1 April 2021
Diary of a Corbynista
Greed is Good
by Don Urquhart
24 March
The spirit of Gordon Gecko is alive and well and living in 10 Downing Street. The hero of the film Wall Street inspired us all with his mantra Greed is Good.
Similarly our Prime Minister cheered up his backbenchers by announcing:
The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends.
The Belgian Budget Secretary published details of her country’s deals with the drug companies.
They are paying €270million for 33.5 million doses.
The rumour is that the UK paid a lot more to get its early deliveries, but you wouldn’t want to confuse the electorate with such information.
25 March
Message Board responses to Corbynista in Shaw Sheet 272:
Walsall:
A little disturbed that you would seem to be advocating a Tory win in Hartlepool, if only for laughs.
Also, re Sturgeon, she was cleared by an independent investigation, which I would expect to carry much more weight than a partisan vote. That the Green representative voted against her is suggestive as they generally support the SNP, so it would suggest that the Green did not think the committee vote would have much impact. The fact that the QT host felt it incumbent upon her to mention it also indicates the smokescreen over the fact that Tories are happy to point out the mote in their neighbour’s eye while ignoring the log in their own. Hypocrites.
Sunlounger:
I’ve given up on the UK.
The Tories are in charge and the voters seem to like it. If the Tories win Hartlepool, this will go a long way towards proving my hypothesis.
Half of the Labour party wanted Corbyn to fail. Half of the Labour party wants Starmer to fail.
The latter indicates that, at any one time, around half of all Labour voters prefer having the Tories in number 10 rather than Corbyn or Starmer.
UK Politics seems to have lost the last traces of logic and reason it ever had. IMHO UK politics is now tribal warfare at the top level and tribal leadership infighting in Labour.
It would appear that the UK has at last found political stability by sinking to the most basic level. Labour will ensure that the Tories are in power for years to come.
A reference point for Labour just happened in Spain. The Podemos party Vice President, Pablo Iglesias, whose dream was to turn Spain into Venezuela II has resigned because the Spanish do not want a medium to far left government.
Flyboy:
The Open Reach experience is another example of our poor management in the UK and why we are so inefficient despite all of the technology development in the past 20+ years. I was pushed into having a smart meter installed despite telling them it could not connect to the network as it was in a cellar. Shocking waste of resources and a massive opportunity missed.
We may complain about Google, Amazon, Apple, Tesla etc having too much money/power but they demonstrate what can be achieved at scale with great leadership. Get Elon Musk over here ASAP would be my advice.
26 March
The Byline Times makes the delicious assertion that the Home Office has spent £77,000 on the Home Secretary’s eyebrows.
HOME OFFICE FAILS TO EXPLAIN Strange Expenses
It appears to have obtained a statement of expenses incurred on a Home Office Procurement credit card including beauty treatments like the £77K for a firm called Beautiful Brows. This has given rise to a festival of nonsense. Some, like Alastair Campbell, call for the Home Office to be brought to book. Was the Home Office wise to give it a certain credibility by tweeting this?
FACT CHECK: It is wrong to claim the Home Office expenses that have been circulated today are the Home Secretary’s. They are department wide and for vital equipment like PPE. It is completely false to say the Home Office has spent money on beauty products, it was PPE.
27 March
The Independent headline tells one side of the story:
Bristol protests: Priti Patel calls demonstrators ‘thugs’
Judging by the many videos on social media there were plenty of thugs wearing police uniforms.
On Twitter #policebrutality items alternate between Bristol and Myanmar.
28 March
Extract from diary entry 1 year ago:
The deaths from CV in the UK topped 1,000 and we had a government lackey telling us that 20,000 deaths would be a good result. Still not clear where the PPE and ventilators are. Or the tests. Worries about our friend Norma who was in The Metro for refusing to self-isolate.
29 March
According to the Independent Long Covid could affect a million people in this country so something else to thank Johnson for as well as the 150,000 deaths.
Dr Elaine Maxwell, clinical adviser at the NIHR and author of a separate review of more than 300 long-Covid studies, told The Independent time was running out to get services in place for patients affected by long Covid.
She said estimates of the scale of the problem varied from between 10 per cent and 30 per cent of Covid patients, which in the UK could mean between 430,000 and 1.3 million patients being affected by long Covid.
30 March
A lady called Thelma Walker has gone viral on Twitter, having been selected as a parliamentary candidate in Hartlepool for the Northern Independence Party. She was a Labour MP from 2017 to 2019.
Part of what she tweeted today:
I have been working for the past few months with leaders of a number of the smaller socialist parties and a large left wing coalition is now forming. This, I believe, will become the future for democratic socialism.
31 March
Why are you watching that?
My wife was put out that I was watching the Scottish Leaders’ Debate. And in truth it was all very ho-hum apart from Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens. She brimmed with conviction and her policy offering was pretty much that of Corbyn’s Labour Party.
I thought of Thelma Walker’s broad socialist coalition and then I thought why not?
