UK Politics V - Have We Got News For You

[Kyriakos]

I am sure it says more about me that the picture, but in this the only bits that stand out are the face (indicating the person the Charles Windsor?) and the butterfly (indicating nature?) and everything else, including symbols of rank and weapons of war, are fading out into the background.

He was wearing a head-mask during the bloodbath?

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

If I didn't know them better, I'd think the people in this thread were doing a brilliant bit

https://twitter.com/x/status/1790764204309291317

 

[Samson]

Apparently the political genius/real life Malcolm Tucker Dominic Cummings is starting a new party. He announced it in August last year on a paywalled blog (???), and the media has picked up on it (text version avoiding paywall). He describes their focus as:

• “completely different from the other parties”
• “ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media”
• “friendly towards all the amazing talent in the country, people who build things in private and public sector”
• reducing immigration, closing tax loopholes for “the 1 per cent,” investing in public services and reforming the Civil Service.

I cannot see him getting any real power, but it could really kill the Tories. To have Nigel Farage taking some demographics, Dominic Cummings taking some different demographics and a whole lot of people willing to vote for whoever will beat the tories does sound like a difficult place in a FPTP system.

Spoiler He really is trying to base his public persona on Malcolm Tucker :

In an interview with a national UK "serious" newspaper, someone who hopes to lead this country says:

Shortly after graduating Cummings moved to Russia where he lived from December 1994 until the end of 1996. His face lights up as he describes the experience as “f**king insane.” “Different places and different times in history are the epicentre of mad energy and in 1994 the epicentre of mad energy in the world was Moscow,” he says.

Ukraine’s a ‘corrupt sh*thole that doesn’t matter at all’

But what about those who’d argue Putin needed to be taught a lesson and that we can’t just allow him to invade a neighbouring country? “What lesson have we taught him? The lesson we’ve taught Putin is that we’re a bunch of total f**king jokers.

Cummings says he didn’t get “much of an impression of Starmer” when he worked with Johnson. “He was kind of irrelevant,” he says. “Ironically, it’s part of the reason why Boris thought he could get away with breaking our deal was him dealing with Starmer. He concluded by the end of July, actually, this guy is rubbish so it changed his calculations a lot on government. After he nearly died [in April 2020] his attitude was ‘holy sh*t the system completely imploded’. The mainstream media killed him, the NHS is f**ked, the economy is f**ked – we need a fast rebuilding process.

“If you look at the big arguments that we had in 2016… the dynamics of the EU and the Eurozone, the Euro is sh*t, it’s institutionally knackered they can’t fix it, the Eurozone is economically stagnant. The Eurozone is culturally increasingly hostile to science and technology, it’s going to massively f**k up everything like biotech, it’s going to f**k up AI regulation etc and it’s got this combination of free movement, can’t cope with Islamic nut jobs and growing political extremist parties. I think we were basically right, all those problems have got worse.”

But, he adds: “The Government has almost entirely not taken advantage of anything, not actually done anything differently. It doesn’t make any sense to do Brexit and then sit the way the Tories have done doing f**k all and basically leaving in place a whole bunch of stupid EU things.”

Spoiler If you have not seen the thick of it you should, but it is nearly as swearly a Dominic Cummings :

 

[EnglishEdward]

Apparently the political genius/real life Malcolm Tucker Dominic Cummings is starting a new party.

In my opinion it will sink without trace, his overly frequent use of the "f" word turns off too much of his target demographic.

 

[Kyriakos]

Would he even get a couple of MPs in the FPTP system?
Iirc Farage got around 10% of the vote and still only one mp.

 

[EnglishEdward]

View attachment 691204

I was expecting the King in Yellow.

Rather strange in my opinion.

Dunno what the artist was thinking.

Painting King Charles in red as if he is the war god Mars !

Arguably better discussed in the thread:

Objective quality in purely subjective things​

 

[Kyriakos]

Red is indeed a strange color for Charles III. I suppose it could stand for England.
Skulls for the Skull Throne.

 

[really]

Sunak fancies the summer off it seems.

General election called for the 4th of July.

 

[Gorbles]

Couldn't write better satire than that shot of him in the pouring rain as reports of internal backstabbing surface due to Tories being shocked he dare call a GE in the same year he legally had to.

They all operate on a different plane of reality. A few more months isn't going to save your image, folks!

 

[Nick723]

At last! I do hope they get a proper drubbing… (and the SNP in Scotland )

I am on holiday that week, will no one think of the Scottish school holidays! Will have to organise a postal vote…

 

[Kyriakos]

Did it suddenly start to rain, or was there some other reason it had to be done that way? At the very least, some pleb could have held an umbrella over him.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

For the past two weeks it's been mostly clear skies and warm weather. Today it starts raining.

 

[Kyriakos]

On the positive side, this means fewer months in power for pogrom-Keir.
Has Corbyn announced if he will run as an independent? (I doubt he would run, decency was his downfall).

 

[Samson]

On the positive side, this means fewer months in power for pogrom-Keir.

I am not sure what this is referring to, but Keir's five years will start when he wins, the timing if the election has no effect.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am not sure what this is referring to, but Keir's five years will start when he wins, the timing if the election has no effect.

It will have to end sooner than if the election was later. Mentally going to near the end, you see.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Rishi Sunak has been a lame duck Prime Minister since christmas.

I suspect that he suspects that the conservative party would start to fall into
pieces during the summer recess (also known as the silly season in UK politics).

I am waiting to see who will be standing in Norwich South.

 

[Catharsis]

Did it suddenly start to rain, or was there some other reason it had to be done that way? At the very least, some pleb could have held an umbrella over him.

He may have been trying to avoid the same fate that befell Steve McClaren; the "wally with a brolly" headline turned out to be very powerful and still follows McClaren around, in fact it's probably the main thing people remember about him nowadays.

 

[Nick723]

On the positive side, this means fewer months in power for pogrom-Keir.
Has Corbyn announced if he will run as an independent? (I doubt he would run, decency was his downfall).

He will!

Jeremy Corbyn confirms he will stand against Labour in Islington

The former Labour leader will run as an independent in the London seat he has represented since 1983.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Kyriakos]

Good for him

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Israel lobby funded a third of Conservative MPs

Exclusive: Tory politicians have accepted over £430,000 from Israel lobby groups and made 187 trips to the country.

www.declassifieduk.org

The main funder is Conservative Friends of Israel, a parliamentary group which does not disclose its own sources of funding.

Other notable donors include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange, and the European Leadership Network.

Thirteen Tory politicians have accepted over £50,000 in total to travel to Israel since 7 October, including for “solidarity” missions.

Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is a pro-Israel lobby group set up in 1974 by Michael Fidler, a Tory politician described in one biography as having political views “reminiscent of the philosophy of Enoch Powell”.

The organisation has long standing links with the Israeli state, and is “beginning to resemble the Westminster outpost for Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud coalition”, according to veteran journalist Peter Oborne.

Around 80 percent of Tory MPs are members of CFI. Over the past decade, it has taken more MPs on overseas trips than any other political donor in Britain.

CFI’s lobbying activities have intensified since 7 October.

The group has led two “special solidarity” delegations to Israel amid the Gaza genocide, involving six MPs – Stephen Crabb, Theresa Villiers, Robert Jenrick, Michael Ellis, Nicola Richards, and Greg Smith.

In Israel, the MPs were hosted by president Isaac Herzog, whose statement in October 2023 – that the “entire nation” of Gaza was responsible for Hamas’ attack on Israel – was cited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as plausible evidence of incitement to genocide.

CFI also funds parliamentary candidates to visit Israel even before they become elected.

Prior to the 2019 general election, CFI brought a delegation of prospective parliamentary candidates to Israel, seven of whom – Siobhan Baillie, Miriam Cates, Dehenna Davison, Peter Gibson, Tom Hunt, Robert Largan, and Matthew Vickers – are now MPs.

In February 2024, one month after Israel was put under investigation by the ICJ for genocide, CFI led another trip to Israel for four more prospective MPs, Alexander Clarkson, Katie Lam, Ben Obese-Jecty, and Bradley Thomas.

CFI’s lobbying efforts are not limited to funding trips to Israel.

The organisation also prepares briefing material for MPs, enjoying “superb access to Downing Street, Westminster, and Whitehall”, and hosts an annual banquet which functions as a public display of support for Israel.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak addressed their latest banquet in January, calling CFI “an integral part of our party”.

Michael Gove, who has led the charge to ban British public bodies from boycotting Israel, accepted £3,086 from AIPAC to attend and speak at its conference in Washington in 2017.

James Morris MP attended an AIPAC conference in 2011, funded by its sister organisation the American Israel Education Foundation, while Henry Smith MP was funded directly by AIPAC to attend its conference the next year.

Other funded attendees of AIPAC events include Jonathan Djanogly MP and former UK home secretary Priti Patel. Their travel was paid for by the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank with opaque funders and close links to Israel.

The JNF is a quasi-governmental organisation which has supported illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine. It has been described by historian Ilan Pappé as a “colonialist agency of ethnic cleansing”.

AICE was established in 2003 by the then Israeli foreign minister, Netanyahu, and his Australian counterpart.

Four Tory MPs – John Howell, Jack Lopresti, Andrew Percy, and Will Quince – have accepted over £18,000 from AICE to travel to Israel on ten occasions.

Lopresti is also the only British politician to have also accepted a donation from Israel’s largest arms firm, Elbit Systems.

In addition to this, he helped to open Elbit’s “research, development and manufacturing hub” in Bristol alongside the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, in 2023.

More recently, Lopresti has been calling for politicians to distance themselves from campaign group Palestine Action.

Yet there has been little media attention on Lopresti’s association with Elbit Systems, Palestine Action’s main target, whose drone was used to kill three UK aid workers in April.