Rhubarb & Custard wrote: Tue Jan 07, 2025 9:47 am
Rhubarb & Custard wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2025 9:04 am
Farage can maybe get 20% of the vote, but to have a shot at power he needs to get that over 30% and he can't do that if enough of middle England thinks he's a Tommy Robinson supporter. He already needs people to hold their noses and skip past there are a lot of UKIP/Reform who overtly or otherwise support Yaxley-Lennon, which is to say hold various extreme/racist/homophobic positions. Wanting to get that next 10-15% of the vote is what's driving frog face, but he's learning the nice way you can't just assume you'll keep your base. An interesting strategy from the man who says he wants to be PM mind, presented with a challenge from Musk he's opted for run silent, run deep in the hope the problem goes away without him needing to act
Also rather odd in all this is we did have an inquiry, one that returned a list of recommendations back in 2015 maybe 2016? And the Tories presented with a list that many involved in the various sectors thought good ideas did nothing with it, and Rayner in saying it wasn't for HMG to determine the need for a further report didn't exactly clarify if Labour would enact the recommendations already on the table. The politics says it's much more important to drive a sense of outrage than to seek sensible progress, which perhaps is depressing more than it's odd
HMG have now assented to some of the recommendations of the Jay report, and indeed one Alexis Jay thinks what's passed these last few days in terms of public debate essentially fails to meet the standards of debate, isn't helpful to implanting change, and we don't need another report at this point because that would merely delay any changes already in the pipeline. No doubt Musk will reflect on these considered positions and issue a suitable apology, or I suppose he could channel his inner Yeeb and just declare Alexis Jay a nonce
We all suspect that National Enquiries are just a way of kicking things into the long grass and leave for others to clear up whilst in the interim allow those guilty to destroy evidence, forget what was said, flee, move on to screw someone else or die. They take years, cost a fortune, have no powers to convict and in many ways delay criminal prosecutions. Grenfell, Covid, Post Office enquiries etc have had little impact on actually holding people to account and allowed the previous Tory Gov to avoid having to actually take real actions to hold folk to account or make significant improvements in the situation. The police have said that they will not prosecute anyone criminally responsible in the Post Office scandal until after the Enquiry has reported ie 2027 - meanwhile the last Gov didn't even set aside funding to pay for the huge compensation bills, hence the financial black hole! It took a TV series to make anything happen with the PO debacle, Covid and Grenfell enquiries have failed to make a single iota of a difference for the victims, to hold those responsible to account or ensure remedial actions.
Surely the single most important thing at the moment is to stop digging the hole any deeper and to start taking actions to fill it in again! As a pretty good starter let's implement the 20 recommendations from the Jay Report even if that is difficult and expensive. Alternatively lets have another National Enquiry, wait 5 years for it to report and have even more victims of child abuse at the hands of predominately family members and, as research has found, group-based CSE offenders who are most commonly white (Ref Home Office Report, Group Based Child Sexual Abuse, 2020 prefaced by Priti Patel).
It is hard to believe this whole episode isnt anything other than a targeted effort by Musk, jumped on by the Tories and Reform to try and destabilize Starmer and the current Gov. Now the right wing owned press, which is about 80% of the press, have jumped on the lynching bandwagon and will go on at this for some weeks now. The more moderate media, such as the BBC, have fallen once again into the trap of letting the right wing drive the news agenda and instead of rigorous and studied journalism respond with the we must hear both sides of the story etc. Sorry folks but we are all being manipulated by a media driven by billionaires who own social media, press and some of our political parties. In the interim the Trump family are off to visit Greenland, a land with very little apart from huge reserves of minerals and rare metals.
