Hey-ho …
Yesterday – since nobody is asking – I spent the best part of ten hours driving to a pub not far from Birmingham and then back again for a two-hour reunion lunch with some old friends.
Yes, it’s wondrous what some of us will do sometimes to fill up a day!
For accompaniment I spent the bulk of my travelling time listening to Radio 5 Live and therefore much coverage of recent and ongoing developments in the General Election.
Furthermore, after I had ‘returned to base’ I just about had time to grab something to eat and drink in advance catching up on news from the domestic group whilst in the background by chance, with the sound set to barely discernible, Andrew Neil’s BBC “Party Leader of the Night” interview (on this occasion featuring Jeremy Corbyn) played out on the television screen on the far side of the room from 7.00pm.
It is a sign of the strange twilight world that the country has got itself into that the stage at which the nation’s critical faculties ‘left the building’ occurred at least a fortnight ago and as a result nothing (howsoever bizarre) that happens seems either to surprise or particularly concern us anymore.
The biggest issue of the day was the fall-out from the letter published in The Times penned by the Chief Rabbi effectively accusing the Labour Party of being institutionally anti-Semitic at the direction of its leadership group led by Jeremy Corbyn.
In the wake of this bombshell, the Labour Party deployed ‘chaff’ [to use a WW2 word describing the debris dropped by RAF bombers designed to confuse enemy radar] measures such as the Tory Party’s alleged institutional Islamophobia whilst the Jewish lobby fielded a number of prominent supporters backing the Chief Rabbi’s thrust.
This quickly became ‘the story of the day’ – a situation neither cauterised nor neutralised by Mr Corbyn’s performance in his Andrew Neil interview [which, as indicated above, I didn’t hear ‘live’].
In it on four occasions he declined Neil’s invitation to apologise for Labour’s anti-Semitism and then also got himself in as terrible muddle at to how Labour would pay for its latest new policy announcement (costing approximately £58 billion) that it would reimburse and/or ‘take care of’ those women born in the 1960s whom – it seems – lost out big time when the Government announced the raising of the retirement age for women from 60 to 65 at considerable short notice.
In the cause of balance, let me also record here that for its part the Tory Party was yet again under pressure during the day over Boris’s predilection for freewheeling-policy-on-the-hoof announcements which are then contradicted by the actualité, e.g. his bold claims that if the Tories win the Election there would be “20,000 extra police on the beat” and (in respect of the NHS) “40 new hospitals” and “(untold) numbers of more new nurses”, all of which statements – when ‘fact-checked’ – turned out to be no more than either re-heated versions of announcements made on one or more previous occasions, wild exaggerations and/or totally untrue.
Much earlier in the day – before setting off upon my epic travels – I had watched the awkward spectacle of Tory grandee Michael Heseltine being interviewed ‘live’ on ITV’s Good Morning Britain by Piers Morgan.
It’s funny how often veteran politicians seem to think their views still matter and Lord Heseltine is a particular case in point because – rather like Labour’s Denis Healey – throughout his career he had an unerring ability to be wrong on the most important issues of the day.
He’s an out-and-out Remainer with a patronising conviction that he’s one of the elite “who know best” and Brexit would be a disaster.
That said, logic was never his strongest suit.
Whilst admitting that the 2016 EU Referendum had been billed as a “once in a generation” event, he nevertheless maintained that (1) subsequent events can always alter the facts and (2) people can also change their minds and therefore having a People’s Vote (or Second Referendum) just three years after the first one was an entirely proper thing to do.
He didn’t bother to respond to Mr Morgan’s perfectly-obvious point that the first one had yet to be implemented.
Nor did he spot the fundamental flaw in his supposed logic.
Surely – if a supposed “once in a lifetime” vote could be effectively re-run just three years later – then why shouldn’t any “Second Referendum” on the same issue also be re-run another three years after that? (After all – as Hezza had repeating ad nauseam – facts can change and so can people’s opinions) …
But it didn’t seem that Lord Heseltine’s brain could cope with that one and/or its inescapable logic. The truth is, of course, that – being one of the “elite who know best” – he simply didn’t like the result of the first Referendum and his fervent desire for a second one is so that “the people” could have the opportunity to come to their senses and reach the “right” decision this time (that is, in his view).
Naturally, if they did that, the result would then indeed be “a once in a generation” decision.
Because, of course, if by any godawful chance they came to the “wrong” decision again, he’d then want a Third Referendum within another three years. And again and again, until the “people” got it “right”…
Lastly, despite all the adverse media coverage Jeremy Corbyn is attracting – and now I think of it, possibly because of it – the latest polls appear to be showing (as happened in Mrs May’s infamous and generally-agreed-to-be-disaster of a 2017 General Election) that Labour are now making strides in reducing the Tories’ predicted lead percentage:
See here for a link a representative report by John Rentoul that appears today upon the website of – THE INDEPENDENT
Plenty more of this stuff to come yet, no doubt …
