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Let’s have another look at Labour Party links to those “crackpots” at the pro-British DUP, the Northern Irish party that articulates a sense of discontent and dissatisfaction with Westminster and the Peace Protest. The DUP is the only mainstream party to oppose the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
The Boston Globe told its readers in 2003 that the Good Friday Agreement was “one of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy triumphs”. The DUP were ‘on the wrong side of histoy’.
Which bring us toWikiLeaks – yes, I know – which has published a cable it claims was sent to Hillary Clinton on May 7 2010. In it Sydney Blumenthal, an unofficial adviser to Ms Clinton, reportedly headlined the email to the then US Secretary of State “H: HERE IT IS! WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON. SID.” The sub-head added: “The Downing Street meeting today.”
Gordon [PM Gordon Brown] is doing whatever he can to hold on to power. Shaun [Northern Ireland secretary Shaun Woodward], for his part, is working on an economic package for Northern Ireland to win support from the DUP and other parties for Labour—a package to be proposed in the Queen’s Speech.
The DUP, those crackpots – albeit ones voted for in a free and legal election – were in the near past Labour’s great hope.
Today’s Radio 4 chatter about social media connecting with yoof was mind blowing. Replace social media for ‘newspapers’, ‘magazines’, ‘John Lennon’, ‘football’ or ‘TV’ and we were once more being told the cool kids have outgrown the old ways and are rebelling.
Our parents don’t understand us, man, they cry. Only they do because they’ve tracked your iphone and follow you on Instagram under an assumed name. And the hubristic people you voted for are older than your dad.
You’re not a rebel marching on the citadel, writing searing protest music and creating a rosy-fingered dawn. You’re not Spartacus. You’re a nerd with a Vodafone contract.
In 2012 Moneyball author Michael Lewis gave addressed Princeton University. He tells the gilded youth arranged before him that they “owe a debt to the unlucky”.
I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.
Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.
This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.
This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I’m sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.
All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.
Of course, cookies make you fat. You should thank the greedy sods for prolonging your lives.
As Anorak forms a new political party – three point plan for success: Hire a Santa Claus look-alike to front the campaign and woo the cool kids with promises of free stuff; Appear strong and stable by repeating the same line over and over and talk about winning for the sake of winning; Demand more voting until the thicko electorate vote for what I want – a word on Ignacio Echeverria, the 39-year-old Spanish lawyer working at HSBC murdered by Islamists in the London terror attack.
The Spanish Government said Ignacio showed “solidarity and bravery in defending a helpless person”. He did. He was an ordinary civilian out enjoying life. But our freedom is the terrorists’ front line. How we react to their threat defines us. Ignacio’s response was heroic.
He’d been out skateboarding near Tate Modern when he came across a terrible sight. Instead of freezing or running away when he saw a defenceless woman being stabbed, Ignacio Echeverria ran towards her. He turned his skateboard, an object of freedom and fun, into a weapon and laid into the attackers. He didn’t stand a chance. They murdered him.
The Spanish government has awarded Ignacio its highest honour for bravery, the Grand Cross of the Order of Civil Merit. We can all do our bit for Ignacio by never forgetting him, because Ignacio Echeverria epitomises the courage, decency, fight and essential human goodness we must cherish and celebrate. No honour for him and the other heroes of that terrible night is too great. They represent the best of us.
Politicians all want to censor the web. CapX writes:
It took us many centuries, a lot of effort and much expended blood and gore to get to this place where we are free – at liberty and ruled by the law, not the whims of people nor the rage of the mob. That we have those who would snatch them from us worries me far less than what our rulers will do to us and our liberty in the name of protecting us from those bearded nutters.
Just wait until the next generation of politicians arrive in Westminster from our elite universities. Spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings tells us: “The more prestigious universities, those ranked highest in popular league tables, are nearly always the most censorious; the few green-ranking institutions are generally less highly esteemed.”
The link between academic success and a fondness for censorship is more than just a mindset. It is precisely because they are the academic achievers that students at elite universities demand freedom from speech…They’ve learned that language constructs reality, and that ‘words that wound’ can inflict ‘spirit murder’ on those who, according to their gender, ethnicity or sexual identity, are assumed to be forever powerless. The students who excel in elite universities today have come to embody the vulnerability they see in others.
They don’t trust us. They moralise about our choices, thoughts and movements. They pick technical arguments about what should be banned and permitted over debating the root cause of the problem that leads people to become Islamist killers. In the minds of these superior prudes and knowing gatekeepers, the mere act of looking becomes a gateway to crime.
Looking for London geezers after the London Bridge attack, the media spots Peckham’s Roy Larner, 47, who when confronted with the murderous Islamists told them: “Fuck you, I’m Millwall.”
Larner decided he needed to “take the piss out of these bastards”. He continued to shut “Fuck you, I’m Millwall” as he was stabbed eight times. Roy tells the Sun:
“They had these long knives and started shouting about Allah. Then it was, ‘Islam, Islam, Islam’. Like an idiot I shouted back at them…. I took a few steps towards them and said, ‘Fuck you, I’m Millwall’. So they started attacking me.”
Roy Larner is a top geezer. Today we should all be a bit Millwall.
Worse than video nasties, scourge of the 1980s, sex and trolls are YouTube videos possessed of a power to radicalise the viewer, transforming a normal bloke surfing the web for Wiggles songs and old episodes of Play For Today into a mass murderer. No circumspection, reflection or deliberation. To see is to do.
I’ve watched plenty of extremist videos and heard some dodgy speeches over the years. I even watched a couple of videos online this last week of extremist Rabbis preaching against rational and modern thought as well as homosexuality. But I didn’t become a backwards thinking fanatic.
Why do some people want to say “was radicalised” (a passive thing), rather than “chose to become an extremist and murderer”?
Passivity reduces the killer’s free will to dust. He’s one step closer to becoming a ‘vulnerable’ victim. And – boy – do Islamists love being victims. The actual victims – the people murdered – are reduced, their innocence linked to the killer’s vulnerability, the good boy or good girl from a good family who was ‘groomed’ online by powers too strong to resist. We are corralled into looking not only at the victim and saying “There but for the grace of god…”, but empathising with the killer, too. And you can’t blame a victim, so the narrative goes. You can’t get angry at a victim.
Radicalisation doesn’t come out of the blue or from a YouTube snuff movie or tweet. It’s rooted in the Islamists’ antagonism towards the prevailing culture and a search for a form of aggrandised, pristine identity they can embrace and be defined by. You might call them fascists.
Should London be more like Texas? One writer makes the comparison:
In the heart of the nation’s capital, at near-maximum terror alert, with the densest national concentration of armed officers, the attackers had 8-10 minutes to rampage unimpeded before the armed police turned up and whacked them in short order.
Contrast this with the May 2015 attack in Garland, TX where the heavily armed gunmen just made it out of their car, managed to slightly wound a security officer, and then promptly expired in a hail of bullets. I can’t help but notice the complete lack of follow-on terror attacks in Texas since then; presumably word has got around the terror community that it’s a poor choice of location. (Glasgow is probably number 2 on the do-not-terrorise list after the terrifyingly vicious response of the residents.).
I can’t help but think that the complete dis-arming of the UK civilian population is not working out quite as well as most of its proponents expected.
These are grim and sobering times for the US. On back-to-back days last week, two videos emerged showing police officers shooting black men – Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota – apparently without provocation. A day later, Micah Johnson, a black former soldier, gunned down police at a demonstration in Dallas, killing five officers. During the standoff with police, Johnson said he was upset about the police shootings, and ‘wanted to kill white people, especially white officers’.
In 2016, Scotland Yard announced plans to increase the number of armed police in the capital by 600, bringing the total to almost 3,000.
What do the police think?
The poll, by the Metropolitan Police Federation, reveals that 75% of officers surveyed feel all Metropolitan Police officers should be issued with Taser whilst on duty.
Just under 11,000 Met Police officers responded to the survey on Taser and Firearms, which ran for three weeks in January.
As well as indicating that more officers should carry a Taser, the results show that only 6% of officers feel there are currently an “adequate” amount of gun carrying officers in the capital.
The force is currently increasing the number of Authorised Firearms Officers in London.
Results also show that the largest number of respondents – 43.6% – believe there “should be more specialist firearms officers in the Metropolitan Police Service but not all officers should be routinely armed.”
Other results in the survey show:
• 57% of officers who responded said they would be prepared to carry a gun if the Commissioner and the Home Secretary made a decision that all MPS officers should routinely carry a firearm whilst on duty.
• A little over one in four respondents (26%) said that they believe all police officers should be routinely armed.
• 12% of officers surveyed said under no circumstances would they carry a firearm whilst on duty.
• 8.2% of respondents said they would resign from the MPS rather than accept an order to routinely carry a firearm whilst on duty. 86.5% said they would not.
When France was attacked by Islamist extremists, journalist Bertrand Dicale wrote for the Bataclan website. His words resonate in light of the attacks in Manchester and London. Last night at One Love Manchester, the benefit concert held in the wake of the Manchester attack to remember the victims of the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert on 22 May, joy and love shone through. It was fabulous.
On November 13 2015, Islamists attacked Paris, murdering 89 people on a night out at the Bataclan.
Here’s Dicale:
Several times in its very long history, the Bataclan had to be reborn and, in November of 2016, it is still reborn.
By reopening one year after the November 13 attacks, the Bataclan confirms what it has always been: a reflection of the culture and the art of living of Paris, whatever the events, the crises, the upheavals this city. This theater has experienced revolutions, chills, aesthetic quarrels and storms. It was glorious, it went bankrupt, it was forgotten, it came back…
And, as Paris was able to overcome its pain, its anger and its fear, the Bataclan would not die. It is born again, with more fervor and more humility than ever: it is to host concerts and shows, to give pleasure, to share the party. It is not much, although we all know that it is one of the freedoms guaranteed to us by living in a democracy.
He concludes:
The Bataclan could only resume the course of its history – generous, audacious, passionate. Free.
After London Bridge, the news is that there will be crackdown on the internet. Freedom of speech must be curtailed. Encryption must be done away with.
Author Douglas Adams go it. In 1999 he wrote:
“I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet’. They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea’, though each of these was new and controversial in their day.”
In the unseemly haste to be first with the ‘breaking news’, MSNBC says the terror attack on London Bridge and nearby Borough market took place in… Luton. There was an incident in Vauxhall – which is just up the road from London Bridge – but it had nothing to do with the slaughter.
It’s not fake news. It’s just crap reporting.
This is why we need newspapers and the nightly news to make sense of all the info that comes belching in across social media.
“We were throwing bottles, chairs, stools, anything we could get. A stool hit one of them on the head,” says Gerard Vowls, an eye-witness to the attack on London Bridge and Borough Market.
“They were running up going ‘this is for Allah’, they ran up and stabbed this girl, I don’t know how many times, ten times, maybe 15. She was going ‘help me, help me’ and I could not do anything. I tried to help her, I threw something at them. There was a bike on the floor, I tried to pick up the chair but it was locked to it, to throw it at them, to get them away from her…
“They kept coming to try to stab me … they were stabbing everyone. Evil, evil people.”
A chef from Fish restaurant tells us: “I saw two men with big knives downstairs outside Roast. They were stabbing people. The guy with the knife was killing two people. We were shouting ‘stop, stop’ and people threw chairs at them.”
Gerard and the other people fighting back make me proud to be a Londoner. The Islamists murdering people enjoying a night out in London are scum. Police shot three attackers dead.
Owen Evans was there. He says: “Then they told us to leave the pub and to run, and a policeman standing outside with a gun was shouting, ‘Go, get the fuck out.’ We ran down the street, turned left at the Market Porter, than ran down the road and away. We got to the South Bank and then waited ages for a tube, and eventually got home.”
The police make me proud to be a Londoner.
Politicians do not make me proud. To suspend the election campaign so close to the vote looks like capitulation.
John Noakes, hymned for his stint as presenter on BBC TV’s Blue Peter children’s show, has died. Given his life of risk-taking for telly, making it to 83 was no small triumph of skill. As the Times notes:
He also complained that he had not been insured for the dangerous stunts he performed over the years. Baxter denied this, saying: “They were insured. That is a myth. Also, we gave them the absolute top whack we could.” That said, in the early days of health and safety a corporate risk assessment for the BBC was understood to read simply: “John may die.”
If you think it’s a hate crime, then it is a hate crime. The Mail has news on hate crimes in Manchester, where many of the people injured in last week’s slaughter are being treated for life-threatening injuries.
To understand the current situation in Europe, we have to look back to the middle of the last century. After the Second World War, the international community gathered together and launched the United Nations. The member states of this newly formed body then proceeded to draft and adopt the non-binding yet foundational Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and a series of binding human rights treaties, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1966) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
During the drafting of these three documents, the issue of free speech was furiously debated. Two opposing views emerged. On the one hand, there were the Western liberal democracies—the United States, Canada, and Western Europe—all of which argued for strong free speech protections.
At the debates, US delegate Eleanor Roosevelt said it was “extremely dangerous” to ban hate speech because “any criticism of public or religious authorities might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred”.
And so to the news that hate speech is something the police are onto. It’s your moral duty to report it.
Greater Manchester Police bosses said the number of reports had risen from 28 to 56 since Salman Abedi set off a nail bomb at Manchester Arena.
Chief Inspector Ian Hopkins called for the city to stand up against hate and ensure any incidents are quickly reported to the police.
He said: ‘Manchester has come together this week but it is important we continue to stand together here in Greater Manchester against the hate-filled views we have seen from small minorities of the community. We had 28 reports of hate crime on Monday, which is the average, but it rose to 56 reports on Wednesday, although we cannot directly link that to the attack.
Salman Abedi murdered 22 people. He maimed 120 more. Hate crime has not yet reach that level of barbarity.
After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. And so it has been after the barbarism in Manchester. In response to the deaths of more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande gig, in response to the massacre of children enjoying pop music, people effectively say: ‘All you need is love.’ The disparity between these horrors and our response to them, between what happened and what we say, is vast. This has to change.
Do we want freedom? Then we must want the freedom to offending saying what we think and having tho opinions held up to scrutiny.
Intelligence officers have identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in Britain as potential terrorist attackers, it emerged yesterday.
The scale of the challenge facing the police and security services was disclosed by Whitehall sources after criticism that multiple opportunities to stop the Manchester bomber had been missed.
About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services. The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorised as posing a “residual risk”.
Manchester Attack News: the BBC tell us: “Police find ‘potentially suspicious items'”.
How is that possible? How can something be potentially suspicious? It’s either suspect or it isn’t.
The trouble with a voracious news cycle is that the police PR departments feel the need to make constant updates. So we get the news: “Potentially suspicious items’ found in Wigan street.”
Greater Manchester Police have said they found “potentially suspicious items” during a raid in Wigan today…
The police statement said: “A house in Wigan was raided this morning and is currently being searched. Potentially suspicious items were found at the address and a large cordon has been put in place as [bomb disposal teams] make an assessment.
“We have a number of officers on the ground and are evacuating people as a matter of precaution as public safety is paramount to our investigation.
“We are working with the local authority to accommodate those who have been evacuated.”
Just hours after the attack, feminist writer and speaker Jaclyn Friedman tweeted: ‘Here is what the coverage will not say: targeting an Ariana Grande concert is targeting young women. This is a violent act of misogyny.’ …
The argument that the bombing was ‘a massive act of gender-based violence’ has continued. The headline of one article, ‘The bombing at a Manchester Ariana Grande show was an attack on girls and women’, is as simplistic as it is inaccurate. Most obviously, it overlooks the fact that men died in the attack too – fathers, brothers and boyfriends attending the concert or waiting to take people home. The author goes on to explain how ‘Grande has advanced a renegade, self-reflexive sexuality that’s threatening to the established heteropatriarchal order’. Rubbish. Grande’s Nickelodeon cuteness combines bunny ears with pink balloons. She’s loved by teen girls because her sexuality is safe and fun and threatens no one.
And it keeps coming.
“It’s not Muslims or people with mental-health problems who are most likely to kill you in a terrorist attack – it’s men’” –Independent.
Why Manchester Bomber Targeted Girls – Rolling Stone.
During Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour, Abedi gave the world a sick reminder of the dangers of being a woman in public in 2017, attacking largely female concertgoers for doing nothing but enjoying themselves while listening to music.
These girls and women weren’t just listening to any music, either – this was feminist music.
Williams nails it: “In presenting terrorism as part of a broader gender war, feminism ultimately reduces mass murder to just another example of everyday sexism.”
As the engaging and insightful Liz Gerard writes, the way the Press responded to the attack in Manchester “demonstrates the intrinsic honesty and desire to tell the story that draws most journalists to the trade.
The papers we see every day are the results of hours of debate, discussion, orders from on high. Stories and pictures are often chosen to press an agenda – be it for Left or Right. But when a story like the Manchester bombing breaks late, true journalistic instincts kick in. The “agenda” goes out of the window.
All those hours spent pondering how to portray Corbyn in the worst light, May in the best (or vice-versa) are as nothing when real life intrudes. You just tell the story.
Unless you work for the Express, of course. Then dementia still runs in the family. But on this occasion that’s about lack of investment, rather (I hope) than incompetence.
Today the politicisers will be back in action. The events in Manchester will be spun to suit the agenda. Tomorrow’s papers won’t have this morning’s rough honesty.
The British are responding to the news that the country is on a near-war footing and the threat is critical in the best way possible: with humour and ridicule. #BritishThreatLevels is firing up on Twitter. And it’s brilliant.
Parcel gets delivered to the neighbour meaning you have to speak to them #BritishThreatLevels
Manchester native Morrissey has shared his view on the slaughter in his home city. Twenty-two people went to a pop concert and didn’t come home. Many more are very badly injured. All around us we are told not to hate, to watch our words and police our thoughts. But if we can’t rage when our children are murdered, when can we get angry? If we can’t howl and surge with anger’s raw energy, we might as well give up. Are you outraged that innocent children excitedly leaving a fun concert were slaughtered? You are. I can tell. You’re breathing.
Morrissey speaks for many when he writes on Facebook:
Celebrating my birthday in Manchester as news of the Manchester Arena bomb broke. The anger is monumental.
For what reason will this ever stop?
Theresa May says such attacks “will not break us”, but her own life is lived in a bullet-proof bubble, and she evidently does not need to identify any young people today in Manchester morgues. Also, “will not break us” means that the tragedy will not break her, or her policies on immigration. The young people of Manchester are already broken – thanks all the same, Theresa. Sadiq Khan says “London is united with Manchester”, but he does not condemn Islamic State – who have claimed responsibility for the bomb. The Queen receives absurd praise for her ‘strong words’ against the attack, yet she does not cancel today’s garden party at Buckingham Palace – for which no criticism is allowed in the Britain of free press. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an “extremist”. An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?
In modern Britain everyone seems petrified to officially say what we all say in private. Politicians tell us they are unafraid, but they are never the victims. How easy to be unafraid when one is protected from the line of fire. The people have no such protections.
Morrissey
23 May 2017.
Agree. Agree?
The Guardian does not agree. It calls Morrissey “controversial”. The best poetry and music from Manchester often is. The Guardian has previously praised Morrissey for his “barbed repartee” that made watching his shows one of the paper’s top things to do over Christmas. Bring the family. Morrissey is right-on.
But today Morrissey is on the wrong side. Calling him controversial is not meant as a compliment. His words have offended. The paper unpacks his open letter to prove it false. The Guardian says MPs are not safe. Morrissey is wrong. We read: “The MP Jo Cox was murdered by a rightwing extremist last June.” The murder of Jo Cox, a respected and committed MP engaging with the people she represented, was abhorrent. But is it right to use her death to stymie debate and free speech?
Jo Cox was murdered by a depraved killer, whose motives were swiftly co-opted to further the Remain side of the Brexit debate (Jo Cox was for staying in the EU; her killer was against everything she stood for). The message was clear: a vote for Brexit was to align yourself with a maniac. A vote for Brexit was to show a cruel disrespect to the memory of Jo Cox.
Writing in the Remain-campaigning Guardian, Polly Tonybee laid it on thick. Beneath the headline “The mood is ugly”, she wrote:
This attack on a public official cannot be viewed in isolation…
It’s been part of a noxious brew, with a dangerous anti-politics and anti-MP stereotypes fomented by leave and their media backers mixed in…
Rude, crude, Nazi-style extremism is mercifully rare. But the leavers have lifted several stones.
So much for debate. Leave voters were insects.
Moving on from Jo Cox – and letting her rest in peace until they need her to endorse another cause – the Guardian continues to study Morrissey:
Morrissey cited government immigration policy among his complaints saying the prime minister would never change her immigration policy in the light of the attacks. It is believed that the bomber named by police, Salman Abedi, was British-born and from Manchester.
The coward’s parents – it is to be believed – are from Libya. Is that relevant? Surely it’s worth mentioning. Or is the conversation now – and I’ll borrow from Tonybee’s lexicon of enlightenment – so “noxious” that to talk of immigration, to even mention the word, cloaks the speaker’s argument in a black shirt? That question is to everyone – not just sub-human pests who creep and crawl.
He also appeared to suggest that a desire to adhere to “political correctness” was behind politicians’ unwillingness to specify that the attack was the work of an Islamist extremist, rather than simply an extremist. The same claim is often made by people on the far-right.
Talk of immigration and you’re a neo-Nazi. You’re a race riot in waiting. So shut up. Go on Twitter and state how the perverted actions of people who destroy children at a pop concert will not bow us and change our liberal, diverse and raucous way of life. But hold your tongue. Free speech is only worth championing if you agree on what is right and proper conversation. Get an official T-shirt. Light a torch. Be in agreement. Keep in step. Stick to the party line. Don’t be a Nazi. The irony is sharp.
One music site manages to go a step further and link everything “stupid” Morrissey said to – yep – Brexit:
Morrissey has had a long history of saying more-than-questionable things about immigration in Britain, and last year called the Brexit decision “magnificent.”
It was. Brexit was a triumph of democracy. It wasn’t a victory for Nigel Farage’s narrow views, monoculture and racism. The collapsing UKIP vote tells us that. Brexit was when the ignored, abused, patronised, without, forgotten and belittled took their chance to vote for change. And if you don’t like it, you can vote for the LibDems in June’s General Election and ensure that the party now operating as a focus group gets into power and holds another referendum. In a free country, you get a free vote. (If you vote LibDem you can keep voting until you give them the ‘right’ answer.)
You can question. You can debate. And just as you can challenge the orthodoxy on the EU, pick the clothes you wear, who you fancy, what music you listen to and sing along to Ariana Grande as she makes your heart throb – and there she is live on stage before your very eyes, the singer you’ve duetted with in the car on the way to school – you are also free to look at the dead children’s faces on the telly and in the newspapers, feel your eyes moisten and your throat tighten as you consider their stories, the horror of their deaths and the hollowed out lives of their loved ones robbed of the most precious of all things; you can consider the people raped of so much joy, light and life; and wonder why it happened and what can be done to end it. And if you value freedom, and consider humanity robust and truth-seeking, you can wonder aloud. To do anything less is to live in fear.
More fake news from the mainstream media as the Daily Mail appeals for help finding children missing after the slaughter at Manchester Arena. The paper tells readers: “Parents are trying to find children missing after explosion at Ariana Grande gig in Manchester.”
Photographer Rachel Devine was shocked to see the picture of her 12 year old daughter Gem being circulated on the internet, when she was in fact safe at school.
The Melbourne mum has told the Hit Network, she just wants people to know her daughter is safe and well. “I have no idea who stole her image or why.”
Twenty-two people went to a pop concert and never came home. And the media works out how to milk them for advertising clicks and retweets.
