I’ve been debating with myself whether to repost anything by Barry Wall, the EDIJester, for a little while now. I really don’t share his political opinions – he’s a Telegraph-reading Tory, who thinks that five years of the Labour party in power will totally wreck this country but will have the benefit of leading to another 25 years of Tory rule, as he says in this video. He also thinks that the NHS needs to be scaled back as it’s a socialist state. Well, it’s not state socialism that’s responsible for the increase in bureaucracy, but privatisation. He is very well-informed on the immense damage Queer Theory and the transgender ideology has done and is doing to gays, lesbians and vulnerable young people, principally autistic and gender nonconforming children. However, he is very forthright and outspoken in the scorn and sheer loathing he has for the ideology and those pushing it. While I share his views there, I’m very much aware that many of the great readers of this blog don’t, and I don’t want to insult them. But this issue’s a bit different. It’s about the Critical Social Justice invasion of STEM and in particular the teaching of evolution and ecology.
In the video, he reads out and adds his own comments to a review from the website ‘Why Evolution Is True’, of a scientific paper demanding that the teaching of evolution and ecology should be revised to include the subject’s racism in order to combat modern racism and ‘White complicity’. He states that it’s the kind of material that comes from Black activists like Ibrahim X. Kehindi. This isn’t anti-racism as you and I would normally understand it, where people look past skin colour and disregard past prejudices in order to appreciate the person within. No. Critical Race Theory states that all Whites occupy a privileged position at the apex of society, while all Blacks are brutalised and discriminated against by the system. This has to be laid bare, and Whites must feel guilty about their past in order to make up for past or present racial inequities. This last word does not mean equality in the sense of equality of opportunity. It means equality of result. Thus, lower performing Blacks must be given preferential treatment over Whites and now Asians through affirmative action schemes.
The Jester’s a meritocrat, who believes that firms should only hire and employ the best people, regardless of race. But this is under attack from the Critical Social Justice adherents, who, following the pedagogical theories of the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freyre, wish to turn teaching into a form of political indoctrination, with the individual subjects merely vehicles for this. The Humanities have been the hardest hit by this attitude, but it’s beginning to infect the science subjects as well. This is particularly pernicious because of the immense power of the STEM subjects to affect the quality of people’s lives. Scientists, engineers and medical professionals need to rely on object fact. But postmodernism, of which Critical Race Theory is a part, rejects objective knowledge as merely a product, or rather a prejudice of western society, and criticises the exclusion of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’. The scientific paper being reviewed does exactly the same.
Now I’d normally avoid sites like ‘Why Evolution Is True’. In my experience, many of them appeared in the first decade of this century as a response to the rise of Creationism and Intelligent Design. They tended to be run by militant atheists, who sneered at people of faith generally when they weren’t attacking them for not believing in evolution. This followed the New Atheists and its leaders, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and so on. Dawkins is known for his particularly bitter hatred of religion, but to be fair he was also very critical of postmodernism. And it’s now postmodernism, in the form of its Critical Social Justice ideologies, that are taken over from religion as the main threat to rationality and objective science.
Evolution is particularly vulnerable to criticisms about its racist past because it was incorporated into the racial anthropology and pseudo-scientific racism that arose in the late 19th century. But Europeans had already developed racial hierarchies with northern Europeans at the top and Aboriginal Australians at the bottom before Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Also, other cultures have also developed their own racial prejudices and hierarchies. Medieval Muslim scholars speculated that White people owed their complexions and temperaments, which were inferior to those of brown Arabs and Asians, because they lived in northern regions and so had not been properly cooked by the sun. Blacks were also inferior, but for the opposite region. They lived in hotter, southern climates and so had been overcooked. And in the First Millennium AD, some Chinese scholars decided that Whites were the product of interbreeding with monkeys. And at one level, I think many students of evolution are already aware of its racist past through works like The Mismeasure of Man by the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
European readers may be surprised at the accusations of racism against ecology, but the American ecological movement is tainted with a racist past. Some of those who established the first national parks in America were fervent racists, who hated Blacks and indigenous Americans. But many of them were also otherwise progressive liberals, who believed in a mixed economy, welfare provision and strong trade unions, as Thomas Sowell points out in his book, Intellectuals and Race. But obviously, racism is only part of this, as I think much of the American ecological movement also sprang from ordinary, working class Americans, who yearned for the beauty of the natural world their parents and grandparents had left when they migrated from the farms to seek work in the cities.
Militant Black activists have also developed their own splenetic racist ideologies, in which Whites are at the bottom. These have been developed by the Afrocentrists and the Black Muslim organisations like the Nation of Islam. The latter teaches that Whites were created thousands of years ago by an evil Mekkan scientist in order to destroy Black racial purity. As time went on, however, they also interbred with lepers and dogs. Now, if the teaching of mainstream subjects like evolution and ecology has to include these subjects’ racist past, the argument could be levelled that no teaching about Afrocentrism and Black Islam should exclude mentioning the racism of these ideologies and religions. But I can see real resistance coming to the mere suggestion of this.
This isn’t about informing students of a particularly evil side of their disciplines, but about using that history as a means of indoctrinating them with an extreme and controversial racial ideology at the expense of the subject itself. CRT should have no place in the curriculum.
‘SHOCKING: WATER COMPANIES WANT YOU TO PAY MORE TO CLEAN UP THEIR MESS. [1]
Water companies have APOLOGISED for sewage spilling into our rivers and seas, and announced that they would FINALLY proceed with the upgrades we have been demanding – to the tune of £10 billion. [2]
But that’s not the whole story!
It was also revealed that we – their customers – will be footing the bill. [3] Then, to add insult to injury, these same companies are still planning to give out shareholder dividends of £14.7 billion from our increased bills at the same time. [4] It’s an outrage!
Thankfully, this has yet to be approved by Ofwat, the water regulator, and we have some time to show these companies how strongly the public is against these plans. If we get thousands of signatures on a petition demanding no bonuses for CEOs or dividends for shareholders, we can pressure them to put a stop to this unjust system – and take responsibility for cleaning up their mess once and for all.
So, David, if you think water companies should be footing this bill and not us – their customers – add your name to this petition today:click the button below and your name will be added automatically.
No bonuses or dividends while you hike our bills to clean up the mess you made.Why is this important?Although the announcement of investment in our sewer network is welcome – your customers cannot be expected to foot the bill.The lack of investment and funding since water companies went private is not the public’s fault and therefore the onus to fix this should not be on us. And we definitely shouldn’t be paying a penny more for as long as shareholders and executives are still getting bonuses and dividends.SignedThousands of your customers
Our pressure is working but we cannot take our foot off the pedal. Sign the petition below and demand water companies stop this bill hike if shareholders are still being paid.Click the button below and your name will be added automatically.
I’ve signed it, because I strongly believe that it’s outrageous that customers should be charged for cleaning up the mess solely so that the companies can keep their boosted profits for their shareholders and senior staff, and I hope you’ll sign too.
I had this piece come though earlier this evening by the pro-democracy group Open Britain. Faced with very many people being turned away from polling stations because they don’t have ID, the Torygraph has decided to dream up a conspiracy theory so that it’s their fault, not the fault of an anti-democratic and unnecessary law. Yes, they’ve declared that protesters are going to disrupt the voting tomorrow, including by deliberately leaving behind their ID. This is desperate. It’s a fantastic excuse, and it shows the powerful imaginations the Tories have when spinning lies and excuses. Here’s the piece:
‘Dear David,
Local elections are tomorrow, and a significant number of people still risk being turned away from the polls – despite councils’ and the Electoral Commission’s best efforts. Compounding that, we won’t even know the actual number of people turned away because of how the scheme has been organised.
Funnily enough, some in the Conservative press and on the Tory backbenches are taking this as yet another opportunity to demonsie “activists” and protestors. A recent piece in the Telegraph claims that left-wing troublemakers will intentionally leave IDs at home in protest. There’s no evidence that’s true – take it from the activists themselves.
Tory MP Craig Mackinlay argues that such groups will disrupt our local elections not because of their disagreement with voter ID as a policy but simply because they have a nefarious agenda – because they’re just out to cause chaos. It shows an implicit inability even to consider the fact that the policy might be flawed. There are many good reasons to oppose the policy, and people like us are busy making those cases fairly and reasonably, not going out of their way to disrupt elections.
Mackinlay’s spasm is really an attempt to distract from the glaring negative impacts of the government’s poorly-planned policy. As always, its easier to blame the “wokerati” protestors than it is actually to take responsibility for policy choices that don’t work. We can’t be sure, but it looks like the results tomorrow aren’t going to reflect well on the Voter ID scheme – with potentially thousands turned away. They could be hedging their bets.
Regardless, Mackinlay is embodying the same attitude that Suella Braverman has brought to the Home Office, one that favours a brutal crackdown on opposition instead of dialogue or debate. Just this week, the Public Order Bill was enshrined into law, meaning that the police’s powers to crush any coronation protests will be vastly extended. Braverman even wrote a letter to various republican groups designed to intimidate them into submission.
A government that forcibly silences dissent is a government that lacks democratic legitimacy. We’re much further along this road already than many realise.
We won’t stop fighting for a government that favours compromise over crackdowns and dialogue over censorship. We’re glad to have you with us for the fight.
The Open Britain team‘
This deep authoritarianism and refusal to concede that protesters have a good reason for demonstrating, as well as Braverman’s letters to the various republican organisations to stop them spoiling King Charles’ special day are just a few more instances of the Tory party’s determination to stifle dissent and protest. It’s why they’re a danger to democracy.
The Torygraph ran a story yesterday claiming that over half of Hindu schoolchildren in Britain had been bullied by their Muslim classmates. This included throwing beef at them, a particular insult given the Hindu veneration for cattle. The victims were supposedly told that the insults and violence would stop if they converted to Islam. The blog’s favourite YouTube non-historian, Simon Webb, posted a video about it on his channel this morning in which he added his own peculiar viewpoint on it. He claimed that the bullying was being ignored by Guardian-reading liberals, who would have otherwise been extremely annoyed and organising protests if the bullying had been by White children against Blacks and Muslims. I’m sure he’s right there. However, he claimed that the anti-Hindu bullying was being ignored because Guardian readers had convinced themselves that Hindutva was fascism, and because India was friends with Israel. This is nonsense. Many academic historians of Fascism across the world have concluded that Hindutva, militant Hindu nationalism, is fascistic. One of the Hindu nationalist prayers appears in a collection of fascist texts because it exemplifies the mystical strain of fascism. The RSSS, a paramilitary Hindu organisation, was modelled on Mussolini’s black shirts. I’ve put up a piece about ultra-nationalist Hindu priests putting bounties on the head of dissident Indians and calling for the death of blasphemers. There have been mass rallies calling for the abandonment of India’s secular, pluralist constitution and its transformation into a Hindu state. Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are the target of militant Hindu nationalist violence, with Muslims and their mosques especially targeted. I also remember a particularly repulsive incident back in the ’90s when one local Hindu nationalist politico announced his support for Hitler against the Muslims, and used the Nazi version of the swastika. But western liberal hatred of India fascism almost certainly isn’t behind the liberal left ignoring such anti-Hindu bullying.
Playground violence between different Asian groups has been around for a long time. I heard back in the 1980s that in one of the schools in a multicultural ward of Bristol the real conflict and violence wasn’t between Black and White, but between different Asian groups. I don’t know if the violence was based on religion, ethnicity or caste. I do remember, however, that talking about it to friends there was a real opposition to any recognition that Asian racism could be as bad or worse than White racism.
Part of the problem is that the anti-racist movement arose specifically to tackle White prejudice, hostility and discrimination against Blacks and other people of colour. It therefore has immense difficulty recognising that non-Whites also have their own racial prejudices and can also be responsible for racist abuse and violence. Some of this comes from the way the right-wing press in the 1980s framed the 1980s/81 race riots and continuing racial controversies as due to Black racism. Diane Abbott has said several times that she wasn’t going to tackle racism within ethnic minority communities, because this would lead ‘them’ to ‘divide and rule’. The result is that racism from non-Whites is played down or ignored. One Jewish writer for the right-wing online magazine, Spiked, wrote a piece describing how she also received anti-Semitic abuse and treatment from ethnic minorities. But this wasn’t reflected in the public discussions about anti-Semitism, which only dealt with it when it came from Whites.
This exclusive focus on White racism does not represent the complex reality of racial attitudes in multicultural Britain. This is grossly unjust, and needs to change, however uncomfortable it may be to official anti-racists like Diane Abbott.
The Tories really are slave-driving sadists. Apart from the unemployed, there’s a real hatred of the sick and disabled, who they also consider to be workshy scroungers. I got this message the other day from the internet petitioning organisation 38 Degrees, asking me to sign a petition against their latest wheeze. There’s a bill going through parliament at the moment that’s gone under the radar, but if passed would force doctors to find suitable work to do for sick people rather than signing them off. I think they’ve tried something like that ages ago. I remember them trying to pass some kind of law to prevent doctors signing people off work. Anyway, it seems they’re going back to it with a vengeance. However, this mentality is actually crippling industry as well as workers. Presenteeism is the state where unwell employees nevertheless have to, or feel they have to come into work. This obviously spreads the disease and doesn’t contribute to efficiency. I can remember reading a piece about it a few years ago, which demolished the Tory policy of forcing people to work even so unwell that they really need time off. But the Tory party is so thick and vindictive that this has obviously gone way over their Eton-educated bonces. Here’s the message
‘David, this new plan from the Government to interfere when we’re sick is unbelievable. GPs would be told not to sign people off sick from work, and instead tell them to find ways to work through illness. [1]
The Government says it’s to help boost the economy, but targeting sick people – instead of corporations like BP and Centrica that have made billions in profit – is cruel and short-sighted. [2]
Luckily we have a chance to stop it. It’s one of many ideas being considered ahead of next month’s budget. And the Government will be watching closely to see how people react. So we have a chance to shoot it down before it becomes anything worse than a bad idea thrown around in a cabinet meeting.
So far it’s not made many headlines or gotten much attention so the Government might think they can get away with it. A huge petition signed by over 49,000 people, is calling out this terrible idea to be dropped before the budget. But we’ll need more people to add their name if we are going to get them to listen.
So David, if you think doctors, not ministers, should make decisions about what happens when we’re sick, sign the petition today. It takes just 30 seconds and we’ll make sure it gets on the radar of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt:
With the NHS crisis the Tories the Tories have created, the sharks really are circling in the water. Nana Akua of GB News seems to be one of those plugging its privatisation, along with broadcaster, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. And now they’ve been joined by Our Favourite Internet (non)Historian, Simon Webb. He put up a post this morning with the title ‘What’s So Bad About Privatising the NHS?’ It’s short, but I haven’t watched it on the grounds that I’d find it too infuriating. Webb is, of course, far right, and seems to get most of his views from the Torygraph, which has also been pushing this nonsense. As someone who takes history seriously, Webb should know what an immense difference the NHS and the welfare state made to the lives of ordinary Brits. I’ve blogged about it, citing my sources. But some of those I’ve used were by social worker types, the kind of people the Tory party has been trying to discredit for donkey’s years, and so someone like Webb would simply ignore them out of hand. But I’ve also used books from the time looking forward to the foundation of the NHS, as well as Jackie Davis’ and Ray Tallis’ excellent NHS – SOS. In contrast to what the privatisers will tell you, private healthcare is not more efficient. It’s less. Private hospitals are smaller, and in order to make a profit private healthcare largely ignores the long-term sick in order to concentrate on people who are mostly well. When private healthcare companies have taken over doctors’ surgeries in this country, they’ve closed down those they consider unprofitable, leaving thousands without a doctor. Also, private healthcare spends a large proportion of their running costs on administration, so as a consequence these costs have risen in the NHS as a consequence of its privatisation.
At the moment there seems to be a trend among the political class to be looking at the continental healthcare systems, where medical costs are paid by a mixture of state and private health insurance. But this also neglects the simple fact that these countries also spend much more on their healthcare generally than we do. The privatisation of the NHS won’t improve healthcare, but it will give private healthcare firms the support of the state sector, which is what they want.
And it seems to me that what the Tories really want is a completely private healthcare system, funded by private health insurance, like America. And that really would be disastrous. Except for their corporate friends, of course, who would get all those great profits.
A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. Here’s their description. The pamphlets are available from me, if you want one, while the book’s available from Lulu.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.
The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.
Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.
This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.
Here’s the video I made years ago for my book against the privatisation of the health service.
I also put up this video, which only four people have watched, asking people to vote Labour to defend the NHS. I hope people will, as some Labour MPs will defend it. But I’m not at all sure about Starmer.
This is the sequel to my post earlier today speculating on whether Starmer is planning to privatise the health service even further. I based that on his interview on the Beeb this morning, where he said he wanted to use private enterprise to clear the backlog, and that his reforms may include a greater use of private healthcare companies. I caught more of this on the ITV evening news, and while some of it looked good, it still included private healthcare companies. He laid out his plans for reforming the NHS in today’s Torygraph, which is a warning from the start. From the choice of paper it’s clear that he’s aiming at Tory voters rather than traditional Labour. Which, by previous experience of the way he and the Blairites generally side-line traditional Labour supporters and members, is what you would expect. According to ITV, he promised to recruit more NHS staff. This is good, but so blindingly obvious that the Tories have also been making the same promise over the past few years. They’ve repeatedly broken it, and working for our health service is now so bad that a large proportion of them are planning to leave. This leaves questions of how Starmer is planning to persuade more people to work for it and retain them. The report said nothing about Starmer promising them better wages or reducing the workload. He also promised to make doctors NHS employees. This is excellent. Pro-NHS groups like We Own It have said that doctors should be NHS employees in order to avoid the privatisation and sale of GP surgeries to the private healthcare giants. These have enhanced their corporate profits by closing those surgeries they deem unprofitable and sacking staff. The result is that many patients find themselves without a doctor, and the remaining doctors and staff have poorer working conditions. But hey, you gotta keep that tax money rolling in for the private healthcare firmes!
And then there’s the bit that worries me. Starmer has said he wants to make better use of private healthcare, but is still concerned to keep it free at the point of delivery. This says very strongly to me that he’s going to privatise more of the NHS and outsource services to the private sector. And as I’ve kept saying, this is one of the problems with the health service. Privatisation had resulted in poorer services and massively increasing bureaucracy and administration costs. Starmer has said he wants to cut down on the bureaucracy, which is more Tory cant. He could, if he renationalised the NHS. But he obviously doesn’t want to do that.
Among the people responding to Starmer’s proposals was someone from the NHS unions, who said that it wasn’t true that they were against change. They just wanted to see everything costed. The fact that Starmer hasn’t done that, or at least, not in the article he wrote for the Torygraph, suggests to me that he really won’t increase funding, or perhaps not by the amount necessary. With the exception of the proposal to make doctors state employees, his reforms come across very much as something the Tories would also say, while also crossing two fingers behind their backs. He did make a fourth commitment, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it.
I want the Tories out, but I do not want Starmer to carry on with their policies, as the Blairites have done in the past. And I think that if he gets the chance, he’ll ditch the promise to make the doctors employees of the state. It’s socialist, and he hates socialism and socialists.
I had this email come through earlier this evening, urging me to contact my MP to ask her to attend tomorrow’s opposition day debate and vote against Truss’ proposal to bring back fracking.
‘David, we’ve got a chance to make sure MPs take a stand against fracking. How? There’s a vote set to take place about the Government’s ridiculous fracking plans on Wednesday in Parliament. [1]
We know the public are against it – it’s why you and 80,000 others signed the petition demanding the Government rethink their plans. And we also know multiple politicians have been speaking out against fracking, including Conservative MPs. [2] Now we need them to back their words up with action, and vote against fracking this week.
But they’ll only do that if they hear from us, their constituents, calling on them to show up tomorrow – and vote against fracking.
So, David, will you ask Karin Smyth to go along tomorrow and vote to stop fracking in its tracks?
Don’t worry if you’ve never emailed your MP before – here are a few suggestions on what you could say:
Make sure you ask them to go along to tomorrow’s opposition day debate on fracking.
Mention how harmful fracking is to the local community and environment – it can cause earthquakes, and increase air pollution and road traffic. [3]
Remind them that fracking was banned for good reasons in 2019, and science shows the process has not become safer yet. [4]
Tell your MP that the real solutions to the energy crisis are more renewable energy and home insulation. In contrast, fracking emits greenhouse gases that contribute to climate breakdown. [5]
So, will you email your MP now asking them to attend the vote tomorrow and stop fracking in England once and for all?
I’ve had no problem doing this, not least because one of the proposed areas for fracking was part of Keynsham, a small town just southeast of Bristol near Bath. If you click on the link, you get to a general page that asks you for your address so you can contact your local MP, whoever he or she may be, and send them your message asking them to attend the debate. If you also want to halt the return of fracking, please feel free to use the link above to contact your local politico.
I got this email from internet democracy site 38 Degrees earlier this evening.
‘BREAKING: the Government has ripped up their disastrous mini-budget – and now they want us to pick up the pieces. [1] They’ve put our livelihoods, our homes and our futures on the line with their reckless plans, and turned the cost of living crisis into a catastrophe. [2]
But with no sign of the rescue plan we’ve needed all along, we need to show them the price we’re paying. And we’ve got just the thing.
So we’ve just launched a HUGE, ambitious new project: the cost of living catastrophe, mapped.[3]Our interactive map spotlights more than 1,000 stories from across the 38 Degrees community – and the country.These are the real lives behind this catastrophe.
This is what the map looks like
Together, thousands of us have forced the Government into the biggest U-turn we’ve ever seen – but we can go further. [4]If all of us share this map far and wide, we’ll put the stories behind this catastrophe front and centre, so journalists, MPs and the Governmentwill have no doubt that we need a proper rescue plan for the country.
So, David, will you help keep up the pressure on the Government by sharing our cost of living catastrophe map – and show the real price of this crisis?
Twitter is the best way to ensure as many MPs and journalists see this map. Just click below and retweet the 38 Degrees tweet or – if you can – ‘quote tweet’ it and share your own cost of living story. You could even tag your MP!
I’ve absolutely no problem with posting this on social media. The Khazi may be gone, but Liz Truss and her Tory hordes are still in power, and people are still hurting. And they don’t care about the poor – only about the rich, and getting re-elected.
This piece from the Telegraph by Charlotte Lytton, ‘The £120 million ‘Festival of Brexit’ is closing after only six weeks – here’s why’ appeared on my internet news page today. It begins
‘In recent years, Britain has developed a taste for an ambitious project: one that elbows its way into the skyline, promises to reframe our cultural identity – and turns into a multi-million-pound disaster. Just as the Millennium Dome racked up a £789 million bill and attracted only half of its 12 million projected visitors two decades ago, so the arts extravaganza once known as the Festival of Brexit has spent £120 million of taxpayers’ money while attracting less than one per cent of the 66 million people that organisers hoped would visit its various venues.
So lamentable has the project – renamed Unboxed – been that the National Audit Office (NAO) this week announced it was conducting an urgent investigation into how the money – four times more than the Platinum Jubilee’s budget of £28 million – was (mis)spent. Instead of an economy-boosting, year-long series of installations showcasing British arts, as was first pledged, it has been beset by delays and poor turnouts; a half-baked idea that was unlikely to reach its nebulous goals.’
There was a point to the Millennium Dome, or at least in the event it was commemorating. This was the turn of the Millennium, which exited outside of the aims or policies of any particular government. The Festival of Brexit, however, was a PR stunt celebrating a Tory policy. Now this policy has done immense harm to Britain, so it’s entirely fitting that no-one wants to have anything to do with its celebration and it’s a complete flop. My only regret is that they aren’t billing Boris Johnson and the rest of the Brexiteers who pushed it personally.
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