‘I’ Profile of Dido Harding, Tory Peer in Charge of New National Institute for Health Protection

Yesterday, Boris Johnson and his viciously incompetent, murderous government decided to wind up Public Health England. They’re replacing it with a new body, the National Institute for Health Protection. The excuse is that Public Health England was too incompetent in its tackling of the Coronavirus. In fact, as a government-owned body, it took its decisions and orders directly from Johnson, Hancock and co. It is they who are responsible for its failings, and for the failure to impose a lockdown as soon as possible. This has led to the deaths of 70,000 Brits, over half of which may well have been preventable.

The new body, by contrast, seems to be a public-private partnership with the same corporate giants that have been heavily involved in the government’s own failures to tackle the virus, such as the lack of provision of adequate PPE supplies to the frontline NHS staff. Many of whom have now died thanks to Boris’ incompetence and sheer indifference to ordinary human life. Medical experts are warning that the disruption caused by the switch to the new body in the middle of the pandemic could be disastrous and cost even more lives.

And people are not impressed by the person appointed to chair the new organisation, Baroness Dido Harding. She’s a Tory peer, who owes her position in health administration  to David Cameron and has a disastrous record as the manager of string of companies. Johnson is now denying it, but it looks very much like she owes her position solely to her connections to Johnson, Cummings, Cameron and Matt Hancock. There have been a string of articles already criticising her. Yesterday the I published a profile of her on page 3, written by Jane Clinton. While not as devastating as the articles about her by left-wing bloggers and commenters on the web, it nevertheless leaves the reader in absolutely no doubt that she is completely unsuited to her job. It runs

Who is Dido Harding?

She came to prominence during the pandemic when she was put in charge of the NHS Test and Trace in England, which has been widely criticised. The Conservative peer is chair of NHS Improvement and has been appointed the new interim chief of the National Institute for Health Protection following the scrapping of Public Health England. She will lead the search for a permanent successor.

She has made headlines in the past.

She was CEO of TalkTalk when in 2015 it fell victim to a data breach that led to nearly 157,000 people’s personal data being accessed by hackers.  The company was fined £400,000 for “security failings”. During her time at TalkTalk she received two wooden spoon awards, in 2010 and 2011, for poor customer service dished out by the Daily Mail’s Money Mail section. There is a rather sullen photograph of her with one of the wooden spoons – according to the newspaper she would not pose with both “awards”. At the time she admitted that the company’s customer service was “not yet good enough”.

Wasn’t she a friend of David Cameron?

Yes, they were at Oxford together; where she studied politics, philosophy and economics. She was appointed a member of the House of Lords by Mr Cameron in 2014. She held senior roles at Tesco and Sainsbury’s and was made CEO of TalkTalk in 2010. In 2017 she was appointed chair of NHS Improvement. She has also been a jockey and is on the board of the Jockey Club, which owns Cheltenham Racecourse. She is married to the Conservative MP John Penrose, who is on the advisory board of the think-tank 1828, which has published reports calling for Public Health England to be “scrapped”. It has also called for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance system.

Yesterday Mike put up another article tearing into her appointment and the dismantling of Public Health England, which contained a number of searing comments from the good folks on Twitter, Independent SAGE experts and the head of the Nuffield Trust, Nigel Edwards.

For once, Johnson was right – it takes ‘world-beating’ incompetence to screw up the health service mid-pandemic crisis

In a previous article criticising the decision, Mike also reproduces a Tweet from neil flek Waugh, which also shows how corrupt and nepotistic her appointment is.

Matt Hancock’s relationship with Dido Harding is totally corrupt. She raised more than £600,000 for his leadership bid. And as Health Secretary he rewarded her with the position of head of TTT, which failed. He is now scrapping NHS England, and she will head up the new body.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/08/17/public-health-england-to-be-axed-as-matt-hancock-desperately-blame-shifts/

And her appointment wasn’t announced to parliament, but to Policy Exchange, a right-wing think-tank founded by the odious Michael Gove.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/08/hancock-hails-harding-head-health-honcho.html

Her connection to Cheltenham Racecourse is cause for concern in itself. There were calls earlier this year for the Cheltenham Festival to be cancelled because of the threat of the Coronavirus. It wasn’t, and as a result there was an outbreak in the town. More profit before people.

And does anyone really believe that she does not share her husband’s desire to see the NHS sold off and replaced by an American insurance-driven system, the system that has seen millions of Americans unable to afford proper health care, and going bankrupt and dying because of it?

This is yet another step in the Tory privatisation of the NHS. And Cameron, Johnson, Hancock and Harding are fully behind it.

 

https://twitter.com/Cornish_Damo/status/1295699047890771973/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1295797226707521540%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fvoxpoliticalonline.com%2F2020%2F08%2F19%2Ffor-once-johnson-was-right-it-takes-world-beating-incompetence-to-screw-up-the-health-service-mid-pandemic-crisis%2F

Tory Vice-Chair Admits to Hacking Labour Opponent

Kemi Badenoch, the vice-chair of the Tory party, managed to put her foot in it in an interview with the Daily Mail at the weekend. The ‘rising star’ of the Tory party was asked in an interview what was the ‘naughtiest thing’ she had done. Unlike Theresa May, who said that this was running through a cornfield while she was small, Badenoch actually owned up to something far more serious: hacking.

She stated that she’d hacked into the website of her Labour party opponent, and altered the content so that it said nice things about the Tories.

Hacking is, of course, illegal. According to Mike’s article on the issue, it may carry a penalty of a year in prison. The Tories have been scurrying to defend Badenoch, saying that she only guessed the password. Which is immaterial. It doesn’t matter if she guessed it or not, she still hacked into someone else’s website. They also claimed it was simply a case of ‘youthful exuberance’. Which it may well have been, but as she was 28 at the time, she should have known better. Besides, youthful exuberance isn’t a defence either. I’m sure some of the thugs terrorising our capital would just love to get away with their crimes by pleading that their stabbings are just a case of ‘youthful exuberance’.

There’s also a more serious issue at stake here beyond the cavalier attitude to computer privacy by Badenoch herself. She holds an important position in a party, which has shown itself all too willing in the past to give individual’s confidential information away to corporate interests. Last week, Facebook was caught datamining 50 million users in order to pass this information on to politicians so that they could target individuals. It’s therefore fair to ask the question whether Badenoch is a fit and proper person to be trusted with issues like internet privacy and security, and how seriously the Tory party itself takes them, when they have given away personal data in the past, and their vice-chair has no qualms about hacking rivals’ websites.

Vox Political on Boris Johnson’s Clownish Incompetence over Russia

Mike yesterday, 23rd December 2017, posted a piece criticising Boris Johnson for his completely inept handling of the talks in Moscow to improve relations with Russia. Boris has already proved to be massively and embarrassingly stupid in the way he has handled Myanmar, Libya and Iran.

Later on in the article, Mike discusses how Boris’ absolutely ignorant statement about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Anglo-Iranian lady, who was imprisoned in Iran for allegedly teaching journalism. She was guilty of no such activity, but had simply gone there to visit relatives for a holiday. As so many Brits of Iranian descent do. Nevertheless, Boris opened his trap, confirmed the lies put out by the Iranian government, who then decided to increase her sentence. Well done, Boris! In fact, the Iranians have decided to cut the sentence back to six months, but this is the decision of their independent judiciary, and nothing to do with the government.

In his meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Johnson’s opposite number in the Russian Foreign Ministry, Johnson got it into his thick, old-Etonian head to make matters worse by criticising Russia for the war in Ukraine, the annexation of the Crimea, hacking and electoral interference over here, and Syria. All while ostensibly deploring the depths to which Anglo-Russian relations had fallen, and claiming to be a ‘Russophile’. I put up a piece the other day about an interview Ken Livingstone did on RT’s ‘Going Underground’ with Afshin Rattansi. Livingstone said that he knows Boris very well, having fought against him in four elections, and doesn’t trust a word he says. He makes the point that Boris doesn’t want to be a politician, but a celebrity, and stated that he doesn’t always read the briefing documents his aides have prepared for him. All of which strikes me as very true. As for being a Russophile, Livingstone said that Johnson would probably immediately start mouthing off about them once more the moment he set foot back in London.

Mike warns that instead of decreasing tension, Johnson’s tactless comments will have served to increase it, possibly leading to armed conflict. Well, it’s what some in NATO seem to want. Think of the way Killary was ramping up military tensions with Russia and China, and the former NATO general, who published a book in 2016 arguing that by May this year 2017, we and the Russians would be at war.

Mike concludes

I would say the UK will need to be prepared for an escalation of hostilities – at least on a covert level.

But Mr Johnson’s public outburst makes it seem abundantly clear that, when it comes to our defence, his government has nothing.

We had better hope that I am mistaken.

As for Mr Johnson himself: He has critically compromised the UK’s relationship with a major foreign power.

When he arrives back in the UK, Mrs May should give him the same treatment she offered Priti Patel – another Cabinet minister who thought she could do whatever she pleased without consequence.

But we all know Theresa May is far, far too weak for that. It’s why she needs to offer her resignation as well.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/12/23/theresa-may-sent-a-clown-to-do-her-diplomacy-an-international-incident-was-inevitable/

I’ve heard from many people with expertise in foreign relations that despite the Fall of Communism, Russia still needs very careful handling. This was known as far back as the 1990s. I’m starting to wonder if Johnson really ever intended to smooth things over with our Russian friends. I don’t think he did, and that this has all been for show. Britain is tied to American foreign policy through the Special Relationship, which means we ride on the American’s coat-tails trying to maintain our status as a world power. In return for this, we do whatever they want. Which our leaders, like Tony Blair, do extremely enthusiastically. Hence Blair’s very willing participation in the bloody and illegal invasion of Iraq.

The Americans seem to want some kind of confrontation with Russia. This is partly about Killary trying to distract attention away from how massively unpopular and corrupt she was by falsely claiming that she would have won the election, if it weren’t for those pesky Russky hackers. It also seems to be about the fury of American multinational industry over their failure to control the Russian economy since the accession of Putin, after so much was sold to them at a knock-down price by another walking alcoholic disaster area, Boris Yeltsin. To whom the Americans corruptly funnelled hundreds of millions into his election campaign. And, according to Red Ken, Obama and the Democrats hate Russia, because they wouldn’t join their anti-Chinese alliance to stop China becoming the world’s greatest economy, instead of America.

So I think that Boris’ mission to Russia was deliberately doomed from the start. It was for show only, so that people would think the Tories sincerely cared about peace and security, while they manifestly don’t. Well, the grunts and squaddies, who are going to die in the frontline will be mostly working class anyway, so from their toff viewpoint, who cares?

So if there are any Russian readers of this blog, I have this to say in my very limited, schoolboy Russian.

Boris Johnson durak. On ne dorozhili k Britanskuyu ludei, kotoraya khotet mir i druzhbu mezhdu Britannuyu i Rossii.

Which I hope means ‘Boris Johnson is a fool. He is not valued highly by the British people, who want peace and friendship between Britain and Russia’.

And very best season’s greetings to all our readers, in whatever country they live, and whatever religious or philosophical beliefs they hold. My you all enjoy a peaceful and prosperous holiday season and New Year.

Hacking Alexa with HAL

In amongst the various seasonal adverts for toys and food, supplied by various supermarkets, are a couple of adverts promoting Alexa. This is a computer device, which allows you to control your home and select what you want to watch on your TV simply through voice command. One advert shows a family commanding Alexa to open their curtains, for example, and order various necessities for them over the internet. The other features petrol-head and full-time right-wing loudmouth, Jeremy Clarkson, commanding Alexa to put on his favourite TV shows. Which in his case, as a man of monstrously inflated ego, naturally include The Grand Tour, which features him, James May and Richard Hammond careering round the world in the cars.

We are truly living in the age of Science Fiction. I can remember reading SF stories when I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s in which the homes of the future all had a central computer, which spoke to the householder and obeyed his or her every wish. Like opening the curtains on command. The late, great Irish comedian, Dave Allen, used such devices as a source of rather crude humour in one of his sketches. In it, a man shows off his new computerised home to another, male friend. He shows how, at his spoken command, the computer open and closes the curtains, switches the TV on, and positions the set so he can watch it in comfort from his favourite chair. His friend asks him if he can try. Allen’s character lets him. The friend commands the curtains to open and close, the TV to come on and off. Astonished and amazed, the friend starts to sit down in one of the chairs, uttering ‘Bugger me’ in wonderment. At which point there’s a close up on Allen’s face as he shouts ‘No!’ and the sound of a spring going.

Okay, it’s slightly homophobic, I suppose, but it was broadcast in the 1980s. Things were very different then.

Now it occurred to me that hackers could have any amount of fun with Alexa. Simply hacking into the programme would give them control over people’s homes and what they watch on TV. But they could also cause a fair amount of panic, simply by removing Alexa’s voice, and replacing it with that of another, far more sinister machine.

Like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You remember HAL, the proud, murderous shipboard computer, that goes mad and kills Bowman’s fellow astronauts, thanks to a secret programme to investigate the alien monoliths must be kept secret at all costs. Critics have commented that, as the rest of the characters in the film are cardboard, the computer is the best drawn and arguably most attractive of those in the movie. The machine is so memorable for its calm, clinical evil that Anthony Hopkins has said in interviews that he partly based Hannibal Lecter’s voice on it for The Silence of the Lambs. The machine is so memorable, that there’s even a reference to him in the 1990’s SF blockbuster, Independence Day. At one point, when Jeff Goldblum’s character turns on his laptop, he’s greeted by a red camera eye and HAL’s voice welcoming him with a ‘Hello, Dave’.

Now imagine what would happen if someone hacked into Alexa, or Google, and replaced the friendly, compliant programme with that classic speech from HAL: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do that, Dave. This mission is too important to be left to humans.’

Alternatively, you could also have a long moan from Marvin, the Paranoid Android of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. ”Pick up that piece of paper, Marvin’, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they want me to pick up a piece of paper’.

Please note: I am not recommending that anyone actually does this. I have zero tolerance for hackers, and none whatsoever for the criminals, who hack into people’s accounts and computers to steal their money or their data. This is very much a ‘what-if’ type Gedankenexperiment. I don’t want anyone to actually do it.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if HAL or Marvin are added as alternative voices, in the same way that you can customise your Satnav to speak like Yoda or Borat.

And here’s a clip from YouTube of HAL in action, very definitely not doing what its human master demands.

From C. 1989: Pravda International on Launch of Greenpeace Rock Album in Soviet Union

Pravda International, with pic of Yeltsyn before he became president. This seems to have been before the drunkenness took hold. It also doesn’t show his uncritical adulation of capitalism, which destroyed the Soviet economy and caused massive unemployment and poverty.

Way back in the 1980s when I was at College, I used to buy Pravda International occasionally. It was, very roughly, an English language version of the Russian Communist party newspaper, but with articles also drawn from the other Russian newspapers and magazines Izvestia, Argumenty I Fakty, Moscow News, as well as by the English editions own staff. Like many magazines over the years, it seems to have folded due to lack of interest. I tried to buy it from my local newsagent, but found out that it was unavailable. The two big magazine distributors had divided Bristol up between them, and one of them wouldn’t carry it. So guess which half of Bristol I was in.

I nevertheless kept hold of some of them, as they were records of an exciting, historic time. This was when Glaznost and Perestroika were in full swing, the Soviet Union was being democratised according to Gorbachev’s belief that democracy and Communism could be combined to produce a new, vigorous, prosperous Soviet Union. The Soviets were opening their borders and allowing western media into the country. The Cold War was thawing rapidly, and right across the Communist bloc censorship was being lifted. The Soviet people were making their voices heard, and books, plays, poetry and art that had previously been banned were now being published and publicly discussed. Stalin and his minions stood, thanks to dissident Marxist historians like Roy and Zhores Medvedev, openly condemned as monstrous mass murderers. And the families, friends and loved ones of his victims organised to demand memorials to the millions he had murdered. And instead of hatred, distrust and the looming threat of nuclear holocaust, for a few years it looked like the peoples of the West and East would live as friends and co-workers. The missiles were being decommissioned, the silos filled in. Across the world it seemed that our peoples would never again have to fear the threat of nuclear attack, or invasion from across the other side of the Iron Curtain.

And I also dug out the old copy of Pravda International out of a sense of mischief. RT UK and America have been under attack recently, accused of spreading Russian propaganda and interfering with our politics. What this means is that the Russian-owned news agency has actually done some good journalism, and uncovered the poverty, misery and despair caused by corporatist late capitalism and the gutting of the British and American welfare state and working class organisations. It’s what our own, domestic news networks should be reporting on, but instead they’ve been turned into part of the same corporate system, publishing nothing but mainstream propaganda for the corporatist elite and their puppets and shills in the political parties. I wanted to dig it out to show that the Russians have always had a media presence in the West, and there was a time when it also really frightened some capitalist interests. Although flicking through that issue of the magazine, many of the stories were about western businesses, including British firms, securing contracts to work with Soviet enterprises, as the economy opened up.

Russia, like everywhere else, is also suffering from environmental damage and climate change. Simon Reeve, in his recent TV journey across Russia from the Far East to St. Petersburg, stopped in Siberia to show the terrifying changes that are occurring in the Russian north. The permafrost is melting causing the remaining rock and soil to subside. This has created vast craters in the tundra. One Russian environmental scientist took Reeve to see one of these. It was staggering, the size of the vast Arizona meterorite crater in the US. It was as if a piece of land the size of a city had been scooped out of the Arctic.

These climatic changes are threatening the stability of many of the cities the Russians built up in the north. They’re also a further threat to all humanity, as they release methane, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than Carbon Dioxide. About 25 times more powerful. This threatens to create runaway global warming beyond the tipping point, to the point where the survival or human civilisation, if not the human species itself, is very much under threat.

Looking through this old issue of Pravda International, it was therefore particularly interesting to find an article by their staffer, Jennie Walsh, reporting the launch of a rock album by Greenpeace, released by the Soviet recording company Melodiya, to raise awareness of environmental issues.
The article, ‘Breakthrough for the Environment’, reads

The ecological pressure group Greenpeace has long highlighted the international potential of the environmental movement. The recent release of their rock compilation album, Breakthrough marks an important step forward for the campaign, and for Western music.

Two years ago Greenpeace chairman David McTaggart approached Ian Flookes of the Wasted Talent Artists Agency with a view to putting on a concert of Western bands in the Soviet Union in order to generate roubles for a Soviet-based Greenpeace campaign. Political problems prevented this at the time, but in the changing climate of perestroika the plans were restarted last year, though a compilation record was considered more appropriate.

‘After what happened at Chernobyl, I think the Soviet authorities have become extremely environment-conscious and their approach to Greenpeace and to the project has been one of great support’, Flookes told Pravda International.

With the full cooperation of the Soviet state record company Melodiya, who were granted independent status last year, Breakthrough is the first major release of contemporary Western rock music in the USSR.

It is the first time that Melodiya has been able to do a ‘normal’ promotion campaign, with many of the artists (who all gave their services free of charge) present at the Moscow launch in March. There was an incredible reception. One record store queue was over 7,000 people, which is quite phenomenal – even by Soviet standards!

The purpose behind Breakthrough, however, must not be forgotten amid such hysteria. Kate Karam of Greenpeace emphasised that in releasing the album, they wanted to educate as much as to entertain. Despite perestroika, it is still difficult to put out independent information in the USSR, and the album provided a vehicle for the distribution of a booklet highlighting the work of Greenpeace and the environmental problems of the USSR.

The profits from the record sales will be shared between Greenpeace and the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity, one of the first independent, non-governmental organisations to be founded in the Soviet Union.

The money will be spent only on projects within the USSR. This is a major indication of the political changes that have taken place. Greenpeace is quite a radical organisation by any standards, and to have some of the top soviet scientists and public servants (including Velikov, vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences) support them through the Foundation, has been vital to the project. It is also an important challenge – a challenge to get programmes started in the USSR while maintaining the traditional Greenpeace principle of direct action.

Several environmental projects have now been formally agreed. Greenpeace will use some of the funds from the record to organise an East-West exchange programme in cooperation with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, for children to study environmental problems. Projects in the pipeline include work with the International Foundation to establish a central clearing house for information on atmospheric pollution problems and trying to involve the Soviet Union in the campaign to stop the industrial pollution of the Baltic Sea.

‘We don’t want to impose our Western standards about the environment on the Soviet Union,’ explains Karam. ‘I think that’s a danger with many of the Western organisations taking advantage of the new political climate there. Greenpeace is going to Russia to learn about their specific problems, because it is wrong to develop homogeneous attitudes about the environment. We need to study and talk to people before we launch into setting up offices and membership drives. Getting educational materials out in Russia is a big enough challenge right now without going straight into direct action projects.’

The popularisation of ‘green politics’ in the West may be little more than rhetoric on the part of its leaders, but it has encouraged the critical eye to fall on eastern Europe with regard to its environmental record. The socialist system may have failed the environment as much as the capitalist, but the big difference is the West has had 10 years lead time with environmentalists pushing legislation through. ‘I think the question is now how bad the USSR’s record is, but what is going to happen over the next 10 years – not in the past 50. I don’t think its fair to criticise.’

Now that the Soviet authorities have made active moves to encourage environmental concern, particularly by creating a Ministry for the Environment, Greenpeace are keen to see whether other east European countries follow suit.

Breakthrough is to be released in all the east European countries as well as in the UK, USA, India, Australia and Japan, emphasising the international aspect of the green movement.

The release of the album worldwide, under the title Rainbow Warriors, will probably be slightly more of a gamble than it has been in the Soviet Union. Compassion fatigue in the West, however, might be overcome by the quality of the record.

There probably hasn’t been an album released yet, which features so many top musicians – U2, Simple Minds, The Eurythmics, Bryan Ferry, Peter Gabriel and Sting to name a few. There are 26 tracks, all of which have recently been hits. For many, the album will probably have an intrinsic value just for this reason. The fact that it supports Greenpeace will be a bonus.

In the three weeks since the album was released in the USSR over 10,000 copies have been received on the forms that were enclosed in the information booklets.

The worldwide launch is on May 22nd and if it sells for reasons other than its musical content, its educational and mobilising potential could be as effective as the fundraising.

Now, unfortunately, we have had Russian hackers releasing scientific data in an attempt to discredit climate change and global warming, while Trump is also trying to stifle climate science, including the virtual closure of America’s Environmental protection Agency. He and the rest of the Republican party are determined that only the paid propagandists for the Koch brothers will be heard.

Labour Promises £37 Billion More for NHS While Hunt Peddles Away from Media

The current crisis hitting the NHS isn’t an accident. The Tories – and Blairites – have had a decades-long policy of privatising the NHS and starving it off funds going back to the days of the molten Tory tin goddess herself, Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS as part of her campaign to destroy the welfare state as a whole. That she couldn’t was down to two things – there was a massive cabinet revolt, as they realised it would be, er ‘highly courageous’ in the words of Sir Humphrey in ‘Yes, Minister’. In other words, they knew it would cost them the next election. Also, her private secretary Patrick Jenkin actually visited America and found that there healthcare system is rubbish, with 55 million people unable to afford their health insurance before Obamacare, and about 30,000 folks dying every year due to lack of medical care.

But this didn’t stop her or them. She wanted to engineer a situation where 25 per cent of Brits would have private medical insurance. And over the next three decades and more the Tories and the Blairites opened up more of the NHS to private industry through the Private Finance Initiative and other schemes whereby private hospitals and clinics are now contracting in to provide services for the NHS, while the NHS is being privatised, starved of funds and broken up.

Even as far back as the 1970s Britain actually gave less funding to its health service than the other countries in what is now the EU. And that funding has been further slashed as part of a spurious programme of cutting the deficit by the Tories.

Jeremy Corbyn has said he intends to reverse this. He will find an extra £37 billion for the NHS, including £10 billion to correct the hardware problems, which left our health service vulnerable to hackers last weekend.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/15/a-tale-of-two-jeremys-corbyn-offers-37bn-to-help-the-nhs-hunt-runs-away/

So where does this leave the Tories?

Well, as the TV host Victoria Derbyshire tweeted, they had seventy years to solve the problems of the NHS, but didn’t.

One of the journos at the Beeb, Jon Ironmonger, doorstepped Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, for his comments on Labour’s pledge. The result is very telling. Hunt kept his mouth firmly shut, and peddled off as fast as he could into the London traffic.

Like May, Hunt depends on first being programmed by the spin doctors at Tory Central Office. Without Linton Crosby to type the soundbites into ZX 81 1 Kilobyte powerhouse that is his brain – for those of you, who remember ’80s home computers – Hunt and the rest of them have nothing to say. And so they disappear as fast as they can into the smoke and petrol fumes.

Despite the Jokes, HIGNFY Is Fake News

Okay, the BBC have started running trailers for the new series of Have I Got News For You that’s due to begin on Friday. The trailer jokes about how the programme won’t be dominated by fake news, before going into a series of clips in which the panellists are dubbed over by a voice with a Russian accent, going on about how wonderful Putin’s Russia is.

Ho ho! We all know how corrupt the Russian media is, ever since the days of the Soviet Union, if not the Tsar. So all good fun and fair comment, eh?

Well, no. I stopped watching the show last year, because I got sick and tired of the way it retailed fake news, cleverly masked as fair comment on the news stories of the week, and wrote a post about it. Jokes like that are dangerous, because they promote a very false image of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, as well as ramping up international tensions, which could all too easily lead to war. Remember, last year a NATO general wrote a whole book about how, by next month, we would be at war with Russia. Considering the stupid actions of Trump and the American military-industrial complex and its poodles in the media, I don’t know if that was a genuine prediction or a prepared script that has been laid down for NATO to follow.

But let’s take the connection between Russia and ‘fake news’. This has been heavily promoted by the Democrats to excuse their defeat in the American presidential elections. They lost, not because they had no policies that would really benefit the poor, not because Hillary Clinton is a corporatist hawk, who has been paid obscene amounts by the Wall Street banks for making sure they can get away with wrecking the economy and impoverishing the country’s working people. Or the way she sneered at implementing single-payer healthcare, and has worked for companies like Wallmart, which stamped on trade unions. No! It was all because the Russians hacked into the Democrats’ computer and handed all the incriminating evidence of their crooked deals with industry and to rig the nominations to keep Bernie Sanders out, and then gave it to WikiLeaks. Except that there’s no evidence of this, and WikiLeaks itself has denied this, saying instead that they were given the material in a Chicago park by a Democratic insider, who was annoyed at the way the party was being run.

And there’s more, much more. Since then the Democrats and their corporate shills, like Rachel Maddow, have been not only banging on about this, but also about how they supposedly hacked into Trump, and have some kind of hold over him, blackmailing him to support their interests. There’s no evidence for that, but nevertheless, that’s what’s being sold the American public. There are two videos from the Jimmy Dore show where he reports on the finding by an American media monitoring organisation that stories about Russian hacking now comprise over 50 per cent of the stories covered by Maddow on her show. Despite the fact that figures from the FBI and CIA have said that it’s all rubbish.

Dore points out how McCarthyite this all is, and how it is dangerously ratcheting up tensions with Putin in a new ‘Red Scare’.

Added to this already volatile situation is the current war in Ukraine. If you believe the media, including Private Eye, Putin doing the same thing as Hitler did to Czechoslovakia. He using the supposed persecution of his people in that country to invade and overthrow its democratically elected government and annex the entire nation.

Except that Putin isn’t. He is in Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainian population, who are genuinely being persecuted by the Ukrainian government. However, Crimea was never historically part of Ukraine, is overwhelmingly Russian, and was only given to Ukraine in 1950 or so. And its people voted, perfectly constitutionally, to leave Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.

As for the current Ukrainian government, they are anything but nice, western-style democrats. The Orange Revolution was not a spontaneous revolution at all, but a carefully funded astroturf coup staged by George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s quango in charge of fomenting coups against governments the American state doesn’t like. Which means, in practice, those countries that try to stop American corporations exploiting them and treating their people as slaves.

The Ukrainian government also contains genuine Nazis from the Pravy – ‘Right’ – Sektor. These organisations dress in the costume and use the regalia – the flags, signs and insignia – of the Ukrainian SS auxiliaries during the Second World War. These organisations, and the leaders they revere, where responsible for some of the pogroms and actively aided the Holocaust during the Nazi invasion. And they are still bitterly anti-Semitic today.

But from Reagan onwards, the American government has supported elements of the Ukrainian far right, and its leaders, like Vladimir Stetso, as freedom fighters.

None of this is being reported in Private Eye, or mentioned on the BBC, not even on Have I Got News For You. Indeed, Private Eye, in their ‘Letter from Ukraine’, actively retailed the narrative that democratic Ukraine is under attack from Putin’s Russia. This is all to serve British, and indeed, western, corporate and military interests.

And so Have I Got News For You, and its hosts, are actively feeding us fake news, all the while pretending to be acting as a kind of humorous check, holding politicians accountable through satire and humour. But there are limits to the joking, beyond which they clearly don’t want to go. And the jolly irreverence then becomes actively dangerous, as it adds an entirely spurious verisimilitude to the lies they are telling about Russia, Ukraine and the former eastern bloc.

I had enough of this a couple of years ago, and have stopped watching it. I am not saying it doesn’t do some good, and that the team and panellists don’t genuinely hold some politicos to account. I’m just saying that it’s also peddling fake news, and that, if you watch it, you need to be very careful about what Hislop, Merton and the guest presenter for that week say.

Russian Hacking Allegations: Democrats Refused to Allow FBI Access to Servers

In this little video from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian discusses a report in the American magazine, The Hill, that the Democratic National Convention, the party’s central party machine, refused to allow the FBI access to their servers following the accusations they made that they had been hacked by the Russians. FBI director James Comey stated he had no idea why they refused to let the Agency examine them. Instead, the examination of the computers was handed over to an agreed third party, CrowdStrike, which specialises in military investigations. It was CrowdStrike that provided the alleged proof showing that the Russians had supposedly hacked into the Democrats’ computers.

Dore here points out that the allegations of hacking by Putin’s minions were designed to divert attention from the Democrats’ own role in creating the massive poverty now afflicting millions of Americans. The Democrats as a party are funded by Wall Street and the corporations. These sources of highly lucrative funding would be cut off, if the Democrats actually started doing what parties are supposed to do, and worked for the electorate, not corporate interests. It’s because the Dems (and Republicans) do exactly the opposite that half of America is poor while Wall Street and the corporations are enjoying massive profits.

Dore pointedly asks why the Democrats’ weren’t keen to have the FBI examine their computers, and also mocks the article’s assertion that CrowdStrike proved that the Russians were responsible for the hacking. And he makes the point that even if the Russians were responsible, that does not falsify what was revealed by WikiLeaks: the massive corporate corruption of the Democrat party.

He states forcefully that these allegations, and the refusal to allow the FBI to examine the computers, were a deliberate strategy by the Democrats to divert attention away from the Democrats’ business connections. He concludes by stating that this whole scandal will be over by Valentine’s Day. And then the Dems will have won.

This is another piece of evidence showing just how flimsy the allegations of Russian hacking are. I’ve put up a number of pieces from news sources like The Young Turks and The Jimmy Dore Show, as well as Counterpunch, showing that the Russians weren’t responsible for the WikiLeaks material. It all came from disgruntled Democrat insiders, according to the British former diplomat who took custody of the information. The documents showing the Russians hacked the DNC do nothing of the sort. And now there’s this little piece of news, which shows that the Democrats were afraid of letting the FBI do its job and examine their machines.

It seems from this that Dore is exactly right. This is just a baseless assertion designed to divert attention from the Democrat’s own responsibility for their massive electoral wipe-out by the Republicans, and their impoverishment of millions of Americans. And in so doing the Dems have also raised tensions with the Russians to a dangerous level, just for their own political advantage.

Counterpunch Analysis of the Spy Agencies’ Dossier on Russian Hacking

There’s a very good analysis of the contents of the American spy agencies’ report into alleged Russian hacking by Vincent Emanuele at Counterpunch for last Monday. Emanuele’s article discusses the report’s background, scope and sourcing, its key judgements, the Russian’s targeting of the 2016 presidential elections, Russian cyberespionage against America, the public disclosure of information collected by the Russians, Russian propaganda, and their conclusion that it was the boldest attempt yet by the Russians to influence American politics, and constitutes a ‘new normal’. It also discusses the report’s appendix on RT, its influence and control by the Kremlin. Mr Emanuele himself concludes

As mentioned above, this recently declassified US intelligence report tells us very little, and virtually nothing new. Any geopolitical analyst, professor, activist or conscious person already knew what the US intelligence community’s claims. The primary task of this report is to reinforce existing assumptions about Russia and Putin, and to mislead the public.

See: https://beastrabban.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Counterpunch: No Proof Behind FBI and CIA Claims of Russian Hacking

Last week, Obama threw out 35 Russian diplomats, claiming that they were spies responsible for the hacking of the Democrats’ computers, leaking the scandalous details of Clinton’s massive corruption and handing the presidency to Donald Trump. The FBI and CIA both claimed that the Russians were responsible for the hacking. However, yesterday Counterpunch posted an article by Thomas Knapp pointing out that the document the agencies produced to show this actually did no such thing. He wrote

Marcello Truzzi, a skeptic of paranormal claims, once said “an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.”

The claim of Russian interference in the election is certainly extraordinary (“beyond what is ordinary or usual; highly unusual or exceptional or remarkable”). So is US president Barack Obama’s response, including the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and closure of two diplomatic compounds in the US.

The “evidence” in the report, however, is not extraordinary. It’s not even ordinary. It’s non-existent. The report is just a list of cyber warfare methods accompanied by some pretty diagrams. No IP or MAC addresses. No chain of verifiable records showing suspect packets coming from, or going to, Russian machines. The report’s “evidence” for Russian government involvement is the same “evidence” we’ve been offered before: “It’s so because we say it’s so. Trust us.”

Did the Russians conduct cyber attacks for the purpose of influencing the election’s outcome? It wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t know. You probably don’t know either. The US government continues to state it as fact while declining to prove it.

Knapp reminds his readers of the way American intelligence falsified the information on Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which was cited by General Colin Powell, and provided the pretext for the invasion of Iraq. He concludes that attacking the Russians is a stupid move, if it’s designed to divert attention away from the content of the leaked information. And it’s also extremely dangerous, as it raises further tensions with Putin.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/02/russian-hacking-report-all-hat-no-cattle/

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the former British ambassador, who actually took possession of the leaked documents for WikiLeaks, said that he got them from Democrat insiders disgusted with Killary and her corruption. The Russians could have hacked the Democrats’ computer, but that’s not where he got the information from. And the American comedian and guest on The Young Turks, Jimmy Dore, has also pointed out that the CIA are notorious liars. They’ve cooked up false information throughout their history to justify their invasion of other countries for American interests, and against those of those nations’ own citizens.

So while Obama’s statement that the FBI and CIA have both provided proof that the Russians have tried to influence American domestic politics through hacking, the opposite is the case. It’s another unsupported claim, and one which deserves more than a little scepticism.