Boris Booed in Wales and Scotland – But Is Anyone Surpised

Boris and his fan club prepare to meet the rest of the UK

On Monday, Boris Johnson, the unelected Prime Minister of the UK, decided to grace Scotland with his presence. And, not surprisingly, he was roundly booed by the guid people north of the border. And then yesterday he turned up in Wales, and got the same treatment.

It was pretty well inevitable that he was going to get a rough ride in Scotland. A few days ago the I published a map showing the Blond Brute’s popularity in different parts of the UK. From what I can remember, it was highest down in south or south east England, where he had a whopping 29 per cent. In the English midlands or north, this fell to 22 per cent. But in Scotland only 16 per cent liked him. That high, huh? I wonder about the accuracy of these polling figures, considering how some of the polling companies are linked to the Tories, and some have been caught using leading questions. Nearly all of them, with the exception of Survation, have severely underestimated Labour’s true popularity. Which makes you wonder if these figures for Johnson have been inflated to make him appear more popular than he really is. And if they have, then how minuscule is his popularity really up in Scotland?

Some of this unpopularity goes right back to Maggie. Realising that the Tories were never going to be popular in Scotland, Thatcher decided she had nothing to lose by alienating them, and so started to use them as her laboratory. She used the country to test legislation before inflicting it on the rest of the UK. As a result, Tory fortunes fell further, with Malcolm Rifkind, one of her cabinet ministers, telling her that she had killed the Conservative party there.

And some of it is Boris’ own fault. This is the man, who thought it would be jolly japes to publish a poem in the Speccie about rounding the Scots up in ghettos and exterminating them. Among his other offences against the working people of the UK as a whole. Much of the movement for independence in Scotland has been provoked, one way or another, by the Tories and their determination to force through policies that will only benefit the London-based financial sector. Now that he’s been appointed PM by the Tory party, he has decided on going on a goodwill visit to the rest of the UK in order to show his commitment to the union. This is despite the unpopularity of the Brexit he’s so determined to force through in the rest of the UK, to the extent that it’s a positive danger to it. But presumably he felt he’d be safe up there as Rab C. Nesbitt is no longer on television. How wrong he was!

And the Old Etonian morlock got a similar reception when he rocked up in Wales. He was booed there. Again, not surprising. The farmers at this year’s Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wales were worried about the impact Brexit would have on the Welsh beef and lamb export industry. If Britain leaves without a deal, those meats will face a 40 per cent tariff in Europe. This will make them uncompetitive. Minette Batters, of the National Farmers’ Union, has said that as a result of this, there would be a massive surplus of British beef and lamb, and called for the government to look at forcing hospitals, schools and other public bodies to buy them.

According to the Times, Gove, who looks to me like a slightly melted Thunderbird puppet, has done just that, and is just finalising legislation to commit the government to buy up lamb and beef at a predetermined price, as well as some crops. This would cost the government about half a billion a year. Zelo Street in his article on this issue has wondered if Gove and the Tories also intend to buy up and subsidise British sugar beet and the dairy farmers, who have now diversified into specialist cheeses. And what about the British car industry, where investment has practically stopped because of uncertainty over Brexit. According to the Groan, the car industry here was investing between £2.5 and £2.7 billion. Zelo Street commented

Half a billion here, a few more billion there, soon it starts to add up – soon it will overhaul the UK’s current annual contribution to the EU budget.

and  concluded

There is no better deal than the one we have with the EU. The proposed antics of Mr Gove The Butcher underscore this. So when are the grownups going to stop this idiocy?

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/mr-gove-butcher-wastes-half-billion.html

This is a good question, as whatever he is, Boris Johnson ain’t a grown-up. Rather, he’s like his American counterpart, Donald Trump, a massively egomaniac manbaby.

On his state visit to Wales, Boris called in on that nation’s First Minister, Mark Drakeford, a Labour politician. And he wasn’t impressed. He tried to impress on BoJob how utterly disastrous a no-deal Brexit would be for Welsh agriculture and manufacturing. Boris gave the usual assurance about the government offering help and support, but when asked about the nature of that support couldn’t give any details. Boris simply told Drakeford again that there would be wonderful opportunities for Welsh agriculture and business. And Drakeford felt that once again there was no detailed thinking behind what otherwise becomes vacuous optimism.

Quite. But this is just par for the course. Brexit has been marketed and sold to the British, and here this means largely the English people, through egregious lies and vacuous optimism. Like the big lie Boris was peddling on the sides of buses telling everyone that the £350 million we’d save from giving to the EU – which was itself another deliberate lie – would be spent on the NHS. No, it won’t. And when it became apparent that it wasn’t, Boris blustered that he hadn’t been lying, just using the NHS as an example of what the money could be spent on instead. And then, when he thought he’d got away with it, he repeated the lie all over again. Everything Boris says is just propaganda and optimistic lies.

And just like Tweezer, he’s another one who’s terrified of public appearances that he can’t absolutely control. The assembled Beeb and ITV reporters were invited to ask questions, but they couldn’t film them. We’re back to Tweezer and her  meetings with members of the public, but only after they’d been very carefully selected first. As Mike pointed out, rigid control of the press and media is one of the classic features of Fascism.

BoJob booed again as the new PM fails in Wales

But going back to Gove’s decision to buy up all the unsold beef and lamb we’re not going to sell to Europe, it’s a good question how long this will go on. Thatcher didn’t believe in the government supporting failing industries, and so let large parts of British manufacturing as well as the iron and steel industries go under. Are the Tories going to do what they normally do, and which Boris appears to be doing now – promise government support but not actually honour those promises when the time comes? And if they do, what cuts are they going to inflict on other areas of public spending, like the welfare state and the NHS, in order to balance the budget?

Boris and his entire party are inveterate liars and the Brexit he’s pushing will be catastrophic, not just for Scotland and Wales but for the UK as a whole. And the Lib Dems are no better. It’s time both of them were gone, and a proper Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn was elected instead.

 

The Young Turks on Pizza Delivery Drivers Being Replaced by Driverless Cars

This is probably going to be the reality behind the driverless cars the car industry and the media have been hyping. In this short clip from The Young Turks, the hosts Ana Kasparian and Brett Ehrlich report and comment on the story that Domino’s Pizzas are planning to replace their pizza delivery people with driverless cars.

It’s only a trial run at the moment. They intend to go through their customers at random, and ask them if they’re happy with their pizza delivered by a driverless car instead. The vehicle will take a maximum of four pizzas to them. To get their orders, the customers will have to punch in a code into a keypad on the car.

After a bit of silly banter about the number of pizzas people usually order, they get down to discussing what this really represents. Kasparian says that when they usually talk about American jobs being lost, they’re usually reporting on corporate outsourcing. But automation is the other way in which people are losing their jobs in America. Kasparian she states that she isn’t against technological innovation, but points out that not only are people going to lose their jobs as pizza delivery staff, but they’re also going to lose an opportunity to acquire useful skills to succeed in a very competitive jobs market. She also states that we also need to give young people proper, affordable college education as well.

Domino’s has released a statement saying that they have at the moment 100,000 pizza delivery people. They hope that when this comes in, they will be able to find other positions within the company. The Turks end by saying that they hope so too.

To be fair, the BBC has carried news and documentary programmes, which forecast that in the coming decades, 1/3 of all retail jobs will be lost to automation. Nevertheless, whenever you see driverless cars appear, the overwhelming message is one of boundless enthusiasm, with the presenters raving about the technology. Clarkson went on a driverless truck on Top Gear, and went almost berserk with excitement when it started to make its way without human guidance.

Driverless trucks are due to be trialed on roads in Britain, according to a report in the I newspaper. They’re going to be tested in groups of three. I talked about this technology and its threats to jobs with a friend a little while ago. He told me that there are about 40,000 truckers in Britain, so that’s 40,000 people, who stand to lose their jobs.

Counterpunch has run an article on this, stating that there’s no desire for the cars from ordinary people. They’re being hyped and pushed by the insurance companies, who hope that their appearance and promotion as being safer than human driving will allow them to put up their premiums for people, who won’t use them.

What also struck me was how cold, lonely and impersonal the future represented by this type of automation is. In much SF depictions of an automated future, the machines performing human jobs also have something like human cognitive abilities and personalities. Long term 2000 AD readers will remember Dredd’s little robotic companion, Walter the Wobot. The character had a lisp and was a gentle soul, providing a contrast with the brutal machismo of Mega City 1’s toughest lawman. Or the robots in the Robohunter strip. These were extremely strong characters with all the traits, foibles and psychological failings of the human creators, including stupidity, thuggishness and all-round criminality. Like the God-Droid, the automatated underworld boss, a machine version of Marlon Brando with a sign stamped across its stomach reading ‘Omerta’, or the incendiary temperament of Molotov, the automatic cocktail-shaker and head of the Amalgamated Androids’ Union, who lectures Spade on the evils of human exploitation. Or Ro-Jaws, a chirpy, bolshie, foul-mouthed sewer droid, and his more dignified mate, the war-robot Hammerstein, and the moronic and sadistic Mek-Quake, the main characters in the Robusters strip, and its spin-off, ABC Warriors.

These fictional machines all had real, authentic characters. They had minds and characters like human beings, even if their bodies and brains were of metal and plastic. And so the strips’ writers could use them to make serious satirical points amidst the cartoon violence and mayhem. From the first, the ABC Warriors strip included a bitter commentary on the horrors of war, and the way soldiers lives were sacrificed by an officer and political class insulated from the actual fighting. The fact that robots were machines, with no rights, also allowed 2000 AD to explore real issues like slavery, racism, and institutionalized discrimination with deliberate, and sometimes very obvious parallels to the experience of Black Americans before Civil Rights.

But the real machines taking our jobs won’t even have personalities, friendly or otherwise, with which we will interact. Admittedly, there isn’t much social interaction with the mail and other delivery people, who turn up at our doors. The conversation is naturally very limited. But with these machines, we won’t even have that. Just a car turning up, following by the customer trudging out to punch in a code to open the doors.

Silent, efficient, and coldly impersonal.

And this is going to make the atomization and despair of contemporary western, and particularly American society, much worse. I’ve also come across a series of videos Chris Hedges has also made, in which he talks about the new American Fascism, and specifically the Religious Right. I think Hedges is probably an atheist, from some of the things he has said about the religious right promoting magical thinking. But he has a divinity degree, his father was a politically radical Presbyterian clergyman, his mother was also a divinity student, and so Hedges doesn’t hate religion or regard the antics of the religious right and the frauds and bigots leading it as normal. Indeed, he is at pains to show that, for all that they scream that they represent traditional values, they don’t. He states in one video that they’re as far from traditional Christian religious doctrine and practice as the religious liberals they despise.

One of the points he makes in these videos is that these bigots have been assisted in their rise to power by the social atomization of modern American society. In places like LA there are no pavements, so people can’t walk down the street. You have to drive. And so people drive straight to work, and then straight home. They don’t really meet or interact with anyone else. And the religious right has exploited this atomization, this alienation, by offering people a community in the ideologically enclosed space of their megachurches. And the people they target are those who have suffered from the attacks of neoliberalism – people in the rustbelt, who have seen their jobs decline and their communities fall into poverty along with them.

Other observers of the American Right have said the same. One of the essays in the book attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservativism, states that these b*stards are able to get away with promoting bigotry and racism, because of the decline in genuine, working class communities. The jobs are going, and White flight has meant that Whites have moved out of racially mixed areas in the centres of town to the suburbs. Community centres have also closed, and the attack on trade unions has also destroyed this pillar of working class community. The result is that the individual is left isolated from both people of other ethnic groups, and similar people to him- or herself. He or she goes to work and comes home. This isolation leaves them vulnerable to the vile propaganda spewed at them by bigots like Jerry Falwell and the rest of the rightwing televangelists that were thrown up by the 1980s.

This atomization and alienation is one of the fundamental characteristics of totalitarian societies of the Left and Right. In the Soviet Union, society was arranged so that people were deliberately isolated from each other. The only way of keeping in contact and forming communities and relationships, at least officially, was through the party organisations. Ditto with the Third Reich. Hitler boasted that they would never leave the individual alone, not even in a poker club.

And the driverless cars also remind me of another dystopian vision of the future, that of Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian. This is a tale by one of the great masters of SF, in which a man walking late at night is stopped and picked up by a police car. The car’s not crewed. It’s entirely automatic. Bradbury describes the computer punchcards being processed as the machine thinks. The machine asks the man why he’s on the streets so late at night. He replies simply that he just wanted to take a walk.

Already there are places in some American cities, where you can’t walk. Mike found this out a few years ago when he visited friends in California. You had to drive everywhere, even down to the local stores. Which means that the cold future of The Pedestrian really ain’t that far away.

Open Britain’s Reminder of Brexit Lies

I got an email from the anti-Leave group, Open Britain, asking me to remind people again of the multitude of lies the Brexit campaigners have told, and for me to share their graphic on Twitter or Facebook. I’m not on either of those, and for some reason my email won’t show accompanying graphics. But I’m more than happy to show the lies the people of this country have been told by the likes of Farage, Johnson and Gove, to get them to vote for Leaving the EU. Here’s the message from Open Britain.

The realities of what a hard Brexit could mean are beginning to collide with the breezy rhetoric of Leave campaigners. Already – before negotiations have even begun – totemic promises are being broken.
•We were told there would be £350 million more a week for the NHS, but Leave campaigners are desperate to run away from this promise, and borrowing estimates have risen by £58bn thanks to Brexit.
•We were told economic warnings were “scaremongering”, but prices have risen as the pound has fallen and car companies are speculating about shifting investment abroad.
•We were told the EU would bend over backwards to give us the deal we want, but Ministers are now talking up the prospect of leaving with no deal at all.
•And we were told our Union would be stronger, but today we see the SNP once again fostering grievance to threaten the break up of the UK.

If you’re as sick of their lies and falsehoods as I am, please feel free to reblog this or poste it up on your own Twitter and Facebook pages.

In Defence of Nationalised Industry

Since the 1970s, nationalisation has had a bad reputation, caused by the inefficiency, poor performance and appalling quality of some of its products. The classic example of this was British Leyland, hit by a long series of strikes, producing cars of a poorer workmanship and much less attractive than its foreign, increasingly Japanese, rivals. Yet the authors of Socialist Enterprise: Reclaiming the Economy, Diana Gilhespy, Ken Jones, Tony Manwaring, Henry Neuberger and Adam Sharples show that in many cases this images is grossly unfair. They argue

The case for public ownership is as powerful now as it has ever been – just as it has never been more urgent to rethink the priorities for public ownership, the methods of achieving it, the accountability and internal structure of publicly owned companies, and above all, their responsiveness to consumer and community needs. Publicly owned companies should be a model for socialism in practice. Unfortunately, for many people, that is just what they have become: unresponsive, often inefficient and often just as brutal in cutting jobs as private sector companies.

In many ways, this public image is, of course, grossly unfair. Nationalised industries are major investors: over the past ten years they have invested three times as much-for every worker employed – as firms in the private sector; and investment per unit of output has been twice as high. Moreover, companies such as BP, British Aerospace, BL, British Steel and Rolls Royce are among Britain’s top export earners. Nationalised industries have also been highly profitable in recent years. Their productivity record has been impressive, outstripping the private sector. Without public enterprise Britain would have had no domestically owned company in sectors such as motor vehicles, aero engines, shipbuilding, microchips and computers.

The Tory government privatisation programme, on the other hand, means that only the most vulnerable companies starved of investment finance will be left in the public sector. Profits will increasingly reflect the abuse of monopoly powers, rather than the efficiency of the company, and the Government’s obsessive desire to cut public borrowing. These factors are, however, unlikely to win much sympathy for public enterprise. Popular opinion may not favour further privatisation but there is no positive desire for an extension of public ownership. This reflects a deep seated lack of confidence in publicly owned companies which predates the election of the Conservative government in 1979.

All of which is true. This was written in 1986, and after Thatcher privatised the nationalised industries we largely do not have domestic firms producing cars, aero engines and ships. And the sale of some industries to foreign investors was quite deliberate, like the helicopter company Westland and the defence technology company QinetiQ to the Americans. Britain’s economy has suffered, as well as her wider defence infrastructure.

As for public opinion towards nationalised industry, this is not as low as may have been the case when this was written. People emphatically do not want further industries sold off. This is most obvious in the case of the NHS, as two reports by the Conservative party have shown. The I yesterday reported that the people using the East Coast railway line do not want to see it privatised. Mike over at Vox Political has presented the statistics showing that most British people still support the public ownership of the utilities.

There is clearly a large number of people, who support traditional, ‘old’ Labour-style mixed economy. They are, however, ignored by all three of the main parties. Their voice, particularly in defence of the NHS, needs to be heard.