Rachel Reeves has perhaps opened up a major debate about state support to all citizens with her announcement that the pensioners’ Winter Fuel Payment will now be restricted to those claiming means tested benefits. It was perhaps odd that it was paid to any pensioner be they millionaire or pauper. But it follows on from the Tory move to stop giving free TV licenses to all pensioners over the age of 75. Are we now about to see an acceleration away from non-means tested ‘benefits’? Age Concern list some of these benefits:
· Attendance Allowance · Bereavement Support Payment · Carer's Allowance · Disability Living Allowance · New style Employment and Support Allowance · Personal Independence Payment And the state pension itself of course. Just lately I’ve noticed that Nye Bevan’s phrase ‘socialism is the language of priorities’ has been tossed around by the 'grown-up' politicians to isolate the rebel Labour MPs who voted for ending the two child benefit cap. Other non-means tested benefits might also catch Reeves’ eye. The absurd £10 OAPs’ Christmas Bonus surely must go. It was after all introduced by Ted Heath and has never been uprated. It is considered a joke. The only reason no Chancellor will abolish it is because they don’t want to be labelled a scrooge. It costs the Treasury getting on for £200 million. And what about concessionary bus fares? Hard-up local councils struggle to meet the cost of this, which is not fully funded by the Treasury. The biggest cost of all is of course the state pension. Shouldn’t this be means tested too, Rachel? Personally, losing the £200 Winter Fuel Payment isn’t going to break the bank, and as climate change is making our winters warmer anyway such things should be kept under scrutiny. But wouldn’t a better way of tackling our perpetual so-called fiscal emergency be to ensure that a fair, progressive taxation system is put in place? The state pension is not tax free, after all. But since Reeves has already boxed herself in with her stupid no change to personal tax rates pledge, she has now demonstrated that no small (amazingly New Labour) largesse will escape her attention. Austerity is back with a vengeance! The only thing missing from Reeves’ speech are some Thatcherite-style references to balancing household budgets. But it’s clear the elderly and the vulnerable (40% of pensioners who are eligible don’t claim pension credit) are in Labour’s sights. Further evidence, if it was needed that I made the right decision to leave the party.
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+It’s not everyday one gets to congratulate a C of E Bishop, but the Bishop of Gloucester, Rachel Treweek ‘said she wanted to “boldly” stand with those comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to how black people were treated in South Africa’ and described Israel as an apartheid state. (Daily Telegraph, 27 July). Bishop Treweek spent a lot of time in South Africa in the apartheid era so she probably has a grasp on the realities. The over the top reaction from the Zionist camp is perhaps predictable: ‘Jonathan Turner, the chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, said: “Reading the Bishop’s article and much else these days, we feel like Jews of the Middle Ages, accused of poisoning wells and murdering Christian children to make unleavened bread for Passover.”’ To imply that the Bishop is an anti-Semite of the worst kind is surely the kind of reaction which can only raise temperatures on all sides, further isolating the cause the likes of Jonathan Turner presumes he is defending. And as regards wells, how many Palestinian wells have the Israelis stolen (along with the best part of the West Bank)? It is Turner and Co. who are living in the Middle Ages.
Having left the Labour Party, I have been taking stock of whether I made the right decision. The answer remains ‘yes.’ One is tempted to have doubts when one reads the onslaught of nonsense peddled by the right wing media about Labour’s plans, which suggest that a Bolshevik revolution is taking place, as opposed to a slight shift in managerial policies. It’s true that, e.g. ‘rail will be renationalised,’ but this refers only to the rail operating companies, which can be brought back into public ownership at no cost. Still, I approve of that. But today we learn that new hospitals proposed by the Tories will not go ahead because they were ‘unfunded.’ The only difference I can see here is that the Tories didn’t really mean to fulfil their hospital building promises, and now Labour is simply saying they won’t build them. Who will notice the difference? On the other hand, there’s talk that Starmer will not oppose the issuance of an international arrest warrant for Netanyahu. We’ll see how that pans out. Starmer’s backers won’t be in the least bit happy about it. +The Paris Olympics have been heralded by what are clearly some terrorist attacks on the rail network around the city, bringing things to a halt. Perhaps this was not terribly surprising. But it was somewhat irritating that the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner said it couldn’t be ruled out that they were Russian orchestrated attacks, or perhaps done by some ‘extreme left-wing group.’ Frank’s opinion is left unchallenged. Nobody on the Today programme even had the gumption to ask him whose speculation it was that we were meant to be digesting. Maybe that’s because they already knew.
+Well it’s not all bad. It seems Ed Miliband is to give the go-ahead for more community owned energy schemes, perhaps with the backing of Great British Energy. So here in the UK we may be able to catch up with what the Danes and Germans have been doing for decades. But in our great British way, will there be limits placed on the size of these schemes and how their profits can be shared? The big companies won’t want to see a plethora of decent sized community owned schemes eating into their market and will lobby hard to keep things under control. It happened the last time Labour was in power (speaking from experience). I hope lessons have been learnt. +Well it’s the news we’ve all been waiting for. But when it comes, it is still a bit of a shock, taking time to be fully absorbed. Yes, I refer to the file in the FBI’s old top secret cupboard, now released, which suggests that the Duke of Edinburgh was involved with Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler of Profumo affair vintage (as reported in the Daily Telegraph 21/07/24). As much was hinted at in the Netflix series The Crown. One might ask, knowing royal family history, so what? I doubt that the D of E was party to any significant state secrets, except possibly that Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures was a Soviet spy. Actually, that’s pretty compromising in itself. I was once invited to a large formal dinner at the Banqueting House (on behalf of an environmental charity of which the D of E was the Royal Patron) and I was fascinated to see the old wit was flanked at his table on either side by two beautiful women fifty to sixty years his junior. He seemed happy enough. They didn’t look like they were senior executives of the charity though.
+Hey ho. What else happened yesterday? Oh yes, President Biden has just resigned his candidacy to create some time to write his memoirs, or I suspect dictate them to a ghostwriter. That’s not a job I envy. But he should have done the decent thing and also resigned the presidency immediately, to create President Kamala Harris. In a relay you don’t drop the (Torch of Truth, aka baton) but he’s fumbled with it for so long there’s not much else to be done with it. Already the global leadership messages are flooding into the White House praising his record. And to think that only a few days ago, our Prime Minister was telling us Biden was totally on top of everything. How the elite lies for its own skin. I could theorise that this timing was planned all along, at least as a bit more than a common or garden Plan B. It will discombobulate the Trump camp, reinvigorate the Democrats and certainly whoever wins the Democrat nomination will give them a bounce in the polls. And it now puts the ‘age’ question firmly in the GOP camp. The media will I imagine focus much more on Trump’s gaffes. Also a younger Democrat candidate may be able to remember and enunciate what they think they’ve done right in the last few years without tripping over their teleprompt. Could have been a tactic all along. In a dramatic departure from this blog’s usual prescience, I didn’t predict this. What’s going on here? Is it possible that if he is re-elected, Trump may actually do some good? I confess I wouldn’t want to be an American woman if he wins in November, nor a poor American of any description. He will not address the second rate status of those he doesn’t respect, and he doesn’t respect women or the poor. He will however further reduce taxes on the rich, and pretend that the environment is an inexhaustible resource—to be consumed by the rich. So what good could he do? It is not inconceivable he may cool down conflict scenarios somewhat. Apparently he would like to take Kim Yong Un to a basketball game. I suspect despite Yong Un’s anti-U.S. rhetoric there’s nothing he’d like more than to be paraded on the Rose Garden lawn and to spend a few days shopping in New York and Los Angeles. He would surely present that back home as somehow conquering America. Easy access to luxury goods? It’s hard to imagine Yong Un shying away from that prospect. Trump’s his man on that score. And what of Putin? It doesn’t seem to be established in anyone’s mind yet whether Trump really is Putin’s man, but when Trump says he can do a deal to end the Ukrainian war in 24 hours, that can only mean conceding territory to Russia. Does anyone care? What after all is the history of Ukraine if not one of shifting borders? Then there’s NATO. European leaders are running around like scared little rabbits because Trump says he’s not a big enthusiast, and may pull the plug on US support. After all these years, isn’t it time this peace loving organisation had a rethink? On a different level, Trump is a trade protectionist. As actually is Biden, who has sought, e.g. to repatriate chip-making technologies to the U.S. We all took advantage of China’s cheap labour when it suited—despite the hollowing out of our own manufacturing. Perhaps that zero sum game is coming to an end, something anti-globalists should welcome.
But yes, Trump is an anti-democratic demagogue, bent on destroying American democracy, with his election lies, packing the judiciary and threatening (through something called ‘Project 25’) the destruction of a non-partisan civil service. On the other hand perhaps it’s time to bring the deeply flawed U.S. constitutional undemocracy to book, to expose the myth of separated powers and now, the latest horror, the nascent creation of one U.S. citizen above the law. All along the Democrats in more insipid form have gone along with this ride. Perhaps now is the time for them to do something about it beyond hand wringing. The assassination attempt on Trump should be roundly condemned, not just for the act itself but also for the consequences it may have unleashed had it been successful. Had Trump been killed, the worst wave of violence in America since the Civil War could easily be imagined (and perhaps was in the recent film Civil War, which I haven’t seen yet). On a parochial sort of note it seems incredible that the FBI didn’t have their own people on the roof where the shooter was—after all, Trump is odds on to win the presidency in November. An unnamed person in the crowd told the New York Times that this event makes that outcome a certainty. The way Trump will milk it can only assist. In the same New York Times article it was reported that in an opinion poll 10% of Americans wouldn’t object to Trump being assassinated. Perhaps in a country whose government has assassinated or plotted to assassinate foreign leaders aplenty there is a flexible morality at play. I wonder how many Americans may feel that Kennedy’s assassination was perhaps no bad thing? Personally I think that when it comes to Trump it would be better to let nature take its course as it does for many men of his age (not least in a country where life expectancy is falling). In the meantime it will be interesting to see if he expresses any humility or regret over his encouragement of the January 6th riot, when calls were made by his followers to dispose of Mike Pence. I doubt it.
It’s quite possible that I’m overdoing this. That is me banging on about how Starmer got fewer votes than did Corbyn in 2019. But given how the media, particularly the ‘mainstream media’ latch on to a narrative and then repeat its fundamental components over and over again, why shouldn’t I? It was political mastermind Peter (judge me by the friends I keep) Mandelson who coined the phrase in the mid-90s that you have to repeat a message over and over again until your intended audience vomits. Then they may have grasped the point you want to make (then it was in reference to ‘22 Tory tax rises’) Well, I don’t want any of my select readership to vomit, but what’s sparked off this little rant is listening to Labour’s campaign co-ordinator Pat McFadden telling listeners to BBC’s ‘Political Thinking’ that any questions about the 2024 vote share are essentially irrelevant, drawing an analogy with football (inevitably). His point was that if you win on goalscore, there’s little point the other side moaning that they had more corners. What are we to make of this, apart from the fact that England may win the Euros despite what many people consider to have been a pretty mediocre performance so far? But if you win, then every mistake you made is suddenly transformed into an only now revealed act of great wisdom—our only problem being that we didn’t recognise this sooner. As Labour hums in self-satisfaction it must hope that our team wins the Euros and doesn’t just end up with more corners than Spain. Things can turn pretty quickly.
I wrote to the New Statesman:
I am aching to see whether any reader will have the temerity to write in to point out that Labour's 'worst ever defeat' in 2019 actually saw the party win 600,000 more votes than it did last week in one of its 'best ever' results. This would be the height of churlishness, surely ? I was a little surprised to get a response from the Editor: Dear Colin Thanks for the note. We appreciate it. Your point is well made. But of course we operate under a first past the post voting system. No point piling up votes in safe seats if you want to win an election and the lead the country. If we had a different voting system - I support PR - the Labour strategy would have been completely different for the 2024 election. As it stands, they won a landslide and Labour in 2019 recorded their worst defeat since 1935. Very best wishes, Jason New Statesman, Editor I responded: Thanks Jason for your response. I just thought it would be worth mentioning given how often we hear about Gore beating Bush, Clinton beating Trump - it seems the popular vote gets a mention when it suits. Now it doesn't suit Starmer! There are three ways an election result can be reported—or hailed—the number of members elected or the vote share or of course the actual votes cast. We are asked in the current circumstance to only look at the landslide of members elected. Doing so papers over the clear verdict of the electorate—Starmer’s a dud. There is nevertheless a fair bit of tutting going on in left-centrist circles about the shallowness of the landslide. Maybe that’s the Starmer effect—he depresses support. This will not in anyway affect his ‘clear mandate.’ The last PM who made much of a ‘clear mandate’ was Liz Truss (albeit given to her by a small selection of crackpot Tory party members). Perhaps it's worth adding that as Jason suggested, the party had a strategy to win where it mattered in 2024. By the way of contrast, the party in 2019 had a strategy to undermine Corbyn at every opportunity, even going so far as to divert resources to right wing candidates. And it should be remembered that the party came out of the 2019 election with a £13 million surplus - so money wasn't spent when it should have been. A new government, a new approach. Let’s see exactly how this plays out with the announcement today that on average water companies will be allowed by the regulator to raise prices over the next four or so years by 94% A bit more than that here in Yorkshire (where the water is the purest in the world). Water companies have gone on the offensive, describing this increase as a cut—they were intent on far higher price increases. They claim they want to do more to protect the environment—but obviously without endangering bosses’ bonuses or shareholders’ dividends. The water companies have ripped us all off Royally, putting the industry in hock to foreign gamblers who since privatisation have fleeced consumers for billions. I bet water renationalisation remains a popular policy, but the new grown-ups in Whitehall will tell us it would be too expensive—as if they had no powers to make it less expensive. I wonder how quickly this story will disappear in a soggy swamp of bureaucratic obfuscation as ministers one by one fall into line. Let me say though: I hope I’m wrong!
In the interests of balance I should say that Starmer did talk yesterday to President Abbas, the titular Palestinian figurehead. The relevant comparative section of the No. 10 briefing of the conversation was:
‘The Prime Minister updated President Abbas on his immediate priorities, including securing a ceasefire, the return of hostages, an increase and acceleration in humanitarian aid, and financial support for the Palestinian Authority.’ Here it seems the need for a ceasefire has been upgraded somewhat to ‘immediate’ as opposed to merely ‘urgent.’ But there’s no mention of him expressing his condolences for Palestinian deaths, and you’d have thought he might have had something to say about the further expansion of Zionist settlements in the West Bank. When he talks of a ‘two state solution’ and what the conditions are for achieving it, there’s no word on that front—to either of the leaders he spoke to. Diplomacy at its least convincing. But perhaps the No.10 press office aren’t telling us the whole story, and Starmer really did give Netanyahu a good old fashioned bollocking. Only joking! We’ll have to wait and see if UK arms sales to Israel will cease. And perhaps more importantly, will Israel be denied intelligence sharing through the ‘Five Eyes’ arrangements? |
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