Many of my fan(s) will know, or remember, that I was once a fan of Newcastle United F.C., hereinafter referred to as NUFC to make it easier to type.

Many of those fan(s) will also have found it difficult to understand why it was that I terminated my relationship with the club, and made a big hoo-ha about it at the time.

It has come as no surprise to me at all that, as of today, current manager Rafael Benitez is no longer Manager of NUFC.  Having been manager of that club for some three and a half years, it turns out that even someone who holds a Champions’ League winners’ medal could not rescue a squad that is stuck in football’s U-bend, and waiting for someone with that metaphorical bog brush to come along, unclog the blockage and flush the club down towards the sport’s considerably-sized sewer.  If Benitez couldn’t do it, it is difficult to come up in one’s head with a manager that can.

Let me assure you, dear reader(s), that it was not easy to sever my relationship with my club, which had been very dear to my heart for the previous three decades.  And, quite naturally, it is not a decision that makes any difference to the club, since I am not in any position there, do not own a season ticket, and furthermore, I am still writing and thinking about it (the club).

In July 2013, it was reported in The Guardian newspaper in the UK that 90% of the workforce of the sports retail firm Sports Direct were on what is called ‘zero-hour’ contracts.  Sports Direct is a company founded and owned by British businessman Mike Ashley, who also happens to own NUFC.

In the same Guardian article, it was reported that, of Sports Direct’s 20,000 part-time staff, a full 100% of them were on these zero-hour contracts; these contracts give the employee certain obligations to the company, but very few in return.  For example, a zero-hour contract does not guarantee you any number of hours a week, no statutory sick or holiday pay, or indeed any benefits that could be awarded to full-time staff.  You can be sacked with less than one day’s notice.

At the same time, reported The Guardian, the company’s 2,000 or so full-time staff were about to share in a bonus totalling £100,000, which averages out at £50 per employee.

The more I thought about it, the more I began to seethe and rant about the unfairness of such contracts which favoured the big company far more than it did the little employee.  And, despite pressure from sources as high as the UK Parliament, Ashley and his company did not budge.  Indeed, further reporting in 2016 noted that employees on zero-hour contracts at the company were earning, on average, £1,000 less than their full-time counterparts doing exactly the same job.

This was enough for me.  On August 7, 2013, I took to Facebook, my usual ranting emporium, and wrote:

Today’s rant concerns a very difficult personal decision for me. No-one else will care about it, certainly not the subject of the rant, but there we are. It concerns the situation at SPORTS DIRECT, the retail company that has 23,000 staff, 90% of whom are ‘part-time’ and have just been handed what are known as ‘zero hour’ contracts – i.e., those that do not guarantee any form of employment from one day to the next, and also remove the right to sick pay, holiday pay, and so forth. Other companies anxious to squeeze every last penny of profit out of its staff and customers include Burger King, McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza. (The Guardian) Perhaps you can see a pattern here regarding the kinds of companies that thrive on zero-hour contracts. The online petition site 38 DEGREES is appealing for help regarding a former member of Sport’s Direct’s staff who is taking them to court over these contracts. You can read more here: https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/page/contribute/Stand-with-Zahera#petition Please donate if you can. It is important that the ‘little guy’ sends a message to these big corporations that they can’t just expect to win because they have loads of money and the claimant doesn’t. Now, why is this so difficult for me? Because Sports Direct is owned by MIKE ASHLEY, who is, as many of you footie fans will be aware, also owner of NEWCASTLE UNITED, a team I have followed since the late 80s. Ashley has made a number of daft decisions as club owner, most of which can be put down to ‘hey, that’s football,’ but the sponsorship deal with WONGA.COM is a step too far. This company, whose investors have included the Wellcome Trust (though they recently put their stake up for sale), and the Church of England for goodness’ sake, are the subject of much controversy due to their colossal interest rates, database collection and loan provision methods. I can no longer follow a club which has Mike Ashley as its owner. This man, currently worth over £1.5 billion, is prepared to squeeze the life out of even the lowliest part-time employee by refusing to guarantee them work. This man has entered into a sponsorship deal with a company that happily admits to charging a whopping 5853% Representative APR. This man has treated successive managers appallingly, and his treatment of Alan Pardew is unbelievable. As I said at the beginning, nobody will care, certainly not anyone associated with the club. But that’s not the point. Today I shall be writing to the club, and to the online fan site nufc.com, simply to highlight the issue in the only way that I can. xx

As promised, I wrote to the club via email and, as predicted, never heard a word back from them.

Just as he does in retail, it appears that Mr Ashley’s sole purpose as owner of NUFC is to run it into the ground.  I am not a businessman, and so I fail to see the logic of this.  Most people in business buy a struggling company in order to turn it around, raise its price and sell it again at a massive profit.  That bit I get.  But, time and again, despite billionaires achieving great things at clubs such as Chelsea and Manchester City, Ashley has said repeatedly that there is no money to buy top-quality players, he takes the purchasing of players decisions out of the manager’s hands, and generally casts an air of depression across a club which has always prided itself on the passion the fans have for the team on the pitch, as well as the club off it.

Mr Ashley has owned the club for about ten years, and, according to his own claims, has had it on sale for around half of that time, claiming also that no serious buyer has ever approached him or the club.  Initially, Mr Ashley was a popular feature at the club; he became famous for sitting in the stands, NUFC scarf around his neck, with and among the fans, rather than in the director’s box with all the other top brass.

His first move as club owner was to bring NUFC legend Kevin Keegan back to the club for his second spell as manager.  From the fans’ perspective, Mr Ashley could not have done anything better.  However, fans were soon to discover that he could not have done anything worse.

Keegan’s second spell at NUFC lasted all of eight months.  The manager quickly realised he could not work with Mr Ashley, managing director Derek Llambas and, most importantly of all, the club’s Executive Director of Football, a bizarre choice in former Chelsea hard man Dennis Wise, who was appointed at more or less the same time as Keegan, and who continually interfered in team matters that should have been left to Keegan, such as team selection, tactics and the purchase of players.  Wise’s role should have been to advise the board on footballing matters, not to make decisions in place of Keegan and on the board’s behalf.  Keegan immediately began publicly addressing his displeasure at the whole concept of Director of Football; he felt that the club didn’t need one.  And indeed they didn’t.  Keegan could have advised the board on footballing matters himself, made all the transfer decisions, etc., just as he had done during his first tenure at the club, between 1992 and 1997.

Keegan resigned for the second time on September 4, 2008.  Fans turned on Mike Ashley instantly.  Ten days later, he put the club up for sale, and his relationship with the fans has not been right since.  Ashley told fans: “I have listened to you. You want me out. That is what I am now trying to do.” 

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/n/newcastle_united/7615618.stm]

Since Kevin Keegan walked in September 2008, there have been nine managers at NUFC, all of them bringing hope, but none of them delivering promise.  The truth is that they have all been hamstrung by an owner whose business practices are shady, and who believes in prudent to punish a football club he regrets buying and now cannot sell.

Those are the reasons why, in 2013, I withdrew my support for a club that I previously held, and still do if I’m honest, a great deal of affection for.  When I was a child, I supported Liverpool, though I never went to see them play, ironically, until 1987, by which time I had already moved to the North-East and was an NUFC fan.  It was Keegan, ironically, who drew me to Liverpool as a child; I saw Keegan’s last match as a player on television, which was for NUFC (I was already living in Whitley Bay by then), after which he made an emotional speech to the fans in the ground, and I saw for myself the love that this man who I had hero-worshipped for 18 years by that time, had for NUFC, and they had for him in return.  Keegan had drawn me to NUFC as well.

I saw first-hand, on many occasions, the huge affection felt by the city of Newcastle and its surrounding environs towards its football club… Saturday afternoons, the city centre would be awash with black & white; the club’s colours adorning flags, banners, shirts and shop windows as many thousands made their way to the ground to cheer the club on, win, lose or draw.

And I wish I could do that again; but my principles as a human being must come first.  Corporate dominance over its low-paid and badly mistreated work force must be punished wherever possible, and in whatever large or small way possible.

The day Mike Ashley manages to sell the club and walks away from it, I will be back supporting them like a shot.  But I cannot now.  Many people protest corporate mistreatment in all walks of life.  Many give up things they hold dear to protest, why shouldn’t I?  I am not a fairweather supporter as I have been called in the past.  My heart is with Newcastle, but I am afraid, that, for the time being at least, my soul cannot join it. x

Sad – nay, tragic – news that singer Sheryl Crow lost all of the master tapes from her albums, including her major seller Tuesday Night Music Club, (1993) outtakes and everything, in a fire at Universal’s Archive in Los Angeles in 2008. The fire was covered in the media at the time, but the extent of the devastation only became known after an investigation by The New York Times earlier this year.

Universal told the media at the time that the fire did indeed take place at their famed Universal Backlot facility on June 1, 2008.  How fortunate for us that my dear wife Jane, and dear brother and sister-in-law Julian and Mandy had visited that facility the year before.  Even more fortunate was the fact that nobody was killed or badly injured in the fire, which started when a construction worker was using a blowtorch on some asphalt during what was already turning out to be a very hot spring season.  My dear wife and I were there that year, 2008, and later in June, in the San Fernando Valley (where Universal is situated), temperatures reached 125°F (51°C).  I have the proof of that!  It was hot, even by California’s standards.

I would love to know how that construction worker feels today, having read the New York Times report.

The fire destroyed a number of tourist attractions that I had visited the previous year: The King Kong attraction, the New England Street backlot, the New York Street backlot, and other sets and buildings.  Those sets, while of interest to nerdy film historians like myself, could be replaced.  Not the end of the world, so to speak.

Far worse, and something that Universal, for whatever reason, decided to keep quiet at the time, was the complete destruction by the fire of an adjoining building, a warehouse called Building 6197, which was a video library containing some 50,000 archived copies of films made by Universal (the oldest of the ‘major’ studios, having been opened as a studio in 1915, and studio head Carl Laemmle began offering tours to the public almost immediately), and of the many smaller companies that Universal had acquired over the decades.  In 2008, then studio president Ron Meyer told the media that ‘nothing irreplaceable was lost.’  All of these videos were duplicate copies of titles held elsewhere, apparently.

However, in the same building were master recordings of many albums and singles by music artists from all of the record labels that had been bought by Universal Music Group across the decades.  The exact numbers of master tapes is unknown; the estimates range from anywhere between 118,000 and 175,000 analog tapes (i.e., on reels of tape as opposed to digitally held on a computer or a hard drive) of albums and singles of artists recording for Chess,  Decca, MCA, Geffen, Interscope, A&M and their many subsidiary labels.

Investigative music journalist Jody Rosen published his article on June 11, 2019 – just two weeks ago, and I read it and wept.  All of these master recordings – recordings which are used to create the singles, albums and downloads that you buy today – were totally destroyed in the fire.  If you buy a remaster or a remix, they were taken from these tapes.  Any outtakes – alternative attempts at songs that were not originally used – as well as dialogue and other musical meanderings, were all gone.

The list of artists – major and some not-so-major – affected is indeed heartbreaking: Aerosmith, Al Green, Al Jolson, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Beck, Benny Goodman, Bill Haley & His Comets, Bing Crosby, Bo Diddley, Bobby Brown, Bryan Adams, Buddy Holly, Captain Beefheart, Cat Stevens, Chuck Berry, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Elton John, Eminem, Eric Clapton, Fats Domino, Guns N’ Roses, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Garland, Les Paul, Lionel Hampton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Muddy Waters, Neil Diamond, Nine Inch Nails, Ornette Coleman, Queen Latifah, R.E.M., Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., Sheryl Crow, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Snoop Dogg, Steely Dan, Sting, The Andrews Sisters, The Carpenters, The Eagles, The Four Tops, The Ink Spots, The Police, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Tupac Shakur, Willie Dixon, Yoko Ono…this is just a small sample of the range of artists whose master tapes were all burned to destruction in this fire.

These tapes were priceless.  Even since the New York Times article was published two weeks ago, Universal themselves were still being extremely cagey to the media about the extent of the damage.  Although we do not know the official reason why the studio decided to cover up the extent of the fire, my own suspicion is that they had made some stupid policy decisions that made the losses even worse.

For example, asked Rosen, why was it that there were no backup copies of these priceless recordings?  There were, Universal replied, it’s just that they were all in the same building as the originals!  Oh, no!  What stupid arrogance from a studio that had already suffered half a dozen previous fires on its backlots: in 1932, 1949, 1957, 1967, 1987, and 1997.  Many of their street sets at those times had been destroyed and rebuilt.

But this fire was worse, much worse.  Universal Music had placed original master tapes, and their backups, in the same building, no doubt thinking that it’s not going to happen to them, they will deal with it later.  Furthermore, many of the artists whose recordings have been destroyed have spoken out in the media about another policy of Universal’s: keeping these mastertapes away from the artists who recorded them.  Sheryl Crow is merely the latest in a long line – the fallout from this fire is going to continue for many months or years to come.

Musician Richard Carpenter, one half of the legendary duo The Carpenters (the other half, Karen Carpenter, died in 1983), described how he contacted Universal, wanting to know the whereabouts of his master recordings for A&M Records.  Having been fudged by the Universal Music bosses, Carpenter made ‘multiple, persistent’ inquiries as to the whereabouts of these tapes, because he wanted to make remastered editions of his albums and include bonus tracks such as outtakes, or songs that were not used on the original albums.  In the end, and only after countless such inquiries, he was told of the fire by a ‘lowly’ studio employee.

Rapper Eminem told the media that he had digitized his master tapes just months prior to the fire, but it sounds like he was very fortunate to be able to have got hold of the tapes at all.  Krist Novoselic, bassist for the band Nirvana, said mastertapes for the massive-selling album Nevermind (1991) were ‘gone forever’; while Bryan Adams reported that he, like Richard Carpenter, had asked Universal Music for access to his tapes, only to be informed that the music giant had ‘lost’ and ‘could not locate’ them.

It is the artists that have departed this Earth, those ‘gone forever’, the loss of whose tapes is felt the most, I think. Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Buddy Holly, and many others who died decades ago; great jazz artists and singers, some of the greatest voices and instrumentalists of all time, all of those master recordings, gone.  It doesn’t bear thinking about.  But it is true, despite what still-fudging Universal Music are trying to cover up.

A number of key artists, Steve Earle, bands such as Hole and Soundgarden, and representatives of the estates of artists such as Tom Petty, Tupac Shakur have begun a Class Action lawsuit against Universal for its actions pertaining to and subsequent to the fire.  A class action suit, for those not so informed legally, means that a number of plaintiffs can bring a suit against corporations such as Universal to claim widespread harm, and I believe these plaintiffs can be joined by any number of others at any time, so long as it is agreed by the judge.  Another advantage is that, because there are any number of plaintiffs, costs of litigation can be significantly lowered among the parties concerned.

This fire, taken within the context of the entertainment industry, was one of the most significant and dangerous of such fires in all of music history.  It is the musical equivalent of The Great Fire of London of 1666.  One estimate showed that the master tapes for almost 500,000 songs were gone forever.  All of that artistic endeavour, including singers, instrumentalists, other session musicians, writers and producers, all wiped out for eternity.  Yes, we have most of the masters on CD, but nothing can be done with those recordings; the recordings themselves cannot be improved, remixed or remastered in any way.  No outtakes or unreleased songs, or dialogue featuring these great artists, can ever be released.

And those reasons – combined with the utter corporate shame felt by Universal (which they would never admit, of course) – are why UMG will never come clean about the extent of the losses of their tapes, or indeed their actions that caused the loss to be so great, why they would not let surviving artists touch their own masters before the fire (except Eminem!), or their actions in the coverup itself.  Of course, the world understands that this event is not a coverup of the significance of, say, the Iraq War of 2003 or the Kennedy assassination of 1963, but for musicians this is a heartbreaking tragedy.

For their part, after the New York Times article appeared on June 11 this year, UMG issued a statement saying that the article contained ‘numerous inaccuracies’ and misrepresented the scale of the damage.  The corporate archivist, Patrick Kraus, told Billboard that the collections of labels such as Chess, Impulse! (John Coltrane and Muddy Waters), and others were not lost; they had, apparently, survived the fire and were still in the archive.  However, aerial shots taken in the fire’s aftermath show a building completely razed to the ground.  The below image gives you, dear reader, a sense of the scale of the damage.  The archive building is to the bottom right of the area covered in red:

That’s all I have for you, folks; be assured that I will continue to update you as events unfold in the coming months and years – this is an ongoing story.  Sheryl Crow has discovered that all of her mastertapes of the first decade or so of her career are all gone; doubtless other artists have discovered or will discover similar or worse losses of their own back catalog.  Disastrous, disgraceful, dishonest, disreputable – these and many other adjectives can be applied to the fire of June 1, 2008 at the Los Angeles lot of Universal Studios and its corporate archive, held onsite and all in the same building, and their corporate actions subsequent to the fire.  At the moment, it is believed that all is lost, in respect of the life’s work of many of the greatest singers, instrumentalists and rappers the world has ever known; there may be some miracle down the line in the future, but at the moment, it doesn’t look good. x

So, the visit of US President Donald J. Trump was a bit of a wet weekend…

…or was it?

I was astounded to read a Facebook post the other day from a young woman who said she was among 250,000 protesting in London against Mr Trump and his visit, when I had seen nothing about it on the news.  True, I hadn’t exactly searched every page of every news outlet in the UK to try and find anything, but a protest on that scale ought to have been a pretty major story, I would have thought.

Especially after Mr Trump had told Mrs May that any post-Brexit trade deal with the US will have to include… the NHS???!!!!

That alone should have sent millions of British citizens straight onto their streets in protest against Mr Trump and against the UK government even for agreeing to such an outrage.  What does Trump want with the NHS?  He reminds me of a certain British businessman who buys up retail companies that are failing, sacks most of the frontline staff and then rebrands them; his name is Mike Ashley.  Yes, Mike Ashley is our very own Donald Trump.  Thank God our political system prevents him from launching a bid to become the next UK Prime Minister.  Our political system does have its faults, yes indeed, but that is a lifesaver.

Besides which, Trump can’t have the NHS.  It belongs to the people of Britain.  To sell it would require a referendum; quite appropriate really, a referendum on the NHS, since most people are sick of referendums.

***

Last night, the UK city of Peterborough held a by-election to try and find a new MP, less than two years after a General Election at which Fiona Onasanya was elected for the Labour Party, taking the seat from the Conservatives with a slim majority of around 600 votes.  But, two years is a long time in politics, and not only have we had the rise of the Brexit Party in the last few weeks, but we have also had the destruction of Ms. Onasanya’s political career (not to mention that of her party, but that’s for another rant).

Ms. Onasanya, it turned out, tried to abuse her political position when she and her brother were charged with not one but several counts of perverting the course of justice, after they were both charged with speeding offences.  She denied all charges, she was a committed Christian, she said, how could she do such things?  A trial jury failed to reach a verdict, but when she was retried, she was sent to jail for, I think, three months.

If 10% of the electorate of her constituency wanted her out, they could trigger a by-election; in the end, 27% signed the petition and Lisa Forbes, who had stood for Labour (and lost) in 2015, finally won for her party with another slim majority, 683.  In second place was not the Conservatives but the Brexit Party, pushing the Tories into third.

What of this?  Well, it appears that the party of our government, the Conservatives, are essentially coming third in our elections at this point.  And though the Brexit Party did well, ironically, in the EU elections last month, are they doomed to come second in elections across the country?  Time will, of course, tell.  I hope they do; I hope they never get elected anywhere.

***

Ergo, ego.  George Galloway, former maverick MP and, more recently, former talkRADIO host, got the boot from that particular radio station after he sent an anti-Semitic tweet concerning Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, presumably after they played Liverpool in the Champions League Final (and lost).  Mr Galloway has an ego that could take in most of Manchester and still have room for large lengths of Liverpool, besides.

Mr Galloway likes everyone to know that he says what he thinks.  Unfortunately, what he thinks is a load of anti-Semitic shite and nonsense.  Indeed, he will find a way to blame Israel or Israelis for just about anything.  If there is a hike in the price of garden furniture, somehow it will be Israel’s fault.

With his permanent tan and tendency to wear Fedora hats indoors, not to mention his very… slow… speech… with… long… pauses, he was a frequent guest on the UK political institution Question Time.  It’s about time Mr Galloway was brought down to size.  And this sacking may do the job; it may not.  Have a read of this article concerning Mr Galloway’s Fedora Fascination; it really is an informative and entertaining read, although not if you are a fan of Mr Galloway’s, of which I suspect there are not many.

***

Speaking of the Champions League Final, Liverpool F.C. won their sixth European title after defeating Tottenham 2-0 in an all-English final in Madrid, Spain.  Curiously, the 2019 UEFA Cup final, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, was also an all-English affair, and a much better game, too, with Chelsea knocking the stuffing out of Arsenal 4-1.

But Liverpool’s Champions League win came after a relatively dull final; perhaps any final would have been dull compared to their semi-final turnaround against Barcelona, when, trailing 3-0 after their first leg in Spain, they came back to Anfield to smash the opposition 4-0 and go through to the final.

***

Today is the day UK Prime Minister Mrs Theresa May resigns her job, officially, as Leader of the Conservative Party and therefore as Prime Minister.  Since we have an amazing thirteen candidates to replace her, there is no replacement as yet lined up, so Mrs May will still be PM in effect until that replacement is found, which could be two months or more yet.

The problem here is ‘better the devil you know,’ because her resignation has led the way for a large number of pro-Brexiteers to stand to take her place.  Of course, professional idiot Boris Johnson is among them; but even he has said in recent days it’s going to be difficult to get Brexit through by October 31, the new deadline.  My view is that Johnson will somehow get himself elected the top job, and that will be disastrous for the UK, even worse than Brexit itself, in my opinion.  Any pro-Brexit candidate will not be good for Britain, but Johnson likes to be a buffoon at every opportunity.

Like his fellow ginger maniac, Donald J. Trump, Johnson is a former television host, as he served as guest host on a number of occasions for the UK satirical news programme Have I Got News For You.

Did you notice that even Johnson, along with his rival Michael Gove, Brexiteers both, said that they could not meet the EU’s deadline of October 31?  How weird is that?  Have they just blown their chances of success in the race for the top job?  x

So, the UK authorities have allowed U.S. President Donald J. Trump into the country, as he arrives for what I believe to be his second state visit since he took the top job for himself.

I might as well point it out up-front: I am not a fan of Trump.  He is one of those sanctimonious smart-arses who thinks they have the solution for everything, but once you get down to it, he has the solution for nothing.

You take his wall, for example.  It’s to keep illegal immigrants pouring in from Mexico.  Two problems with this: 1) It’s incredibly racist and populist; 2) It does nothing to stop terrorists from flying planes into their tall buildings, does it? 3) Thirdly, human beings are incredibly resourceful, especially those who have a desperation to get into the U.S.A. over a wall.

Oh, but Trump has a plan for the Muslim thing.  Ban them from entering the country.  The U.S.A.!  Land of the free, home of the brave, remember that?  Of course, the writers of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ could not have possibly foreseen to what levels the American population would grow, or that there would come a day when a president would be elected who spent his entire time telling tourists, traders and televangelists to f*** off.

In other words, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and the U.S. Constitution, was not future-proof.  That’s why, over the years, they kept adding amendments to it.  The first was in December, 1791, while the most recent was in May, 1992.  But, of course, the fact that the Constitution was and is hopelessly out of date regarding the use of weapons, not to mention misunderstood, is ignored by Mr Trump and many of his followers.  Apparently, it is OK to carry assault rifles that can fire 300 rounds a minute in full view in order to protect yourself against those who wish to harm you or steal your cattle.  Here’s an idea; if no-one was allowed to carry weapons, unless in the military, what would you be protecting yourself against?  The only possible option would be civil war.

Oh, I hear you argue, what about weapons procured illegally, off the internet and stuff?  I agree that to remove all weaponry from use would require one hell of a lot of policing, but I live in hope that it could be done.  No point in believing in anything if you don’t think positively.

But, I am against all use of arms and all acts of violence.  Trump likes to act tough but that is only because he has people around him who would take any assailant down on his behalf – once, during his election campaign, an assassination attempt was thought to be taking place, and Trump was held down, led very quickly to his car and driven off.  Yeah, Mr Trump, very tough.

I am against all use of arms, even against Mr Trump.  He has as much right to live on this Earth as anybody, and while I hope there will be protests aplenty during his visit, I would expect none of them to turn violent, with or without the use of weapons.  Stand against Mr Trump, people of Britain, but also stand against violence.

x

“Yes!!!  Finally the old dragon is gone!!!  Pushed out by her own party over Europe!!!”

About whom am I writing?  Theresa May?

Well, no.  The above words were spoken after a huge sigh of relief on November 28, 1990, after then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was driven away from No.10 Downing Street for the last time, having resigned when Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe resigned, followed by a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine, which had gone to a second ballot.

I remember that day well.  I remember it because I was working in a Westminster City Council library, on Marylebone Road, and some of the staff, not exactly Thatcherites, went out and bought a bottle of champagne.  To celebrate Thatcher’s downfall.  Because she refused to entertain the thought of joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which went on to become European Monetary Union, which went on to become the Euro.

Despite Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, and former Chancellor John Major taking the job, Britain never did join the Euro, never did drive on the right, and never did swap its miles per hour for kilometers per hour.

Therefore, we as a nation have had a soft Brexit since 1993.

Fast forward 28 years or so (God!!! Is it really that long?) and this very day, May 24, 2019, Britain’s second female Prime Minister, Mrs Theresa May, resigned after all but being pushed out of her own party by MPs frustrated over Europe.  Does it sound familiar?  It should do.

In her resignation speech, Mrs May alluded to the fact that she was the second female British Prime Minister, but certainly not the last.  Of the potential candidates for her replacement, there are two who have declared their candidacy, while four others are thought to be considering a stand, who are female.  No reason to suppose that there will not be two consecutive female Prime Ministers in a row, although Boris Johnson, former guest host of Have I Got News For You, and the man I like to call BloJo, is the front runner and evens favourite to win the job.

God help us.

I have suggested elsewhere that, should BloJo get the job, two of the West’s biggest allies, the UK and the USA, will be run by ginger maniacs, barely distinguishable the one from the other, between Donald Toilet – sorry, John – Trump and Boris Johnson.

God help us.

Today, the Financial Times published an article which spelled out its view of the future of the UK after Brexit. It’s not good.  I wish I could link to the article, but sadly, it will not let me do so without a subscription, so, if you’ve not used up your free article limit, go to the Financial Times‘ website and search for:

Goodbye EU, and goodbye the United Kingdom

Copy and paste that, because I got that title from their website.  Many apologies for not being able to link it.

One interesting statistic that it discusses is that not only was Brexit a largely English phenomenon, but that the majority of Brexit voters lived in rural areas; most of those in large towns and cities voted to remain, with a few exceptions.  It also characterised Brexit as a runaway train.

Yes, that’s exactly it, and its driver is David Cameron, who lost control of the train within 24 hours of starting the journey.  His staff, the Conservative Party, said, ah, Theresa May will do it, get Britain out of the EU quickly and easily, because after all, she campaigned for Remain, didn’t she?

Promising to stand by the Referendum result of 2016, and putting Theresa May in charge of departure once they decided to call the whims of around 600,000 people ‘the will of the people,’ were two of the most calamitous political decisions ever made in the Twentieth Century, and that century had two world wars in it.

Mrs May wanted to Remain in the EU, she campaigned for it, and during that campaign she spelled out the reasons why the UK would be better off in the European Union.  Then, as Prime Minister in charge of Brexit, she spelled out, with equal passion, the reasons why the UK would, in “her mind,” be better off out of the EU.

She, and Nigel Farage, are the two most obvious examples of politicians lying to our faces, but I am sure there are many more, particularly within the context of Brexit.  If you are reading this from the US, you will know that both Trump and Clinton lied to you during the election campaign during that momentous year of 2016.

You will know that previous presidents have lied to you about wars, and rumours of wars – Vietnam was subject to a massive series of cover-ups, as were both wars in Iraq of 1991 and 2003.

Back to the present.  Back to Brexit.  So much has been written and talked about it that I sincerely believe that there is nothing more to say that hasn’t been said already.  I suppose in part because of social media, and the internet in general, it has been possible to gauge more accurately the amount of discourse that has taken place over it, much more so than previous political crises.  Maybe many people wrote down their own private thoughts about World War Two, say, in 1939, but of course then there was nowhere for those thoughts to go, except maybe in a bin or at the bottom of a box in the loft, or similar.

Theresa May fought for her vision of Brexit, which was a “Brexit Lite,” and in many ways merely a slightly altered version of the Brexit we have already had since 1992, when the Maastricht treaty was signed.  We never joined the Euro – remember all that Exchange Rate Mechanism business around 1992?  We had loads of trade deals with the EU, that profited both us and them.  That’s the essence of a fair trade deal.  But the Euro threatened to beat us around the head as we sat on the netty of our European involvement.  Boy, were we glad when countries that used it began to go down one after the other, like dominoes, after the major financial crash of 2008: Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal…

But Brexiteers wanted to kick all that away, completely remove ourselves from every advantage that belonging to the EU has, pull up our drawbridge across the English Channel, and go home.  And they chose Mrs May to do it.  But she had a completely different vision of Brexit than they did.  It still appears crazy to me that they even elected her; far more stupid than Labour’s election of Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.

She negotiated, and she fought.  She negotiated with the EU, taking all the credit herself, by the way, and she fought her own party and her own parliament.  She thought she could take them all on alone and defeat them, the Brexiteers, like John Wayne punching the lights out of ten bad guys on his own, standing over their writhing bodies, and drawling “Let’s get out of here!” with a wry smile.

Sadly, that vision she had in her mind was not to become a reality.  The rebels in her party, and Parliament in general, were simply too strong for her.  She had to go, and on May 24, she finally admitted defeat.  No wonder she was in tears.

Or are the reasons for those tears really that obvious?  Were they tears for the country that she loved, for her failed ambition, for herself as a failed Prime Minister, for her dog, for what?  There are so many options to choose from that, unless she says so at a later date (and she is honest about it, of course), we’re never really going to know the correct answer.

From July 2016, when Mrs May was elected, it was all sadly so inevitable that she would go and be replaced by yet another unelected Prime Minister in Boris Johnson.  The only surprise here is that it has taken so long, almost three years, but that can be easily put down to her own personal ego.

I used the title Mrs May May Resign in May because it was an attempt to be clever, despite the fact that it is inaccurate on so many levels.  Mrs May is going to resign in June, on June 7 to be exact, and then stay on in the job, should another national crisis occur, until the party has managed to choose itself a new leader, one who will automatically become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain.  And one, no doubt the rhetoric will exclaim, who will immediately unite the party and the country from its deep division, wider than Moses’ parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956), over Brexit and its implications for the UK and its national identity.  x

Yesterday, May 22, 2019, I watched UK Prime Minister Theresa May deliver a speech to Parliament, which outlined ten changes she and her ‘government’ were prepared to make to the European Union Withdrawal Agreement Bill, which needs to be passed by Parliament before Mrs May can sign the bit of paper that means bye-bye EU.

Now, everything is politically motivated.  The Conservative Party, the party currently in government here, are doing really, really badly in the opinion polls at the moment, so it is no coincidence that this speech was delivered on the day before the country votes in the European Elections.  Hmmm… I’ve said for many years politics is show business; and it is.  It’s all about making sure that viewers get to see them doing stuff just at the right moment so that they change their minds and vote for them, whoever them may be.

So, these statements, and the timing of them, is not about Government doing something, it is about Government being seen to be doing something.

Mrs May, her policy advisors, her civil servants, indeed her cabinet, must all be smoking crack or something.  She really seems to believe she can unite the country with this shit, and if you’re looking for evidence that Mrs May’s delusion was now to the point of requiring medical intervention, you do not need to look any further than this speech and its contents, in which she kept referring to ‘deliver the change the British people so clearly demanded.‘

They did?

That clarity of demand came from 1.9% of the 33 or so million people that voted!  That’s roughly 600,000 people, out of a total population of 66 million.  That is how clear it was, Mrs May.  If the demand was so clear, why would there be any argument?  Why would there be calls left, right & centre for a second referendum, if it was so clear a demand from the British people?

The answer is that Mrs May, and our political class, whatever their party or political colours, will basically say and do whatever it takes to keep themselves riding the gravy train that is politics in the United Kingdom – indeed, in many so-called ‘democracies’ – around the world today.  That doesn’t sound very technical, political, or come from any sense of deep thought or clever analysis, but that’s the truth of it.  They’ll just say anything to keep themselves getting nice and rich.

I doubt citizens of many countries in the world care that much about Brexit, other than perhaps watching it from a safe distance and offering a wry chuckle as they witness the United Kingdom, once the proud lioness as she ruled an Empire that stretched from here to New Zealand, that soon changed its name to a Commonwealth, now imploding into a pool of its own sick, red-nosed and drunk, muttering something about losing their keys and forgetting the way home.

Yesterday’s speech by Mrs May is being seen here in the UK as something of a last-chance saloon, a final attempt at making her vision of Brexit stick, before the vultures that are already circling in the air around her fast-dying political corpse, swoop down and start picking away at it until there is nothing left but bare bones, lying in the desert still banging on about delivering the will of the British people.

The only reason Mrs May is still Prime Minister today is because she resolutely refuses to quit; they’re going to have to drag her kicking and screaming from Number 10 Downing Street, London SW1.  But, count your blessings; as long as that idiot holds the keys to No.10, us Remainers will have our way and Brexit will never be delivered.  By rights, she really, really, really ought to go, but as long as she is there, there is some glimmer of hope; who knows, we might even get that second referendum out of it?  Although I doubt it.  I have history when it comes to political predictions; I predicted that Leave would be heavily defeated in the Referendum, and that Donald J. Trump will never be President of the United States.

Because the alternative for us in Britain to Theresa May is really very scary.

The alternative is called Boris Johnson, or BloJo as I like to refer to him, because the moment he is given the keys to No.10, he’ll have his chops around Donald J. Chump’s charlie so quick it’ll make your teeth chatter.  Indeed, as a holder of both a UK and US passport (he was born in the USA…), he could, in theory at least, become a candidate for the US Presidency as well – a true Illuminati Globalist World Leader.

And Johnson will attempt to deliver his own vision of Brexit.  Johnson wants what they call a ‘hard’ Brexit – a snap withdrawal, no deals, no trade agreements, nothing that will tie us to the EU in any way, kick out Johnny Foreigner back to the country they came from, especially the European ones for now, and, in another Trump-like move, build a wall – a psychological one in our case, but who knows? – right round the coastline of the United Kingdom, no matter how many peace agreements that rips up.

For now, it will mean that both the United Kingdom and the United States of America will be ruled by ginger lunatics.  Both want to pick up their respective balls and take them home to play with on their own.  Both want to destroy the values enshrined in their constitutions that made their countries great, even if it means using those very same constitutions as justification for their very unconstitutional acts.

But back to Britain.  What of our opposition, the Labour Party, led since 2015 by Mr Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North or somewhere like that.  He is true dyed-in-the-wool Labour, espousing its traditional values of fairness and equality, that I have held dear for many, many years.  Indeed, when he was elected in one of the most surprising results I have ever known in any election, I joined the bandwagon and believed him to be the great white hope for Labour which, under the multi pronged attack of Blair, Brown and their clones, had moved to the ‘centre’ of politics, changing their many principles simply to stay elected.

Surely Mr Corbyn, with the might of the Labour Party behind him, can slay the Prime Minister and her ridiculous plans for ‘compromise’ on Brexit, and send her to the back benches where she belongs.

No, he can’t, and don’t call me Shirley.

The Conservatives reached out across the political divide and offered to talk to the Labour Party to see if they could find some sort of level of agreement.  Mr Corbyn agreed, they talked for six weeks, then the Leader of the Opposition chose to end it one day last week, no reason given other than they weren’t getting anywhere, and he was effectively bored with them.  Oh right, OK then…

Mr Corbyn keeps demanding a General Election because Labour will beat the Tories, form the next Government and deliver the Brexit that the British people supposedly so clearly wanted.  First off, he too is deluded, the smoke from Mrs May’s crack* must have wafted across the Commons chamber, if he thinks that Labour could beat the Conservatives in what they both want to be a two-party system.

If the country thinks anything like I do, they do not want either the Conservatives or Labour in the driving seat, especially where Brexit is concerned.  They want a new kind of politics, and unfortunately that seems to be appearing in the shape of one of the most detested men in the history of British politics: Nigel Farage.

Farage formed a new party, the Brexit Party (guess what they want?), just a few short weeks ago, some say from questionable funding but I don’t know about that, and already that party shot to 27% of the vote in a recent poll (YouGov last week sometime).  That’s over a quarter of the electorate in about three weeks!  Nothing like that has happened, to my knowledge, among the political class in my lifetime.

In truth, we shouldn’t be fighting these elections.  The Referendum was in June 2016, Article 50 triggered in March 2017, and we were supposed to have left the EU in March 2019, but the EU granted us an extension until October 31.  Mrs May still wanted us to leave earlier than that, so we did not need to fight these elections.  But, she has failed in every single aspect of the Brexit negotiations.  What the hell were the Conservatives thinking when they elected an openly Remain politician to negotiate and lead us out of the European Union?

So, broadly speaking, the situation is this: Mrs May and her government are supposed to be delivering Brexit, but they never will, because her own party – the one Mr David Cameron wanted to unite by holding this referendum in the first instance – is completely divided, as it always was over Europe, and as it always will be.  Really, as long as Mrs May is in charge, I would dare to predict (see above) that we have no chance of leaving the EU.

However, from a political standpoint, Mr Corbyn should be offering opposition to Brexit, but he is not; he is simply and very weakly proposing a different way to do the same thing; get themselves elected to power.

And don’t get me started on the Liberal Democrats… they slept with Mr Cameron in a coalition because in the 2010 General Election, Cameron could not command a majority, and they facilitated all of the government’s actions against the people of Britain, especially those in a lower income bracket.  The destruction of the NHS in 2012?  The failure to get rid of students’ tuition fees?  Remember those?

For me, the only party that can establish and sustain not only opposition to Brexit, but also a cleaner and healthier environment in which to live, is of course the Green Party.  In the European Election constituencies, I believe most, if not all, have Green candidates.  In our area, the Greens already have someone sitting in the European Parliament, and I know that there are several more in other parts of the country.  The Greens aren’t perfect, nobody is; but of all political parties, they will do their very best to stick to the core values that I believe in such as honesty and decency in politics, or die tryin’.

To sum up: Brexit is not happening, and it has no opposition anyway.

Isn’t that a unique place to be in for a country under a Prime Minister who promised ‘strong and stable leadership’?  Isn’t this a unique time in British political life, where a country narrowly voted to leave the EU but cannot agree on how to do it, and there is no opposition to it anyway?  When was the last time a Government imploded, and its main opposition imploded at the same time?  Three years, it’s taken, three bloody years to get us into a state of seemingly terminal chaos.

This is why I believe a Second Referendum will be democratic.  It will say to the Government, sort this mess out.  This is what we want.  I believe the next referendum will be much more decisive, I hope, and clearly a required majority of, say, two thirds either way will make sure that, whichever way it goes, the Government will be carrying out what it says will be the Will of the British People, instead of this chaotic mess, which will never be corrected as long as the same old faeces – sorry, faces, keep popping in and out of No.10 Downing Street, for those all-important ‘Cabinet meetings.’

But not Boris Johnson, or any of his ilk, and definitely not Nigel Farage.  These kinds of discussions, in which nobody has a single clue what to do, should never have happened at all; the fact that they are is because previous PM David Cameron arrogantly assumed he would win.  Even if they were to happen, they should have done so three years ago – not way past the original deadline that was agreed by Parliament, one of the few things that were.

So, let us have that Second Referendum, and vote once and for all that Remaining in the EU is the only way to keep the United Kingdom together, not to reinvoke the troubles in Northern Ireland, and to keep the UK trading happily with its European partners, enjoying freedom of movement (don’t forget, inasmuch as you don’t want foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs, the same will happen to you the other way around.  What if you want to retire to Spain after working and paying your taxes for all those years?  Sorry mate, you can’t.  What if you want to pop over to Italy for a quick break as you work hard and pay your taxes?  Sorry mate, you can, but you’ll need to apply for a visa.  My sense is that, if Brexit were to happen, other EU nations would fall to the temptation to give the UK and its citizens an unnecessarily hard time, just because they can.

I want that Second Referendum because I want to Remain in the EU and I want to be able to prove that the majority of the UK want it, too.  Of course, it could go the other way which, as long as it is achieved via a fair and democratic vote, I will accept because I am a law-abiding citizen, but I will also campaign against because free speech is important to me also, as is the fundamental position of staying in the EU.

Thank you so much for reading this long and rambling diatribe, I repeat myself, I am not a great writer, and I repeat myself.  But thank you so much, dear reader(s), for my taking so much of your time. x

* Having read this sentence back to myself, it induced involuntary laughter which I then had to explain to my dear wife… it reads pretty disgustingly, it’s true, but it was meant to pertain to a drug reference I made earlier…honest…

…look like they’re going to be the biggest load of old toss in four decades.

But we can stop that, ladies and gentlemen.

And the tactic is hardly new, I’m sure it’s been used in many an election prior to now.

It’s just that, when we need it, we seem to forget about it.  I know I did, until I was reminded of it by a friend on Facebook.

It’s called Tactical Voting.

Current polls (remember these fluctuate hour by hour), show that YouGov predicted a whopping 27% share of the UK vote for Nigel Farage and his new party, The Brexit Party.  That’s extraordinary for a party that launched just a couple of weeks ago.  And it shows how quickly people can unite behind a party that seems to speak immediately and clearly to their core values, even if those core values are fundamentally xenophobic, neo-fascist and whatever other professorial-sounding term can be applied to these people who are so short-sighted that they cannot seem to think beyond their own island mentality – all this self-governing, sovereign state, independent nation shit.

Twenty-seven percent – that’s extraordinary.  That’s put the 100-year-old Labour Party into second place and the 200-year-old Tories into third – possibly even fourth, behind the Green Party, depending upon the exact outcome, of course.  That’s over a quarter of the vote for one country.

This blog is basically a plug for this site: https://www.remainvoter.com/.

This web site tells you why tactical voting is important, both mathematically and logically, and tells you whom you might like to consider voting for, based upon the area that you live in.

That is presuming, of course, that you voted to Remain, as I did, in the 2016 Referendum, or have changed your position (as many hundreds of thousands have, indeed there are some, to give a balanced and fair analysis, who have gone the Other Way) since the Referendum.

People say to me, what do you prefer, feet & inches or metres & centimeters; I say, feet & inches, because that’s what I grew up with.  Ha!  They say, but you still voted to Remain, and the Tories have kept us out of the single currency, out of km/h over mp/h, etc. etc.  Yes, they have, but we’re still an EU state – we’ve had a soft Brexit since 1993, and here are a so-called ‘majority’ of Leavers wanting to kick all that away, tear up those agreements, and instead of telling the EU to fuck off, we tell them to fuck right off instead, and to another planet as well.

If you are reading this and you voted Leave, I would encourage you to change your position; but the whole point of a democracy, which I hold dear above all else, is that you are freely entitled to vote as you please.  The most important thing is to vote.  Just vote.

I hold democracy dear, yet at the same time I join the calls for a Second Referendum.  I must admit, after the result was announced, and Remain lost, Cameron went, I thought that a second referendum was undemocratic; we should not go down that road.  But, the more information that came out about the Referendum, the more I thought that the whole thing was mismanaged from the start.  It was, if you like, undemocratically organised.  Just as a for example: I thought a simple 50-50 split of the vote was far too lenient for a vote as fundamentally important to the people of Britain such as this one.  It had to be at least a two-thirds majority one way or the other for it to carry any authority with Parliament, who could then justifiably act ‘on behalf of the people of Britain.’  Every time I hear Theresa May say that she is carrying out the wishes of the people of Britain, I want to vomit.  No, she is carrying out the wishes of a little over half of the people of Britain, who are currently desperately clinging on to the democratic card because they can see their beloved Brexit running down the plug hole of this dirty sink we call politics.

I can admit that Leave won by a simple majority, I accept that, but at 1.9% difference, it’s not enough; not enough for it to be used as ‘the wishes of the country’ or of ‘the people of Britain.’

So, to make the vote democratic, it needs to be predetermined as a necessary two-thirds (or some other figure clearly in the majority) figure one way or the other to be a clear win.  If Leave won that, I would be deeply unhappy about it, but I would accept it and that would be that, except that I would continue to campaign for Britain to rejoin the EU, if first of all they will have us, and second if we could get that majority to swing the other way.  That, my friends, is democracy.  It was not democratic for Mr Cameron to hold a Referendum and not have a plan for what to do if the ‘majority’ voted to Leave.  That’s what happened, and no-one was prepared for it; you’ve ended up with three years of chaos, with nobody truly getting their way at all.  Is that what you Leavers voted for?  Of course not!

For a party to have a clear majority in Parliament, they cannot simply have more seats than the nearest opposition.  No, sir.  They have to have more seats than the rest of the parties combined, so that they can act like a government and push through their policies in the form of Bills, etc.  That’s called democracy, because it was predetermined before any election.  We understand that that is what we need to do.  Why not, then, for a Referendum?  Oh, no, because that would be undemocratic; a Remain Prime Minister held a referendum with all the arrogance of a dictator, suddenly finding he lost it (the referendum, that is), and not having any idea what to do.

If you want to discuss democracy, I think you have to have those thoughts in mind, and I’ll happily discuss it with you.  Nigel Farage tried to argue the democracy card on The Andrew Marr Show a couple of weeks back, forgetting (and not reminded by Marr) that, in June 2016, he argued that, if Leave were to lose by, say, 49% to 51, Leave would not get a recommendation for a Second Referendum agreed by Parliament.  No sign of “Of course not, it would be an affront to democracy!”, but “well, we could do, but Parliament would never agree to it anyway.”  That’s Nigel Farage for you, a proven liar and one whom you expect to lead your Leave charge for you.

So, please, consider tactical voting; it is the one way that we have – in the context of the EU elections, at least – to kick Farage and all who sail in his Brexit ship with him into touch.  I’m not a violent person; Farage must be stopped peacefully and democratically, but he has hinted at violent protest should Leave’s No-Deal Brexit desire not get through.  I would hope that, should Remain lose and we do end up leaving the EU, our fellow Remainers do not go down the road to violence just the same.  Just vote, and vote tactically, following the best advice that you can from the site that I linked to above.  Try, as much as possible, to deny Farage the mandate from the UK to crow about democracy, immigration and all his other favourite topics.  Because, I’m sorry, whatever a Leave voter tells you, that’s what it is essentially about, otherwise why would an entire nation become so het up about lines on a map and trade deals?  That’s not democracy.

Thank you for reading this far.  If you did, please type “Olivia Newton-John has the voice of an angel!” in the comments, just for my statistics you understand, so I can see if this style of rant is working for the reader. x

I awoke this Easter Monday morning to the news that hundreds of people had been killed on the island of Sri Lanka, in a violent and coordinated attack on churches and hotels in the country.

As I write, it turns out that the death toll as a result of these attacks has risen to 290, with hundreds of others injured; eight of the dead are said to be British.

A life is a life, but the newspapers here in the UK are focusing more on the lives of the British nationals than the others because, well, they’re British, and it sells more newspapers.  That’s what business our journalistic media are in.

Almost every newspaper in Britain are highlighting the plight of one family in particular; the Nicholson family – father Ben, mother Anita, son Alex and daughter Annabel.  Almost the perfect Western family, in other words.  This family were staying at one of the island’s more upmarket hotels, I forget the name of it, for an Easter holiday.

As yet, nobody has come forward to claim responsibility.  Not that it would be of any comfort to Ben Nicholson, father of the family named above, who, it appears, is the only survivor out of his whole family.  His wife, and both children, are feared dead.

It is an awful fact of life that life itself is fragile; you never know when your number’s up, etc.; but goodness me, it sometimes feels so random, so pointless.  And it’s kind of ironic that churches were a target; because here were many people worshipping a God who appears remote, even nonexistent, and Christians will be hard pressed to explain why it is three out of four of an innocent family, or indeed anyone killed in those attacks, should be blown to bits, while others have survived for all sorts of reasons.  It makes no sense to me, and I doubt it does to anybody else because there is no rational explanation for it.

Some of you Brits of a certain age will remember the McWhirter twins – Norris and Ross.  They were identical twins, and together they founded, I believe, the Guinness Book of World Records, which is still published annually today.  The reason why I mention them is because they were well-known on television, which gave them a sort of public notoriety, and that in turn allowed them to speak out on issues that troubled them.  Ross, in particular, thought that the British government of the time was too soft on Northern Ireland, and offered a reward for the arrest and capture of any terrorist known to be carrying out a series of bomb attacks in London at that time.

And so it was that, on November 27, 1975, Ross McWhirter opened his front door to find himself on the business end of a .357 Magnum revolver, and two operatives of the Provisional IRA, who shot him dead at point blank range.  No time to say goodbye to his wife, his family and his brother, just – bang!

The reason I mention that is because, of the two brothers, Norris McWhirter got to live another 29 years on his own.  I remember the killing of Ross; it was on the news, and it shocked me.  I didn’t think that things like that happened to presenters of the Record Breakers TV programme, and to this day I could not, and cannot understand why it is that one brother has to die, but not the other, at such a young age (he was 50).

Some call it Fate, with a capital F.  Well, he was meant to go.  It was his time.  Why was it ‘his time?’  He seemed fit and healthy, he had no disease and was not violent in any way, why should he die and his brother live?  It makes no sense to me, when many other pairs of twins around the world can both live into their ripe old ages.

Fan(s) of my blog know that I always bring Elvis Presley into anything and everything.  Well, Elvis Presley was one of a set of identical twins.  His parents named him Jessie Garon, but he had one distinct disadvantage; he was born dead.

Not even a shot a life.  Is life really so random as to claim the life of one twin before it had begun, while the other went on to everlasting fame.  What’s that all about?

Some people in this life get to win hundreds of millions of pounds on the Lottery; others are blown to bits by a suicide bomber before they are ten years old.  Like many of you out there, I just don’t get it; I just don’t get it. x

Yesterday, March 29, 2019, marked the day that the United Kingdom, us, we, the country I live in, should have left the European Union, with a deal in place so that we can, I don’t know really, still be a part of the EU without actually having any powers in that context.

But, you guessed it, we didn’t.  Leave, that is.  Why?  Because our Prime Minister, Theresa May, our government, our Parliament, are the most inept bunch of incompetents it has ever been my misfortune to have heard of.

And Brexit is the biggest national – indeed, international – disaster to have befallen this country since the English Civil War of 1642.  Well OK, there was the plague of 1665, and a number of wars since then, but in 1642 our Parliament conspired to cut the king’s head off, which they did, in 1649.  That’s the baddest thing Parliament has ever done, in my view.  OK, apart from voting for a completely illegal war, ignoring two million protesters, in Iraq in 2003.  Apart from all that, Brexit, and Parliament’s handling of it, is the worst thing they have ever done.

I’ve written before that David Cameron promised the 2016 Referendum as an election booster the previous year, and it worked.  So he had to follow through, so to speak.  He also made the mistake of promising that the government would honour the wishes of the majority result, and that majority turned out to be 1.9% in favour of Leave the EU.

Now, here’s where the cockups start.

The day after the Referendum, David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister.  He should not have done that.  He had campaigned to Remain in the EU, this is true, but I see no reason why he could not have said, OK, I lost, but I’ll continue to work for the majority vote and honour Brexit, as it was now called.  But, no, he threw his toys out the pram, didn’t he, and said right, that’s it, someone else can pick them all up.  Big mistake, especially in the light of who that someone else turned out to be: Theresa May, one of Cameron’s fellow Remain campaigners, who had said, as Home Secretary, that Britain was better off Remaining in the EU.

Now, she replaced David Cameron as Prime Minister, her political ambition realised, she told the country: Britain is better off Leaving the EU.  How can anyone trust a politician that does that?

Turns out, not only was she a lying hypocrite, she was completely inept at anything remotely connected with being Prime Minister.  She was supposed to ‘lead’ the negotiations but she left that up to her minions while she insisted on the big stuff, like the Irish Backstop.

Oh, I forgot to mention that in 2017, to shore up her political advantage in the House of Commons, she called a snap general election, just to make sure that she had a mandate from the country to do what needed to be done.  In that election, she ended up losing her majority and, for some crazy reason, aligned herself and her party with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who now had ten seats in Parliament and could help her form a majority government.  Hardly a mandate from the nation, is it?

Oh, I also forgot to mention that, having called the Referendum, David Cameron – so arrogantly sure was he that Remain would win – that he didn’t, ever, at any time, consider what to do if Leave the EU won.  There was no backup plan, no Plan B.  There was no BREXIT PLAN.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

The next two years were spent in negotiating the ‘best deal’ for the country, but when it finally came after that period, it was so shabby that Parliament couldn’t support it.  She lost the vote for Parliament to accept the deal and Leave the EU by what I believe was the biggest margin in political history.

Somehow, she managed to bring the deal to Parliament a second time.  She lost that, too, although the margin was less.  Speaker John Bercow intervened and told the Prime Minister, in front of everyone, that she could not bring the same deal back to the House of Commons unchanged.  All right, she said, I’ll split it into two, and we’ll just vote on the deal bit of it, and leave the ‘Political Declaration’ to leave the EU out of it for now.

That vote happened yesterday, March 29, 2019, the day we should have left the European Union.  Mrs May lost that vote, too.

Now, we hear she’s planning to bring the f***in’ thing back to Parliament a fourth time.  True, the scale of defeat has lessened each time, but there are 34 ‘rebels’ in the Tory party who will never back this deal, and neither will the 10 members of the DUP.  According to the BBC, she will never get those on her side, and she is truly delusional if she thinks she’s going to win them over, especially since her tagline is: You’d better accept this deal, there isn’t going to be a better one.  That’s it.  After two – almost three -years, there isn’t going to be a better one.

The Conservative Party has been in civil war over Europe since, well, the beginning of time.  That’s why Cameron called the Referendum.  He was attempting to heal the rift in his party, and ended up dividing the nation.

Britain is now in a kind of civil war itself; instead of bullets, people are using social media posts to fire off missives to their enemy.  So far, mercifully, there has been no violence but I wouldn’t rule it out, given the strength of feeling, particularly in certain areas of the country that are prone to outbursts of a physical nature.  Whichever side eventually has their way, Leave or Remain, this tension is going to simmer below the surface for many decades to come, a bit like radiation.

But, as of yesterday, unless Theresa May does manage to pull off a miracle, Brexit, as we know it, looks dead in the water.  Personally, I am pleased about it.  But I do not look forward to the resulting protests from the Leave side if the UK ends up revoking Article 50 and staying in the EU; although, of course, I would share their view that democracy has been shat on from a great height.  It has, whichever way you voted.  And as for David Cameron goes, he thinks the government should hurry up and get on with it, completely unaware as he is of the shitstorm he has created.   It was all his doing.  It’s his fault, sir, his fault. x

P.S. By the way, the narrowing of the defeat in the third vote was partly down to some hardline Brexiteers, who would never vote for this deal come hell or high water, voting for the deal.  These included: Dominic Raab, Jacob Rees-Mogg and, most crucially of all, Boris Johnson, long touted as a Prime Minister, God knows how and God knows why, but there we are.  He is our very own Donald Trump and, I suppose, it is inevitable that he will at least get a chance at the top job.  But, as John Crace wrote in The Guardian today, you can never trust a politician who, like Johnson, has traded his principles for his career.  After all, that’s what Theresa May did, and look where we are. x

Since Brexit is possibly the most important political event in our lifetime, it is hardly a surprise that it is already the subject of several of my rants, and may well be the subject of many more to come.  But last evening, March 12, 2019, Parliament voted on the revised ‘deal’ that UK Prime Minister Theresa May had dumped on their desks at around 11 pm the previous evening.

That’s correct, ladies and gentlemen.  The Referendum was almost three years ago in June 2016; Article 50 was triggered in March 2017, the vote was scheduled for yesterday, and the Prime Minister handed in her homework just the night before.  How’s that for strong and stable leadership?

Of course it is not strong and stable leadership at all, and neither is it anywhere near it; indeed, it is an affront to the people of Great Britain that Mrs May even tries to pass it off as such.

What it is, is behind-the-scenes panic, humiliating begging and a willingness to do something – anything! – as a return favour in exchange for putting something – anything! – in the document that looks different to the previous one. So the EU put a few very minor changes in it, said, here you go Theresa, and sent her on her way.  As she left they told her that those would be the final changes the EU were willing to make.  Mrs May hoped that the lateness of the ‘deal’ would be in her favour; it would give MPs very little time to analyse it properly before the vote at 7 last evening.

But yesterday morning, the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox – a Tory, mark you – said very openly and publicly that there was very little in the new ‘deal’ that was indeed ‘new.’  The Prime Minister must have known then that her number was up.

And indeed Parliament, by a majority of 149, a significant number, told Mrs May where she could shove her deal.  And the sun don’t shine there.

This has left Mrs May, the Conservative government, the party, Parliament and indeed the entire country in an extremely precarious position.  As of the time of writing, it is 16 days until the date which is enshrined in law, March 29 (European Union (Withdrawal) Act of 2018).  Under this law, we must leave the EU by that date or we will be breaking our own law.  In other words, if Parliament rejects leaving the EU without a deal on March 29, which seems likely, then a new law is going to have to be passed pronto to gain an extension to Article 50, the legal procedure that is used to extricate us from all the European rules and regulations.

Oh.  My.  God.  That our government, and their followers, would even think that leaving the EU without a deal is just crazy.  I apologise in advance for the increased use of italics here, but the madness of all of this can only be highlight in this way, or perhaps bold text just for the sake of variety.  The only reason they want to leave without a deal is so that the UK leaves now, with no delay, and gets on with setting our own rules for the price of cabbage, and all that.

If that were to happen, Brexiters will pay for that impatience.  When the United Kingdom goes flushing down the U-bend, I would hope that it hit those who voted for it the hardest.  It won’t, of course, the poorest of our society will be hit the hardest, while those with holiday homes in the Algarve won’t even notice the difference; apart from, maybe, a slight change in the nationality of their servants.

So, today, Parliament votes on whether we now leave the EU without a deal.  I would hope that they tell Mrs May where she can stick that, too; which means on Thursday (tomorrow), Parliament will then vote on whether to extend Article 50, and by how long.  (Remember, this means changing the law, which can be done in the time frame needed.)

If we do extend Article 50 (delaying the deadline by which we must leave the EU), then the big fear among our Brexit-hugging friends is that we will never leave the EU at all.  We can but hope.  But that’s why they want to do it now – not because it’s good for the country, it certainly isn’t, but so that the country does not have sufficient time to change its mind.  (By the by, polls are suggesting that if a second referendum were to take place, and it is a possibility now, the result would be very different.)

After her defeat yesterday, Mrs May did hint that a second Referendum could be one of the sweeteners in a future deal with Parliament to get this mess sorted, because it worked so well before, right?

In 2015, before the election that year, David Cameron promised a referendum to try and heal the division in his party over Europe, which no previous leader had been able to do.  In effect, he was ‘doing a John Major’; telling his party either get behind me or get out.  We’ll let the country decide, and you must follow that decision.  Cameron was very pro-E.U., and wanted to remain, indeed, so did Theresa May (then Home Secretary) for that matter.

When the Referendum did happen, both campaigned to Remain.  It will be a breeze, they thought.  What they didn’t count on was the severity of anti-immigration feeling in those deep pockets of Middle England, and interference from Russia and the US in spreading stuff about the EU that simply wasn’t true on Facebook and that.  Despite the lies and misinformation, Leave won, by a majority of 1.9%.  One point nine percent!  And suddenly, that became the “will of the people.”  Cameron was a sore loser and resigned, only for a replacement to take us out of the EU who had just been campaigning to stay in it!  Step forward Theresa May, who now believed that Leaving was for the good of the country, when just a few weeks earlier, she had been just as sincerely believing the direct opposite.

How’s that for strong & stable leadership.  This is the situation we have been in ever since.  Last night’s vote rendered her entire tenure as Prime Minister a complete waste of time.  By Friday, we could at the very least be looking for a new Prime Minister; and possibly looking at what they call a ‘snap’ general election.  A quickie election with one issue at hand: Europe.

Now, last night’s vote not only stymied the Prime Minister, but politics as a whole, because if you don’t like what the government are doing, you just go and find those in Parliament who could replace them.  But there is none; if you want strong and stable leadership, you’re not going to get it from Her Majesty’s opposition, the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn.  His name was added to the 2015 Leadership vote in the Labour Party as a joke, and he only went and won it!  He is a leader most Labour MPs don’t want, and certainly not the ones who left the party and formed The Independent Group alongside a few disaffected Tories.

This is one of the few occasions in my lifetime where a political mess leaves no clue as to how it is going to pan out.  One statement in Mrs May’s speech last night which I agree with was that to delay Article 50 is not going to solve the problems we face, merely delay them.  The result will still be the same.  I was against holding a second referendum previously; but now, I feel it the only course of action open to the government right now because if the country were to vote to Remain, that would make all of this horrible mess go away – at least as far as the Conservative Party is concern.  They would be let off with a warning – don’t do it again.

Now, we are told that feeling among the people of this country is strong on both sides of the debate.  Perhaps it is, but not strong enough to take to the streets and peacefully protest.  I abhor violence; but remember the English Civil War of 1642-1646 started over much less than this.  The King was demanding money off Parliament because he was the appointed representative of God on Earth.  Charles I’s demands for money were simply getting too much; his father had repeatedly done it and Parliament was now fed up.  Battle ensued.

I am certainly not advocating or suggesting violent conflict of any kind.  But where are the protests?  There must have been about six people outside Westminster yesterday.  There should be thousands – millions – on the streets of Britain, and London especially.  But we are all so overfed on Strictly Come Dancing and similar shows, that we are now too emotionally fat to take to the streets.  We prefer to do our protesting on Twitter now.  But this does nobody any good at all.  The government can ignore that.  But they can’t ignore the sight of, say, one million people stuffing the streets of Westminster, turning up on the government’s doorstep.

Come on, United Kingdom!  All corners of England, Scotland, Wales and especially Northern Ireland, that bloody backstop, should be out protesting, and again I stress peacefully.  Perhaps, somewhere deep down, people know that an issue such as Europe would be very difficult to protest at a peaceful level.  People are entitled to their own views, but there can only be one right answer, and that is to Remain in the EU and benefit from their trade, movement and partnership.  To do otherwise would be to isolate us, and render us a pariah in European and World Trade.  Remember, supermarkets are stocking up on tinned foods because our supply of fresh fruit and vegetables will dry up after Brexit.

Even if we get an agreement among ourselves, we’ve still got to take it to the EU and get them to approve it, and there is no guarantee of that.  The extraordinary ineptitude of this whole thing is mind-blowing, from all parties but especially the Tories.  The responsibility for it must lie on the shoulders of both David Cameron and Theresa May.  But I will say this: not every Tory is displaying the idiocy of the party line.  My own MP, Mark Harper, a conservative with a small and a large ‘C’, voted to reject the deal yesterday.  He has been staunchly on the side of Remain since the referendum.  So, thank you for that, Mr Harper.

But I have to keep writing it in order to get my head to believe it: the ineptitude of this government is mind-blowing.  A general election in which no incumbent Member of Parliament is allowed to stand, could be the answer.  A small does of US-style politics in there; and it is something which, as things stand, is impossible.  But who would have thought that this complete political calamity was possible, either? x