A friend, Seorais Graham, has written and produced a moving radio play entitled Liberation is not a Recognised Protocol.
The script, story and sound are top notch – and the actors, some of whom are from The Archers and Game of Thrones, really deliver.
Trigger Warning – though satirical, the general theme may be disturbing for anyone who has had to care for or visit loved ones in UK care home or hospital settings.
I remember a GP at a public discussion I once attended during the coalition years saying that whilst he couldn’t tell his stressed out patients to take up meditation, it was perfectly fine to tell them to to bone up on their mindfulness.
Apparently the word meditation had unscientific . . . spiritual connotations, whereas patients would feel less aggrieved at simply being asked to be more mindful.
The elephants in the room being deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation, technocracy, profiteering & austerity.
Today’s Times leads with the following story:
The term puff piece isn’t new.
Meanwhile actual humans who contribute to keeping patients alive and driving ambulances to get patients to hospital on time are striking because they’re being underpaid. Can they all be replaced with driverless ambulances and android paramedics?
Every crisis is an opportunity to reshape organisations, save money, centralise power and change behaviour. Why would high interest rates, high energy prices and food price inflation be any different?
The following Guardian piece is from April this year:
Reading the Times you’d be forgiven for thinking that computers are still the answer to all our problems! This time it is to stop stalkers.
The finger is pointed quite creatively in the blurbs.
Firstly at the non-white non-Christian population for invading UK’s great cities Manchester, London, & Birmingham. Secondly any Tory rebels who exercise their conscience (lol) are effectively sabotaging the party’s chances of winning the next general election according to Tory Jacob Rees Mogg. Thirdly someone is being labelled as a member of a crime gang for helping to transport refugees and asylum seekers into this country. It was demonstrated at the Home Affairs Select Committee last week that the only way you can apply for refugee status in this country is if you enter “illegally”. Of course many Tories are standing down in advance of the next election. The thing to do is to position themselves as former insiders with significant experience liaising with top civil servants, regulators, and other politicians. The Chinese government is to vaccinate the elderly to appease its locked down cities. A Chinese student in the UK told me the Chinese vaccine is ineffective. Kate Bingham formerly of the vaccine task force has publicly admitted that vaccines in the UK didn’t stop transmission and were extremely limited in the duration of their effectiveness. She is now on a new NHS Taskforce which will obviously accelerate the technocratic deregulation and privatisation process previously mentioned.
Interesting that HSBC is selling its Canada business. Is the activist investor that is encouraging the sale a Chinese insurance firm? Does it make sense to see a Chinese insurance firm that started off as a state entity deciding what HSBC policy is?
When Xi Jinping defended globalisation at Davos in 2017 it was in the context of newly appointed US President Trump’s disdain for globalisation and the “rules based order”.
Now the UK and USA are officially against China as they view it as a “threat” and a “rogue state”.
Here is PM Rishi backtracking on David Cameron and George Osborne’s love in with Xi Jinping.
Hinkley Point nuke plant was a Chinese French project which would have helped progress the Belt and Road initiative. This film is divided into three thirds – the final third is particularly instructive on Chinese motivation to do Belt and Road in the UK.
On the subject of Rishi Sunak versus Cameron – it was Cameron who brought in the policies to put brown and black MPs on shortlists for Tory constituencies and then put them into junior Ministerial positions to ready them for high office. Don’t suppose Mr Sunak will be backtracking on that!
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