“When speaking at public rallies, while canvassing votes for himself or his party, Modi works in the polemical mode, loudly mocking his rivals in an ever-increasing cascade of insults”
Modi, Johnson, Trump & Bolsanaro all cut from the same loutish cloth
Gross domestic product contracted by 23.9 per cent between April and June 2020. By some estimates, more than 100m people had lost their jobs.
That’s the consequence of relying on gut instincts over expertise.
Politicising the civil service & the diplomatic Corps & a lapdog MSM
Remember him announcing, in November 2016, that 500 & 1,000 rupee notes (amounting to 86% of the value of currency in circulation) would be rendered unusable in four hours’ time?
He did the same over the first lockdown on 24/3/20 with zero planning for the jobless, stranded
In the 1st wave “some experts had claimed that India would be ravaged by the virus, with several hundred million people being affected; but when the number turned out to be far fewer, they were scolded by our prickly patriots.”
“Our drains are not filled with bodies, our hospitals have not run out of beds,” wrote one prominent Delhi editor. “Our crematoriums & graveyards are not out of wood or space. There is not even a cricket field-sized sliver of India anywhere that might resemble the Spanish ‘flu”
The infectious disease experts were right. Infectious diseases infect and now India’s
📌hospitals have not run out of beds
📌they have run out of oxygen
📌crematorium fire plates have melted due to over use
📌 graveyards and funeral pyres are out of wood and space
Had they spent more time and expertise in the first wave ensuring that disease was accurately identified and deaths truthfully counted then the urgent necessity of preparing for the second wave would have been more compelling.
As it is the dead literally do not count to the Gov.
For me that is the final insult.
Your Government cares so little for you or for truth that it cannot be arsed to put in place systems to ensure that when you die an honest account of that death will be made.
Literally You will not count
Yet, at the beginning of this year Modi, who has done so much harm, remained very popular. 70% in the polls.
How could that be?
This sounds awfully familiar.
“How does one explain this disjunction between performance and popularity?”
“One reason...is that his ideology of Hindu majoritarianism is widely shared by voters, particularly in the populous states of northern India. The BJP has been especially successful in getting lower-caste Hindus into their fold, by offering them cultural superiority over Muslims”
The Indian MSM has played its shameful part.
So has a supine Supreme Court, refusing to protect individual liberties and minority rights, insensitive to savage repression of dissent by the state.
Pay attention.
That is what Johnson seeks to deliver here
“Modi is a bigot & megalomaniac”
As the funeral pyres burn in their hundreds of thousands Modi goes ahead with his architectural vanity project.
Johnson spends £14k on wallpaper alone & wrangles for a year over who should pay the £200k bill for redecorating the private quarters
In India each certificate of vaccination carries a portrait of Modi. One Indian posted a photo of his certificate with the sarcastic line: “Sir Modi jee knows what to do, when to do, how to do”.
A too little, too late woefully inadequate vaccination programme.
Another commentator was more brutal, tweeting: “Just as there is a photo of Modi on the vaccine certificate, there should also be a photo of Modi on the death certificate of those killed by Covid.”
As others have pointed out Orban should be added to the list of vile populists with 2857 Covid deaths per million (U.K. bad enough with 2272 per million. 1 in every 440 U.K. citizens)
“This is not a story about soft furnishings, or taste, or a snobbish attitude to a department store
It is about money
& because it's about money, it's about accountability
& because it's about accountability, it's about democracy.
“Do we accept that a prime minister is not accountable to the public? That he does not need to tell us if he's in receipt of cash favours? That he can open up a private revenue stream, and tell the public where to shove their right to know about it?”
“If we do, we are letting down our democracy as badly as the most corrupt politician. We will have dismantled yet another of the defences that protects democracy from the corrosive power of wealth. That's why, in the end, this is not about Boris Johnson at all.”
I really like the phrase coined by @ciaranmartinoxf “Know your place Unionism”. Not the UK, but “Greater England”. ( Really a “larger but diminished England”
I reflect once more that this is the product of damaged human beings who know not how to love & respect a diverse Union
Nepal records highest-single day Covid-19 surge since the beginning of the pandemic, hitting 7,137
44% positivity😱
In the past week, 3,427 individuals under 20 have tested positive for the virus
823 were between the ages of 0-9
2,604 were aged 9-19. kathmandupost.com/health/2021/05…
That is pretty scary given its exceptionally high positivity rates, mirroring the sharp acceleration seen in India.
The Government suggests this wave is driven by the young and mobile.
Both 🇬🇧 B117 and 🇮🇳 B1.617 but I do not know how much sequencing has been carried out..
Borders on some of the high prevalence areas in India.
Watch this one. Not least because the positives are most concentrated in the 20-40 age groups (insofar as testing is done), as well as 9-19.
New Statesman estimates that each victim of the virus in England & Wales ALONE would have lived, on average, a further nine years and six months – collectively adding up to a staggering 1.3 million years of life lost.
Follow up over a longer period re full vaccination needed and, now, we are in a time of low prevalence partly due to vaccination reducing transmission and disease and partly due to lockdown measures.
Moral of the story.
Get your second dose and stay very vigilant until at least two weeks after it.
Symonds, aiming to create a ‘high society haven’, wanted to model the flat on 5 Hertford Street, a Mayfair club owned by the step-brother of Zac Goldsmith – a close friend of both Symonds & Johnson – with wallpaper alone costing at least £14,000.
At the same time on 3 Feb he made that bizarre Greenwich speech
“We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as Coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation”
A segregation he said “ that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some Government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange.”