Loser Johnson Loses Majority, Loses Vote and Purges Rebels

Ho ho! Things definitely aren’t going too well for the Blonde Generalissimo. Yesterday he lost his majority in the Commons when Philip Lee crossed the floor to join the Lib Dems while he spouting something about the G7 summit. Lee gave his reason for joining them his opposition to the immense harm being done to this country by Brexit. He declared

“This Conservative government is aggressively pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways. It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk unnecessarily and it is wantonly endangering the integrity of the United Kingdom. More widely, it is undermining our country’s economy, democracy and role in the world. It is using political manipulation, bullying and lies. And it is doing these things in a deliberate and considered way.

“That is why today I am joining Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats.”

Even with the odious DUP supporting him, BoJob only had a majority of one. Now he doesn’t even have that. Which means that, democratically, he can’t pass any legislation whatsoever.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/tory-mp-defects-to-lib-dems-now-dictator-johnson-has-no-majority-in-parliament-at-all/

But the humiliation got worse. The 21 Tory MPs who were threatening to rebel against Johnson over the vote whether to debate a bill preventing a no deal Brexit put their money where their mouths were and actually did it. They voted with the opposition. From today backbenchers have control of commons business. The Old Etonian Duce becomes the first Prime Minister since Pitt the Younger to lose his first vote.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/mps-defeat-government-theyll-debate-bill-to-prevent-no-deal-brexit/

The Tories, who voted against him were Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Guto Bebb, Rory Stewart, Oliver Letwin, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Nicholas Soames, Richard Benyon, Steve Brine, Alistair Burt, Greg Clark, Justine Greening, Sam Gyimah, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Margot James, Anne Milton, Caroline Nokes, Antoinette Sandbach and Ed Vaizey. Clarke is, I think, the father of the House, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer under John Major. Hammond was also Chancellor until a few weeks ago, while Oliver Letwin and Nicholas ‘Fatty’ Soames have been prominent, even notorious, Tory politicos since the days of Thatcher, as I recall. And unlike many Tory chancellors, such as George Osborne,Clarke did seem to understand something about economics. When a prominent MP like him rebels, the fault’s very much with Johnson, not with him.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/the-21-tories-ejected-from-their-party-for-voting-with-their-consciences/

But BoJob also reacted as he threatened. He removed the whip from them, effectively expelling them from the Tory party. But there are also rumours that, following the advice of his adviser Dominic Cummings, he also removed their parliamentary passes so that they’d find it difficult getting into the Commons today to vote against him. One of the rebel MPs, Sam Gyimah, was reported by Sky News to have said that it seemed he had disabled their passes when they came in yesterday evening.

This was followed by the bizarre behaviour of the Polecat himself. It seems that with nothing to do during the debate except wait, Cummings retired to the bar, where he became, as Private Eye would have said, ‘tired and emotional’. Peter Walker, one of the Groaniad’s hacks, spotted him wondering down the parliamentary press corridor, lost and clutching a bottle of red wine, looking for the office of a particular newspaper. Then Cumming lurched over to Portcullis house where, according to Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Murdoch propaganda sheet the Sunday Times, he started yelling at Jeremy Corbyn ‘Come on Jeremy, let’s do this election, don’t be scared’. Shipman claimed the Labour leader was then whisked away by horrified aides. The Labour MP Cat Smith tweeted that, ‘As one of several shadow cabinet members stood right next to Jeremy (who was on the phone at the time) I just thought there was some loud bloke who stunk of booze yelling at us’. Commenting on this bizarre spectacle, Brexitbin tweeted ‘ Drunk & disorderly in Westminster is a new low even for him. The way to beat these people is not to play their game. Put them under pressure and they crack”. To which Zelo Street added ‘Didn’t need much pressure, did it?’ and concluded ‘Cummings is cracking up. Expect more pissed apparitions before he is taken away.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/dominic-cummings-go-home-youre-drunk.html

Did Boris Johnson really cancel Parliamentary passes of rebel Tory MPs? And what did drunken Dominic do?

This really doesn’t look good for BoJob. Corbyn could seize power, as the Skwawkbox says, it Jo Swinson wasn’t so determined to preserve Tory power in order to keep him out. https://skwawkbox.org/2019/09/04/johnsons-majority-shattered-lab-could-form-govt-if-mps-really-want-to-stop-no-deal-time-to-revisit-corbyns-offer/

Johnson has also confirmed that he’s a Stalinist by purging the Tory rebels, who now have absolutely nothing to lose by voting against the government and bringing it down. And as various bloggers, like Zelo Street, have already remarked, it also shows up the horrendous hypocrisy of the press. They were howling a few months ago that Corbyn was an evil Stalinist because he gave the constituency parties the power to deselect their MPs. How terrible and dictatorial, reinforcing internal party democracy like that! In fact, Corbyn hasn’t deselected anyone. But Johnson has. And the Tories are likely to have been embarrassed by it. When BoJob first made the threat, James Cleverly – surely a misnomer? – tweeted out that the party has no mechanism for deselecting MPs. Perhaps not, but Duce Boris has still kicked them out of the party nonetheless. Still, it could have been worse. Dictator Boris could have gone full Hitler and had them all killed like the SA during the Night of the Long Knives. I wonder who would have taken the part of the SS? Conservative Future, perhaps? They seem to be racist enough, if not necessarily that violent.

Here’s the Guardian’s video of Philip Lee crossing the floor:

I hope these are just the first of many defeats leading to this vicious, murderous government finally collapsing. And hopefully taking the whole Tory party down with it for good.

Boris Johnson and His Cabinet of Privileged Thugs Seize Office

So it’s finally happened. As just about everyone expected, but nobody outside his circle of the Tory far right actually wanted, yesterday Boris Johnson finally slithered into office. It was already on the cards on Monday, when the papers published this piccie of an expectant, jubilant Boris.

It sounds ridiculous, but I know people, who were genuinely unsettled by this image. They described him as looking mad, possessed even. I think it was probably due to a loathing of the man’s vile personal character and views coupled to his goofy expression. It also struck me that with his eye’s wide and his mouth wide open, there’s a certain superficial resemblance to the expression on this notorious American mass murderer, Charles Manson.

Which means that when they saw the picture of Johnson, subconsciously they saw this:

Which is enough to give anyone the creeping horrors.

Now Johnson isn’t a vile, unrepentant serial killer and cult leader like the late Manson. But he is an obscenely wealthy aristo, who has just appointed a cabinet of similarly obscenely wealthy aristos, none of whom seem to have the old virtues of genuine concern for the poor of the Tory paternalists. Because being ‘wet’ went out with Maggie Thatcher. They also stand for nothing more than their own enrichment and the simultaneous impoverishment of the less fortunate. They are vehemently pro-Brexit, anti-welfare and for privatisation and deregulation, despite the immense harm these zombie economics have done to this country and its proud, fine people. And it hardly needs to be said that they’re also pro-fracking and against the environment.

Two days ago on Tuesday, male feminist and anti-Fascist YouTuber Kevin Logan put up a video, Super Rich F**ks, which exactly described the Tory front bench. It was a piece of musical satire, mirrored from Dirty Little Owl’s channel, which showed images of various leading Tory politicians, with captions showing their personal wealth and a short piece about their horrendous voting record, while a song plays in the background viciously sending them up.

It begins with the statement that the Tories have a combined net worth of £2.4 billion, before going to the following –

Michael Gove

Net worth, £1 million +

Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability.

Chris Grayling

Net worth, £1.5 million

Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms. (Bedroom tax).

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson

Net worth £1.5 million

Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.

Is a massive child.

Theresa May

Net worth: £2 million

While her husband’s £1.1 trillion investment firm avoided UK tax, she cut 2,000 police, raised tax on the self-employed and took benefits from 60,000 disabled people.

Penny Mordaunt

Net work: £2.5 million

Always voted to reduce help with council tax for those in financial need.

Philip Hammond

Net worth: £8.2 million.

Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices.

Sajid Javid

Net worth: £8.5 million

Almost always voted against spending public money to create jobs for young people who’ve spent a long time unemployed.

Lord Stratchclyde

Net worth: £10 million

Voted against free school meals and milk.

Wryly commenting on the girth of the above aristo, the video comments that ‘clearly hasn’t suffered a want of meals himself.’

Jeremy Hunt

Net worth: £14 million

Here the video quotes his views advocating the destruction of the NHS:

‘Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain.’

Adam Afriyie

Net worth: £50 million

Voted for reduction in benefits for disabled and ill claimants required to participate in activities intended to increase their chances of obtaining work.

Zac Goldsmith

Net worth: £75 million

Voted in favour of proposed spending cuts and changes to the welfare system in favour of spending on new nuclear weapons.

Lord Deighton

Net worth: £95 million

Voted against protections for pensions being ‘raided’ when the master trust fails.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Net worth: £100 million

Voted for cuts in Housing Benefits for recipients in homelessness hostels, refuges, sheltered housing and accommodation for people with ongoing support needs.

Richard Benyon – richest MP in the UK

Net worth: £110 million

Voted to set the rate of increase for certain benefits, payments and tax credits at 1%, rather than in line with the increase in prices at 2.2%.

The Marquess of Salisbury

Net worth: £330 million

Receives £250,000 each year of taxpayers’ money for his inherited 10,000 acres, mostly in Jersey.

Lord Ashcroft

Net worth: £1.2 billion.

A tax exile in Belize who has poured millions into the Conservative Party over the years and strongly supported Brexit, which would remove Britain from the jurisdiction of forthcoming tax avoidance rules in the EU.

This bit has a clip from Panorama showing Brexit hiding in the gents’ toilets to avoid having to answer questions on tax avoidance.

I dare say that some of these grotesques are no longer in power, like Theresa May, thanks to Johnson’s massive purge of the cabinet. But those, who have replaced them are pretty much the same. They are what Private Eye once described as ‘the futile rich’. Their only concern is to grab more money for themselves, and steal it from the mouths of the poor.

And the press are complicit in this. Owned by millionaires themselves, they’ve now started a campaign of truly nauseating sycophancy, praising Boris to the rafters. Toby Young even raved about how Boris was a type of ‘Nietzschean superman’.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/tory-propaganda-assault-begins.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/toby-young-says-gissa-job-bozza.html

And the Beeb enthusiastically joined in last night on the One Show, where one of the guests was his father.

It’s all just Tory lies, one after another. Boris won’t do anything for this country. He doesn’t stand for more investment in the NHS or public services. He won’t put 20,000 more rozzers on the street. But he will privatise the NHS and cut welfare spending like the Tories always have. And Brexit will decimate our manufacturing industry, just as they’re anti-environmentalism will destroy our natural environment.

Get these thugs and hypocrites out now!

Boris, do what you said ought to be done when Blair transferred power to Brown and call an election so we can kick your sorry rear end out of No. 10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Panorama Next Week on the Universal Credit Crisis

According to next week’s Radio Times, for the week 10-16 November 2018, Panorama next Monday, 12th November, will be about ‘The Universal Credit Crisis’, as the programme is titled. The blurb for it in the Radio Times runs

As the government’s new benefits system universal credit is rolled out, Catrin Nye spends time with families forced to survive on handouts from food banks while their claims are being processed. She also asks whether the Chancellor Philip Hammond’s extra 17 billion pounds of funding is too little, too late.

I don’t think there’s any question of any of that. One of the stories in today’s I paper is that food bank use has gone up 13% due to problems with universal credit. And the top reason for people using food banks has been delays and problems with getting benefits.

The government is coming under very serious pressure because of universal credit, and I hope this programme adds even more. It’s on at 7.30 pm, on BBC 1.

Corbyn Criticizes the Tory Budget

The main news story today is Philip Hammond’s budget. Details of it were released a few days, and it’s been discussed ever since. In it, Hammond, dubbed by some ‘Phil the Bleak’, is trying to convince the voting public that austerity is coming to an end, and more money is going to be pumped into welfare services like mental health and the NHS, and town centre shopping in the high street will be revitalized as business rates for the shops in those areas will be dropped.

It’s strange how all these promises were suddenly made just when the Tory party is seriously challenged by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, and is being widely attacked for its colossal ineptitude and massive divisions over Brexit, and the immense hardship it is causing with Universal Credit. I don’t doubt that the Tory press will hail – or in the case of the Daily Mail, heil, the budget as a genuine boost to the economy, which should be enthusiastically embraced by all right-thinking Brits. Just like I can remember the Sun’s headline screaming the benefits of Norman Lamont’s budget back in the late ’80s or first years of the ’90s: ‘The Lager of Lamont’. Which pretty much shows the level the Scum is aimed at – drunken yobs. And for ordinary people, you have to be drunk to think there’s any substance or real benefit in the budget.

Mike’s extensively critiqued it on his blog over the past few days. Yesterday he put up a piece showing that it was all a tissue of lies. Despite his claim that austerity is over, public sector pay is not going to rise, nor are benefits, the bedroom tax ain’t going to be repealed and there aren’t going to be 20,000 more police on our streets.

Furthermore, the tax cuts he’s promising will only really benefit the rich. As Mike points out, this is another swindle to decrease the amount the state takes in tax, which is then redistributed as benefits to the poor, or spent on public services.

But the Tories are still going to introduce 7 billion pounds’ worth of cuts. Hammond also said that

Brexit would not affect spending plans because he had assumed an “average-type free trade deal” between the UK and EU after Brexit, and had £4.2 billion in reserve in the case of a no-deal scenario.

Mike ends his piece by stating that this is also a piece of deception, saying

But you can bet that this will not be enough to deal with the consequences of a Tory Brexit. They want harmful effects because they will then be able to justify harsh cuts to your rights and living standards.

About the only welcome announcement in the whole sorry mess was the decision to stop using hugely-wasteful Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes.

One of Mike’s many excellent commenters, Barry Davies, points out that the PF1 and PF2 deals would simply become PPP, so there’s really no change there.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/10/29/its-phil-the-bleaks-fantasy-budget-would-you-buy-anything-hes-offering-before-brexit/

Actually, I think all Hammond’s promises are worthless for the same reason Mike does: their provisional. They only have force until Brexit occurs in March, when I full expect Hammond to announce that the terrible deal forced upon Britain by the European Union will mean that they’ll have to reverse their policies and start cutting benefits, public services and again reverse their spending on the NHS.

It’s all lies, from a government of liars, who lie and lie again without qualm of conscience.

Jeremy Corbyn has already responded. This little video from RT UK, posted yesterday shows him denouncing it as ‘a broken budget’. He says

The Prime Minister says austerity is over. This, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is a broken promise budget. What we’ve heard today are half measures and quick fixes while austerity grinds on and far from people’s hard work and sacrifices having paid off as the Chancellor claims, this government has frittered it away in ideological tax cuts to the richest in our society. This budget won’t undo the damage done by 8 years of austerity and doesn’t begin to measure up to the scale of the job that needs to be done to rebuild Britain. The government claims austerity has worked, so now they can end it, but that is absolutely the opposite of the truth, austerity needs to end because it has failed.

Corbyn’s right: austerity has failed. It’s failed working people, the poor, the disabled, the long-term sick, and the unemployed. But it’s done wonders for the rich, who’ve benefited massively from the Tories’ tax cuts, and privatization of public services, including the NHS. And, of course, the provision of cheap labour through the welfare to work industry, pay freezes and the removal of workers’ rights. Reforms all intended to make workers easy to hire and discard, and create a cowed workforce in constant fear of the sack and starvation, which will accept any work, no matter how precarious or poorly paid.

And as you can see from the video, when Corbyn laid into the budget, he was greeted with the usual Tory sneers and laughter, especially from Hammond and the Maybot, who jerked and spasmed as if she was suffering a short-circuit. Well, the Tories always find working class poverty a great laugh. You just have to remember how Cameron and IDS had a right good guffaw in parliament when one woman’s suffering due to the benefit cuts was read out.

Well, let’s cut their cackling short, and vote them out at the earliest opportunity.

Tory MP Condemns Tory Students for T-Shirts Revealing their True Nature

Oh dear! It seems the attempts of the Tory party in the 1980s and ’90s to purge the offensively extreme right-wing element among the party’s youth and student organisations hasn’t entirely been successful. According to today’s I, Thursday, 4th October 2018, a group of students from Plymouth University Student’s Union Conservative Society have been condemned by the Tory MP Robert Halfon after a photo of them appeared in yesterday’s Mirror wearing very offensive T-shirt. These showed what they really thought of the NHS and Adolf Hitler.

The article on page 8, by Serina Sandhu, reads

Students Condemned for Explicit T-Shirts

A Conservative MP has condemned a group of students believed to be part of a Tory university society for wearing T-shirts with explicit wording including “f**ck the NHS”.

An image of the group from the University of Plymouth on a night out was published by the Daily Mirror yesterday.

The students wore blue T-shirts with hand-written slogans and messages. One also appeared to have drawn a Hitler-style moustache on his face.

Denouncing the behavior, Harlow MP Robert Halfon said the image reinforced people’s stereotypes of the party.

The image came to light on the final day of the Tory conference but contrary to speculation, the picture was not taken at the event. It is not clear how many of the students are part of Plymouth University Students’ Union Conservative Society.

So, it seems that some Tory students, at least, are going back to the old days, when members of the Union of Conservative Students used to go around singing ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ and ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks and Asians’, the latter to the tune of Pink Floyd’s ‘Brick in the Wall’.

But it’s wrong for Halfon to complain that they’re presenting a stereotyped image of the party. While they are indeed reinforcing an established, negative view of the party, it’s also one that is also true.

The Tories are trying to privatise the NHS, whatever they say to the country. You only have to look at the stats showing the hospitals that have been given over to private firms to manage, and the operations and other NHS functions that have also been contracted out to private firms. And then there’s the speeches and attitudes of leading Tories themselves, beginning with Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher really did want to privatise the NHS, and was only prevented from doing so by a back-bench revolt and the findings of her own private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, about how dire the American private healthcare system was. So she contented herself with trying to get a certain percentage of the British public to take out private health insurance, and her party embarked on a forty-year programme of privatizing it by stealth. Which was also continued by Blair and his cronies when they were in power. And it wasn’t just Maggie. The Dorset Tory MEP Daniel Hannan also wants the NHS privatized. Philip Hammond, before he became health secretary, wrote that he wanted the health service to disappear and be merged with private healthcare. And I remember the furore a few years ago when another Tory privately declared that in a few years the NHS would cease to exist. Then someone at Tory Central Office took fright, and declared that the comments attributed to him in the press were incorrect, and that what he really said was that the Tories were cutting down on bureaucracy and combatting inefficiency. The usual Tory lies.

As for Nazism, there always has been a section of the party which supports the Far Right. Despite Cameron cutting links with the Monday Club and purging members with connections to the BNP. The Traditional Britain Group, whose annual dinner a few years ago was attended by Jacob Rees-Mogg, is led by a Tory activist with a very strong fascination with Hitler and the Third Reich. The Libertarians in the party, of which Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes, was a part, invited over to their annual dinners the leaders of South American Fascist death squads. The late Alan Clarke insisted that he was a Nazi, and called his Rotweilers Himmler and Goering.

Quite apart from the barely disguised racism of Tweezer’s own administration – its unjust deportations of Windrush migrants, its hostile atmosphere policy to deter immigrants and the far right rantings of the Tory press, like the Heil and the Scum.

However embarrassing the students and their wretched T-shirts were for the Tory party, they honestly showed what a sizable, influential chunk of the party really thinks.

Hammond Blames the Disabled for Fall in Productivity

This is another outrageous statement. But it really doesn’t come as a surprise, as it was mouthed by the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, a poisonous incompetent amongst a government of poisonous incompetents.

When Hammond was asked about the fall in British productivity, he responded by blaming it on the inclusion of various marginal groups in the workforce, such as the disabled. Mike over at Vox Political has posted a piece commenting on this stupid, insensitive and mendacious reply. He points out that if productivity has fallen, it might have something to do with a lack of motivation coming from insultingly low pay, poor nutrition, overwork, tiredness and anxiety due to zero hours contracts to care about profits or productivity.

He also points out that, thanks to May’s government fully supporting poor wages and precarity, employers now find it cheaper to employ people under these wretched conditions than invest in new equipment.

Mike also points out that Hammond’s comments follow the usual Tory line of blaming and demonising the disabled. But this doesn’t mean that they’re coming for them to throw them in the gas ovens just yet. No, they’re just content to let the stress of dealing with the benefit system either worsen their mental health, or force them to commit suicide. All while denying that people are being driven to take their own lives by the stress of their benefit reforms.

This is despite suicide notes left behind by those who have committed suicide, explicitly saying that this is why they have been reduced to taking their own lives.

And Mike also rightly notes how DWP staff are asking people with suicidal tendencies why they haven’t taken their own lives. Which sounds like a question from the infamous ‘Nudge’ Unit, the psychological manipulation department set up to manoeuvre people’s thinking so that they come to the decision the authorities want.

Mike also quotes Labour’s Debbie Abrahams, who has condemned Hammond’s comments, pointing out that disabled people are paying the price for the government’s failed austerity policy. This has included scrapping the schemes to get disabled people into the workforce. She states that we should be doing more to get disabled people into work, and definitely not denigrate their contributions. She went on to demand an apology from Hammond.

Abrahams also points out the contradiction that’s also hidden in Hammond’s statement. He states that there are more disabled people in the workforce, which we should be proud of, but the Tories have actually cut the programmes to get the disabled into work, as well as scrapping their manifesto pledge to halve the gap between the employment rates for disabled and able people.

You can’t have it both ways, so one way or another, Hammond is clearly lying.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/12/07/chancellor-blames-fall-in-uk-productivity-on-disabled-people-in-the-workforce/

Hammond’s comment is disgusting, but it is more or less standard Tory replies. The Tories’ entire economic strategy is to prolong the deficit crisis as long as possible, so they have an excuse for cutting welfare benefits, privatising whatever remains of the state sector, including education, and removing workers’ rights. All to create a cowed, beaten workforce that will accept starvation wages, for the benefit of ultra-rich profiteers, including the banksters, hedge fund managers and multinational corporations that are currently keeping their wretched party afloat.

At the same time, they desperately need a scapegoat. Usually this function is filled by the unions, who provide them with an excuse for taking away more workers’ rights while at the same time trying to dismember the Labour party by attacking its foundations in the trade union movement. But as no-one’s currently on strike, they can’t do it.

So Spreadsheet Phil has to blame the disabled.

As with everything else the Tories utter, a few moment’s thought can show that the reality may be the very opposite of what they’re saying. Let’s examine Hammond’s statement that the fall in productivity is due to too many disabled people in the workforce. Quite apart from the fact that, as Mike has pointed out, the Tories have actually cut initiatives to stop disabled people finding work, you can find reasons how disabled people in the workforce may actually be a boost to productivity.

Firstly, there’s the obvious point that just because a person suffers from one type of disability does not mean that they are totally incapable of work. One of the blokes I met years ago was a computer whizzkid, who was totally paralysed from the neck down. But he was very, very good at his job, and was earning a very high salary for his skill. Which he clearly earned and deserved. Despite the problems of dealing with this gent’s handicap, his firm clearly found it well worth their while to employ him. And he wasn’t the only one. I’ve heard of other, physically disabled people with mobility problems, who have also pursued successful careers in computing. Clearly, these peeps are anything but unproductive individuals.

Disabled people also act to stimulate innovation. I blogged a little while ago about how the robotics department at the University of the West of England in Bristol had set up a company to manufacture and sell their artificial hands, which are designed specifically for children. Never mind the hype and bullsh*t about self-driving cars: this is precisely the type of robotics we need. This technology is making it possible for disabled children and their parents to have more normal, better lives. It is positively enabling them, giving them the ability to do things that they otherwise couldn’t do, or would find more difficult. The technology is brilliant, and I’m sure will have other applications as well. And its effect on the children is liberating and empowering. If adults with similar disabilities also have access to improved artificial limbs, then you can expect that their productivity will also improve, as well as simply quality of life.

And this can be said of almost any technical innovation that improves the lives of disabled people, and gives them more independence and freedom, if only a little.

Then there’s the fact that disabled people, like everyone else, contribute to the economy. They have to eat, pay bills and the rent or mortgage. Getting disabled people into proper paid employment, rather than just subsisting on whatever benefits the DWP deigns to throw their way, means that they have surplus cash to spend. Which means that their purchasing power also pumps more money into the economy, and encourages manufacturers to produce more.

And the disabled have also contributed to British culture. Remember Evelyn Glennie, a drummer with one of our orchestras? She’s actually deaf, but that hasn’t prevented her from excelling at her instrument. And those of us, who were kids in the 1970s will remember the brilliant madness that was Vision On. This was a show for deaf children, so that the dialogue was signed as well as spoken. Much of it was silent, accompanied only by music. Among those on the show were Sylvester McCoy as a mad professor, a couple of young animators, who went on to form Aardman Animations, and the artistic genius that was Tony Hart. It also launched the career of another star, at least down here in Bristol: Morph, the mischievous plasticene man, who acted as a kind of comic foil to Hart’s artistic endeavours. The show brought joy to millions of kids, both deaf and hearing, and part of its legacy has been Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and the other films to come out of Aardman. Vision On is remarkable because, by taking the job seriously and doing it well, it became more than a programme aimed at children with a particular type of disability, and was a massive source of TV creativity.

This makes me wonder about the possible potential out there for other programmes aimed at or with a disable audience, that could also do the same today.

But this is all too much for their Tories. Their whole philosophy is based around grinding their social inferiors down, and then blaming them for their poverty.

But this also shows how desperate the Tories are getting, and how they’re running out of plausible excuses.

Once upon a time, they would simply have blamed British workers, claiming that we’re too lazy, work shorter hours and go on strike more than our French or German competitors. But they can’t do that, as it’s notorious that we work far longer hours than them. In fact, the Germans even make jokes about how we work ourselves into the ground, but nothing in this country still works properly. So that excuse simply won’t do. You still hear though, occasionally, from the odd CEO windbag, who feels like giving the rest of us the benefit of his decades of ignorance. But it’s very definitely not true, and Hammond knows it. Thus he’s been reduced to blaming the disabled.

I’m sick of him, sick of this government, and sick of their lies and bullying – of the disabled and of ordinary working people. Debbie Abrahams is right: Hammond should apologise. And then I want him and his vile government cleaned out like the parasites they are.

Satirical Song against Philip Hammond: Blackstreet Phil ‘No Unemployed’

This is another piece of music I found on YouTube sending up the Tories, like the Iain Duncan Smiths and their ‘All I want for Christmas is Universal Credit’. It’s by somebody called Blackstreet Phil, and with the title ‘No Unemployed’ it’s clearly an attack on Philip Hammond and his claim on the Andrew Marr Show that there weren’t any jobless in Britain.

As well as sending up that claim, it also attacks the Tory policy of not making work pay by expanding the low wage economy and zero-hours contracts, and the general poverty created by the Tories.

Videos of People’s Assembly Demonstration against Budget

I found this on the channel of someone describing themselves as ‘Loveofpeace’. On Thursday, just before Philip Hammond released his vile, abysmal budget, the People’s Assembly organised a mass demonstration in front of 10 Downing Street, in which they piled up a small mountain of food, which they would later deliver to a real food bank. They did this to call attention to the mass starvation the Tories’ austerity policies are causing.

This is just a series of short snapshots of the demo, but it shows the workers piling on the food. There’s also a performance poet attacking the media for colluding with the government. It shows the signs up demanding an end to austerity, the sacking of the Tories, and defending the NHS. There’s also a banner from one of the Marxist parties or groups, and another sign saying ‘Migrants welcome here’.

There are now something like a quarter of a million people forced to use food banks. 7 million in ‘food insecure’ households, where they don’t know if this meal will be their last. And that liar Philip Hammond had the utter gall to appear on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday and claim there were no jobless in Britain. He was wrong: Marr quoted the figure of 1.25 million. I don’t believe that, as the figures are fiddled so that they’re meaningless. I think the real figure is probably 4 million. Quite apart from the fact that most of the poor in Britain are actually in work. But they’re not making money because of low wages, zero hours contracts and all the other fiddles employers are using to not have to pay real wages. And Mike put up another piece about some female Tory from Yorkshire, somebody Pow, who claimed that people had thousands in the bank and the Tories had made them richer.

Well, they have made some people richer. Those, who were rich already. The top 25 per cent. Either this woman really doesn’t know any poor people – which is possible – or she’s suffering from serious cognitive dissonance, and actually believes what her party says – or she’s a liar. Either way, she’s telling porky pies, and is totally unsuited to government.

Get her, Hammond, May and the rest of the Tories out. Now. Before more people die from starvation.

Protests by Maybots against Hammond’s Public Sector Pay Cap

Another interesting report from RT, which you probably didn’t see on the Beeb or the terrestrial channels. Just before Hammond released his decidedly lacklustre, and frankly abysmal budget on Thursday, a group of workers from the GMB dressed as ‘Maybots’ – robotic versions of Theresa May to mock here robotic personality, in protest at the 1 per cent pay cap the Tories have imposed on public sector workers. They made the point that it had condemned 5 million of them to misery over the last five years. The report ends with the news anchor reporting that he had lifted some aspects of it, but not others.

RT Report on Food Bank Donations Placed Outside Downing Street in Protest against Universal Credit

This is another excellent piece of reporting from RT, and shows why we need the Russian-owned station to provide us with the news that the mainstream channels won’t give us.

In this short segment, RT’s Laura Smith covers a protest by the People’s Assembly against the planned roll-out of Universal Credit to even more areas. The organisation has stacked some of the food donated to it outside Downing Street to call attention to the way Universal Credit is forcing more people into poverty. UC is supposed to make the benefit system simpler by rolling six benefits into one, but delays can mean that it is up to six weeks before claimants receive any money.

Smith also interviews the spokesman for the People’s Assembly, Sam Fairbairn, who states that the extension of UC across even more parts of the UK will throw an extra 30,000 people into poverty, while the clip also shows headlines predicting that as many as half a million people more could be forced to use food banks. The organisation has chosen today to make the protest as Philip Hammond will announce his new budget tomorrow. Fairbairn states that the existence of such poverty is not acceptable in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world. He states that the government should either get rid of Universal Credit, or get out.

Mike over at Vox Political has also covered this, and included RT’s video. He remarks that he hasn’t found anything about the protest in the mainstream press, with the exception of the Metro. He also jokes that he’s not sure that the Tories will understand the message. Theresa May will probably take it as meaning that the food can be used for the next time she goes for a banquet with Murdoch or Dacre.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/11/21/food-bank-donations-dumped-at-downing-street-door-in-budget-protest/

Universal Credit was, of course, the big idea of Ian Duncan Smith, who boasted that it would be the greatest strategy to raise people out of poverty since William Wilberforce ended the slave trade in the British Empire. Which shows the sheer, colossal vanity of the man.

And I don’t believe for a single minute that the problems with Universal Credit and the various snags and delays in paying it to those claiming it are remotely accidental. The Tories have said time and again that they believe in making the process of claiming benefits as painful and humiliating as possible in order to force people off welfare and into work. Or rather, just off welfare. The neoliberal and Monetarist economics they follow demand a ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed to keep wages down by making sure that jobs are actually in short supply. Thus we have something like 4 million jobless, but for the sake of his political career the Tories have to lie about the figures being much less. This explains why Philip Hammond appeared on TV on Sunday to claim that Britain ‘had no jobless’.

I am also not remotely surprised that none of the mainstream media, with the exception of the Metro, are covering this. The right-wing media really wouldn’t want to, as they’re probably acutely aware how weak and fragile May’s position actually is. For all the Tories’ criticism of her leadership, they have no desire to see her fall just yet, and take the rest of the current Tory government with her.

As for the BBC, the Corporation has consistently tried to avoid reporting on protests against the Conservative governments. It even managed to ignore one, that occurred right outside its front door when David Cameron was in power a couple of years ago. This was a protest by a crowd of several tens of thousands. But it didn’t appear on the broadcast news. It was, however, mentioned on the Beeb’s news website, so they could claim that they had covered it.

As I’ve mentioned many times previously, the Beeb’s management is very solidly composed of White, public-school, Oxbridge educated men, and there is a very strong Conservative bias at the Corporation. You only have to consider the very anti-Labour bias of ‘Goebbels’ Nick Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg. Years ago Private Eye reviewed Robin Day’s autobiography, Grand Inquisitor. Day was, or had been, the corporation’s main political interviewer. The Eye remarked that while Day was keen to present himself as a fearless journalist holding the government and civil servants to account, in reality his instincts were to side with the government and authority against criticism and protest. The BBC is the state broadcaster, and it sees itself very much as one of the country’s great, central institutions. While it’s supposed to be impartial, it does have an institutional bias towards established authority. And it’s refusal to cover anti-government protests properly seems to indicate that this bias is such that it seems to look upon such protests as something close to subversion. Any act of mutiny against established authority, which should not be indulged, but ignored or suppressed as quickly as possible.

RT is under concerted attack in America, where the current ruling elites are bitterly hostile because of the way it covers domestic discontent, and poverty and injustice within America itself. It’s also being used by Killary’s team as a convenient scapegoat for her failure to gain the American presidency against Trump. And so Republicans and corporatist Democrats are claiming that the protests and demonstrations that have taken place across America, including movements like Black Lives Matter and the Take The Knee protest by NFL players, aren’t genuine, authentic demonstrations of popular anger, but all stirred up by RT, which just disseminates propaganda for Putin.

It’s absolute nonsense, but the Tories and Theresa May have tried to copy the Americans and have made the same accusations over here.

This shows why we need RT to cover the demonstrations and issues that the mainstream media and the state broadcaster would prefer to ignore.