15th June 2022
When will he get found out and sent packing?
So the liar survived the vote of confidence but he remains a dead man walking. The bye-elections in the next couple of weeks will find him out and I fully expect the Tories to be booted out of Wakefield and Taunton & Honiton. The message that will send to Tory MP’s will be loud and clear – YOU HAVE BEEN FOUND OUT FOR THE LIARS YOU ARE! So called ‘Red Wall Seat’ Tory MP’s will be quaking in their boots at the prospect of becoming unemployed at the next General Election and what were once considered ‘safe’ Tory seats will have their MP’s exposed to the possibility of an ignominious end to their political (or should I say money spinning) career. Who can remember the look on Portillo’s smug mug when he lost his seat? Remember well and wait for a similar look on Johnson’s face at the next election – he’s not in the safest of seats and his party–going antics won’t be forgotten in a hurry by those who had to wave goodbye to friends and relatives from behind closed windows.
Going back to the actual no-confidence vote I would ask those of you reading this who might be represented by a Tory MP who supported the liar to ask them to justify their reasons. Those Tories voting to support Johnson have basically said that it’s OK to break the Lockdown law (their law by the way), lie to HM Queen Betty Battenburg, lie to the House of Commons and lie to the people of the UK. Is that OK by you? It isn’t OK for me and the Constitution of the UK should be amended to address this nonsense. I’ll return to the Constitution later to discuss this, amongst other things where I feel our dependency on the ‘honour’ of Government to rule over us honestly needs shredding and replacing with a set of laws which carry a punishment when broken – and I don’t mean a paltry £50 fixed penalty notice!
Talking of punishment – what are your views about the way this Government is going about dealing with those people who are making a living smuggling refugees across the Channel? Is it really moral to pack off the refugees to Rwanda? Why not invest the money in tracking down, arresting and prosecuting those doing the smuggling? Because this bunch of inhumane twats like the kudos picking on the easiest targets to placate your average Tory voter. As a tax-payer are you really convinced this is good value for your £’s donated in tax to this mob?
Still on the punishment theme – when are we going to get some justice for all the taxpayers money handed over to all those who were fast-tracked through Hancock’s VIP channel to provide the PPE needed to help combat Covid-19? The Government borrowed billions and billions to buy this stuff in, most of it wasn’t fit for purpose and we- UK tax-payers will be paying it off for decades to come while Boris’s chums happily trouser the billions and chuckle up their sleeves at mugs like us.
This section of my blog could go on and on and on – 5 years on and still no satisfaction for those who suffered because of the Grenfell Tower blaze, or those who live in fear because they live in tower blocks with the same sort of stuff wrapped around them. How can this be right? The first duty of Government is to provide and secure the means of the health and safety of all its people. This Government patently fails this test – just take a long hard look at the way they ae dealing with the cost of living crisis, the deeply embedded problems in the NHS, where we are thousands of Doctors, GP’s and Nurses short and housing shortages to name but a few.
And then there’s the manner in which they have decided to re-write the Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, an internationally accepted and legally binding agreement – a document that they wrote and signed up to. They are now prepared to drive a coach and horses through international law and bugger the consequences all in the name of the biggest example of self-inflicted harm we’ve ever seen. Blogs passim have seen me argue that if Brexit was stupid for just one reason compromising the Good Friday Agreement was it. The international consequences will be what they will be but nationally I can see Northern Ireland heading towards a Border Poll in the not so distant future. Add that to the growing pressure from the SNP for a second bite at the independence cherry and with Wales quietly biding its time in the wings well, not only is Boris a dead man walking so is the United Kingdom. Regardless of your views about the Monarchy Betty Battenburg can’t have many more months to go and her demise will trigger a very real Constitutional crisis. It’s now the time to re-jig the Constitution of the UK to ensure that Prime Ministers like Boris Johnson can no longer treat the country’s coffers like his personal purse and no longer treat us and our land his personal fiefdom. Not only that but we must be able to hold politicians to account for the damage Party political policies inflict on those they are tasked to protect. And I don’t mean just the opportunity to vote them out in a General Election. There needs to be a system in place that properly scrutinises proposed legislation and tests it against a written constitution, enshrined in law, that safeguards the health, wealth and security of all – over seen by an elected second House – none of this House of Lords nonsense.
Our current electoral system is rigged to maintain the status-quo of a two-party system that continually fails us and policy makers get away with blue murder, spending or giving our money away to friends and relatives whilst consigning those on the lowest rungs of society to poverty. It’s time for regional autonomy, a republic of the regions if you want, which puts local back into government – where our day to day lives are governed and managed by people who live amongst us and who share the problems and concerns of their electorate.
The war in Ukraine continues and yet the West basically sits back and pretends to be bothered, virtually all the Western European nations either too scared to upset Putin because of their dependence on Putin’s oil and gas or just plain afraid of upsetting the megalomaniac and fearing his revenge. Boris, playing Billy Big Bollox in his Winston Churchill pyjamas is making all the right noises but the truth is the UK armed forces have been stripped to the bone and haven’t got anything like enough kit to make a difference. Joe Biden is an old, old man, so out of his depth that he’s scared of his own shadow, never mind Putin. Macron here in France thinks talking to Putin is the way and has basically done nothing but run up a massive phone bill, learning nothing from history – a history that destroyed the reputation of France during the Vichy years of WW2. Dictators know only the strength of force and if their power isn’t met by an equal and stronger power then they will push and push to the bitter end, regardless. The position adopted by Germany does, and then doesn’t surprise me. On the one hand I can understand why they don’t want to piss off Putin, after all they were the original Nazis who took the world to the brink in 1939 but as good as refusing to honour their promised military support to Ukraine smacks of moral cowardice, more concerned about their own needs and not the needs of others.
Putin’s assertion that he is fighting fascists in a Nazi regime in Ukraine is an absolute nonsense and the country that spawned the original Nazi regime should be taking the lead in refuting and resisting that lie. The German people have moved on by 2 generations from that time, it is time for their leaders to recognise that and rid their nation of that stigma by taking a lead against Putin’s new Nazi dictatorship. Poland and the Baltic States recognise the existential danger Europe is facing and if Putin’s aggression in Ukraine isn’t stopped he will not stop. First he went for Ukraine, next he’ll go for Poland and the Baltic States and then he’ll be on the doorstep of Germany. This is a long way from over and it won’t end well.
Economic sanctions are all well and good but the truth is they don’t work, they don’t impact on the likes of Putin and they won’t be sending the sanctioned oligarchs down to the dole or the food banks – they’d have squirrelled plenty enough away in a safe London bank account somewhere. Sanctions will hit the ‘normal’ Russians and they will suck up the propaganda fed them by the Russian media. Now I don’t for one minute want to assume that all ‘normal’ Russians are stupid BUT the question must be asked of them – where do all these billions and billions of Euros that keep getting paid into Putin’s bank account go to? Now please feel free to correct me but I get a distinct impression that your average Ivan and Tatiana is either unemployed or in a poorly paying job, living in worn-out Soviet-era housing and trying to keep a clapped out old Lada running. I apologise for the stereotypical illustration but one thing is for sure – the oil revenues back into Russia are enormous, even now when they are supposedly sanctioned, but your ‘normal’ Russian doesn’t see even the slightest benefit. Rather than offering a nodding donkey vox-pop when interviewed on television Russians should be asking why their young men are getting burnt to a crisp in blazing tank or armoured personnel carrier just to please the whims of a deranged President Putin. It’s not like WW2 when Russia was fighting Hitler’s Germany for it’s very survival as a nation – as Ukraine is doing now against Russia. There’s no national glory for dying in a tank for someone else’s ego. Death in a Russian tank is horrendous. An anti-tank missile will burn through the armour of a tank sending a jet of molten steel into the interior, exhausting all the oxygen inside, so suffocating the occupants whilst at the same time igniting all the main gun ammunition stacked in the carousel underneath the seats of the turret crew. This is a design fault of all Russian tanks since the early 1970’s when they adopted auto-loaders to reduce the crew from 4 to 3, the upshot being that any internal fire causes an explosion that blows the turret off the tank – and scatters burnt bits and pieces of the crew all around the place. Parents and wives would be lucky to get a shoe box full of unrecognisable body parts to bury, never mind a coffin. This is the reality that Putin is sending youngsters who have been conscripted or who had no other employment choice to face and the West should be pumping this message into Russia at every opportunity. We should not fear the consequences – Putin declared war on the UK when he authorised his spies to use a biological warfare agent in Salisbury and quite happily tried (succeeded?) to interfere with UK and US elections. He knows no boundaries and the free world needs to recognise this and resist him – to the max.
OK, so now back to the boring normality of life here en France. Except it hasn’t really been normal. Earlier blogs have recorded the difficulties, trials and tribulations Karen and I have faced getting all or building works started, worked on and (eventually) completed. The final piece in the jigsaw was the conservatory, the construction of which was finished at the end of November. We then had the underfloor heating put in and that was topped off with the finishing layer of chappe – or self-levelling compound. The chappe needed three weeks to set and then we had to burn in the electric underfloor heating which took a month. Then, and only then could we tile the floor which, at 40 m2, took a week or so and then the sockets needed sorting and the wall patching up. The upshot being that we didn’t really get the conservatory to ourselves until April and it was (is) a joy – lots of space which opens out onto a new patio and our field with trees and farmland beyond.
All was well and good until Thursday 3rd June when the storms that normally follow any period of hot weather here arrived. On Thursday night we had a glorious display of thunder and lightning, as good as any we’ve had to date. The internet connection survived – in no small part being down to having been changed over to fibre in February (more on that later) so there was no metallic connection for the lightning to zap – but the whole night was a nervy time for Karen as she’s not a fan of atmospheric disturbances. Friday night saw an encore – and this time it was even scarier, well more dramatic but at least the garden had had a really good watering for two days. Saturday was the killer. At about 17:30 the sky went black and the heavens opened. Rain drops as big as buckets full tipped down and then the hail storm started and when I say hail storm I don’t mean your usual UK sized peanut hail stones, I don’t even mean grape sized hailstones, I mean golf ball and tennis ball sized chunks of ice, hitting the ground at 100 kph. The storm lasted a good thirty minutes before it passed over us but before it went it had chopped branches off trees, branches and stems off plants, smashed the mosaic top of a garden table to pieces, smashed a hublot in the roof (a little roof light window that allows easy access to the chimneys) and caused a leak in the conservatory roof. The next day we also so found damage to the car-port guttering, multiple dents in the conservatory roof and an array of dents in the roof, bonnet and wing of the spaz-van, as well as a broken rear light lens, a crack in the windscreen and wipers ripped off by the force of the storm. This time the internet did go off – a connection box took a direct hit – Orange texted us to say it would be back on by noon Monday but they had it fixed on Sunday morning – great service in my book – and after working in Tonbridge Wells and environs after the great storm back in 1987 I know what storm damage can do to telecoms infrastructure.
God knows what the insurance will have to say for themselves! Ioner France who put the conservatory up for us came out yesterday (Monday 13th June) and repaired the roof under guarantee so that was a result and all the cars damaged are going to meet at the local garage later this week so the insurance assessor can sort them all out in one go. Michel (our local mechanic) told us all he’d done since the storm was fit new windscreens and wipers so as to keep people on the road – he came out to us on the Saturday night after the storm to sort our wipers – he’s a good bloke. As I type it’s about 28’C and temperatures well into the 30’s are expected later in the week but we’ve another ourage forecast for Saturday so we’ll soon see if the leak is repaired. Fingers crossed and you know what’s knotted!
Going back to us getting converted to fibre, when I was a manager in BT back in Walthamstow and working from home I tried getting BT Infinity broadband installed but couldn’t, because they couldn’t get electricity to the cabinet (the big green cast iron boxes you see by the side of the road). That was shame because the cabinet was literally within 50m around the corner and the telegraph pole was on the pavement outside next door’s house. Here I am now in deepest rural France and I’ve had a fibre-optic cable delivered overhead and I’m getting 30M up and down – it’s brilliant!
It didn’t all go according to plan though. The first bloke who turned up told us it needed two men and a long ladder and scooted off. The second guy who eventually came to do the job managed to get the line up and installed but it wasn’t (isn’t) the best of fits. Back in the 1980’s when I drove round Stockport in my little yellow van, knocking on doors and fixing phones it wasn’t unusual to come across installations where the job had been rushed – who in their right mind would drill through a uPVC double-glazed window frame? I’ve seen it done! We get our internet, phone and TV service through Orange but given the size of the job providing fibre across the whole departement they subbed the work out to an outfit call Scopalec. They weren’t very good to say the least – and I can hear many of my old Post Office Telecommunications/British Telecom/BT/Openreach and POEU/NCU/CWU colleagues reading this sucking in a deep breath remembering those bad old days back in the UK. When the lad had finished we found ourselves with a totally new phone number, which took a couple of days to get sorted out, by which time the double sided tape used to hold the fibre connection box to the wall had dried out leaving the box on the floor! Fortunately it all works so I’ll wait until our next DIY’er visitor comes and get it screwed to the wall.
OK, I think I’ve done enough for now so I’ll start signing off for now, until the next time.
Please make sure you all keep safe – as much as Johnson would have you believe Covid-19 is still infecting people, still hospitalising people and still killing people. It isn’t going anywhere.
TTFN
Jem