“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.”
“ It's about us. And our responsibilities to the democracy in which we live.”
“A prime minister cannot serve two masters. If a Head of Government is receiving large financial payments from a private donor, totalling tens of thousands of pounds, a democracy has a right to know”
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.
“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
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.”