Category: Uncategorized

Now You See It…

Back in 2003, when I was receiving chemotherapy, all my hair fell out. Later a young lady, who was cutting my newly grown locks, asked, “What, all of it? … Even down there?” My eye was caught this week by a thread on Twitter requesting forcibly that the Prime Minister brush his hair before appearing in public.

I wonder, tho, if it isn’t deliberate. My six-year-old grandson was given a magic set by Father Christmas. He’s beginning to master some of the tricks, but there are two skills which need a lot of practice. One is “palming”, or hiding an object from the audience’s view, (but his hands are still small), the other, misdirection, where the audience’s attention is deliberately focused away from the heart of the trick. In a small way, is the PM’s fluster and bluster, and Wurzel Gummidge appearance a misdirection away from his and his government’s misrule?

Of course, this is nothing compared with the misdirection being employed by HM Government, as all the confusion of the pandemic and lockdown distracts us from the rapidly approaching cliff edge of 30 june, and the refusal of the government to consider an extension to the “Implementation” of BrExit.

Nico

[This article was first broadcast in Sixteen Million Rising, Episode 64, “Look over there!”, on 2020-06-21.]

Doublethink

It was in his 1948 novel “1984” that George Orwell conceived the phenomenon of “Doublethink”. He defined it as, “To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy is impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy. To forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself”.

What better description is there of HM Government’s attempts at communication?

Nico

[This article was first broadcast on Sixteen Million Rising]

Your Conscience, Your Guide?

I awoke this morning to the news that the Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, Sir Mark Sedwill had “agreed” with No 10 Downing Street that he should “step down” at the end of September. In normal circumstances this should scarcely cause the slightest quiver of an eyebrow; but the circumstances are far from normal, and our eyebrows should be tightly knit in deep concern. There is a fly in the ointment of government, an éminence grise in the shape of the Prime Minister’s SPAD, Dominic Cummings. (I have deliberately chosen to use the term “SPAD”, which is short for “SPecial ADviser”, because the letters also stand for “Signal Passed At Danger”, which is often used to indicate the cause of a collision on the railway.) Reports have been circulating for a while of Mr Cummings’ desire to take a razor, if not an ax, to the Civil Service and the Cabinet.

The Prime Minister’s propensity for telling alternate truths is well documented; why even SMR’s episode #59 was entitled “Lies, Lies, Lies”! Time and again Mr Johnson has been depicted as Pinocchio, with his nose stretching way out in front of him. The puppet’s redeeming feature was a small insect which settled on his shoulder to remind him of what was right and what was wrong, namely Jiminy Cricket.

What is now troubling me is the thought that Cummings is Jiminy Cricket to Johnson’s Pinocchio. First, because his trip to Barnard Castle in the name of an eye test shews us that he himself has difficulty in discerning right from wrong, and second because crickets are chirpy and cheerful, while Cummings is largely dour and brooding. Say, more cockroach than cricket.

Nico

[Broadcast on SMR Episode 67, “The Blame Game”, on 2020-07-13.]