Battening down the hatches

When I woke on Friday the 13th to the shattering news that Johnson had won the election, I knew that the only thing I could do to get through the day was to batten down the hatches and ride out the first of the storm.

I cancelled the papers as soon as I’d had my breakfast, for I had no desire to read the sort of triumphalist crowing that would certainly be going on there. I didn’t switch on the television or the radio, for the same reason. I knew what was going to happen and I didn’t want my nose rubbed in it. Bad enough to have to face the fact that we now have a fascist government and will have to endure it for the next five years. God help us all. I never thought I would live to see such a dreadful thing in my country.

From time to time during that first dreadful day, I dipped in and out of social media, avoiding the braying and boasting of the conquerors and only listening to voices I knew. Many were saying much the same things that I was thinking. Some were commiserating with one another, all of them were afraid and rightly so.

By the next day the first reports of racist attacks in the street and on the tube were beginning to come in. I found myself wondering miserably how soon it would be before the triumphant Johnson sold off what remains of our NHS to Trump’s American private health companies, as Mark Britnell promised they would be back in 2014, and how soon it would be after that before we all had to pay for any treatment we received and any drugs we were prescribed. It was worrying, because after a heart attack and a TIA, I need quite a lot of treatment and what seems to me, an exorbitant number of drugs. How the hell was I going to find the money to pay for all that? I went to bed with a headache.

But headache or not, this is a very serious and ugly situation we are all now in and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can say or do to make things easier for my family and my friends. I’m slightly comforted by news of Trump’s impeachment this morning. But we must remember that the USA works under a slightly different system of democratic government to our own and that option is not open to us.

How are you all? And how are you coping? Somehow or other and at some time or other, we shall have to find a way to organise an underground resistance. There is a pattern for it in Hitler’s Europe. But it will be hard-going.

Keep in touch. We need one another.

 

A word of explanation

This is a blog for friends, fans and all the people I’m going to send Christmas cards to and it’s by way of explaining something that I don’t want to burden you with on the card.

My life has been rather difficult for the last fortnight. I had a TIA in the early hours of Friday morning nearly two weeks ago, when the room spun all round me and I couldn’t speak, although I knew perfectly well what I wanted to say. That’s a new one for me!

An ambulance took me to hospital where I spent the rest of the night having all manner of tests and was sent home the following morning. I’m now recovering, although rather more slowly than I would have wished.

These things, as the old wives used to say, are sent to try us, but I thought I’d better let you know why I haven’t been as communicative as usual. This is not a plea for sympathy, just a bit of information.

Love to you all. Your cards will be in the post very soon!!

‘I have never lied in all my political career’

This astonishing statement was made by Boris Johnson yesterday, it beats cock-fighting. Does the man really not know when he’s telling lies? This statement is certainly a whopping lie, but then he IS a liar. He tells lies as easily as he breathes but he does it extremely skillfully.

He won a majority of people over to his view that leaving the EU was a good thing by telling two monstrous and deliberate lies about it. Being a skilled operator and well used to the art of propaganda, a lot of people got sucked in by it. The Birmingham voters interviewed on Channel 4 on Monday were repeating it as if it were nothing but the truth. So in this blog I’m going to take both lies apart and explain how the trick was pulled.

We’ll start with the big red bus, where he claimed by implication that if we left the EU we could save ourselves £350 million a week in EU fees and could spend it on the National Health Service. What he deliberately didn’t explain to us, is that the levy we pay to the EU is used to fund all manner of necessary things, like fisheries and farming throughout the union, and that although there would be times where we wouldn’t get the full £350 million back, there were other times when we would get that sum and considerably more to help our economy. That is the way the EU levy works. And would any of it have gone to the NHS? As he also implied.

No, it would not. And when you know something about the background you will understand why. The NHS has been planned for destruction ever since 2010 and we know that because that is when Mark Britnell, Chairman of the KPMG Global Health, made a speech to a meeting of private health companies in the USA, in which he said ‘In future the NHS will be a state insurance deliverer not a state provider.’ And to underline his point, he told them that ‘the NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be the next couple of years.’ He couldn’t have explained the position more clearly and he knew exactly what he was talking about.

The KPMG is a very powerful, monetary organisation. One of the big four accounting organisations that operate in this country. Our current Tory MP in Bognor Regis, one Nick Gibb, used to work for them. And they have been heavily involved ripping off our NHS, certainly since 2014 when they were ‘suppliers of services’ to six of the nine NHS consortia. And to give you some example of how costly those ‘services’ were, the Arden and Greater East Midland Commissioning Support Group paid KPMG a quarter of a million pounds a month for the first six months of 2014 for ‘services’. I kid you not. And all that money had come out of our pockets either in the form of NICs which we all pay or through our taxes which we all pay.

Now Jeremy Corbyn has published all 451 pages of uncensored documents, which have revealed that trade discussions have certainly been going on for years. One of the things it reveals is that between ‘July 2017 and July this year, senior UK and US trade officials have discussed the NHS, drug patents, the pharmaceutical industry, health insurance and medical devices as part of a post-brexit trade deal’ See the Guardian 28^th November 2019.

The poster hinting that Turkey was going to join the EU and that we would be flooded with ten million Turkish refugees, was another lie. And now that Turkey hasn’t joined the EU and there hasn’t been an influx of ten million refugees to this country, most people must have realised it.

But there are still plenty who have not. The Birmingham voters interviewed on Channel 4 on Monday were a terrible example. They still think that Johnson is a lovely, cuddly, bumbling, harmless man and that Jeremy Corbyn is the devil incarnate.

So can they or anyone else trust this lovely, cuddly, bumbling Bo-Jo? My answer to that would be very definitely no. In fact I would go so far as to say that all the wonderful things he is now promising us – poor mutts that we are – are lies. It is easy to promise £2.9 billion in handouts of one kind or another. He doesn’t need to come across with the money. Once he is elected he will forget all about it. Or tell us it was a joke. But be warned. If you do vote for him the ‘joke’ will be on you.