Archive for the ‘Britain’ Category
Renewable Heat Initiative at Stormont …where incompetence carries no sanction – Cash for Ash| Tommy McKearney
In the North of Ireland the Chuckle-Sisters Foster and O’Neill (Democratic Unionist Party-Sinn Féin) Escape Sanction.
The minister in charge of the department responsible for the scheme was briefed of its flaws by whistleblower Janette O’Hagan as early as 2013. Nevertheless, in spite of this she remained oblivious to what thousands of others knew and exploited. Moreover, having inexplicably failed to read the legislation she presented to the Assembly, Mrs Foster felt and continues to feel under no obligation to do the honourable thing and offer her resignation. On the contrary, the DUP leader has actually been rewarded and now acts as First Minister of Northern Ireland.
Across the corridor from Mrs Foster sits Michelle O’Neill who throughout the years of the ‘Cash for Ash’ scandal was Stormont’s Minister for Agriculture. Notwithstanding the fact that a majority of those installing biomass boilers were poultry farmers, the minister apparently remained blissfully unaware of the lucrative scheme that many of her constituents and supporters were availing of. However, as with Arlene Foster, this prolonged period of somnambulance has had no detrimental impact on Ms O’Neil’s career. She now holds the position of Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister
— Read on http://www.tommymckearney.com/blog-/stormont-where-incompetence.html
Rebecca Long Bailey Would Let Luciana Berger *and* Alistair Campbell back into the British Labour Party: RLB Supporters in Melt-Down.
British Labour Party Leadership Candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey lurches to the right – and she is supposed to be a left-winger! It is a dark day for the workers’ movement and all progressive forces in the British State.
Out of the Ashes…….
Thanks to Andrew Coates for the Information.
Jeremy Corbyn the British Labour Party Leader with Leadership Candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey in Happier Times
Chris Williamson says RLB is “Bending over backwards to facilitate right-wing saboteurs, while simultaneously doubling down against anti-racist socialists, who’ve been smeared by those selfsame saboteurs, suggests Labour isn’t a home for socialists nor a vehicle to deliver a modest socialist programme.”
Diary of a Corbyn Foot Soldier (February, 2020)
Diary of a Corbyn Foot Soldier (February, 2020)
https://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/diary-of-a-corbyn-foot-soldier-february-2020/
— Read on cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/diary-of-a-corbyn-foot-soldier-february-2020/
I highly recommend Michael Murray’s account – Days of Hope Started when Jeremy Corbyn was elected to the job of leading the British Labour Party.
The foot-soldier’s trek through a gloomy British political landscape ends on April 4 2020 when Jeremy Corbyn officially resigns from his leadership job, and Tony Blair style right-wingers take over the British Labour Party again.
Doctor Strangeloves are lining to press a nuclear button, and prepare the funeral rites of the British Labour Party, which has already lost its one-time electoral fortress in Scotland.
Dictionary definition of “foot soldier”: “…a dedicated low level follower…”
Contents:
*The Labour leadership election;
*The Trump “Plan” – the end of the 2 State solution to the Israel-Palestine question?;
*2020: 100 years of the Jewish Labour Movement/ Poele Zion.
*The Labour leadership election Read the rest of this entry »
Coronavirus has sparked a perfect storm of nationalism and financial speculation – Yanis Varoufakis, Former SYRIZA Finance Minister in Greece – THE GUARDIAN
Here is a fresh warning about the toxic combination of two different phenomenons – the CoVid-19 Health Crisis and a Financial Money Markets Storm, similar to the 2008 Crash.
The author is Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek Finance Minister sacked from a SYRIZA Government before it surrendered to the Austerians.
When the air is replete with inflammable materials, any given spark can cause a financial explosion, at any time.
Éric Toussaint of CADTM examines a worldwide stock market collapse.
Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the international spokesperson of the CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt) , and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.
He is the author of Debt System (2019), Bankocracy (2015); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago; “Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank, Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers”, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010. He has published extensively in this field. He is a member of the Fourth International leadership.
Nationalism and speculation have seldom had a better opportunity to combine forces as the one riding today on the coattails of Covid-19, known as the coronavirus. When Covid-19 leapfrogged from China to Italy, even ardent Europeanists normally appreciative of open borders joined the deafening calls to end freedom of movement across Europe’s national borders – a longstanding demand of nationalists. Meanwhile, the money men speculating on government debt are performing a classic flight from Italian to German government bonds, seeking the financial safety that only the continent’s hegemon can offer during any crisis. As if in a bid to remind us of the great contradiction of our times, Covid-19 is illuminating gloriously the freedom of money to transcend a borderless financial universe while humans remain as fenced in as ever.
Coronavirus has sparked a perfect storm of nationalism and financial speculation – THE GUARDIAN
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2020/03/09/coronavirus-has-sparked-a-perfect-storm-of-nationalism-and-financial-speculation-the-guardian/
— Read on www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2020/03/09/coronavirus-has-sparked-a-perfect-storm-of-nationalism-and-financial-speculation-the-guardian/
Dubai ruler organised kidnapping of his children, UK court rules | World news | The Guardian
The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, is an international criminal. Perhaps he will be the next monarch visiting President Michael D Higgins of Ireland in the Phoenix Park. It is time to stop grovelling to Royal Parasites. Read the rest of this entry »
Words on Des Bonass (died 26th September 2019), commemorative evening, Teachers Club, 29th February 2020.
Words on Des Bonass (died 26th September 2019), commemorative evening, Teachers Club, 29th February 2020.
Delivered by Des Derwin, on behalf of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions.
Des Bonass, a constant campaigner in a long life of activity in the most stirring and also the most unproductive political times, is missing, just missing, the extraordinary outcome of this month’s general election. The upending of a century of duopoly by Tweedle Fail and Tweedle Gael, a surge for change at the ballot box, the development of a left-right configuration, however confused, and a crisis in mainstream, establishment politics. ‘Who would have thunk it’? An overflow crowd outside a political meeting in Liberty Hall [25th February 2020] addressed in the biting wind by one the speakers who has come out to speak to them too. In the 21st century.
Well, such is the lot of many a life-long political activist. Things happen just after you are gone. But that is not the way we think and its not the way Des would have thought. Because he worked and acted in the here and now; he did what could be done at the time. And because he helped set the present in motion, and a lot of other big steps too in the past. And because we are this evening giving Des his rightful place in whatever is happening now, because of his contribution, and because he would have been no less a part of the big things, and the small less-noticed things, than he ever was. And finally, what is happening this month is – if indeed it keeps up and develops – only a small proportion of the eventual historical events that will be needed, and that will follow, and will probably be missed by most of us here too, to bring about the really momentous social change that Des Bonass stood for, and worked for and carried a clear vision of in his head, throughout his long trade union, republican and socialist life. Read the rest of this entry »
British Royal Vultures Visit Ireland in 2020
James Connolly
Unfortunately Irish President Michael D Higgins is among the grovellers in March 2020!
A correspondent notes : Actually it’s nice that welfare recipients are able to take a brief holiday. I suppose they’ll be sending holiday post cards of Ireland back to Benefits Street. And to think our budget strapped national broadcaster can spend resources reporting on these scroungers. It’s win-win all around.
The deepening standoff over the Irish Protocol
On 12 February a team from the European Commission met a group of Northern Ireland business organisations at the University of Ulster campus in Belfast.
— Read on www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2020/0229/1118290-brexit-blog-tony-connelly/
It is time for the Irish Radical Left to Get Real about Brexit.
EU Brexit Negotiator Michel Barnier Responds to the British Government Attempting to Waive the Rules – Perfidious Albion is playing ancient tricks :
“Barnier is becoming increasingly insistent on making the point,” says one source, “not least to Dublin, that if this thing doesn’t go well there are only two options for Ireland. One is the imposition of a land border, the other is exclusion from the single market.”
Plain Speaking About Torture – Ireland’s Hooded Men Betrayed
On Tuesday March 20 2018 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decided that in August 1971, during an Internment Operation in the six counties of Northern Ireland, the British State did not torture a group of “Hooded Men”. In plain language the ECHR says the British State did not, in this instance, deliberately inflict pain on captive persons.
Is that credible? Consider this :
Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband Linked With Torture in Sri Lanka
Gareth Pierce is a distinguished human rights lawyer who helped free Irish people wrongly convicted by the British government. She wrote: “Torture is the deliberate infliction of pain by a state on captive persons. It is prohibited and so is the use of its product. The UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment emphasises that there are no exceptional circumstances at all justifying its use” According to Pierce, the British, during the Mandate period in Palestine, in Kenya and Northern Ireland mastered the art of the “lesser” tradition of stress torture, forced standing, forced sitting and choking with water, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and suspension. “These tortures were clean and allowed for plausible denial not because they are less painful, but because they leave less of a visible mark.” Nonetheless, these tortures produce agonising muscle pain. The kidneys eventually shut down.
Amnesty International describes what the British State did to the Hooded Men in 1971 :
Amnesty International comments on a “disappointing” ruling
The detained men were interned in 1971, and subjected to sustained interrogation by the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary, involving the ‘five techniques’ of hooding, stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation, and deprivation of food and water. These were combined with physical assaults and death threats, which the Court did not consider in its 1978 ruling.
Amnesty International’s full statement is, as Oscar Wilde might say, disappointing.
This ECHR ruling is careless – those six judges who left the British State off the hook don’t even know what torture looks like.
The surviving hooded men will not give up. Why should they? They were tortured.
Gerry Adams and the Sons of former Portlaoise Prison Officer Brian Stack, Killed by the IRA in 1983
Many of my friends may be surprised, but I think Gerry Adams is telling the truth about his encounters with the sons of Brian Stack, a Portlaoise Prison Officer killed by the IRA in 1983.
Austin Stack probably gave the names of alleged 1983 IRA killers of his father Brian Stack (a prison officer) to the Sinn Féin President, not the other way around. That explains the Gerry Adams email to Garda boss Nóirín O’Sullivan on this matter.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 