Trump dumped in Queen's Speech

As the Queen’s Speech became a game of Bingo for the commentariat on what measures would not be included that existed in the Conservative manifesto (conveniently deleted from the Conservative Party website), the humiliation continued for Theresa May and her backers in the press.  The Daily Telegraph worked itself into a lather about, “outside, the revolutionary mob,” threatening democracy and the government “calling for its violent overthrow in the streets,” as if it was the last days of the Russian Provisional Government holed up in the Winter Palace in October 1917, rather than those justifiably outraged at the Grenfell Tower disaster and the policies of May and the Tory government.  But while the right-wing press tried to restore the status quo ante of upholding the rich and denigrating the poor, that other disparager of the less well-off was missing from the Queen’s Speech: Donald Trump and his mooted State visit.

Though the government and the White House administration are circling the wagons, Trump is prone to his own Custer-like sallies.  Like a recidivist arsonist who remains at large, he starts more fires while his lawyers and aides are extinguishing his previous conflagrations.  Trump has suggested that he won’t go to London if there are protests, delicate flower that he is.  If only the signatories of the petition to block Trump from coming at all knew it would be so easy.

This inevitably ties into whether he should be accorded the honour of a State visit at all.  Many proponents on the right carp that no such protests or censure from the Speaker of the Commons occurred when President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China was accorded a State visit, having selective memory of demonstrations by pro-Tibetan and Hong Kong groups.  President Xi, though vigorously expunging the already extremely truncated civil liberties that previously existed, does not pose a threat to Britain’s national interest.

The Queen has had to make nice with various unsavoury characters to advance her government’s foreign policy from Nicolae Ceaușescu and Mobutu Sese Seko to kings of Saudi Arabia.  The first two were viewed through the prism of the Cold War while the latter make lucrative arms purchases.  Disreputable but not against the national interest (though Saudi Arabia might be).  Donald Trump unquestionably is against British national interest.  From equivocating on upholding NATO’s collective defence through pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords to picking a fight with London Mayor Sadiq Khan just hours after the London Bridge terrorist attack, Trump manifestly undermines Britain.  It goes deeper too as Trump shreds the very civilizational values that Western Society has built up, thumbing his nose at adherence to the rule of law to threatening the Fourth Estate with prison.  He is a signal danger to Britain.

Yet Trump might not come at all.  Though the talk is of a ‘date not set’, it is highly unusual for a State visit not be included in the Queen’s Speech – as evidenced by the announcement that the King and Queen of Spain will visit in July.  It may be that Trump does not want to come as his ally, Theresa May, could fall at any moment and that there could be a very different prime minister in charge when he arrives (one that takes a dim view of making political capital out of terrorism).  Ultimately though Trump is a narcissist and cannot countenance anything that might detract from his success from rigged elections denying him the overall popular vote to faked inauguration crowds.  For Trump, Theresa May is a failure for losing her parliamentary majority and to appear next to her would be associating himself with failure.  As the Tories show no intention of rescinding the premature invitation, it would be the best thing he could do for Britain by not turning up.

A wonderful few days

I cannot recall three days where I have been so regularly uplifted.  First of all the General Election result, then its aftermath, polished off with the sweet dessert of England winning the Under-20 football World Cup, a first such triumph in a major tournament since hat trick hero Geoff Hurst and the boys hoisted the Jules Rimet trophy more than three score years ago.
All three elements had a bit of nervous tension to them.  To start off with the last, England won 1-0 against a for-once formidable Venezuela (a team who previously have fallen short in qualifying for tournaments), meaning that all the result was continually in the balance, never more so than when Venezuela were awarded a penalty (with the assistance of the 'video referee').  However, not only did Freddie Woodman (on the books of Newcastle United) save it after initially almost going under it, but he pushed it to safety too.  His opposite number in the Venezuela goal was on course for the best goalkeeper of the tournament prize but if you save a penalty in a World Cup final, then there can only be one winner.  And so, gloriously, England are World Cup winners (at Under-20 level).  Cue much fist-pumping from me.  Kudos to the BBC for broadcasting it too.
When I had a regular exercise work-out from so much fist-pumping over about two hours and much hearty laughter to boot was the General Election result.  I had gone to bed just after checking out the exit poll and would wake up the next morning to see how it panned out (this makes me a 'normal person' according to Emily Maitlis).  I was pleased with the exit poll seeing the Tories 12 short of a majority, rather than the landslide the last polls predicted and recalled how this was the YouGov poll (which used the same methodology to predict a 'Leave' win in the Brexit referendum but had been suppressed because of pollster herding) that took so much abuse - YouGov were so unnerved that they released a later different poll using the old flawed methodology.  I was warned that exit polls can be wrong and so I dreamt that the Tories had in fact secured a small majority (a humiliation in itself).
To wake up and find the exit poll was almost dead-on was by turns both brilliant and hilarious.  Solemn faces from the punditocracy proclaimed a hung parliament was bad for Britain (the same pundits who had failed miserably to predict this outcome).  For me though, a hung parliament was the best that could have been hoped for, seriously hurting the chances of a hard Brexit and five more years of Tory austerity.
Jeremy Corbyn, no longer shackled by selective media and with some media training of his own, was terrific.  Even I came close to voting for Labour (I voted Lib Dem in the end, as much a protest vote as anything).  A 40% share of the vote, the biggest since 2001.  A 12% increase in the share of the vote - the biggest for Labour since 1945.  Sure they fell short and Corbyn will be unshakeable until the next General Election (either prospect no longer so bad) but they disrupted the disastrous plans the Tories had lined up.
There were some stand-out results of the night.  Alex Salmond and SNP deputy leader Angus Robertson losing their seats and to the Tories at that.  Nick Clegg departed as Sir Vince Cable returned.  There were some earthquakes in England too. A 10% swing took out Ben Gummer, previously tipped as next Brexit Secretary, in Ipswich.  Julian Brazier, a 30 year stalwart in Canterbury, which the Tories had held for more than a hundred years, fell to the student vote as Labour took it for the first time ever.  After a third recount (with the interval of the counters being sent home through exhaustion) saw Labour beat the Conservatives for the first time since its creation in 1974 in the constituency of Kensington, the wealthiest seat in the country (albeit very unevenly spread).
Almost as noteworthy was Labour's capture of Peterborough.  There were many reasons why this was delicious.  After the successful Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, The Daily Mail (and what a humiliation for this staunch May backer) emblazoned on its front page 'Heroes of Britain' or some such guff with a big picture of a ragtag of Conservative and UKIP activists applauding the result.  There, in the middle of the photo, was Peterborough MP Stuart Jackson.  But there is more because he is a nasty piece of work.  After JK Rowling wondered aloud on Twitter on her trauma at the outcome, Jackson, gratuitously and offensively, tweeted at her, 'Deal with it.'  What an absolute dick.  And now he's lost his seat.  Interviewed later, he said he'd had a commiserating call from David Cameron but nothing from Theresa May or Conservative chairman Patrick McLoughlin.  Jackson carped, "It is poor."  Jackson should 'deal with it'.
Now the dust is starting to settle and May is trying to pretend all is business as usual but the shockwave of this humiliation and her cheerleaders in the press cannot all so be easily swept away.  For the second year running, a Conservative prime minister has called a ballot they didn't need to call for the sake of party management.  Now the knives are out and we will see for how long May can hold them off.  This vote was a smackdown to contempt and incompetence and austerity until 2025.  If it results in a softer Norway-style Brexit, then so much the better.

Seeking to divide

In the James Bond film Goldeneye, M, played by Judi Dench, in emphasising the value of British Secret Intelligence, contrasts it with our friends across the Pond: "Unlike the Americans, we prefer not to get our news from CNN."  That was 1995.
Now things have changed in the White House.  CNN is shunned while Fox News is lapped up ad nauseam.  This is of big concern as Fox News, as conceived by that ultimate conservative, the disgraced, late Roger Ailes, is a hive of lies, half-truths and false narratives that unites to push a right-wing extremist agenda (often successfully but to the detriment of decency).  How else would Donald Trump take the London Mayor's comments so out of context?  It wouldn't be from his intelligence briefings and he wouldn't have the gumption to seek out independently the comments of Mayor Sadiq Khan.  No, they were twisted and presented on a platter to him by his Islamophobic favourite news channel.
To recap, Khan, who when running as a candidate for London Mayor was on the receiving end of a string of innuendo about being a Muslim from his Conservative rival, said "people shouldn't be alarmed at seeing armed police officers on the street."  Trump willingly believes that Khan said people shouldn't be alarmed about a terrorist attack and goes on tweet about that and that British people should have had guns because the attackers only had a vehicle and knives (a crashing illogicality in that if the populace at large had access to guns so would the terrorists, who would then do far more damage, plus the only injury of an innocent civilian from a bullet was someone accidentally shot by police).  Trump also seeks to make political capital out of the terrorist attack by calling the resumption of his travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries, even though that would have had no impact because this happened in Britain (and the attackers may well turn out to be British citizens).
The Mayor has chosen not to comment directly, leaving his spokesman to trash the president curtly.  Yet when Theresa May, the prime minister, calls for unity, her biggest friend, the man on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seeks to undermine trust in the mayor of her capital and divide the country.  She won't condemn Trump as her intellectual vacuity leads her to believe she must uphold the transatlantic relationship at all cost. But what cost if that victimises one of the main officeholders of the UK, who just happens to be Muslim?  Megaphone diplomacy is usually crude and ineffective but in this case it's the only way to make a president using his own megaphone hear and desist, if not from our entreaties, then from the condemnation of his own electorate.

Tweaking the law

Another day, another waking up to a terrorist attack in this country.  The Westminster Bridge attack, a later knife attack outside the Houses of Parliament, the Manchester Arena attack, today a London Bridge attack.  More people die, more people injured when they were just going about their daily business.  The threat level is critical yet still the security services seem unable to prevent these things happening.  No doubt in the days to come there will be stories of how those who did this latest terrorism were known to the police, maybe even warnings were given to the police but that surveillance failed at a key moment.
Even during the IRA years the frequency (at least in Britain, specifically England) was never on this level.  It is estimated that our security services are keeping tabs on 18,000 people who potentially want to this country harm.  There has been talk of internment which is horrifying and invokes the shame that the USA has to this day when interning Japanese-Americans in World War Two (the same never happened to German-Americans).  However much these fanatical murderers of innocents want it, we are not at war
That is not to say nothing should be done.  The security services it seems are overwhelmed, foiling multiple terror plots yet still some get through.  Clearly the situation as it currently stands is untenable and though this will come across as a kneejerk reaction - the 'something must be done' which leads to bad laws - I hope whatever the government has planned (if it has anything at all, which is a doubt under the intellectual vacuity of the prime minister) would be along these lines.
This country operates a law where things in court must be proved beyond reasonable doubt.  For those who plan terrorist acts maybe that threshold should be lowered to 'on the balance of probabilities'.  Therefore the bar for deportation should be lowered and if UK-born, house arrest without internet access.  The bar is lowered but not precipitously so.  For some, that will go too far (leading to abuses), for others, not far enough.
Habeas corpus is not being suspended as Lincoln did during the Ammerican Civil War.  To ensure it is used only when the circumstances dictate, it should be a 'sunset law', to be renewed by parliament every year.  France has imposed a state of emergency.  I don't think putting troops on the streets will in any way enhance our security as it is Intelligence that is the real driver to preventing terrorism.  Yet there are many who live in our society who wish to destroy it along with everything it represents and everyone who operates by it.  They are pyschopaths and it is playing with fire to let such people be free at this moment in time.