Category: Brexit

Keir Starmer: The Decline of the Dork Knight

Sir Keith’s Funda-Centralist Martyrdom Op Flop

By James Tweedie

In this article, Lexiteer, communist and former International Editor of the Morning Star takes a jaundiced view of the Labour Party in opposition lead by Britain’s former top lawyer, Keir Starmer.

In religious fundamentalist parlance, a suicide mission is called a ‘martyrdom operation’ – promising the hapless volunteer low-grade sainthood in return for their ultimate self-sacrifice.But the chimeric modern ‘Left’ revels in its own martyrdom ops, choosing lonely political hills to die on — like opposition to Brexit — and obscure crosses to be nailed to — like the mess made by the European Medicines Agency of COVID-19 vaccinations.

Starmer cunningly combines smarmy yet stultifying lawyering — amid the school-yard rough-and-tumble of Parliament — with a set of noble-sounding extreme centralist principles that no voters actually support, and an ever-expanding list of instantly-forgettable slogans.

A recent poll found that Labour voters overwhelmingly want Starmer to go before the next election, but most have no idea who will replace him.

Since, incredibly, losing Hartlepool to the Tories, Starmer has been engaged in a balletic act of shadow-boxing against a leadership challenger who doesn’t exist. A recent poll found that Labour voters overwhelmingly want Starmer to go before the next election, but most have no idea who will replace him. In other words, they’re so keen to be rid of him hat they don’t care that there’s no obvious successor.

It’s no use pointing to Andy Burnham, the runner-up in the poll after ‘Don’t Know’, or Sadiq Khan. Neither of them can be Labour leader because neither of them is an MP. It could take both of them until the next general election to engineer a return to Parliament. In any case, neither is a match for the double-jabbed, triple-wed BoJo Mojo.

It’s no use pointing to Andy Burnham, the runner-up in the poll after ‘Don’t Know’, or Sadiq Khan. Neither of them can be Labour leader because neither of them is an MP.

Meanwhile, calls for a ‘Grand Progressive Alliance’ of not-the-Tories parties are becoming increasingly strident in the Guardian-reading dining rooms of Hampstead and Islington. But such a Labour/Liberal Democrat/Green hybrid — the ‘Lab-Deens’ if you like — would be a losers’ coalition.

The Lib Dems’ pound of flesh for entering into that marriage made in hell would be a neo-liberal economic policy and a commitment to reverse Brexit and rejoin the European Union. The Greens, also bitter Remoaners, would demand job-massacring environmentalist policies.

The Lib Dem vote might look on paper as though it could tip the balance in an election, but in fact it is concentrated in those few areas of the country where the ancient Whig party still wins seats: Lancashire and Cumbria, Parts of Scotland, Bristol and south-west London.

Meanwhile the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru would scoop up even more of the disillusioned core Labour vote, while the Tories would continue to enjoy the support of most of those who actually work for a living.

Labour’s rot runs deep, right to the core. It has been systematically turning its back on the working class for more than 20-years

In fact it is Labour’s failure to stop the extremely right wing SNP and the discordant choir of Plaid from blatantly stealing its clothes since 1997 that has created the current situation: where the Tories have gone from having no MPs north of the border to now being the second-biggest parties in both devolved regions of Britain.

Labour can’t win a general election without the 45 Scottish Commons seats now squatted on by the SNP. But neither can it afford to appeal to nationalists, because ‘independence’ for Scotland and/or Wales would similarly guarantee a Tory majority for decades.

Labour’s rot runs deep, right to the core. It has been systematically turning its back on the working class for more than 20-years — actually, since it backed the human slaughterhouse of the First World War in 1914 — and the working class has finally turn its back on Labour.

The party is increasingly retreating into its last strongholds in the inner districts of maybe a dozen cities. It is turning away from what meagre class politics it ever had, to identity politics as it desperately panders to its last voter bases: metropolitan middle-class liberals, the chronically-unemployed and ethnic minorities. Even there the Tories are making inroads into the Asian vote, with three of the top cabinet jobs held by Afro-Indians.

Another Hartlepool-style upset for Labour in the July 1 Batley and Spen by-election could be the nail in Starmer’s coffin — and his lifetime meal ticket as a Law Lord. But will whoever draws the short straw of leadership the from the increasingly-hopeless pool of Labour MPs be able to turn the doomed ship around?

James Tweedie was born in Hammersmith, West London, in 1975. He grew up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud in the time of colonial liberation, being taken to Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament  and Anti-Apartheid Movement events by his mother and father respectfully.

James has lived and worked in South Africa and Spain. He has worked as a reporter and the international editor of the Morning Star newspaper, a foreign reporter for the Mail Online, an online journalist for RT.com. He has appeared as a commentator on BBC Radio 4, RT’s Crosstalk, Turkey’s TRT World and Iran’s Press TV. He currently works for Sputnik.

James maintains an occasional blog (http://ositorojo.blogspot.com/), describing himself as “one of the most deplorable purveyors of fake news about populist strongmen (and women) around the post-truth world.”

So, is London finished as a leading financial hub?

Not so fast!

By Thomas Levene

The City of London is the goose that laid the golden egg. Not even the left in the UK want to kill it. Ken Livingstone, a great hero of the left and the former leader of the GLC, advocated for The Square Mile because he knew that, realistically, the fortunes of all Londoners are tied to the success and influence of the City. The City provides the UK with  £75.5 billion in tax revenue every year. Although, the need for greater financial regulation seems imperative to humane socialists, at the same time it would be a disaster if financial companies migrated in numbers out of London. Thomas Levene discusses the prospect of that migration happening, now that Brexit is a reality.

One of the biggest arguments for staying in the EU was the fear that if we left it,  there would be catastrophic financial implications for the UK. Will the city of London, post Brexit, be able to keep its seat as the financial hub of Europe? Will it keep its status as one of the three main financial hubs of the world, alongside New York and Shanghai? There are serious fears that The City of London, or ‘The Square Mile’, as it is affectionately called, will lose its position. After all, why stay if London is no longer the gateway to the rest of Europe?

Since Brexit, what exactly has happened? In a recent survey, since Brexit, around 400 UK – based financial service firms have moved all, or some part of their business to somewhere in the EU. 10,000 financial jobs have already left the city and Some say the total number could rise to around 70,000. Amsterdam has now become the center for share dealing in Europe–taking a whopping 80% of the revenue from London’s control and costing the City of London an estimated £10 Billion in a year.

The financial sector is the biggest taxpayer in the UK, so the flight of large financial corporations is disastrous for the country. According to the Corporation of London, the City paid  £75.5 billion in tax for the financial year 2019 to 2020.

Amsterdam has now become the center for share dealing in Europe–taking a whopping 80% of the revenue from London’s control and costing an estimated £10 Billion in a year…

To make matters worse, London may lose more financial business in the future because EU countries want a piece of the pie, and are aggressively incentivising financial companies, brokers and investors to relocate. For example, President Macron of France has given a huge 70% tax break to those entities who may wish to move from London to Paris. Italy and Spain are offering similar deals. These are not the actions of enlightened European social democrats eager to make corporations pay their way, they are the actions of cut-throat neoliberal competitors.

EU countries want a piece of the pie

This situation has been further exacerbated because the EU has not given ‘equivalence free’ financial ‘passporting’ rights between the UK and EU to sell their financial products across the 28 member states.

Right now the UK allows EU companies to operate within their shores, but not vica versa. The trade is not on equal regulatory terms. And in yet another ruthless effort to squeeze even more business away from London, the EU has decreed that all EU–listed equity exchanges must take place solely in EU regulated exchanges.

So, is London finished as a leading financial hub? Not so fast. Daniel Hodson, former head of the London futures exchange says: ‘Yes, you have good financial centres like Paris, Frankfurt and Milan, but they are not, and never will be, the size of the City of London.’

‘Yes, you have good financial centres like Paris, Frankfurt and Milan, but they are not, and never will be, the size of the City of London.’

Daniel Hodson continues: ‘The City is too big, too liquid to fail. The EU needs London’s vast pools of capital.’ It’s logical to make the observation that, if the EU insists on barricading itself its own system, then companies and investors outside the EU may want to keep their Euros outside the EU and look for cheaper, more established, alternatives. ‘This is where London can facilitate and offer cheaper options’. Of course, additionally, London offers a great agglomeration of services to financial institutions that are not available anywhere else in the EU.

‘The City is too big, too liquid to fail. The EU needs London’s vast pools of capital.’

London has always been a buccaneering innovator. The City has been willing to adapt and capitalise on financial opportunities and change. After all, that’s how The Square Mile came to prominence as a key financial center in the first place in the 1960s. During that period the US created similar financial walls to the ones the EU seem to be intent on erecting right now. All that happened is that people eventually looked for cheaper, better alternatives for places where they conduct business. In the 1960s, that place was the City of London.

London has always been a buccaneering innovator. The City has been willing to adapt and capitalise on financial opportunities and change.

When it comes to regulation and taxation, London should be careful. However strong the cachet is for a company that locates in the City of London, no place is immune. Rash measures could result in financial businesses relocating to countries inside the EU, or even moving online altogether – especially in the time of a pandemic. Even The NY Stock Exchange, after the election of Joe Biden to the US presidency, has recently threatened to leave New York in the face of a proposed Stock transfer tax and increased regulations. 

If [to the resigned despair of the left in Britain] London goes the opposite way, and, strategically reduces taxes and if it makes regulatory hurdles even lower, then it is likely that money will flow to where it gets treated best. In this case, London will continue to thrive as the dominant financial hub, not just of Europe, but of the whole world,

… it becomes clear that London is still in the driving seat

The financial landscape is changing faster than it ever has. With the rise of Bitcoin and decentralised finance parallel industries, now worth $2 trillion and rising, there are more attractive, emerging opportunities for businesses and companies who operate in the financial sector, for those finance based businesses nimble enough and open-minded enough to capitalise on these opportunities, and for those financial hubs which willing to innovate.

Luckily, according to one report, London is the premier location in in Europe for local ‘sandboxes’ and innovation hubs. The City of London is a place that encourages innovation and Fintech startups. €2.1 billion in the UK vs €1.5 billion for the continent have been invested in Fintech startups in the City. Couple this with the fact that the current UK government has expressed a strong intention to back innovation; the huge talent pool from top universities in London that the Square Mile can draw on; the fact that The City is the leader in cyber security and green technology startups, and it becomes clear that London is still in the driving seat of Finance; at least for Europe.

In a recent PWC survey, post Brexit, The UK – and so London – was ranked ‘4th most attractive place to do business’ by CEO’s worldwide, despite Brexit. Surprisingly, investor confidence in the UK and in the Square Mile is, cautiously, high.

Thomas Levene

Thomas Levene, has been a long-time teacher, and in the last few years, been a passionate expert and investor in Bitcoin and Blockchain technology. He has completed, a ‘Blockchain Applications’ course with distinction, from Oxford University Said School of Business in 2018.

Thomas has given presentations on Bitcoin and Blockchain, internationally to young entrepreneurs on the digital Nomad Cruise in Greece and the DNX Digital Nomad Festival in Lisbon. He currently lives in Taiwan.

Cartoon Brexit Villains

By Rob Hyde

On the face of it, given how my country-hopping life in Europe turned out, I should have been made an EU pin-up boy. Though a 43-year-old British national, I have spent half of my life on mainland Europe. Last year I also acquired German citizenship, which in turn makes me a citizen of the European Union. So does all this leave me siding with most Germans in raving about the EU and chastising Brits for Brexit? Does it heck!

Popping the elitist bubble

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some little Englander living in some snooty British expat bubble. Two years in Saudi Arabia put me right off such elitist lifestyles. My stomach turned as I saw wealthy expatriates hiding from the natives behind the walls of their luxury compounds.

None of that for me. I live in social housing, I take public transport and, through my work as a freelance journalist and language trainer, I have contact with Germans of all ages and social classes on a daily basis.

Germans are my friends, my neighbours, my students and my clients. They are the people I have been living amongst and working with for almost twenty years. But, had I listened to my class mates back at school, none of this would have ever happened…

Fruity and flirtatious

It all started back in French class in Birmingham. Many of the boys just viewed the French language as something fruity and flirtatious. Most lessons took on the flavour of a ‘Carry On’ film, full of loud whispers of “ooooh là, là madame!” or even “voulez vous couchez avec moi?”

I saw French totally differently. My parents, both teachers, had a place in France where we spent each holiday. The local lads who often were not on school holiday, so would take me to with them to class and show me off.

And how wonderful it was! Unlike my British male classmates, I didn’t dismiss French people as titillating cartoon-characters, they were real people with their ways and charms and fears and foibles, and I wanted to find out about all of it.

I lapped up every opportunity to practice my French by answering their questions on British life and culture. At school I was a socially awkward non-entity. In France I was the self-appointed official British Ambassador for the City of Birmingham.

Achtung Brainwasch!

Behaviour in German lessons was equally puerile. You could count the minutes down before someone muttered “Jawohl, mein Führer!”, “Sieg Heil!“ or, on a particularly bad day – “Achtung Schweinhund!”

Years and years of Nazi-busting WW2 films, Nazi documentaries and hilarious British television series such as ‘Allo ‘Allo had taken their toll on my classmates.

It had installed in them a profound sense that Brits were chipper, joke-cracking war-heroes. Germans, however, were evil, goose-stepping fascists who munched salami and liked to shout.

I ignored them all, worked hard and topped the class. After a degree in German and French, and a couple of years flitting between England and Austria, I moved to Germany 2003.

I’m also unnerved about how the EU monopolises Europe as a concept. The EU is not Europe. Europe is made of over 50 territories. But only 27 of these choose to be in the EU.

The years flew by like a breeze. Until, of course, the Brexit referendum came, and Britain left the EU.

Now, as a holder of joint British and German citizenship, I completely accept that without my German citizenship, my life here would have remained precarious. I am completely grateful to Germany, the stimulating Wunderland that has become my new homeland.

What I don’t accept, however, is the idea that this morally obliges me to agree with everything the EU or Germany decide.

Can’t vote ‘em in or out!

This argument is extremely old hat now in the midst of widespread Brexit exhaustion, but I’m afraid I just can’t get past it. Sorry, but I still have a real problem with EU citizens only being able to vote for the European Parliament, and not the Commission.

How would you feel if, in Britain, the House of Lords – this unelected secondary chamber – were transformed into the fully-fledged British government, responsible for legislation?

Before you answer – first remove the opposition bench, where the official government’s opposition is tasked with holding the government to account. Finally, also do away with any electoral mechanism which would allow citizens to remove their legislators from power. You might be perfectly happy with the result. I find it rather sinister.

Autocratic group-think

I’m also unnerved about how the EU monopolises the concept of Europe. We should not, for example, refer to the ‘European Parliament’ rather the ‘EU Parliament’. Europe is made of over 50 territories. Yet only 27 of these choose to be in the EU! When the EU claims to represent the EU citizens who cannot vote for it, this is arrogant enough. But the idea that the EU speaks for Europe’s non-EU citizens too is arrogance at its most breath-taking.

This arrogance, however, sometimes takes on a wholly despicable nature, particularly when MEPs associate criticism of the EU with the darkest elements of nationalism imaginable.

Perhaps the most poignant example was in 2005 when MEP Margot Walström, then EU Commissioner responsible for communications, took school children round the former Nazi concentration camp in Terezin, in today’s Czech republic.

Here the original version of the press release for the event suggested that doing away with a supranational Europe could lead to the holocaust. So, the 27 odd European territories such who choose not to be in the EU will therefore be complicit in the vile persecution and mass-murder of Jews?

Repulsed by nationhood

I can understand Germans being wary of Brexit. It is, after all, an assertion of British sovereignty as an independent nation-state. And many here in Germany favour the EU mantra that the nation-state should be consigned to history’s dustbin.

It makes sense that many Germans see the nation-state this way. The ferocious, malicious ultra-nationalism under national socialism resulted in war, persecution, endless suffering, mass murder, death camps and much of Europe reduced to flames and rubble.

But this does not put me off the nation-state as a political model. Using German history as a model to measure the success of a nation-state is suggesting that a worst-case example is all people can aspire to. It is the logical equivalent of saying paedophiles are proof that adults cannot have children.

And I really think the nation state is working. It is not what the EU wants, but I rejoice in the fact that Europe is an exciting patchwork of diverse systems.

Striving for a friendly, co-operative demotic nation-states seems a healthier option to me than striving for a homogenous block of citizens who cannot vote for their legislators.

I believe the nation-state model is working especially well in non-EU countries. Just check the statistics and you will see that the four countries in the non-EU European Free Trade Association, EFTA, are far happier, literate, healthy, transparent, equal and democratic than their EU counterparts.

Instead of blindly embracing EU expansion, I think Germany should first foster a healthy sense of national pride, without automatically equating the concept of a nation-state with the horrors of the holocaust.

In the 2006 football world cup many Germans flew their flag with pride – albeit nervously. Here in Bremen and in other cities, however, you had people placing flyers on cars denouncing the flag-flying, and arguing that Germany should not be getting caught up in nationalist fervour.

I see it differently. I say reclaim the German flag from the far-right scum who are holding it hostage, and fly the German flag as a celebration of all the wonderful values which Germany stands for.

Pot, kettle, black!

Just like the simplistic, highly insensitive and even twisted Disneyfication of French and Germans I experienced back at school, comments of the same ilk about the UK and Brexit are now snaking their way into the mouths of German politicians.

German politician Martin Schirdewan, co-chair of the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL), recently declared UK was risking becoming a “rogue state” for supposedly breaking international law.

Bojo’s Internal Market bill does indeed break international law, which is wrong. Why do those highlighting this, however, not also accept that the EU itself is equally guilty of the same offence?

Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland which form the non-European Free Trade Association, EFTA, are far happier, literate, healthy, transparent, equal and democratic than their EU counterparts.

When it suits the EU, it simply does not follow its own treaties. Germany and France have broken EU laws on debts and deficits, yet did not face any consequences.

The EU has also for years not adhered to international law by ignoring World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules on hormone-treated beef.

And in the Kadi-Barakaat case of 2008, the EU’s Court of Justice even ruled that the EU should ignore the most supreme example of international law – the UN Charter!

The Council of Europe also slammed the EU in 2019 for breaking international law with its treatment of refugees. And, more recently, the EU has also been under-fire by NGOs for breaking international law in 2015. This was when it allegedly funded unauthorised Palestinian buildings in areas placed under Israeli control by the Oslo Accords.

Beware the cartoon-speak!

Just as I hated the outlandish remarks about Germans I heard as a teenager, I feel there is a similar current Disneyfication of Brexit taking place.  One which is reducing those who have legitimate concerns about the EU to racist cartoon characters.

Brexit is not what I wanted, or voted for. None of this for me changes the fact that the EU is undemocratic, or that it accuses countries of breaking EU and international law when it does exactly the same itself.

It also doesn’t make it alright for me that the EU is hell-bent on eroding the democratic nation-state.

After all, favouring democratic nation-states over undemocratic homogenous blocs does not make you an isolationist imperialist in my book. It just makes you more of a democrat.

Rob Hyde

Rob Hyde is a freelance journalist based in Germany. He has been published in mainstream newspapers such as The Times, The Times Ed Supplement, The Weekly Telegraph, The Mirror, and specialist titles including The Lancet, The Catholic Herald, Woman, Bolted and The Volvo Group magazine.

He also acts as a Germany-based stringer / fixer for British media. This involves doing research and writing for The Daily Mail, Mail Online, The Sun and The Sunday Mirror.

https://www.rob-hyde.com/

No Country is an Island

Photo by freestocks.org on Pexels.com

Song by Richard Tuley: Taking Back Control

 

By Richard Tuley

Perhaps it’s distasteful to mention Brexit. People are dying in droves, horribly. The Tories got a resounding mandate. Case closed. The British public bought the lie and now we will reap the whirlwind. We are about to hurtle out of Europe with no deal and we are about to discover quite how important our relationship with the EU was, after all. Too late to go back.


Over the last 40 years Britain has had a nasty habit of voting in right-wing governments. There have only ever been four Labour Prime Ministers (if you don’t count Blair and New Labour, and I don’t). Labour achieved a decent majority in 1945 and 1966 and that’s it.

The truth is Labour lost the referendum decades ago. They should have presented a more positive vision of what cooperation between European countries meant. They should have blown the ridiculous chattering about butter mountains, straight bananas and imperial units of measurement out of the water. They should have confronted myths about the effects of EU migration and a growing resententment of immigrant labour within its own ranks and the outright xenophobia of grassroots Tories, the same Tories who imagine that Farage is a great bloke to have a pint with.

Instead of looking for a brighter side, for so much of our time in the EU British governments looked for opt-outs and dragged their feet when it came to extending the rights of citizens. But for many of us, during the years that we were members of the EU, it often felt like the EU was a bulwark against the excesses of the wilder right wing appetites of the Tories in government: for deregulation, privatisation and speculation.

We are about to hurtle out of Europe with no deal and we are about to discover quite how important our relationship with the EU was, after all.


Brexiteers would like us to move closer to America. Brexit was, fundamentally, a right wing coup. Right-wing press barons now have a degree of control over British governments and have power they never could hold over the EU. The Daniel Hannans of this world saw salvation in a deregulated, free trade Anglo-sphere (those countries that watch Friends without subtitles).

The Right were the ones who pushed Brexit from a fringe issue to one which has left Britain more divided than it has been at any other time in recent history. Brexit may even lead to the break up of the UK (no small irony for supposed patriots).

So what is left to be said? Brexit has begun and will continue. It will bring nothing good. While they imagine the United Kingdom is still influential, right wing fantasists in British governments bend over backwards so as not to upset the Chinese. How many of us hide behind the sofa with embarrassment when British politicians start to talk about the “special relationship” we have with the US?

How many of us hide behind the sofa with embarrassment when British politicians start to talk about the “special relationship” we have with the US?


The sad thing is that, in leaving the EU we have lost real influence. Britain has abandoned its place at the decision making table, its opportunity to deliberate over the processes that really matter. This is a league in which there are only three teams that have any real chance of taking the title: China, the USA and the EU.

Size brings power and that power gets to call the shots. We are often told that the UK has the 5th largest GDP, but, let’s face it, that is a bit like saying St Johnstone are 5th in the Scottish Premiership. When St Johnston play Celtic or Rangers they won’t win – and neither will we. Other countries are at best ambivalent about the history of Empire, not as impressed as we are about England winning the World Cup in 1966 and strangely to ignorant of the Brotherhood of Man’s triumph in the Eurovision Song Contest a decade later. Just because we are obsessed by ourselves, it doesn’t mean everybody else is.

Just because we are obsessed by ourselves, it doesn’t mean everybody else is.


As members of the EU we made an impact. We had a chance to work with others to change laws and regulations if there were things we didn’t like about them. Leaving the EU will not address any of the real issues of inequality of wealth and under-investment in public services and infrastructure. At a personal level, I am extremely depressed about the whole thing.


But it wasn’t just the right-wing that brought us Brexit. They were aided and abetted by the Lexiters – who were in favour of a Left wing exit from the EU. Lexiters told us that membership of the EU prevented us from achieving a socialist Britain; though not quite as much as the British people constantly voting for Tory governments prevented us from achieving it, you might say.

But it wasn’t just the right-wing that brought us Brexit. They were aided and abetted by the Lexiters – who were in favour of a Left wing exit from the EU.

Against the available evidence, Lexiters claimed remaining in the EU would prevent state ownership. Being in the EU didn’t stop the French State, through EDF, from being one of the major players in the British energy sector, or the SNCF and Deutsche Bahn from running national rail services franchises. In any case it is a bit rich the British to criticise the EU for not allowing state ownership when our governments virtually invented privatisation in its modern form. It’s like Sky TV complaining that there is too much football on TV.


We can also blame pro-Leave voices in the Labour Party. They were too slow to realise that, far from splitting the Tory party in two as the conventional wisdom had it, it was the Labour Party that would destroy itself over Europe. Although we are now told that Labour lost it by becoming too close to the Remain side, they were never going to win an election opposing the vast majority of its own supporters on the central issue. Even in the ‘Leave’ seats, the majority of Labour voters were Remainers. People forget, but it was Labour committing to a referendum on the deal that pushed the Liberals over the edge. At that point they were a credible alternative for Remain voters, but Labour moving onto their patch forced them into saying they would revoke Article 50 without a referendum and this was when their campaign started to unravel. Had Labour gone full Brexit, there is every chance that it would have been the end of the Labour Party as we know it. Metropolitan voters, who live and work contentedly with people from all over the world and who consider themselves to be European to the core, could never bring themselves to side with the Farageists.


Some took Jeremy Corbyn’s near success in 2017 as evidence of electoral support for a Labour pro-Brexit position, but his undoubted popularity, especially with the young, was despite and not because of this. And let’s not forget that Corbyn was probably up against the worst PM in British History, Teresa May, who was a better dancer than she was candidate for Prime Minister. There is no other Tory leader in living memory who could have performed so badly and blown the 20 point lead that she did, yet she still won the election in 2017.

Corbyn was probably up against the worst PM in British History, Teresa May, who was a better dancer than she was candidate for Prime Minister.


The EU is far from perfect, but for all of its faults, Europe is certainly more progressive than most of the rest of the World and certainly a right wing Britain under the Tories. The arguments of the Lexiters were unsound. If you had to be poor, you would surely rather be in the EU than almost anywhere else and if you have to be poor and British, then you would surely rather Britain be in the EU than outside it. The EU has enlightened human rights and labour law legislation and consumer standards that protect Britons, too. These are the real reasons the Tories are champing at the teeth to leave the EU, all the better to exploit ordinary people without restraint.


Soon the myth of the sweetheart deal Boris Johnson claims he can get with the EU will be exposed for the lie that it is and we will suffer the severe consequences of a sudden departure. The Corona crisis has demonstrated that nations’ fortunes are interwoven to a degree that they never have been before and in ways that are hard to imagine being undone. The unraveling of European trade and co-operation will demonstrate clearly to every observer that no country is an island, not even Britain.

We’re going to take back control

 

We’re going to take back control
Like in the days of old
Like in the days of gold
We are going to take back control

We’re going to rule the waves again
Back to the glory days of when
The Sun would never set
Those days we can’t forget

Back to the days when the shops all closed
Before the colour TV sold all our souls

We’ll show them what we’re all about
We’re going to kick the bad ones out
No one will tell us what to do
We’ll rule the world from our front room

We’re going to stop them coming in
We’re going to judge them by their skin
We’re going to turn back the tide
We’re going to get back our pride

Back to the days when the lights went out
We sat with candles through the darkest hours

We’re going to bring back the steel
We’re going to make the greatest deals
We’re going to have the freest trade
We’ll have it all and still get paid

Back to the days when the pubs all closed
Before the satellite TV sold all our souls

We’re going to take back control
Like in the days of old
Like in the days of gold
We’re going to take back control

Back to the days when the lights went out
We sat with candles through the darkest hours

Back to the days with our hankies on our heads
We sat on beaches with our faces turning red



Released May 31, 2020
It’s me on everything…
license all rights reserved, Richard Tuley

Richard Tuley

Richard Tuley is a teacher and musician who has lived and worked in many different places, most notably France, Japan, the Middle East and England.

Down with Lockdown!

What do you do when the cure does you more harm than the disease? You stop taking it.

Controversially, James Tweedie puts forward an argument for lock-down to be lifted.

Will lock-down lead to deaths ?Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com


By James Tweedie, Plymouth, England, Friday May 15 th 2020

The prescribed treatment for the COVID-19 pandemic, a disease without a cure or vaccine, has been the lockdown, a government-enforced shutdown of economic and social life. It has become a sacred cow for opposition parties, academics, the media and some (but not all) trade unions. Anyone who speaks against it is denounced as an apologist for mass murder.
But with the UK and other countries past the peak of infections and deaths, the ill effects of the lockdown are becoming more serious than the virus itself.
The most common justification for these extraordinary emergency measures in the West is to ‘flatten the curve’ of the infection rate to make sure hospitals are not overwhelmed and patients left to die at home.
In most countries this has been achieved. Despite dire predictions by opposition leaders, ex-civil servants, academics and journalists, the British NHS never ran out of intensive care beds or ventilators, and now we’re way past the peak.
True, some countries have so far managed to contain the virus and keep the number of deaths very low. But most of these nations – China, Vietnam, Singapore, North Korea, Cuba – have very different socio-political systems. They are equipped for this in ways the Western liberal democracies are not.

Cuba and the DPRK are isolated from the rest of the world by Western sanctions. New Zealand, often praised in the UK media, is 2,000 miles from the nearest land and has a population of less than 5 million.

The New Crisis

The start of the lockdown saw the NHS switch to crisis mode. Hospitals cleared the decks, discharging as many patients as possible and cancelling all ‘non-urgent’ procedures – everything but emergency life-saving surgery and treatment.
But this is in danger of creating a worse health crisis than the pandemic. Family doctors have stopped seeing patients unless they were literally dying, for fear of catching the virus themselves. Accident and emergency admissions have fallen by more than half as patients are afraid to go to hospital.
Last weekend British Medical Association Chairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul warned the NHS would have a waiting list of 7.2 million cases by the autumn as a result of the lockdown. In April Cancer Research UK said referrals to consultants were down by 75 per cent, meaning 2,700 new cancer cases were going undiagnosed every week. Specialist Professor Karol Sikora said that could mean 50,000 extra deaths.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) has already recorded over 50,000 more deaths this year than the same period in 2019, but as of May 14 only 33,614 have been ‘linked’ to coronavirus. In many of those cases the virus was not the sole or even the primary cause of death.

On Wednesday the British Medical Journal reported that of 30,000 deaths in care homes, the new hot-spots of infection, only 10,000 were identified with the virus – and that the rest may be down to the policy of discharging elderly patients from hospital to community care to make way for a wave of COVID-19 admissions that never came.


Suffer the Little Children

The latest cause for middle-class hysteria in the UK has been the government’s announcement that some children will go back to school at the start of June, and that it wants all schoolkids to have at least one month of classes before the summer holidays. It’s kind of amusing to see so many of those who advocate free and compulsory state education now vowing to keep their kids at home when their schools reopen – with some teachers encouraging them. The social-democrats have transformed into libertarians and anarchists. Only 12 per cent of deaths from the virus so far have been among people under the age of 65. Five per cent
were in their fifties, one per cent in their 40s, while the under-40s accounted for less than one per cent of deaths. An overwhelming 95 per cent of fatalities have underlying health conditions – co-morbidities – like heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes. If you’re under 50 and healthy, your chances of dying of COVID-19 are almost nil. In fact the harm of keeping children off school for months outweighs any risks of them returning.
UNICEF warned on Tuesday that the lockdown could kill 1.2 million children worldwide in the next six months due to reductions in routine medical visits and the poverty and malnutrition caused by the economic freeze.

The Bottom Line

The brutal truth is that if people don’t go back to work soon, they won’t have jobs to go back to. Government-guaranteed loans are still just liabilities on employers’ balance sheets and aren’t going to bring back lost custom. The numbers of insolvencies and redundancies are soaring and the middle of the year the UK will officially be in a recession.
An ONS survey of businesses found that three-fifths of those still trading had suffered a loss in revenue, with a quarter saying they had lost half or more of their income. Three-fifths of exporters said overseas orders were down.
Businesspeople aren’t the only ones voicing concern. This week the airline pilots’ union BALPA attacked the government’s plan for two weeks’ quarantine for those arriving in the UK, saying it was an effective ban on tourism that would kill their industry. The National Union of Journalists pointed out that advertising revenue in the business had fallen by 80 per cent since the start of the lockdown, with thousands of workers already laid off. Two-thirds of freelancers told the union they’d lost income.
When side-effects of the cure are worse than the disease, you have to stop taking it. It’s time for the young and healthy to go back to work, school and university and get Britain and the world back on its feet.Down with Lockdown!

What do you do when the cure does you more harm than the disease? You stop taking it.

James Tweedie

James Tweedie was born in Hammersmith, West London, in 1975. He grew up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud in the time of colonial liberation, being taken to Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament  and Anti-Apartheid Movement events by his mother and father respectfully.

James has lived and worked in South Africa and Spain. He has worked as a reporter and the international editor of the Morning Star newspaper, a foreign reporter for the Mail Online, an online journalist for RT.com. He has appeared as a commentator on BBC Radio 4, RT’s Crosstalk, Turkey’s TRT World and Iran’s Press TV. He currently works for Sputnik.

James maintains an occasional blog (http://ositorojo.blogspot.com/), describing himself as “one of the most deplorable purveyors of fake news about populist strongmen (and women) around the post-truth world.”

“YOUR BOYS TOOK ONE HELL OF A BEATING!”

The demoralisation of grassroots Labour.

Stroud Labour canvassers November’19

By Paul Halas

The Stroud Labour CLP meeting to nominate its preferred leadership candidate back in January was packed, yet the atmosphere was sober and subdued. Members were permitted a two minute slot to talk up their choices, with the majority speaking for Starmer, citing his electability, his dependability, the fact that he was a safe pair of hands. Strong and stable, was the message. He proved to be the CLP’s outright choice, gaining twice as many votes as Rebecca Long Bailey, his nearest challenger. What had happened? Many of the people speaking up for Starmer I knew as Corbyn supporters; together we had spent the past five years passionately extolling the gospel of Corbynism – we believed a fairer, more equitable society was a real possibility.

Stroud is an atypical constituency. Stroud itself is smallish Cotswold market town with an industrial heritage more in keeping with a northern mill town than its more genteel, green-wellied neighbours. It has strong “alternative” credentials, being the cradle of Extinction Rebellion and home to many green socialists and socialist Greens. There are a couple of smaller towns, with similar characteristics, within the constituency borders, but the rest of it is true blue rural. Over the years it has ping-ponged between Labour and the Conservatives, and at the last election Labour was defending a majority of under a thousand.

During the weeks leading up to the general election Labour ruled the streets. We had the numbers; there were hundreds of us. We had stalls, we had teams of canvassers roaming the towns and many of the villagers. Being a marginal, help poured in from all over. Momentum was magnificent, doing what it does best: getting droves of activists out. We knew the Greens were a threat and they fought a dirty campaign, but we outnumbered them and carried the narrative. As for the Tories, their candidate and a few councillors were seen seen in Stroud High Street for a couple of hours every weekend, but largely they kept to the smaller villages and estates where their support was the strongest. They had the money but we had the people. Surely we’d done enough to hang onto the seat; as for the country as a whole, we tried not to think too hard about that.

During the weeks leading up to the general election Labour ruled the streets. We had the numbers; there were hundreds of us.

We lost. We lost the nation and we lost Stroud. Some of us blamed the Greens, but no matter: we were saddled with a vanilla Tory MP who didn’t appear to know which county she had been parachuted into. As a hyperventilating commentator babbled after Norway beat England in a World Cup qualifier many years ago, “…Winston Churchill, Maggie Thatcher, your boys took one hell of a beating!” We’d been licked. Like countless thousands of us up and down the country, we’d taken a hell of a beating. Again. Party members were demoralised and fed up with it. Fed up with losing.

At our CLP meeting we chose Keir Starmer. Good friends of mine said give the man a chance. He’ll appeal to a wider demographic, he’ll bring the party together, he’ll heal the wounds. With his fine legal mind he’ll take Boris to the cleaners. The argument that as a member of the Trilateral Commission he’s embedded in the Establishment cut no ice. Nor that he was part of the failed “Chicken Coup”, nor that he’d so far refused to disclose the backers of his leadership campaign, nor that his insistence on a Remain stance had been an electoral millstone. Trust him, we were urged. His policies were mostly leftist, and even if it meant the dilution of some of our cherished ideas, surely that was a price worth paying to get back into power?

Since that time, Starmer’s credibility has suffered blow after blow. Not only has he agreed to the Board of Deputies of British Jews’ unconstitutional “Ten Commandments”, he has also okayed Labour staff training on anti-Semitism by Jewish Labour Movement members. Neither organisation represents or has the legitimate authority to speak for all UK Jews.

The biggest issue, however, the motherlode of dismay on the political left, is the internal report on anti-Semitism

Nearly all Corbynistas have been sacked from the shadow cabinet; the front bench has been steered sharply to the right. Starmer has been quick to distance himself from the 2017 and 2019 manifestos, giving rise to the fear that economically his instinct will be to follow Milliband’s “austerity lite” policies, rather than the large scale investment advocated in Corbyn and McDonnell’s Green New Deal. Those expecting a large scale return to public ownership will probably see those plans watered down over time. And now that the full official list of Starmer’s backers has been belatedly revealed – oh my! With friends like those…

The biggest issue, however, the motherlode of dismay on the political left, is the internal report on anti-Semitism intended for submission to the EHRC… which was leaked when it became plain that Starmer was going to ignore it. Is there any need to go into the nitty-gritty of it? It is seismic, the biggest scandal to hit British politics in decades. The UK’s own Watergate. And Starmer’s every instinct is to cover it up: the make up of the panel investigating its contents and release gives ample evidence of that. And while a great number of instances of malefaction will no doubt be revealed, many wider implications, such as the consequential electoral fallout, and all the connections between the rogue staff and the lobbyists, politicians and backers they were in league with, is tellingly not part of the commission’s brief. If members are not outraged some vital part of their DNA is missing. Hundreds of thousands of activists were betrayed – not to mention our country’s political process and electorate.

If members are not outraged some vital part of their DNA is missing.

Trust in Starmer, many colleagues insisted. As far as I am concerned any trust that existed between Keir Starmer and the Labour membership has been broken. He never gave any clue as to what sort of vision he had and now we know he has none – bar gaining power, without losing the support of the highly suspect figures who are backing him. I consider that he has made a Faustian pact. And part of that arrangement is to ditch the left.

Left wing members are leaving the party in droves. At local level control freakery and the centrists are in the ascendancy once more. And if the activists, the ground troops who flock out at election time, are culled, the party will be in a position to emulate the Tories and use copious amounts of wealthy donors’ money to fight the next election.

Some of those who backed Starmer back in January are having second thoughts, though many still cling to the hope he’ll come good. I suspect that as his leadership progresses that optimism will erode further, but for the time being it will make little difference. Like it or not, barring cataclysms Starmer will be Labour leader for the next few years. There are no simply no viable alternatives at present, although the signs are positive regarding possible young leaders from the left in the future. Presented with the dilemma of whether to stay in the party or quit, I’m staying while Labour still has a left wing to fight for. Whether that remains in my hands or not is another matter.

Paul Halas’s escape from 1970s hippidom was the discovery that he could invent stories. He spent forty years contributing to various Disney magazines and books, as well as a variety of non-Disney comics, books and animated films. His retirement from commercial writing coincided with Jeremy Corbyn becoming the Labour Party leader, which led to five years’ political activism. He left the party two years ago with a heavy heart.

Why Did the Working Class Vote Tory?

Photo by ELEVATE on Pexels.com

by James Tweedie, Plymouth, May 6th 2020

The one-word answer is: “Brexit.”

The Labour Party backed the losing side in the 2016 UK referendum on leaving the EU, despite then-leader Jeremy Corbyn’s 40 years of opposition to British membership of the trade bloc-turned superstate.

Labour came within a hair’s breadth of winning the snap general election in 2017, when it campaigned on a promise to respect the will of the people on Brexit.

But at its 2018 and 2019 conferences, branch and trade union delegates voted explicitly to disrespect the result by forcing the people to vote again – and presumably over and over until they ‘got it right’. There is no greater sin in party politics than being at odds with the majority.

Corbyn cited party democracy and unity as his reasons for going along with this betrayal of the very people Labour was founded to represent, the working class. But those excuses rang hollow.  Labour MPs, including the party leader, are not bound by conference resolutions. ‘Unity’ with those, such as shadow Brexit secretary (and now leader) Sir Keir Starmer, who’d stabbed him in the back over and over was a joke.

There is no greater sin in party politics than being at odds with the majority.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the Conservative Party dumped Remainer PM Theresa May as soon as they saw the newly-formed Brexit Party was going to win the EU Parliament elections last spring. There was never any doubt that Brexiteer Boris Johnson would succeed May as Tory leader.

Labour immediately switched tactics from demanding an election once a week to colluding with the other opposition parties, Tory Europhile rebels, partisan Parliamentary speaker John Bercow and the megalomaniac law lords of the abomination of a supreme court in an attempt to create political anarchy and engineer a return to the disastrous National Government of 1931.

But Johnson outmaneuvered them all, first peeling off Labour MPs in Leave-voting seats to support his Brexit deal with Brussels, thus forcing the Scottish Nationalists and Liberal Democrats to vote for another snap election in a last-ditch bid to stay in the EU.

Johnson’s election strategy was to turn every speech and journalist’s question back to Brexit. It worked. On election night last December 12th, shadow chancellor John McDonnell, an ultra-leftist who’d also sold out his Euro-sceptic principals when leadership beckoned, admitted to the BBC that maybe the electorate wanted to ‘get Brexit done’ after all.

Class Betrayal

If Labour’s stance on EU membership was its only problem, it would have a fighting chance of winning the first post-Brexit election.  But the rot runs much deeper than that. Quite simply, the Labour Party is no longer a party of labour. Even under Jeremy Corbyn, the great white hope of the Left, it drifted further away from its core constituency.

Labour has a long history of abject class betrayal. The party was founded in 1906, and eight years later supported the bloodbath of the First World War, sending the flower of Britain’s working class to be killed and maimed in the trenches to defend the spoils of colonialism.

What did Labour’s election manifesto last year offer the workers? After losing their jobs in a environmentalist fire-sale…

Ramsay McDonald made his bed with the Tories and Liberals in his National Government. Clement Attlee’s 1945 government turned its back on our wartime ally the Soviet Union to join NATO and send troops to fight in the Korean War, when such things still mattered to a more class-conscious electorate. Neil Kinnock betrayed the striking miners in 1984, while Tony Blair realigned Labour with ‘Middle England’ and the City of London.

Labour’s membership has become overwhelmingly metropolitan, university-educated, middle-class, ‘woke’, Guardian-reading liberals. Most leaders of the Labour-affiliated trade unions are the same, and have never had a job outside the labour movement or been on the front line of a strike.

What did Labour’s election manifesto last year offer the workers? After losing their jobs in a environmentalist fire-sale, they’d get a bit more in benefit payments, paid for out of the remaining workers’ taxes. Oh, and free home internet in ten years’ time.

As someone who was excited by Corbyn winning the leadership in 2015, four years on I was disgusted to see him become another soft-left Judas goat like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. I’d rather have an honest enemy than a false friend.

The same Labour members who elected Corbyn as leader twice have now chosen his nemesis Starmer, a knight of the realm and the arch-Remainiac, as his replacement. It’s like they want to stay in opposition forever.

Identity Crisis

Labour long ago abandoned class politics for identity politics, taking the workers’ support for granted while they focus on winning the female, black and LGBT vote. And it’s the self-styled ‘socialists’ and ‘Marxists’ on the Left of the party are most guilty of this.

This has become a feedback loop: the more Labour’s northern and Scottish heartlands slip through its fingers, the more the party falls back on the inner-city seats where its most reliable voters are Afro-Caribbeans and poor Asians.

This explains the rage provoked among Labour MPs when Johnson named the most racially-diverse cabinet Britain has ever had. Shadow defence secretary Clive Lewis told fellow Afro-Caribbean and Tory party chairman James Cleverly that ‘black members of the cabinet had to sell your souls & self-respect to get there’.

It’s worth noting that three of the top government jobs are held by MPs of African-Indian descent – Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Attorney-General Suella Braverman. Whether or not you like their politics, they are members of a diaspora of a diaspora, which was central to the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, who were oppressed under colonialism then too often despised for their supposed ‘privileges’ by some misguided African nationalists since independence.

After accusing every black Tory of being an Uncle Tom, Lewis abandoned all sense of irony by calling Johnson, a foreign-born citizen with Turkish and Russian Jewish ancestors, ‘racist’.

Working-class white Tory voters and the ‘Blue Labour’ faction trying to win them back are derided as right-wing, racist or even closet fascists by this politically-correct clique, echoing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election-losing ‘basket of deplorables’ speech. Labour MPs and councillors helped the police cover up Asian paedophile grooming gangs, and called the whistle-blowers racist too.

The danger of populists is not that they might be demagogues, but funnily enough that they’re popular with the masses.

In the end though, ‘intersectional’ ID politics devours itself. In Birmingham, Muslim parents were told their children had to learn about same-sex relationships in reception year to stop them growing up to be religious extremists. Every woman running for Labour leader or deputy leader this year signed a pledge to expel thousands of feminists and gay rights campaigners from the party for being ‘transphobic’.

Those leaders who used to be called ‘dictators’ and ‘autocrats’ are nowadays dubbed ‘populists’ instead, a subtle but ultimately meaningless change of language. The danger of populists is not that they might be demagogues, but funnily enough that they’re popular with the masses.

Johnson  is neither blind nor stupid. After snaffling Labour’s lunch and smashing its ‘red wall’, he acknowledged that the workers had ‘lent him their votes’ and promised to do right by them. If the Tories can do social democracy better than Labour – like paying everyone’s wages during the lockdown – and speak the language of the people better to boot, they could stay in government for decades to come.

______________________

James Tweedie

James Tweedie was born in Hammersmith, West London, in 1975. He grew up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud in the time of colonial liberation, being taken to Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament  and Anti-Apartheid Movement events by his mother and father respectfully.

James has lived and worked in South Africa and Spain. He has worked as a reporter and the international editor of the Morning Star newspaper, a foreign reporter for the Mail Online, an online journalist for RT.com. He has appeared as a commentator on BBC Radio 4, RT’s Crosstalk, Turkey’s TRT World and Iran’s Press TV. He currently works for Sputnik.

James maintains an occasional blog (http://ositorojo.blogspot.com/), describing himself as “one of the most deplorable purveyors of fake news about populist strongmen (and women) around the post-truth world.”

How to defeat Covid-19

By Phil Hall

In China the barefoot doctors believed in prevention rather than cure. So how can we make societies like ours more resilient to pandemic infections like Covid-19?

Well, we could advocate for a more humane society. That would make us much more resilient. We could guarantee a fully functioning, well-funded health service free of charge for everyone. To fund this better health service we could increase income tax. How about going back to the 60’s and having a generous tax rate of up to 90% on the highest of high earners? Generous to ordinary people, I mean.

Covid-19 attacks the unhealthy, the impoverished; improve nutrition and make people healthier that way. Ban low quality processed foods from sale. Make sure that only cruelty free animals and animal products are sold: meat, eggs milk and so on. Set higher standards for food production and sale.

How about going back to the 60’s and having a generous tax rate of up to 90% on the highest of high earners? Generous to ordinary people, I mean.

How about exercise to go with it? Encourage people to garden in the cities. Give everyone a country plot of land where they can grow an orchard or vegetables. They used to do this in the Soviet Union. Many people had dachas, little plots of land outside town. In the UK we could increase the supply of allotments.

How about investing heavily in universities and encouraging them to find scientific solutions to diseases. We could focus investment on the most advanced areas of medical research. Make medicine more affordable. Control the big pharmaceutical companies and force them to hand over the recipes for useful drugs over shorter time periods. Give the NHS access cheaper generic drugs.

Why not provide quality, free health education on all aspects of human health and health protection and the prevention of diseases? Why not provide sports facilities for everyone of every age to help them improve their overall health; from bowling greens to football grounds. Give the playgrounds stolen from schools back to the children.

Covid -19 loves crowded spaces. Make public transport spacious, frequent, clean and affordable.

Make us more healthy and disease resistant by encouraging more people to cycle. Build proper, isolated cycle lanes in every British city. Be like Amsterdam. Provide free bicycles for public use. Make the very centres of all cities and towns car free.

Covid -19 loves crowded spaces. Make public transport spacious, frequent, clean and affordable. Encourage trust in politics by ensuring a rigorous democratic selection process before every election so that MPs and local council officials are kept honest and answerable. Make it very difficult for people to have full professional careers as politicians. Increase citizen participation in all political processes.

Bring in the four day week. That would reduce people’s stress and reduce crowding on public transport and in offices and schools. You know it makes sense.

Pensioners are the victims of Covid-19. Provide pensioners and affordable housing. Give pensioners good money so that they can afford to live healthily. Reward all carers generously, especially family members. Ensure a living wage and good working conditions for all employees in the public and private sectors so that people have the leisure time and money they need to eat healthily and exercise. Encourage worker participation on company boards.

Make contingency plans for epidemics and learn from the lessons of previous epidemics in order to mitigate the problems. Buy in sufficient equipment to handles such a crisis and make preparations through the WHO to combat pandemics in a coordinated and effective way in future.

Prevention really is better than cure.

______________

Phil Hall

Phil Hall is a university lecturer working in the Middle East. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. Phil was born in South Africa where his parents were in the ANC. There, his mother was imprisoned and his father was the first journalist from a national paper to be banned. Phil grew up in East Africa and settled in Kingston-upon-Thames. He has also lived and worked in the Ukraine, Spain and Mexico. Phil has blogged for the Guardian, the Morning Star and several other publications and he has written stories for The London Magazine.

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