It’s time to talk about power. Apologies for the slightly dry tone but I’ve been having women problems lately. You can think of this as the fourth instalment of my “Political Personalities” series from last summer (just as Douglas would have wanted it).
How shall we define power? From Google, we have:
Continue reading “Power and the Perfect Idea”
I my previous post (see here) I highlighted the concerns regarding the drinking culture at Durham University and how the Labour MP for Durham City, Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods, voted with the student element in the referendum, indeed, in conversations that I had with her on her blog (now deleted by her) she said that she voted that way because of the student vote in Durham, and how important it was to heed their voices.
When it was pointed out to her that the student vote was transient and that her resident constituency had voted massively in favour of Leave she severed contact.
Continue reading “Champagne Socialists or Hooray Henrys?”
The National Health Service in Britain is seen as a “National Treasure”. Politicians of a certain stripe have recently started to call it “Our National Health Service”, leading me to wonder just who it used to belong to before it was ours. But I digress (slightly).
There are certain truths about this organisation that we should be clear on and there are certain myths surrounding it also. For some people it is the pinnacle of what civilisation can achieve. A clean, efficient, well run and free at the point of use service for the taxpaying citizens of The United Kingdom to make use of should they ever need to. For others it is exactly the opposite, a dirty, inefficient and expensive shibboleth that badly needs to be taken down and possibly never rebuilt.
Continue reading “National Treasure”
I live a few miles out of Durham City, in a former pit village. For those who don’t know Durham it is a World Heritage site
and home to Durham University, one of the prestigious 5 Universities in Britain (Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Imperial College London being the others).
Durham University is (temporary) home to some seventeen and a half thousand students (last available figures 2014). There exists an uneasy truce twixt Town and Gown but our MP, Ms Roberta Blackman-Woods, and Durham County Council, seems to hold them in higher regard than their more permanent constituents. I communicated with Ms R B-W regarding her stance on Brexit and she eventually stated that she voted to remain because “the student vote was to remain”. When it was pointed out that this 17,000+ voter base was transient, and that they could not ALL be remainers and that her total constituency had, in fact, voted to leave she closed communication with me and deleted the correspondence on her blog.
Continue reading “Sex and drugs and upper firsts”
The Labour Party is currently led by Jeremy ‘Marxism is a philosophy for all time’ Corbyn, and John ‘Let me be straight with you, I am a Marxist’ McDonnell. Both are fanatically in favour of open borders, but what did their intellectual hero say about the economic benefits of the free movement of Labour, and who reaps the rewards, and who loses out?
Well, in Das Kapital, Marx notes that slave owners have to look after their slaves if they are going to make a profit from their labour, unless there are cheaply available slaves as a result of a flourishing slave trade, in which case they can work their slaves to death and replace them.
Continue reading “Marx and Immigration”
Politicians, if that is what we should call them, are a very funny breed. I don’t know if it has always been the case but the current members of the House of Commons, with one or two notable exceptions, seem to me to be lost in a morass of contradictory thought and opinion. Male and female members, on all sides of the house, appear to delight in exhibiting the very characteristics that, if they were to exhibit them in every day scenarios, would see them roundly and justifiably challenged.
How has this come about? One of the problems and possibly the biggest one stems from the fact that so few of them have ever had anything remotely resembling a proper job. Many have never worked outside the Westminster bubble since leaving education and many, especially those who consider themselves “progressive liberal free thinkers” are anything but. They find themselves in a constant state of flux because everything that isn’t “progressive and liberal” has to be wrong, no matter how right it is.
Currently there is some brouhaha within political and media circles surrounding the forthcoming state visit to our country of probably the single most powerful man in World politics, PotUS Donald J Trump. This hissy fit, initially instigated by that paragon of political virtue John Bercow, over whether or not the PotUS “grabbed a fanny”, has accelerated exponentially since three tweets, originally posted by Britain First and picked up by American ultra-conservative Anne Coulter Nile were re-tweeted from the Presidents twitter account. There is little doubt in anyone’s mind that at least two of the videos contain graphic images of atrocities being carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah. The third video, strangely enough the one that the MSM and the political cognoscenti have concentrated on, holds less veracity but is, in its own way, just as shocking. It clearly shows a young man on crutches being beaten by men of “Asian” appearance who may or may not, be the offspring of Muslim immigrants.
Continue reading “Shocking Pink”
