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Rick's b.log - entry 2022/10/17 |
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You are not reading my b.log using HTTPS. You can switch to HTTPS by clicking here. General Election NOWSo the new Chancellor of Coins is Jeremy (Richard Streynsham) Hunt, who was previously the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (2010-2012) where he annoyed rather a lot of people by saying the Hillsborough disaster was partly caused by football hooliganism, not to mention being a bit too besties-buddies with News Corp for which he threw his special adviser under the bus (seems to be a thing with Tories, doesn't it?); Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (2012-2018) where he brought in controversial reforms including increased privatisation and stating that patient choice was no longer key to improving performance, and was the subject of the first UK petition to reach the target of 100,000 signatures (ultimately achieving 222,991 signatures), calling for a vote of no confidence in him. This wasn't able to happen, so he kept on fiddling with the NHS to the point that junior doctors went on strike (with 98% of the ballot voting for a full strike). He continued annoying junior doctors to the point where he ended up as the most disliked frontline politician; and he was Foreign Secretary from 2018 to 2019, where he supported Saudi Arabia's military intervention in Yemen, especially after a bomb was dropped on a Yemenese school bus killing 51 people (40 children). He defended selling arms to the Saudis by saying that British jobs were at stake. He also managed to piss off Slovenia during a Brexit-related visit, referring to them as a Soviet vassal state. Slovenia was part of the former Yugoslavia, not the Eastern Bloc (the FYR had been aligned with Russia from 1945 when it was founded, until 1948 when it became neutral).He supported Remaining in the EU in 2016, only to then claim to have supported Brexit in 2017. He also has something of a history of accountancy oversights. In his favour, of course. So, today, Hunt undoes most of the provisions of the mini-budget and stresses the importance of economic stability, and says that the government will have to take decisions of "eye-watering difficulty", which I take to be a warning to prepare for a tax hike to pay for the damage. That is to say, you will be the ones expected to pay for their mistake.
As Rachel Reeves (shadow chancellor) points out, all that remains of the mini-budget is higher mortgages and the lifting of the cap on banker's bonuses. And that is it, exactly. A "strong and stable" government, as the Tory rhetoric goes. The government that has a new PM and a new chancellor effectively flush the economy down the U-bend, which the new chancellor (after the ritual sacrifice of the previous one) pretty much undoes everything, and then has the gall to stand there wittering about stability. Is that your idea of stability? This whole fiasco was totally avoidable, but Truss wanted to make her mark. Well, she has. A pound sign branded onto the back of every low income person in the country.
Earlier in the day, Penny Mordaunt said that Truss had shown "courage" in changing course. Those tosspots performed an idiotic experiment on the country's finances, even moreso given that they (Truss and Kwa-whatever) went to lengths to not declare it as a real budget so as to sidestep the usual oversight and scrutiny that may have stopped this shitshow from ever happening. This screeching reversal is not "courage", it's pretty much the only way to avoid a disaster. Courage would be to put it to the people you're supposed to represent and hold an election.
The current government is not the one that people voted for in 2019. It is now a sinking ship captained by a completely delusional idiot in charge of clueless sycophants whose only idea is "whatever she says". It's is no way to run a country. This shower of cockwombles have no mandate, no clue, no ideas, and no credibility.
General.
ZoomThere's a RISC OS meeting in an hour. I've installed Zoom on my phone, set my virtual backdrop to the one of Cthulhu in the clouds. I've even set my preferred pronoun to "human".I've hung up a grey backsheet I found (single colour-ish, ought to be easier for the automatic person-detection) and, well... Never done anything like this before so wish me luck. I won't hang around for long. Those early Saturday starts have wiped me out. I tend to wake somewhere between 5am and 6am, which means I'm pretty much toast by 9pm. This while thing, I think, begins at 8.30pm (my time). So, yeah, I'll pop by. See how my little introvert self copes with being an ugly mug in a square on other people's screens. Actually, that's not the thing that bothers me. Real time interaction is. Nothing against ROUGOL, I'm just the same in three dimensions. But, I can't feel entirely happy in my shell until I've crawled out of it for a little while, y'know?
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Last read at 08:53 on 2024/05/02.
 
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