Congrats to the anonymous readers of this site. Overnight we passed the 150,000 milestone. Last night, before I closed the computer we were at 149,938 and early this morning we are at 150,053. Thank you for visiting this site at least once. In virtual terms, this means that about 1.5 million people have looked at the cartoons since the beginning (2005). 

I know that some articles are controversial and deliberately so, often to redress an imbalance of views in the main mass media — or stir our minds preventing calcification of the neurons.

I hope that we will carry on offering better points of views. And we still think of our mate, John Richardson. Thank you...

British Prime Minister Johnson braved the rainy weather to visit Surrey Police headquarters to talk about the government’s new plan to tackle crimes. However, it was not his ‘chain-gangs’ initiative that has attracted so much attention online. 

Social media users suspect Boris Johnson of having some troubles with umbrellas.

The prime minister had quite a wet and frosty reception at Surrey Police headquarters on Tuesday following an announcement that most police officers across the country will be hit with a pay freeze.

Johnson tried to cool tensions down as he spoke to reporters outside of the headquarters while defending his approach to law and order with the government's new Beating Crime Plan. It was raining heavily at the moment, and despite the prime minister having an umbrella ready at his disposal, it didn’t really help.

As images of the drenched prime minister with a brolly in his hand were making rounds on social media, users went on to discuss what could have possibly gone wrong. Some joked that it was probably the first time the prime minister had held an umbrella in his life.

“Boris Johnson still managing to get wet under an umbrella yes that’s the Prime Minister,” another one sarcastically announced.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/viral/202107281083476134-online-crowd-bemused-by-boris-johnsons-magic-ability-to-get-soaked-while-under-umbrella/

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By Seth Ferris

When the Soviet Union was invented, the one thing its supporters and opponents agreed on was that it was a grand experiment. No such state had ever existed. Indeed it was a feature of Communist states that they tried to cut everyone off from the past – Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge displaced most of the Cambodian population, destroyed their towns and villages and moved them into new ones so there was no content to anyone’s life before the Khmer Rouge, a process known as “atomisation”.

Consequently views on that experiment elsewhere became polarised. Some felt that the system was so tightly controlled that it would never fall. Others sought every last sign, however small, that the experiment was going to fail.

It is often described as “populism” – identifying what a certain aggressive segment of the population thinks, and pitting that segment against “the system” which the same politicians who do this are part of. However it goes deeper than that, which is what makes the UK’s variety of populism unique.

BoJo’s Clown Show has inflicted on its forgotten plague-ridden islands a new experiment which cannot possibly succeed. It is not a matter of “us” versus “them”. It is about taking one aspect of populism to absurd lengths, just to see if it can be done – as victory would be so much of a boost to one already vast ego that the temptation is impossible to resist.

Reductio Ad Absurdum

One reason you end up with “us versus them” situations is that some people feel that the rules made by other people are wrong and are hindering them. So they do the opposite for the sake of it, thinking they are “liberating” the “good” people from the rules invented by their persecutors to keep them in their place.

Former Soviet citizens know exactly where this leads. When you get rid of everyone else’s rules, you replace them with a system much more rigid and repressive than the one you were complaining about. There is no tolerance for deviation from the new orthodoxy, because it can only survive as an instrument of repression, designed to benefit those who impose it, rather than because it has any intrinsic merit, which can withstand difference.

The UK has a reputation for tolerance on the global stage, although many of its citizens don’t see it that way, and with reason. With its long traditions of parliamentary democracy, hereditary monarchy and rule of law, it has no need to feel threatened by other peoples and cultures, new ideas or working with international partners.

But the failure of policies popular the world over, i.e. the unnatural coupling of globalist ambition with narrow austerity, has created a climate in which people brought up with a particular mindset feel themselves the victims of foreign deviancy they should never have been asked to embrace. If everyone had a job and a home, they wouldn’t care about so-called foreigners “flooding in” to do the jobs they still refuse to do themselves, even after Brexit. But their problems have to be the fault of “the system”, and therefore of those who tell them what to do, whoever they are.

If you change the system, you change the rules. The UK doesn’t do revolution, due to the intrinsic value of its system, however much it may fail in the short term. But it can change the rules when there is enough public resentment of those rules to make it credible.

Margaret Thatcher did this when she changed the prevailing economic wisdom before most other countries followed suit. Clement Attlee did when he introduced the Welfare State after World War Two, and Earl Grey, famous for his tea, did when he secured the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832, a fundamental change to the basis of parliamentary representation.

All politicians are accused of lying and cheating, often unfairly. There is a game people have to play to get good things done. But Boris Johnson had an outstanding track record in lying and cheating long before he entered politics.

Wilfully breaching even the mainstream media standards of truth was his hallmark as a journalist before he stood for any office. As for cheating, ask his girlfriends, and their various children, who the absent daddy seems unable to count.

So in that sense he is the ideal person to lead a charge against the rules made by others, even though those others are products of the same upper class, Eton and Oxford and daddy bought him his career background. But Boris has to be different. He isn’t replacing the rules his fans don’t like with ones they do. He is doing what no one has done before – destroying all rules for the sake of it, just to see if it can be done, because each time he gets away with it, the cleverer he thinks he is.

In other spheres of human endeavour, this has been done before. The artistic movement of Dada came into existence because artistic culture was associated with the same social and political culture which had led everyone to World War One. To be an “art lover” was to be responsible for unleashing the horrors of the first mechanised global conflict on the world, so Dada sought to break all the rules, doing everything the wrong way and proclaiming that this too was culture.

But the Dadaists eventually moved on, many into Surrealism, an alternative way of doing things which provided rules they could live with, but broke the previous ones. They got tired of constantly attacking what went before, just to show how clever they were.

But BoJo is incapable of getting to that stage. Like all the great fraudsters, he knows he is filth, and has to spend his life justifying it. The more he gets away with breaking all the rules for the sake of it, the more he can pretend his lifelong lying and cheating are a virtue – and he has no incentive to do anything else, because in anything straight, decent and ordinary, he is condemned, and can’t stand out from the crowd and make a noise.

All Crack and No Pot

The Conservative Party was always a broad church whose members were more loyal to their party than those of other parties, no matter what they thought of its direction. When Tristan Garel-Jones realised his views made him a dangerous liberal in the eyes of Margaret Thatcher he became a leading party whip, rallying people to vote for any measure he himself heartily disagreed with because it was party policy.

This was one of the ways it distinguished itself from Labour, which was portrayed as a collection of mutually intolerant factions, each fighting the other for control with no regard for the voters. It also created situations such as that of 1905, when the party lost the election in a landslide but the poorest parts of the country, in an echo of today, remained faithful to their natural class enemies.

BoJo has not only conducted a purge of Conservatives who didn’t accept his sudden policy on Brexit, but also surrounded himself with the most venal, hypocritical and incompetent bunch he can. He knows his ministers are as unfit for office as he is, and there are serious ethical question marks against them. But those ethical rules were made by the other side, so the more he surrounds himself with such people, and gets away with it, the cleverer he is.

We recently had the Matt Hancock episode, where the Health Minister, known for dropping a succession of untruths regarding COVID, had to resign because he was caught having an extramarital affair. It is hardly uncommon for government ministers to have affairs, and many get away with it. Nor is this the worst of Hancock’s offences, as he led a department routinely accused of corruption in the way it handed out Covid-related contracts.

According to Dominic Cummings, the former spin doctor also sacked in disgrace, Boris Johnson once described Hancock as “totally fucking hopeless”. Hancock called this allegation “ancient history”, but did not deny this was the Prime Minister’s opinion of him.

So why was he still in office? Because BoJo wants totally hopeless and corrupt people around him because they break all the rules, and justify him.

It is commonly assumed that in breaking his own Covid guidelines by getting in close proximity to his aide, Hancock had gone too far. In fact the opposite was true – he had followed a path taken by many successful politicians on the “other side” of the us versus them war, and thus become one of the usual, flawed, liars and cheaters, not the Johnson clowns who do these things on principle.

We also have Home Secretary Priti Patel’s latest immigrant-bashing crusade. There are many ways of controlling immigration, and all countries do it, without most courting controversy.

Patel owes her job to adopting an anti-immigrant stance, ironically enough , and there are many ways she can change or implement laws to achieve an even more ethnically homogenous UK population. But Patel also owes her job to being a known “victim” of the standards of decency the “other side” made up – she was sacked from the Theresa May government for holding secret meetings with Israeli government members and then “misleading” the Prime Minister, and her Foreign Office superior, Boris Johnson, about them.

To the clowns, this makes her a hero. So to continue currying their favour she has to change the other side’s immigration rules the worst way she can, to show it can be done.

Patel’s latest monstrosity, the Nationality and Borders Bill, makes the very act of helping a person claim asylum in the UK, which is not in itself illegal, a criminal offence. In particular, it will now be an offence to rescue asylum seekers who are adrift or drowning in British waters, despite the fact the same government says that every fish found in those waters is automatically British.

This attempted legislation breaks the Law of the Sea, which obliges vessels to rescue those in need in the waters, regardless of how they got there and why. This is an international law, not a UK one, so Patel has no jurisdiction. But “international” is taken to mean “imposed on the UK by dirty foreigners”. If the bill becomes law and is shot down by the UK courts, those judges will be “Enemies of the People”, just as the judges whose legal rulings delayed Brexit were portrayed.

The more you can break the rules for the sake of it, the better off you are in Boris Johnson’s Britain. Unless of course you are one of those people his sycophants declare “undesirable” – different nationality, race, profession, colour, religion, politics or anything else that can be dragged in. Then you can expect no mercy – after all, only the right people can break every rule possible, because only the wrong people made them.

Brother Can You Spare A Dime

One day there will be no more laws to break. The experiment will become the norm, and having wrecked everything will leave nothing in its place but a bunch of self-satisfied people who then want more than their own tactics can ever give them.

One day a new set of ever-more rigid contrary rules will have to be imposed. As in the Soviet Union, you will have to be a party member, and sign up to every jot and tittle of these new rules, to have any hope of a decent life. Anyone else will be impure, ignorant or counter-revolutionary, with no one allowed to ask how the people making the new rules got to be so different.

But when that day comes, the government won’t be judged on how many of the old laws it has broken. It will be judged on whether the new ones work. They won’t, because doing things of substance has no glamour, it doesn’t make a noise. If the new orthodoxy isn’t workable, that only makes it more different, and makes more people feel superior.

What then? Many countries emerging from communism, fascism or military dictatorship have faced this question. Some go back to the past, some try and develop a “third way”. But most go running to whoever they think will give then the most credibility, rather than the most respect, as we have seen with so many post-Cold War US allies who Uncle Sam dumps all his excrement on.

Even in its darkest and least powerful days, the UK has never had to do this. When it does, it will make BoJo think he is bigger than the country, and all his lying and cheating has made him so.

Then he’ll get out before he is lynched. What everyone else will have left is the opposite of what they think they are fighting for – what everyone who trusts a conman should expect, but never chooses to.

Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/07/30/the-uk-s-grand-experiment-which-cannot-succeed/

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Methinks that our Scomo is even a worse clown than BoJo (born in New York)... Last night, Scomo's interminable press conference was a dumper on how good he is and how bad the rest of us is for not recognising his brilliance.... Note we already had our sad stupid dangerous clown when Tony Abbott (born in the UK) came with his dirty bag of lying tricks...

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Do you know how pigs live in your local government district? You deserve a prize if you do.

But if you are in the UK, and you tell anybody how many there are, you can be prosecuted for breaching the Official Secrets Act. The reasoning behind this is that an enemy of the UK could use this information to attack the country, by disrupting food supplies and harming the population. Boris Johnson is not being prosecuted for doing exactly the same by inflicting Brexit on the UK, but if you or I did it by stating facts, we could expect a prison sentence.

The concept of “national security” enables you to do anything, even attack journalists. According to the FBI, some journalists are conspiracy theorists, and therefore they are domestic terrorist threats. Because they are called terrorists, they do not need to be charged with an offence, or prosecuted, tried or convicted.

Like Bin Laden, they can just be murdered by the US government at any time, no questions asked, no justification needed. If someone else murders them for unrelated reasons, they won’t be prosecuted because they murdered terrorists. Then of course those journalists won’t be around to ask the obvious question: who are the terrorists, me or you?

The UK government is rightly concerned that the Official Secrets Act is no longer fit for its original purpose. The internet has changed everything. It is much easier to obtain leaked documents about matters considered national secrets, whether you know the information is classified or not. It is also much easier for people to make their own deductions, based on solid journalism, and then find they have repeated information in a leaked document they knew nothing about, and thus be liable for prosecution.

Therefore the Home Office is seeking proposals for how to reform national security legislation to address current realities. There are indeed many examples of such legislation which could be looked at.

For example, under a fifteenth century bye-law any Welsh person found within the city walls of Chester after sunset and before sunrise is to be decapitated. Chester no longer lives in fear of Welsh rebels invading, but the law has never been repealed, so if someone went to the police and demanded it be enforced it would create a delicate legal situation.

But instead the British government is using such legislation to defend itself, not the country it happens to rule for the moment. It can’t identify terrorists, because fingers would point in some unwelcome directions. But it can attack those who write things the government doesn’t want to hear, in the process of doing their jobs.

If the government itself, or its members, breached national security by their actions, as was alleged during the notorious Profumo Affair of the 1960s, the public would have a right to know, even though such a story would damage the government. Yet BoJos Clown Show is trying to promote exactly the opposite argument: that writing press stories which damage the government should be a national security offence, covered by a reformed Official Secrets Act.

Coming from the man who takes out super-injunctions to prevent people repeating facts they see on the internet, it is obvious why this is happening. But there is another reason. If government = nation, everyone else isn’t the nation. Their security doesn’t matter – and that is the point BoJo is trying to make, before anyone notices.

The Bombs That Won’t Defuse

The idea that national security means protecting the government should be raising a hollow laugh in the great city of Birmingham. Its natives know only too well what that means in practice, and those who lived through those times will never forget.

In 1974 bombs were planted in two pubs in the centre of Birmingham by what were presumed to be IRA terrorists. At the time, this was the worst terrorist atrocity on the UK mainland. But with not that many others to compare it with, few people noticed the anomalies in this case compared to those which came before and after it.

In other cases, everyone asks how a stranger got into their wonderful city and started planting bombs. The press and public look for links with foreigners, external agencies and everything they think their city doesn’t represent.

In Birmingham the immediate assumption, shared by press, public and politicians, was that local Irish people had carried out the bombings. The same Irish everyone lived and worked alongside. Birmingham does indeed have a significant Irish community, but so does every other UK city which saw Irish republican terror attacks. Only in Birmingham was everybody told to suspect their neighbours, not people considered “other”.

Sure enough, six local Irishmen were arrested, a move which stopped most of the random assaults on Irish people which the “Paddys Under The Bed” campaign had unleashed on the streets. The following year they were found guilty of the bombings and sentenced to life imprisonment. But 17 years later they were free – their sentences quashed because the way they had been arrested, tried and convicted was demonstrably far below the standards which should have been required in such cases.

It was campaigning journalists, most notably the sometime MP Chris Mullin, who fought for years to prove the innocence of the accused men. Over time, it became clear that not only had the men been mistreated by the police but shafted by the justice system.

Those involved in the arrest and prosecution of the Birmingham Six had known from the very beginning that they had not committed these bombings, or any others. Evidence had been rewritten after the fact, the science used to convince them was nonsense, and politicians who could have released them a lot earlier knew they were innocent but were afraid of what some people might say, in direct contraventionof any principle of justice.

It is obviously in the national interest to know who really did murder twenty-one people in crowded pubs, and how they did it – which has never been established. It is also in the national interest to know how this case was conducted, what was really known, and how all the crimes against these innocent men were committed. But the public will not know the full facts for decades to come – because the British government has sealed the evidence until 2067, claiming it is “in the national interest”.

We know from other events that the British government worked with terrorists to infiltrate the groups they belonged to. But we are told those terrorist groups have disbanded, and many of their members are now respected politicians and professionals. No existing security operation would be put at risk by revealing what happened nearly fifty years ago, in one individual case.

The only “interest” being protected by the sealing of these papers is that of the government. The Home Secretary of the time, responsible for the security services, was Roy Jenkins, who represented Birmingham Stechford, home to many Irish people he would have had some connection with. If the bombers really were local, what did Jenkins know, or what should he have known? If not, why was everybody told to find locals to blame, instead of being encouraged to report what they knew about the sort of “foreign infiltrators” usually blamed for such atrocities?

The machinery of the British government, whoever is in power at a given time, continues to be protected at the expense of the national interest. The victims were only Brummies, or Irish, so what did it matter? You may not be Brummie or Irish, but are equally disposable, even if you are on the “right” side of the politics of the day.

Grey Areas With Black Undercoats

Changing the law isn’t the only step being taken to protect the government at the expense of the country, and call it the “national interest”. Ask an asylum seeker, and those who work with them.

The same British press which told Brummies that they were being bombed by their neighbours has spent a generation screaming about “illegal asylum seekers”. This has led to a common perception that every asylum seeker is a criminal, and therefore a threat to them.

Claiming asylum in another country is not illegal. Not having paperwork to verify your claims is not illegal, as people at risk of persecution can’t be seen by their persecutors walking around with ID. Furthermore, the vast majority of asylum seekers request asylum in developing countries, with Europe receiving only a tiny percentage of such applications, and the UK a tiny fraction of those.

But tell the public that anything to do with seeking asylum is illegal, and you move reporting on it into a different category. How the government deals with asylum seekers becomes a matter of “national security”, because borders and police are involved. How everyone else treats asylum seekers, acting on the signals given by government, also becomes a matter of “national security” which cannot be reported on or discussed because it might embarrass the government.

In 1999 the British government stopped asylum seekers receiving the same welfare benefits as UK nationals, instead giving them “vouchers”. Immediately after this the number of people claiming asylum in the UK fell dramatically. This caused the government to continue with the policy, claiming that people were flooding into the UK because it gave them welfare.

Within a few weeks, this trend had reversed itself. More people were claiming asylum in the UK than ever before, even though they were not getting benefits. Using the government’s own argument, the policy had been an utter failure.

But even then no one was prepared to put those two pieces of information together, because the government refused to make that connection itself. If you did, you had no voice, just like those who claimed that Germany was rearming and the UK was not prepared for the coming war, when that same British government was developing television to provide much of the technology to fight that war, several years before it took place.

To make legislation work you have to create the climate in which it is accepted, as the people behind legislative blunders such as the Poll Tax found to their cost. Tell a lie often enough, you can create that climate and then get away with what you want in the name of the “national interest”, as a great many of those same asylum seekers have found in their own countries.

We The Non-People

No one is going to jail journalists for attacking the government, despite the concerns of civil liberties and journalism bodies over the proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act—at least not yet! If a journalist is that much of a threat, they have a readership, which will probably agree with them and want them to tell more, or they would read someone else. These are not the sort of martyrs you want to create if you rely on votes.

What will happen is that government ministers will decide what they are most sensitive about. Then, in subtle ways, they will make discussion of those things unacceptable – not by talking about the thing itself, but by associating it with other things the public will readily agree are negative.

If ministers lie to parliament, it is in the national interest to expose this, as decisions based on lies lead to worse outcomes than those based on fact. However it is “unparliamentary” for MPs themselves to do this without informing the Speaker in advance. It would be a simple matter to declare any such accusation “defamatory”, even if true, censor it, and ultimately get journalists sacked for breaching what the public would come to accept as a norm, if that was all they were presented with.

If there really is a ring of paedophiles operating in parliament, which the government and police know about but do not stop, they won’t make it illegal to talk about the thing itself. But they will invent new laws about “disclosure”, claiming that any suggestion that a politician is committing a crime should not be revealed because it could be used by enemies of the state.

That’s a different argument, but it has the same effect. It doesn’t protect the state, as what is kept secret has greater blackmail value. But it will protect the government from the people, the ones they are supposed to serve, but actually consider the enemy.

The British government is hoping to create a situation where only members of the government are fit to be regarded as “the nation” and everyone else has something wrong with them. This is how the UK has traditionally presented itself compared to the rest of the world.

The same idea was behind Brexit, which we were told was “the will of the people”. It is only a matter of time before enough of those people see how much their will, their rights or their happiness are actually respected by those claiming to act in their name.

Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

READ MORE: https://journal-neo.org/2021/08/18/the-uk-official-secrets-are-not-worth-the-lies-they-are-written-on/

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