King Bags-of-Cash & Queen Fag Ash – need an extra £45million? (512)

My main reaction when I read that the ‘Sovereign Grant’ is to rise by £45m this year from £86.3m to £132m was – huh – they’re still there…

And remember the sovereign grant is just the tax payer money they get given – pocket money so to speak - on top of a whole lot of everything else. The royals are rich from land ownership and inherited wealth and they cost the tax payer money in so many other ways not least policing for when they are out and about in their dressing-up clothes shaking hands with the great unwashed.

The King’s coronation cost (as UK papers estimate) between £50 - £100 million. Why there is not an exact figure is anyone’s guess – maybe its considered poor taste to calculate to the odd £50 million when dealing with anything Royal.

Despite all this, Charlie boy was reported to have accepted 3m euros in cash in shopping bags from a Qatari politician (2022). Clarence House trotted out the balm that the money was ‘immediately passed to one of Charlie’s charities’ – and that was that was sufficient explanation as the UK press was concerned - so that’s ok then. Nothing grungy at all about that. And yes – Charlie has a talking house as opposed to a talking horse.

There is absolutely nothing about this that makes any sense. And by this I’m talking about THE MONARCHY in what is supposedly a modern Western democracy.

And after a decade and a half of Tory austerity where a disgraceful number of children are now living in poverty and there is a scrap over whether pensioners should keep their winter fuel allowance. UK pensioners receive between £200 and £300 for the whole year  while others with titles are getting £333 per day in the House of Lords for doing fuck all. So clearly, in the UK, it’s something to do with wearing ermine that entitles you to free money!

Fag Ash Lil – who currently holds the title of queen consort – despite all we hear about tradition and continuity when the sycophants are drivelling on about royalty – was the ‘third person’ in the Diana / Charles marriage and has since been credited with some of the most abusive treatment of Meghan Markle who was hounded out of the UK by the racist royals and a gleeful press.

And yes – any royalist reading this will possibly trot out the tired old argument about what ‘they’ do for Britain – the income from tourism etc but no one ever puts a figure on that or weighs it against the cost and the stupidity of it all. No one points out that many countries without a Charlie and a Camilla – get far more tourism than we do.

So my question is not so much why the increase in free money to some of the richest folk in the world – my question is WHY still a monarchy at all??? 

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Starmer’s social cruelty. Surprised? You shouldn’t be… (511)

Sighs of relief reached gale-warning levels when the Tories were ousted in July. However, that storm front fast lost its identity as the new reality was battered home by the son of a tool maker (did you know?). No one who understands politics or the sheer social carnage of Conservative maladministration this past decade and a half can have been expecting instant Nirvana. However, what we got, it seems, was a posturing PM who wanted to show he could be tough.

Not sure that’s what the electorate that bothered to turn-out, voted for.

It’s to do with expectation. Somewhere at the back of our minds we still think of Labour as more ‘caring’ than the Tories – despite the dead-eyed stare and forced smile (grimace) of Wes Streeting. Despite the treatment of Diane Abbot (and I’m no fan) by the party she served for decades. Despite the enthusiastic, unnecessary welcoming into the folds of Tory right-wing loon Natalie Elphicke earlier this year. Yes – that Elphicke. Not only extreme right wing but took over her husband’s seat when he was accused of sexual assault. Her defence of him being (and I paraphrase) these women chased him because he’s so gorgeous. – Do look up Charlie Elphicke.

So the clear lack of empathy evident in initial decision making in the early days, the bits folk will remember – have shaken people. An equivalent would be the shockwave that reverberates through society when we learn of a woman involved in extreme physical cruelty to a child. We all know it’s a possibility but deep down it’s something we still on the whole associate with men. Statistically that is a correct supposition.

There were expectations that Starmer’s administration would be more compassionate than a Tory government and Starmer could have made decisions that supported that expectation. He did not.

So – choosing to keep the two-child benefit cap brought us up short – and it was a choice. Scrapping the winter fuel payments to the elderly stuck in our collective craw.

Add that to Labour’s trotting along in the US tail-wind regarding the soft touch on Israel’s ‘Trump’ - Netanyahu for nearly a year now – despite the other 3 nations of the union calling for an immediate ceasefire back when it might have made a difference - and we are already wondering what is going on.

I would argue strongly Starmer’s Labour is acting entirely true to form.

Blair’s New Labour chose to stick to Thatcher’s fiscal programme for two years. It was the Blair administration that introduced tuition fees – crushing generations under debt. It was New Labour that introduced the private sector into NHS and Education infrastructure and of course – it was Blair who served up the tragedy of Iraq, the nightmare that followed and which reverberates today.

But step back further into the mists of time. During the pre-Thatcher Labour years 1974 – 79, £750million worth of shares in BP were sold off, there were extreme public spending cuts and the sell-off of council house stock was sanctioned by the Labour government albeit it the sell-offs happened in Tory-controlled councils.

What I’m saying is – Labour has ‘form’ and I’m not just referring to the last Labour government.

Anyone surprised by Starmer’s Labour needs to dust off some mental cobwebs.

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Blair & a Convenient Untruth – (510)

 I re-start this blog with the nasty surprise I got a few days ago because political Nosferatu Tony Blair has reared up again, possibly revived by sucking at the arteries of Labour’s resurrected political body and with the aid of his media thralls.

As those achieving power seem to come and go faster and have (with some not particularly honourable exceptions) come in younger, our tired political circus is having to juggle departed but undead politicians – post-party/ post-mortum (!) politicians so to speak – ever faster.

There are none more shudder-inducing than the cadaverous old war criminal Tony Blair who is still – against all decency and sense of moral fairness – platformed by straight-faced journos who clearly have selective and collective amnesia. Or, journalism school teaches them that if the mass murderer is a. one of their own b. a millionaire c. mates with Rupert Murdoch d. so personally delusional that he himself does not believe that being responsible for the illegal (ref; Chilcot Report) and entirely unnecessary deaths of untold, uncounted tens of thousands of innocent civilians matters, then he’s in the clear.

Tony Nosferatu has conveniently forgotten what we all learnt in political history 1.01 - that destabilised and ruined countries spew out fleeing desperate people by the thousand. Fear of that mass movement of the distressed, dispossessed and dislocated, feeds reactionary fascistic narratives as it has throughout history.

OR maybe – in the same way that the right-leaning media serve up Alex Salmond at any available opportunity – in a way they would not have done when he was actually leader of the SNP – ie in order to create discomfort for the current leader of that party – maybe the legacy media see Blair in this handy role for Starmer’s Labour. Nb. Starmer needs no help peeing into the tent. He’s doing fine on his own…

You have to hand it to them. Reminding the public that this scrawny old shit,  was the Labour leader who took us into the absolute disastrous invasion of Iraq while Starmer (40+k Palestinians deaths and counting – plus hostages and the spread of the conflict – still doesn’t seem to have a clear line on Gaza genocide, unlike the other 3 nations of the x4-naiton union) – is a real dooozie in terms of juxtaposition. Just what is it with Labour and feeling so entirely comfortable with the mass slaughter of brown people?

Or does Blair really just think it’s all about him plus his correct instinct that the legacy media do not care as long as they’ve got a rich white bloke to share his opinions.

His latest ‘I got it all right about Brexit cos I’m Tony’ tone – would be laughable if it weren’t so mad. Listen to anyone with two brain cells to rub together who wasn’t David Cameron and more interested in trying to keep his party together than doing what was right for Britain – and literally anyone could (and did) predict the horrors of Britain’s tortuous European exit.

Tell us something we don’t know Tone, like where you buried your conscience.

I’d rather read Lizz Truss’s appalling book cover to cover three times while sharing a taxi with the fascist frog-faced Farage and watching a video of Michael Gove cocaine dancing to the sound of  Jabob Rees-Mogg warbling about Brexit benefits in one ear and Boris Johnson  burbling about fatherhood and Peppa Pig than hear Tony Blair on any topic at all. Ever.

Call me squeamish - I just cannot stand war criminals.

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