Lynch Mob Mentality

-

Whatever we are to make of Angela Rayner's current predicament over her missteps over property and tax; and to be fair, there is as of today no official pronouncement on the affair and so, in my opinion, comment should be kept at simply that: comment. But in this always on, insta-feed world of opinion-as-fact, I know best and the rest of you can shut up, the woman has already been convicted, tried and executed. It's bad enough that the rumour mill of social media has already made its varied and often vitriolic pronouncements on the matter; but the worst thing is that Badenoch and her reprobate Tory opposition are claiming the moral high ground in the matter: as if! Even given that Angela Rayner deliberately tried to evade taxes - I don't really believe she did, and anyway the jury's still out on the matter - where does that put the very many on the blue side of the House to whom tax avoidance is a routine of life?

That one is illegal and the other not is but a nicety of the law and those with the 'right' background and the 'right' education and the 'right' connections stand a far better chance of getting away with paying less or nowt in taxes than the hoi polloi. Angela Rayner has been consistently targeted since her earliest days as a member of the Shadow Cabinet, and now in government, by the vilest of the establishment right wing's apologists, in a witch hunt that continues to the present day. As far as I'm concerned, she's guilty of very little more than having been born working class, a strong woman, and having got on [in politics]. Whatever the outcome of the standards' committee et al, I'd give her the benefit of the doubt over any one of the twisted mendacious crooks that infest His Majesty's Opposition and the previous Tory government. I also know that I'd rather have Rayner on my side in a fight over Badenoch, any day...

Comments

  1. Anonymous5 September 2025 at 09:31

    "Our" Press are a disgrace. It's a technicallity regarding Stamp Duty: she paid but was it the "right" rate cos she'd bought a forever home for her disabled son, should that effect the ammount that she should have paid? Of course if you're one of these people with nothing more to do than fleece & confuse the public!
    ATB
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more