right to call for an inquiry. Legislation needs to be passed forcing currency speculators to disclose their actions, if not a complete overhaul imposed on the financial sector as a whole.

And Johnson needs to be turfed out of parliament, and replaced with Corbyn.