THE SERIAL LIAR EXPOSED - BORIS JOHNSON, THE BRITISH PM TAKES ANOTHER NAILING

 Peter Stefanovic is an Australian lawyer, journalist, and film-maker who has created this journalistic masterpiece that has now had 10.7 million views - and yet received no mention on mainstream media. BBC News, ITV News, Channel 4 News, and Sky News have not said a single word about it. Peter's message is: 'Please help me send it to 12 million this weekend and shame them into reporting it.'

In May 2020, I published a series of blogposts that tried to get inside BJ's mind - to understand the flaws of 

IMPUNITY REIGNS - DEMOCRACY DECAYS - THE STORY OF THE BORIS JOHNSON PREMIERSHIP SO FAR

When impunity reigns, the fabric of British democracy decays. The man who holds the office of prime minister in this country, Boris Johnson, is a serial liar with no moral compass. He is a narcissist who has serious shortcomings in empathy. He bears significant responsibility for the deaths from COVID-19 of around 150,000 British citizens.

Watch and listen as he is nailed by Hardeep Matharu for Byline Times. The Jennifer Arcuri affair matters a great deal. Johnson got away with political wrongdoing then. He is becoming more and more brazen. What next? That is the question posed by Hardeep Matharu - and it is one we all need to be asking. Know your enemy. Be prepared. Resist.  

 

 

Lest you forget, this is the story of Johnson lauding vaccine 'greed', taken from the Morning Star on Thursday, 25 March 2021. Addressing the Tory MPs on the 1922 Committee, the prime minister joked that 'greed and capitalism' had contributed to the success of the vaccination programme in the UK. The

OUR TWO MAIN POLITICAL PARTIES ARE DETACHED FROM THE MORAL PROBLEMS THAT WE NEED TO ADDRESS

 This blogpost has two parts - linked by moral and spiritual prespectives. First, the more obviously political part: 

The journalist Peter Oborne observed in a recent interview with Stop the War Coalition's Sweta Choudhury that "the main political parties seem to be detached from the moral problems of our age". The Morning Star daily newspaper composed an editorial around this judgement (Tuesday 6 April 2021). Rather brilliantly, Ben Chacko and his team dissect the pretensions of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer:

"(Starmer) has defined himself against the most important movement for far-reaching change to have emerged in Britain in decades. While Starmer was (attempting another revamp), his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn was on the streets, standing with demonstrators opposed to the government's plans to criminalise peaceful protest.

Jeremy Corbyn on the streets at a Kill the Bill protest against the government plans to criminalise peaceful protest

"(Starmer) is heavy on platitudes and short on specifics.... Across the Atlantic, at least Joe Biden combines his warm words for unions with condemnation of Amazon and other major employers. In fact Labour has proposed nothing approaching the significant investment in infrastructure and job creation that the US president has announced. 

"(Starmer) has spent his first year in office defining himself not against the Tories but

THE LABOUR PARTY UNDER KEIR STARMER SEEMS TO BE MORALLY BANKRUPT - A PALER VERSION OF JOHNSON'S MISGOVERNMENT

This blogpost is my opportunity to widen the circulation of a resignation letter from a Labour Party candidate, James Osben, who has stood in two parliamentary elections. His powerful indictment of the history of the Labour Party since the election of Keir Starmer as leader in April 2020 appeared in a SKWAWKBOX post on Tuesday 30 April 2021. Do you disagree with James Osben's heartfelt analysis? He seems to me to nail it exactly. Please do use the comment box at the end or email me directly to express your views - this is a debate that goes to the very heart of what is means to be part of the Labour movement as a socialist, in this critical period for the future of life as we have come to know it on this planet.

James Osben is at the front on the right 

Those of us in the Labour movement which by definition represents those whose interests are damaged by unregulated capitalism are facing an existential crisis. My own journey is towards supporting the

WHAT KIND OF SOCIETY DO I WANT - AND IS IT THE SAME AS THE SOCIETY WE NEED?

 I reference my friend, David Siggers in Brent, London, in chapter 5 of 'Dying to Know - Running through a Pandemic' (2021, pending) - as you will have seen if you opened this month's Mailchimp newsletter. David gifted me a newspaper cutting last year that informed me about Brent's terrible position as one of the areas worst-hit by COVID-19 infections and deaths. I then incorporated some of that awful detail into my pandemic story. David is featured in this blogpost of mine from 2017 - see this link here.

More recently, David sent me another gift - this time, a book: 'Alone in Berlin' (1947/2009), written by the German author, Hans Fallada (1893-1947). David wrote: 'the protagonists reminded me of you and other bloggers drip-drip of information against this government'. Thank you, David. Sam Munson in The National wrote that Fallada's work is 'the great novel of German resistance ... (and) deserves a place among the 20th century's best novels of political witness'. Philip Hensher in the Independent describes the book as '(Fallada's) heartbreaking tale of futile resistance in Nazi Berlin'. I am fifty pages in; there are around 600 pages in all. I am hooked. It is gut-wrenching.

When a democracy slipped into dictatorship - and fear governed every encounter

I began my formal resistance to the new government in the UK the day after they were returned to power back in December 2019 - see this link here - but you will have seen if you opened the link that my warnings pre-date that General Election at the end of 2019. From my political and social and spiritual perspective, as a christian socialist, I find what has happened over this last decade - and particularly in this last last year and a half - deeply troubling. 

Who else thinks so? I was inspired to wrote this blogpost today by an article in one of my two daily newspapers: the 'i' (the other one is the 'Morning Star'), written by the columnist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, under the title: 'Racism and sexism stalk this land that I no longer recognise'. Here are some

DAVID JAMES PATTERSON (1935-2021) - MY REMARKABLE TEACHER

On Wednesday this week between 1 pm and 1.40 pm, thanks to the wonders of a webcam installed at a Brighton crematorium, I made my virtual attendance at the funeral of a man - David Patterson - who transformed my life. 

David Patterson was a significant person in my life before I became a systematic photographer - this was the one picture I found in my archives that included David. He is the one wearing the hat. I like its symbolism. He is the self-effacing responsible adult almost indistinguishable from the children whose lives he was shaping for the better. I think this must have been taken on the Devon walking holiday in the summer of 1964. 

David - Mr. Patterson - became a member of staff at Dartford Grammar School (DGS), as a newly appointed history master, in September 1963. History was my favourite subject and I was looking forward to being taught by W. W. Wilkinson, the Head of History, for the next two years leading up to my GCE examinations. Wobbly Wobbly Wilkinson was a legend, as they say these days, and I loved his lessons in which he would dictate his notes on 20th century British history and we would sit in silence for forty-five minutes and copy them to the letter. My A-grade pass was guaranteed and was duly delivered in the summer of 1965. Meanwhile, Mr. Patterson was making his mark in the school. 

My instincts as an historian and archivist - shaped of course by David Patterson as you will discover - have enabled me this morning to trawl through copies of the DGS school magazines for the period from 1964-68 in order to find the evidence of how David made that impact.  

In the 1964 edition of 'The Dartfordian' I discovered a piece I had forgotten all about - an account written by R. E. K. Donovan, 4A,with the title: 'Walking Tour of the Cotswolds'. This would have been

THE ROAD FROM DEMOCRACY TO OLIGARCHY - PART TWO - WHERE ARE THE GOOD PEOPLE IN POLITICS WHEN YOU NEED THEM?

My first blogpost in this series ended on a note of optimism, tempered by an advance warning of a wake-up call for me lurking around the corner. In this second blogpost, I am sharing the update on my persona as a Labour Party activist that I posted on my website in 2019 (see this link here) - and then bringing my personal story right up-to-date with a fresh update that takes you, the reader, into the present time as I consider my options. All this will be set in the context of the latest moves by those misgoverning us to take the country further along the road from democracy to oligarchy. 

Let's begin within that wider context of national politics.

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, posted this message below on Facebook early yesterday evening, Tuesday 16 March 2021: 

'I spoke out against the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill in the House of Commons debate today. We have never seen anything like this Government before. Our democracy is being swept away in a calculated programme to leave the public muted and powerless. If this Bill goes through, anyone who values their democratic rights must get organised and fightback.' 

Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South

Two days before, the Observer newspaper had a leader article under the heading 'Civil liberty' in which the Metropolitan police force and its leadership are castigated for their failure to recognise their own institutional racism and sexism. This is a police force that decided to clamp down a day earlier on a peaceful vigil to commemorate the lives of women killed by men - a vigil called in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard. The man now charged with her kidnapping and murder is a serving officer in the Met. This is a police force that refused to engage with the women planning the vigil and cited government Covid regulations in the lockdown as the reason. As the Observer states: 'This is misogyny.'  

So it is - and it is important to understand the link between any government and their police forces. In