UK Public Not As Stupid As Boris Looks

Hitler once said if you are going to tell a lie, make it a big one which is a lesson people like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and the guy at the local garage have taken on board but there is another quote i like even more by a lady on the train this morning, 'They are so stupid that even they must realise how stupid they are'.
She was obviously referring to Savid Javid's decision yesterday to try and distract attention away from the regular piss up's in Downing Street by throwing Covid-19 restrictions, and therefore us, under a bus.
The lie the Conservatives are hoping that if they say enough times people will believe is that they have been proven correct to not bring in restrictions over the Christmas and New Year period and now because of that success, they can lift all of the restrictions and life can return to as normal as it can after a pandemic.
On the 1st December in the UK there were reported 48,374 positive cases, 123 deaths and 7,381 in hospital and yesterdays figures were 108,069 positive cases, 359 deaths and 18,979 in hospital so i'm not sure what they are using as a measure of success but more than double the number of positive cases and almost trebling the number of deaths and hospitisations does not scream success to me and certainly not time to life the restrictions.
You would need to be all kinds of gullible to not see that this is an attempt to distract from Boris Johnson's self inflicted disaster and i have yet to discuss it with anyone who doesn't believe that is exactly what this is and as for Sajid Javids insistence that Omicron is 'in retreat' and they can do this because the 'data allows it', that's not what the experts are saying.
The British Medical Association said it 'risks creating a false sense of security' which will 'inevitably increase transmission' and the NHS Confederation said 'now is not the time for complacency about this virus".
The NEU teachers union called it 'premature' while the UK'ss largest care home operators said they would ignore the Government and defy any attempt to weaken self-isolation rules while even the the Department of Health and Social Care said it was 'confusing' and Professor Martin McKee of the Independent Sage group said he was 'worried' by it while another Sage scientist, Prof Stephen Reicher, just summed it up with 'crazy'.
Boris said he would he would rather see bodies pile high than take the country into another lock-down and it seems he may get his wish, and to end on another quote: 'There's not a pill you can take; there's not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever' unlike the old and the vulnerable who are not forever but will be prematurely thrown under the bus, into a Crematoriums oven or into a hole in the ground
to save the PM's neck

Since When Did Labour Take In Right Wing Idiots?

Usually, the Conservatives losing a loony right winger is a cause for celebration but why has Bury South's Christian Wakeford come over to the Socialist Labour Party? Socialists are all about Equality and fairness which is the exact opposite of the Conservatives who are all about self and greed and to hell to everyone else so on the face of it i can see nothing we would agree with him about.
Maybe he has changed his mind and realised that right wing policies are downright awful and spiteful but that side of the political fence don't normally have such a change in their shriveled up hearts and the They Work For You website shows he has a voting record any right wing imbecile would be proud of
In the two years since he became a Member of Parliament, he has voted voted three times against measures to prevent climate change, three times against measures to reduce tax avoidance and even voted against enabling domestic abuse victims to have access to benefits and is anti-EU, voting for a stricter asylum system.  
This is not even close to being a voting record of someone fit to be a Labour representative as the Momentum campaign group pointed out saying: 'He should be nowhere near the Labour Party'.
Why Wakeford would want to join our ideologically opposite side i don't know, there are other right wing parties he could join, but more confusing is why Keir Starmer would welcome such a revolting hard right MP to our Socialist Bosoms, unless he is planning to sack him and call a by-election in Bury South but that seems unlikely so bit of an own goal their Keir, we don't want him.

To Boldly Go To The Shetland Islands (Or Cornwall)

Around 360 Million years ago Great Britain was lying at the Global equator which would have been the perfect time to develop a space launch site but we missed that opportunity and are now situated 3,826.26 miles north of it which is not ideal for slinging things into space which is why in the 60s we set one up in Australia but gave up after the very first launch.
With companies like Virgin, SpaceX and Blue Origin now joining the big boys of NASA, ESA, CNSA and Roscosmos firing up the Space exploration programs, they all need somewhere to be launched from and Britain is joining in by building Space Ports to launch rockets carrying satellites into space.
The people of the Shetland Island in Scotland and Cornwall are the first to wake up to find a launch site on the doorsteps but Wales will soon have one plonked into Snowdonia with four more being built around the UK and they are all expected to become operational in 2022.
The UK Government have ambitions to capture 10% of the global space market, worth £3.8 billion to the UK economy, by 2030.
Due to Britain's northern latitude, our location provides excellent access to polar orbits around the Earth
although it is a bit worrying though that rockets are delicate instruments that need to be launched in ideal weather conditions with no strong winds and rain and we are placing a few in Scotland, has any of the planning people ever been to Scotland? Rain and strong winds are it's natural climate!
Anyway, my CV is already in at Spaceport Cornwall and the Shetland Spaceport and i have already been practicing my counting backwards from 10 so beam me up Scotty.

ONS Covid -19 Stats Breakdown

The Government may have reported 150,000 Covid-19 deaths within 28 days of a positive test but their own Statistical agency, the Office of National Statistics, put the number of at 175,000 for all deaths where the virus was mentioned on the death certificate.
The ONS gives a useful breakdown of all Coronavirus deaths so what does the data tell us about the unfortunate 175,000 people whose deaths have been recorded to date?

Age
122,500 or 70% of the deaths occurred in those aged 75 or older meanwhile, deaths among those aged 44 and younger made up under 2% of the total, or 3500 deaths.

Vaccination status
For the first 10 months of 2021, for every 1 death of a vaccinated person, 28 deaths were for the unvaccinated

Gender
Men made up 94,433 or 54% of total coronavirus deaths.

Geographical
The death rate was in the north-west of the UK and among the four nations of the UK, Wales recorded the highest death rate.

Deaths by occupation
Male and female workers in the care and leisure sectors and other public-facing jobs experiencing higher death rates

Deaths by ethnicity
The ONS shows that minority ethnic people were at a higher risk of contracting and dying from Covid-19 compared with their white counterparts with the mortality rate was highest among black men, then black women and then South Asian groups before white men and then white women.

Stop Asking For Boris To Resign Labour Party!

It was a amazingly fortuitous piece of timing that just as Party-gate was breaking and his head was head was being called for on a spike by his own side, someone in Boris Johnson's close family went down with Covid-19 so he had to isolate for 7 days.
Far be it from me to suggest that the first thing he did when he got home from his half arsed apology and grilling in the House of Commons was to grab one of his kids crayons and scrawl a second line onto a Lateral Flow Test but it has conveniently kept him away from TV cameras and journalists for a week which would generally be a good thing but i'm not even sure why he is isolating.
The official NHS guidance is if you live with or have been in contact with someone with COVID-19, you will not need to self-isolate if you are fully vaccinated and are just required to do daily rapid lateral flow tests (1 a day for 7 days) to protect yourself and others.
He is obviously fully vaccinated so maybe he is just choosing to stay away from everyone in an abundance of caution but that is unlikely as many of his colleagues have gone down with it and he carried on and he was quite keen to 'let the bodies pile up' rather than stop people working previously so maybe he has Covid-19 again, in which case we should probably be told.
Whatever the reason his face is not gurning out of my TV Screen, i wish Keir Starmer would stop calling for his resignation, i am not one to quote Napoleon that often but his 'Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake' quote is perfect for this situation.
As a Labour supporter, i don't want him to go, the next election is still two years away and i want him to stay bumbling around being awful and acting as a constant reminder to people that while this Johnson Government couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, they did a great job of organising many of them in number 10.
Labour is 10 points ahead in the polls so just leave him there and don't give the Tories the new guy bounce, shut up Kier!!  

Is Russia Eyeing UKraine?

 People are asking if Russian forces are getting ready to invade Ukraine and considering that there are 100,000 Russian troops and artillery circling Ukraine it seems like it and the rhetoric coming out of Moscow warning of military measures and saying its patience with the West is at an end and the US is warning of unprecedented sanctions isn't helping to calm down the situation.  
So what’s behind the conflict between Russia and Ukraine? After the 2014 revolution, the Ukraine chose to break away from Moscow’s political orbit and the Ukraine has been making eyes at the EU NATO and that Russia s main beef is that would put NATO right in Russia's back yard which Putin said would cross their red line.
Putin has promised 'military-technical measures' which are widely expected to mean deploying troops to Cuba and Venezuela in America's backyard while America have said that direct conflict with American troops is not on the table but they would impose unprecedented sanctions if Moscow gives the troops the nod to enter Ukraine.
The US are warning that they have intelligence that Russia are preparing to fabricate claims of an imminent Ukrainian attack on Russian forces as a pretext for invasion and has provided Russian passports to 500,000 people in the eastern rebel-held areas of Ukraine which they could use to justify any action as protecting it's own citizens.
Whether Biden and Putin are the modern day equivalent of John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev but it has a ring of the  Cuban missile crisis  which came to an end when Moscow withdrew its missiles in exchange for Washington removing US missiles from Turkey and hopefully it will have the same peaceful solution.

Celebrating All Asses Today

It probably won't come as a surprise that the early Christians tagged their guy into most Roman Festivals such as Christmas and Easter and today is another where they saw the Pagan celebration of Cervulus where they would dress up as animals and dance through the streets and thought, we should have some of that so created the Feast of the Ass to celebrate all the donkey-related stories in the Bible.
Now you probably think there can't be that many donkey stories in the Book but there are 72 including the story in Genesis where Abraham asks two young men to keep an eye on his ass while he goes for a bit of a pray. Later they 'laded every man's ass' and then there is the story of Issachar who is a strong ass and Moses was no weakling in the ass department because he put his wife and his sons upon his ass
and took them to Egypt.
There is the famous bit in Exodus about not coveting other people asses and how anyone trespassing for ass 'shall come before the judges' so they were pretty strict on ass trespassing in those days although it does say later that you can rest you ass on the seventh day.
In Numbers Moses tells God that he has not taken, nor hurt, any ass although Balaam did, he smote it a few times with a firm stick but God wasn't so happy about that, Numbers 22:28 shows he sent an Angel to 'open the mouth of the ass'.
Deuteronomy asks that 'What shalt thou do with asses?' and then answers it own question by saying thou should  'lift them up again' but no plowing else the ass shall be: 'violently taken away' so leave the ass plowing to another day Christians.
The book of Joshua 6:21 is not so kind and tells of when all asses in the city were utterly destroyed but they get their own back in Judges when Samson and his ass slay a thousand men.
In Samuel, someone called Jesse took an ass laden with bread to Saul and one person in the book took his ass to the King for his lame servant although in Kings-1 13:13, a king told his sons to saddle his ass to ride and whilst out riding came across a lion who respectfully left his ass untouched.
Job shows that all the wild ass was let loose and in Hosea, Ephraim only has a wild ass for company but they had no problem in Zecharia, they had a plague of ass and in John, Jesus finds a young ass so there you have it, the Bible is full of asses so celebrate the Feast of the Ass, i am reliably informed that Sticky Buns are in order.

Prince Andrew And Problem Of Paying A Settlement

Prince Andrews latest attempt to play the get out of trial free card and avoid facing Virginia Giuffre’s sexual abuse lawsuit has been rejected by the judge and now he faces a reputation damaging civil case in America.
As much as Andrew and the Royal's want the case to go away, it is now full steam ahead to the court but Andrew could delay proceedings by tying events up with an Appeal which will just keep him and the accusations in the spotlight for years to come.
As a court case will trawl through Andrew's history, which could prove very uncomfortable for someone who reveled in his nickname of 'Randy Andy', he could just refuse to testify but that would very much go against him with the jury and as a potential criminal case could follow it would not be a wise move.
The lawyers are now saying that the only possible way to make it all go away very quickly would be a settlement where both sides could agree to an amount that would bring proceedings to a close without a decision needing to made in a court of law but while that may be acceptable in America, Brits see it in a very different way and judge it as as a tacit admissions of guilt.
Legally there is no admission of guilt attached to an out of court settlement but to many it is paying for the problem, and a likely guilty verdict, to go away due to the accused holding a very weak case they wouldn't win in court, if they had a strong case they were confident of winning then why make any payment to the accuser at all?
If the Prince does take that route and pays out hundreds of thousands to Virginia Giuffre, he will forever be, in British eyes at least, the guy who sexually abused a minor and then bought her silence to avoid prosecution.

Can The Queen Sack Boris Johnson?

A question i have been asked three times now is can the Queen remove Boris Johnson, the man we are referring to, for now at least, as the Prime Minister?
I always answer that i doubt it due to antiquated rules established around the time of the Magna Carta and the whole Oliver Cromwell thing but i thought i had better checked so i looked up the House of Commons Library which say's no she can't sack him but there was a but...
While the Prime Minister may be head of the government appointed by The Queen, there are certain residual powers retained by the monarch from bygone days where if the UK Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence in the house, and then 14 days later loses another one, it should sound the starting whistle on a general election and the matter is put to the electorate to resolve.
If after the two votes of no confidence, if the Prime Minister refuses to resign, then the Queen can't sack him but can invite another political leader from the same party or the shadow Government to try to form a government and then if they win a vote of confidence from the members in the Houses of Commons, the Queen swears in the new Prime Minister replacing the old one.
This leaves the ultimate power of appointing and dismissing Prime Ministers in the hands of the elected representatives in Parliament and the Queen therefore can't do anything until a second vote of No Confidence has been tabled and succeeded and only then if Boris refuses to pack up his bags and leave Downing Street.
It is unlikely the Labour Party will pushing for a vote of no-confidence, it is in their favour to leave a hugely unpopular leader on the opposition benches hemorrhaging votes so it will probably come from the Conservative Party itself and the 1922 Committee who can call a vote of no-confidence if 15% of Conservative MPs (54) send a letter requesting one.
This will stop a General Election they would probably lose and keep a Conservative Government in place until at least the next election in 2024.

Bring Your Own Booze Party

Another day and another leaked report of a Party at Number 10 while prosecuting the rest of us for it, this time an email on 20 May 2020 to 'make the most of the lovely weather' and 'bring your own booze' for a knees-up for in the garden of Downing Street for 100 of Boris's closest friends.
The email was sent 55 minutes after the end of the live televised coronavirus briefing when Oliver Dowden reminded people they were only allowed to meet one other person from outside their household, as long as it was an outdoor public place and two-metre social distancing was maintained but it is believed that around 40 staff ultimately attended the event that evening, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife, Carrie, showing up, according to eyewitness reports.
Senior civil servant Sue Gray is currently investigating other alleged lock-down breaches by the government so this is another one to add to the list along with the May 2020 'wine and a cheeseboard' party, the November staff members gathering and the November leaving party for a No 10 aide and the December Christmas Quiz for No 10 staff and the one that started it all on 18th December which Johnson vehemently denied happening until a video emerged of his press secretary Allegra Stratton joking about it.
Johnson now has the line that 'we must wait for the inquiry to do it's job' to brush it all under the carpet for now but at some point he will find out that a potential 100-person boozy gathering while telling people to watch their family members die on an iPad then buried them with only six mourners at graveside funerals was not a wise move.