Showing posts with label blair. Show all posts

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform - a brief history.

Me too. UK Government "crackdown on benefits fraud" my arse..

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform has a history...... read all about it.

BENEFITS REFORM - What price preventable harm: social policies designed to

disregard human need?

Here's a history of the introduction of the system that led to Work Capability Assessments, Benefits Sanctions and so much else along those lines... I have posted here a section, the introduction, to *peak your interest, dear reader.

*(A dear reader pointed out my spelling error, I used the incorrect word. I ought to have used 'pique' - thank you Bernie Hastie on Facebook...)

I offer this in the hope you will read the paper. I'm afraid it will infuriate and inform in equal measure. Knowledge is powerful, because understanding the evidence makes for better decision making, and also assists in firming resistance to ill-informed policy.

This is critically important information and all to often left out of even the liberal press in their ruminations on this subject of 'benefits reforms'.

To tell the truth so that the population can understand what is being done matters.

Reading Mo Stewart's Paper will, I believe, inform and infuriate in equal measure. I know. I have just repeated myself.

It is shameful the 'news media' refuse this rather straight forward task so often.

https://citizen-network.org/uploads/attachment/746/what-price-preventable-harm.pdf

Mo Stewart

The Centre for Welfare Reform, England

Abstract

"Historically, the UK welfare system was designed to protect those in greatest need, which provided the necessary financial and psychological security for the unemployed and especially for the chronically ill and disabled community who are unfit to work.

This paper identifies how social policy reforms based on fiscal priorities have had the opposite effect, creating a crisis for disability benefit claimants. Conducted over a period of ten years, the Preventable Harm Project demonstrates the negative impact of the adoption of American social and labour market policies, and the often fatal human consequences of the removal of medical opinion from disability benefit assessments.

I argue that the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment for the restriction of disability benefit(s) has created preventable harm for those in greatest need, and this article identifies the negative influences impacting on UK social policy reforms to the detriment of the chronically ill and disabled community.

Key words: preventable harm, work capability assessment

Introduction

The past financial and psychological security provided by state financial support for the long-term chronically ill and disabled community was destined to end with the adoption of neoliberal politics, which is an ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal state intervention in all aspects of social affairs.

Neoliberal ideology has swept the globe and has impacted on all countries in the Organisation For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who are influential in the social policy reforms of all OECD member countries (OECD, 2003; Soldatic & Grover, 2012; Stafford et al, 2019). Margaret Thatcher was the first elected neoliberal politician in the UK and in 1982, during her first term in office as Prime Minister, Thatcher identified her political ambition to remove the UK’s welfare support system, including the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of the adoption of the American welfare system using private health insurance (Travis, 2016).

Every successive neoliberal government since Thatcher adopted social policy reforms to work towards this political ambition. In doing so, the past psychological security provided by the UK welfare state was removed, and every effort was made to ensure that access to state financial support would be made as difficult as possible when moving from a welfare state to a market state.

Commonly known as ‘welfare reforms’ the combination of social policy reforms, together with the adoption of increasingly punitive conditionality using financial sanctions (Dwyer, 2018), increased the prevalence of psychological distress identified within the disabled community (Patrick, 2012). The Preventable Harm Project (the Project) was created to offer a critical reflection of published research papers and key policy documents in this area of social policy reforms.

Preventable harm: the creation of a social policy crisis

The Project identified the adoption of a ‘non-medical’ functional assessment model, known as the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which disregards medical opinion when used to assess claimants of disability benefit (Stewart, 2018) .

The WCA was introduced in 2008 to restrict access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit, by tightening the benefit gateway in order to reduce the costs of the social policy budget (DWP, 2006); as recommended by government commissioned research (Waddell & Aylward, 2005) which was funded by the American corporate sponsors UnumProvident Insurance (Cover, 2004).

Introduced on an exclusive fiscal basis, with a dangerous disregard for health and wellbeing (Barr et al, 2016), this flawed method of assessment guaranteed that disability benefit claimants would learn to live in fear of the WCA (Garthwaite, 2014), which became a matter of life or death for many of those in greatest need.

The use of harsh sanctions by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for often minor misdemeanors associated with the WCA is linked to a disturbing number of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants attempting suicide (Mills, 2017; Barr et al 2016), and others have starved to death in C21st UK when they were sanctioned with all benefit income removed, identified as being ‘killed by the state’ (Elward, 2016: 30)."

https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58235/1/1351_Shakespeare.pdf - a more detailed paper on the Waddell & Aylward, 2005 model. The devastation that the implementation of the BPS model as interpreted by Waddel and Aylward is an immense unspeakable horror story. Millions of lives have been adversely impacted, just to 'save a few bob'...

In essence the voices of the vulnerable, their interior sense of what they are going through, are key to designing healthy policy. Always ask the locals, they know their territory really well.

Meeting the unmet needs of the vulnerable (we are all vulnerable) is an essential element of healthy policy, in as much healthy policy seeks always to avoid avoidable harms.

I think it is not so much to ask for, when we consider Governance of our society. The improved outcomes for all of us are what I describe as the profit of healthy policy. Rather than wealth extracted from privatisation of health care, we ought to mandate the profit as being the outcomes for the whole population.

Clean water is the profit denied when water utilities refuse to invest, and their negligence leads to raw sewage being free, from the rivers to the sea, as CEOs take their bonus's and the shareholders celebrate with glee.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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The Problem of Adversarial Politics.

The Problem of Adversarial Politics - Bullying as a modus operandi.

a brief overview

Adversarial dynamics and struggles for power tend towards bullying as an underlay for the flooring of 'debate' - the point is to win, rather than to arrive at an accurate understanding that informs and reassures all involved.

"In good conversation, there is neither victor nor vanquished - there is only better informed and reassured participants."

quote from Tim Field.

https://www3.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol1_1/Burton.htm

"The party political system is historically adversarial. It evolved out of past feudal landlord and commoner confrontations.

It became even more politically divisive with industrialization.

It retained consensus support and remained viable as long as its authorities were in effective control.

The hierarchie's political adversaries and grass roots activists could be criminalised and exiled. Poverty and poverty based crime could be contained by criminalising the impoverished, building more jails and by 'transportation' of the convicted poor and many more impoverished people as indentured workers to build colonies on foreign lands, at the expense of the native peoples.

But with communications that help to establish a separate culture for the under privileged, and with the availability of weapons, effective control of the alienated became ever more difficult.

With economic growth in industrialisation and their democracies there has evolved a dominant middle class. Its members have no desire to be caught in the cross fire of any historical we-they confrontation.

The press, radio and television and, more recently, social media have brought to its attention the absurdities of party political debate as a decision making process.

Furthermore, the members of the dominant `capital' and `labour' parties are now seen to be in conflict largely for personal career reasons, not because of policy differences.

There is a growing consensus that the problems civilization face must be tackled by less adversarial processes in which analysis and reason prevail."

Political Grooming and 'wedge' politics are designed to exacerbate the adversarial dynamics.

Use of dehumanising language targeted the perceived adversaries and marginalised groups within society is evident everywhere.

The 10 stages of Genocide - Sprouts Schools

The term 'sheeple' is a good example of that process, in that it inspires a sense of superiority among those who would use the term to describe others, who are deemed inferior.

We are all familiar with political and vernacular use of the words animal, cockroach, rat, vermin, monster, ape, snake, infestation, parasite, alien, savage and 'hate marches' as weapons.

The lack of humane understanding, the lack of empathy and the reliance on incomplete or inaccurate 'information' bias and curated bigotry are all stimulated by the term 'sheeple'.

This is one example familiar to me within my own situation and I cite it here because so many among my contemporaries, left and right, feel it is fine to use that term. I have always been appalled by that term.

I find that when I challenge it, I experience push back, dismissal and derision and an unwillingness to explore the meaning of use of such terms.

'Sheeple' is no less dehumanising than 'towel heads' or 'faggots' or 'dykes' or any number of similar terms.

Debate or Discourse?

Adversarial dynamics and struggles for power tend towards bullying as a underlay for the flooring of 'debate' - the point is to win, rather than to arrive at an accurate understanding that informs and reassures all involved.

"In good conversation, there is neither victor nor vanquished - there is only better informed and reassured participants."

How bullying works: projection and scapegoating.

Written by Kitty S Jones

https://politicsandinsights.org/2015/01/22/how-bullying-works-projection-and-scapegoating/

"Very few people, when put to the test, have the integrity and moral courage to stand up against bullying, harassment, abuse, threats and corruption. The targets of adult bullying are selected often because they DO have the moral courage to challenge; many people will pass by on the other side.

A target of adult bullying is most often chosen because of their strength, not their weakness. Research shows that targets of bullying tend to have highly developed empathy, and sensitivity for others, a high degree of perceptiveness, high moral values, a well-developed integrity, a strong sense of fair play and reasonableness, a low propensity to violence, a reluctance to pursue grievance, disciplinary or legal action, a strong forgiving streak and a mature understanding of the need to resolve conflict with dialogue.

Often, targets of bullying are independent, self-reliant and “different” in some way. Weak people often disingenuously confuse these hallmarks of character with weakness.

Bullies aim to inflict psychological injury more often than physical injury. Their main aim is to control, discredit, isolate and eliminate their target.

The word “victim” also allows disingenuous people to tap into and stimulate other people’s misconceptions and prejudices of victimhood which include the inference that the person was somehow complicit in the abuse. (See just-world fallacy and victim-blame narrative).

I use the word “target”, which is also accurate because bullying involves the intentional singling out of a person or group for abuse.

Bullies, who have no integrity, are vindictive, aggressive, demanding, and regularly violate others’ boundaries; displaying aggression does not respect peoples’ rights, and a bully’s “requests” come with a negative consequence if the course of action demanded by the bully is declined.

A bully’s bad behaviour is entirely his or her responsibility, they intend to cause their targets harm, to undermine them and damage them socially, emotionally, psychologically and sometimes, physically. And they often do."

Corbyn - making an example

Jeremy Corbyn and the false anti-Semitism, ‘friend of terrorists’, ‘communist spy’, ‘protest politician’ and ‘he’s unelectable’ charges laid against him present a recent and very well documented example of this dreadful behavioural dynamic. It’s sole purpose was to prevent a genuinely honest politician with a track record for integrity, honesty, empathy and a good understanding of the issues facing the body politic and society at large from gaining the position of Prime Minister, with a majority in the House of Commons.

That bullying campaign was perpetrated within the Labour Party by a group who were aligned with Blairism (and its wars) and this was replicated throughout the News Media and online, through social media micro targeting campaigns, funded and supported by those concerned with Wealth Extraction and their power to protect Wealth Extraction from accountability for the avoidable harms it refuses, repeatedly, to avoid.

Healthy Governance - avoiding avoidable harms.

The function of a healthy governance system is to maintain and support the population in living well and at peace.

Part of that process is the deployment collective resources to avoid avoidable harm and to prevent preventable harms.

There are harms that cannot be avoided and there are harms that can be avoided.

War can be avoided. War can be prevented.

However as we see, again and again War is not avoided and we know too well that within war the murder of civilians and the destruction of civil infrastructure which form the essentials for ‘living well’ - schools, health care facilities, housing, roads, utilities - which are the basic human right of a civilian population caught in the crossfire of warfare - tends not to be avoided, more often than not by conscious choice. The destruction is intentional, not accidental.

Collateral Damage : A euphemism designed to throw a veil over the realities of warfare.

We cannot stop a violent hurricane from causing destruction - we can however build infrastructure designed to withstand the impact of such natural catastrophes. We could deploy resources to protecting the affected people’s welfare, supporting them in the recovery process.

Resilience

Rather than raw personal human resilience, we could choose to build in resilience as an infrastructure policy and thus offer more effective and efficient support for the people made vulnerable by the storm.

Likewise, regards Climate Disruption, we cannot stop the process underway because it is the result of a few centuries of build up of Carbon Dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere that will take centuries to reverse. We can reduce or stop further pollution yet the effect of such action will take decades to be felt.

What we can do is design resilience into infrastructure, social care, wealth sharing, aid systems and so on to offer best support and protection of the people made most vulnerable by Climate Disruption - that would be a matter of avoiding avoidable harms in the near, medium and long term.

Bullying in politics is lethal.

Bullying in politics undermines all these objectives and more by at attacking the proponents of equitable industrial, social and economic policy as a method of defending the status quo, a status quo born of adversarial violence as described in the beginning of this piece.

Letter to my MP on the failure of UK Parliament to uphold International Humanitarian Law and the interests of Peace.

The facts laid out in a meme.

The Undemining of Peace, by a pro-War activist Lawyer (the persecutor of Julian Assange)

To Gareth Thomas, MP

Following the clearly adversarial approach of Labour and Conservatives this Wednesday last, in the UK Parliament in Westminster, London, an approach that disabled the SNP Opposition Day Motion calling for an 'immediate ceasefire in Gaza', and the 'ending of the collective punishment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli State', a reasonable motion by all standards, and then replaced it with a watered down, conditional motion that sought to avoid a 'rebellion' within the Labour Party back benches, a move that does not serve the interests of Peace, but instead protects the interests of Israeli Military State, and Keir Starmer’s clearly undemocratic leadership of the Labour Party, I write to you to, respectfully, to demand that the Labour Co-operative MPs who are genuinely active in seeking Peace and Justice step away from the Labour Party.

The same Labour Party that has repeatedly refused to hold Tony Blair et al to account for their War crimes, even when we had the evidence before us.

The country re-elected him in 2005. The country failed in it’s basic duty of care.

Since then both Labour and Conservatives have launched or supported a series of amoral Wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere and have ordered Military action beyond our borders, in contravention of the Laws of War.

This means, in real terms, that the Parties and Parliament are de facto War Criminal Entities that remain unindicted.

This failure has led directly to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, in that Russia used false claims similar to the way Blair et al have done, with the real politick understanding that in practice International Law does not apply to the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council.

The obvious hypocrisy of the different stances the UK Government has taken in relation to that War and all the other wars mentioned above is now clear, and presents a constant threat to world peace and co-operation.

It is worth noting that in a world that permits and enables warfare, the co-operation required to meet the challenges of Climate Disruption is not possible.

You must understand, as a member of a co-operative, that mutual aid is an essential component of developing healthy policy and that the adversarial dynamics of the current Govt. vs Opposition run counter to the meaning of healthy governance.

With that in mind, I am calling on you to uphold Humanitarian Law and International Law and the Laws prohibiting War.

Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 indicated that he would, if he gained the position of Prime Minister, order that War Crimes Investigations be initiated.

That was the primary (unspoken) reason for the Establishments vicious slanderous attack upon him, and upon the pro-peace policies he supported.

That was driving emotional reaction behind the internal Blairite Campaign within Labour to undermine his leadership.

That Campaign succeeded, because Labour MPs and Members refused to stand up for International Law.

Blair walks free, on a healthy state pension. He is amassing a large fortune as a direct result of all of this.

That failure is unacceptable, intolerable and utterly repugnant.

Please confirm that you will move to uphold International Law, distance yourself and your Party from these abject War criminals and stand with the peaceful people of Earth in your role as a politician, as a community leader and as an official whose wages we pay.

I advise you that my future, your future and all our children’s futures would be better served were you to align with the Green Party and all other genuine progressives and work to hold the war criminals to account, be they British, Russian, Syrian, Ukrainian or Israeli, or any other.

Failure to respond positively to this request will place you in a position that history will deem adverse the the interests of the people, and of peace.

Mass Murder by Economic Violence aka 'Austerity' - the Legacy of Conservatives, Lib Dems and Blairite Labour.

It is not 'trickle down economics', it is economic violence.

'Austerity' is mass murder by deliberate withdrawal of support for vulnerable populations.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/23020397.tory-austerity-likely-caused-deaths-covid-academic-says/

The report said there was now a “clear and urgent need ... for such harmful policies to be reversed”, with the authors urging the UK Government to “implement measures to protect the most vulnerable in society”.

These policies, promoted on the back of lies and gaslighting, were intentional actions that the Government of the time was warned against, and they went ahead, fully aware of the likely consequences.

"The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, noted there were 334,327 excess deaths over the expected number in England, Wales and Scotland over the period. This included 237,855 excess deaths among males in England and Wales, with a further 12,735 excess deaths recorded among men in Scotland.

Among women, there were 77,173 excess deaths in England and Wales, and 6564 in Scotland. The research was carried out amid “a stalling of improvement overall” in mortality rates, with increasing death rates among the poorest having been observed across the UK since the early 2010s.

Statistical analysis showed previously improving mortality trends had changed around the period 2011-13 in both Scotland and England, with this occurring following the Tories’ election victory in 2010."

This is Murder by Economic Violence, nothing less.

The United Nations has issued two reports in which they asserted that these policies amounted to a breach of the Human Rights of vulnerable people across the UK.

The Labour Files prove, in quite clear evidence, that the Centrist Blairite Brigade, now led by Sir Keir Starmer were in spite of the evidence focussed upon actively opposing, undermining and slandering Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum, the Disabled, The Vulnerable, the Unemployed, the Working Poor and Labour's own BAME members and staff from within the Labour Party, using illegal and amoral tactics - rather than pushing hard against these policies, showing a united socialist, humane front that had depth and energy, by joining in the work Corbyn and Momentum and Human Rights groups were and still are engaged in - this is a total betrayal of trust and of all the vulnerable people across the UK, on behalf of the Ruling Oligarchy, the Fossil Fuel Industry and the Military Industrial Complex of the UK.

The Labour Files, and why it matters.

The Labour Files provide plenty of solid evidence of persistent campaigns, nationally and locally, from the very moment Jeremy Corbyn accepted the leadership position, campaigns that included outright lies fabricated to suppress Socialists, false allegations, court cases driven by abusive spouses, Racist and Misogynistic abuse, email hacking, and the weaponisation of Anti-Semitism to undermine Corbyn, and more.

https://www.medialens.org/2022/mass-media-omerta-burying-al-jazeeras-the-labour-files/

"The damaging revelations about the Labour Party in the recent four-part Al Jazeera series, ‘The Labour Files’, and the almost totalitarian silence in response by British news media, should ram home the illusory nature of ‘democracy’ in the UK.

Based on the largest leak in British political history, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has exposed how Labour party officials smeared and intimidated rivals on the left of the party. The leaked data comprises 500 gigabytes of documents, emails, video and audio files from the Labour Party, dating from 1998 to 2021. They reveal:

The weaponisation of antisemitism by the right-wing of the Labour Party to hinder Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of becoming Prime Minister.
A ‘hierarchy of racism’ within the Labour Party disciplinary process which prioritises the investigation of alleged antisemitism cases over other forms of racism.
Shocking examples of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism within Labour.
The crushing of dissent within Labour under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership."

How utterly ugly has the Party formed to represent and protect the interests Workers become since Blairs wars, and the refusal of Labour Party to countenance War Crimes Investigations?

That warlike group within the Labour Party share culpability for these horrific deaths - be it in illegal and amoral psychological warfare against it's own members, or the economic violence of dying by poverty, cold, exacerbated disease, chronic poverty, chronic distress, abandonment and COVID are all utterly awful, awful ways to pass from this life. These are not the peaceful deaths most of would hope for.

The Weapons sent into multiple war zones lead to more violent deaths, always.... and as I have held, ever since the Iraq War, Labour and Parliament remain War Criminal entities, unindicted. Now they are mass murderers of their own constituents.

Labour and Conservative and Unionists and Lib Dems are all soiled by this vast culling, 580,000 awful deaths in the past 12 years, in pursuit of 'growing the economy'.

What then must we do to protect our own people from such harms?

What rights to action do we have?

Do not look to the Labour Party that is adopting a Vaticanesque silence on the false anti-Semitism charges aimed at Corbyn and the entire Socialist peace mongering Left now fully revealed, beyond any possibility of denial or open admission.

Al Jazeera’s ‘The Labour Files’ is a must-watch series. For the state-corporate media, for Labour Executive, for anti-Socialists and for the UK Ruling Class it is a ‘must-ignore’, 'not not mention the war' series.

All four episodes are available on YouTube:

Part 1: The Purge

Part 2: The Crisis

Part 3: The Hierarchy

Part 4: The Spying Game

We, the good and decent people of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland need a new political solidarity that takes on these bullies and gains a majority of seats in the Legislatures, at the ballot box. We have won the argument already.

Peace is more than the Absence of War - Songs from 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2018

First off this 7 minute video by Joe Glenton on the realities of war is essential viewing. I'd go as far as saying watch this video, then there's no need to read my polemic or listen to my songs about war.

I still cannot get my head and heart around the idea that USUK and other NATO armies have Christian chaplains and other religious pastoral officers embedded in their ranks. For me critical thinking is grounded in empathy. But that is one dynamic my empathy cannot reach. A spirituality that blesses organised violence makes no sense to me. Other than it presents the psychology of dominator cults as rather cruel, callous and manipulative. The concept of God as an absolute hierarch is a mirror image, a projection of the bully culture.

So yeah, I can understand that and I can also really feel for everyone affected and afflicted by the horrific Twin Towers violent mass murder terror horror. I really do. Utter horror, an atrocity beyond belief. Deliberate cruelty.

I was never one to say "America got blowback, got a bit of what it dished out, fair enough!" That's just the most venal, unthinking, heartless and debased way of framing that event. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

I know a little about trauma, and how it afflicts one after the events, how it can linger and contaminate one's life ever after. For some the impact is worse than for others, because we are all different. Comparisons are less than useful unless they are attended to with great empathy.

I can kind of imagine the pain, terror, grief, hatred, confusion, despair, loss, of anyone in the many situations that morning, in offices, stairwells, clambering for safety, having to walk over dead bodies, fleeing for safety without really knowing what was going on... by thinking of all the times I felt terror, trauma, fear of death, horror, disgust and grief and multiply all that, and make it head spinningly fast, turn my world upside down so I don't know what hit me until it's well over and the dust has settled feeling, the first quietness, that stillness when the grief really strikes.

I can kind of imagine being on the streets seeing this happening, not knowing, making decisions to flee, or be rooted to the spot, to experience terror and horror and fear and outrage as a witness a mile away, two miles way, 100, 10,000 miles way, as it was then broadcast as a happening event.

Luck, accident of birth

I realise I am a very lucky human being to have been born where I was away from all that - it is a matter of luck and luck alone to be have been born in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Bejing, New York, or Baghdad, Gaza, Hanoi, Seoul, or born in Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Myanmar, or to find oneself as an indigenous peasant in South America being attacked by militarised police waging war against drugs, or to be civilian in any one of any number of wars, or a bystander or a target in any number of mass shootings, or caught up in riots and crackdowns.

I have missed so much trouble by luck more than by effort on my part. A little humility goes a long way towards a more realistic view of our culture.

I have my story, it's a minor tragedy in comparison. You have yours. Mine seems big to me, impacts me daily, and yet I see that it is only that big because I am close to my own trauma, and obviously it seems so impactful.

So many people are made to suffer through no fault of their own, by this dominator cult we call 'civilisation' - hierarchies of wealth, power and violence.

Propaganda, lies and The War Against Terror.

"Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way; stop participating in it." Noam Chomsky

So when the propaganda vomits over the air waves and the light tubes this weekend, as they deny the War Crimes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and so many others from Vietnam to Troy, from Agincourt to Trafalgar, from Pearl Harbour to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from Gaza to Aleppo, from Sudan to Mali, I resist by reminding myself that war is the result of the behaviour of the leading bullies of the bully cult, Such behaviour is not an innate or inherent part of being human, it is a dirty, ugly, sick, depraved way of dominating for the sake of dominating..

I reject all fatalism about war's inevitability.

I have written anti-war, pro-peace, love songs for a nurturant culture for all of my working musicial life, and will continue to do so until I pass on or the wars stop - it's more likely the former, than the latter, yet my hope springs from the unfinished nature of life itself.

War is not inevitable. Dominator Cult is not inevitable.

Two score songs and more.

I have a reverbnation account that allows me to present MP3 files of my songs, for listening and for downloading, all for free and there's more than 50 there. The first six are arranged as my proPeace songs written in response/reaction to 9/11.

Below are descriptions of each song, why I wrote it, what the context was for each. Folk music is story telling.

Play them at least once this weekend, for me, for you, for your friends, for your children and for all their friends. Play them for the Afghani women and children, play them for the Yemeni people, the Libyans, The Iraqis, the New Yorkers, the people of Idlib, the people in Nablus and Hebron, play them the desperate people, the families with small children, trekking across strange lands, to get into in small dangerous boats to cross wide choppy waters just to find degrees of safety from wars our governments and oligarchy and businesses export for profit.

Play them to make sounds that are pro-peace, that are less anti-war than they are for peace.

I will be doing a few live stream shows this weekend, from my Facebook Page and I will record them and put them up on youtube.

The theme will be this : Peace is more than the absence of war. Why can't we have Governments that avoid avoidable harms to human beings, to our shared environment, to the species that live with us? Is peace too much to ask for?

1. TOWERS: September 2001

This song was written the week after the awful 9/11 terror attacks in USA. This recording was taken at a Virtually Acoustic Club night, in Angel, London, first week in October, with additional layers added later on that month. I had been writing letters, sending emails and even spoke on LBC Radio phone in to John Gaunt, all to articulate my desire for honesty, healing, maturity and to urge the US and UK refrain from further violence, warning that it would only make matters worse globally.

I understood the pain, the trauma, the anger - on all sides.

This song was my way of bringing that compassion to life in a song. It's not that I was 'right'. I was and remains that warfare is an abomination, is an irrational, reckless chaotic way to do foreign policy. Hierarchies of violence are toxic.

2. WE ARE GOING TO WAR : November 2002

A youtuber account known as Edensounds, a purveyor of fine music, of selected tunes and mixes, well known in certain communities associated with electronic music dance events in London, (a stalwart of the DJ craft long before the acronym EDM was ever coined), made a video of the song, listing English/British Combat Deployments since 1900, noting that there was only 1 year where British troops did not engage in combat, in the 110 years between 1900 and 2010 when he made the video.

Professional violence at the behest of the English parliamentarians has a long tradition, indeed. Ever since the New Model Army, and before. None of it is honourable. The two world wars erupted because the prevailing culture was a culture of violent Empire. Every war since then has emerged from the same dynamic. In that context no-one fights for ordinary people's freedoms - wars are fought to preserve violent hierarchies. That is why they fight.

This song was written in November 2002, while I was living in an art collective squat in North West London, Kensal Rise.

What was this new war for? Was the outcome assured? Had we not already seen failure of War policy in Afghanistan? The Helmandi had not forgotten. Blair blatantly did not take heed of history.

3. WAR TAX : December 2003

This song was written in late 2003, and produced in 2004, in response to the battle of Fallujah that March, This track was the first I produced in my first real home of my own, in London, after 6 years of homelessness after my flat was destroyed in a fire in 1997.

The tax bill to pay for war means all that cash and effort is not being directed into nurturing healthy communities, abolishing poverty, making life better for ordinary people.

Witnessing the appalling invasion of Iraq, in which it was already clear that it had brought, at great expense, chaos, blood, gore and horror to the people of Iraq and vast profits to Corporate America, I was really furious, and also terribly sad. I also safe in a new rented social housing home of my own after a long time of homelessness, and I was imagining the unfortunate, innocent people of Iraq, so many displaced, surviving in camps, homeless due to the violence of USUK.

How lucky am I to live here, and not there, I would tell myself every morning, as I ate breakfast and took in the news.

4. DARK DESERT HIGHWAY. September 2003

A rewrite of Hotel California inspired, if that's the right word, by the images of US Military convoys on darkened desert roads heading towards Baghdad.

5. DEPLETED URANIUM BABIES May 2001

Inspired by Brian Haw's protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London. There were an inordinate or excessive degree of birth deformities post Gulf War I, across areas of Iraq exposed to aerial bombing with DU munitions.

Depleted Uranium munitions have been in use since the 1990s, in Iraq, The Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq II, Libya, Syria and elsewhere by US and NATO forces.. Arguments rage about the health impacts to troops and civilian populations exposed to DU. Typically exposure occurs within a war, where there exist multiple potential contaminants and stressors and not enough research has been diligently pursued to give definitive answers. The precautionary principle ought at the very least led to an examination of toxic effects before such munitions were ever deployed. No such examination was undertaken.

6. THUNDER RUN July 2003

Written after I read reports about an armoured 'charge' of US Military Battle group into Baghdad, The Thunder Run, which apparently involved competition between battlefield commanders for the glory of being the first to 'conquer' Baghdad. As the column was travelling through urban areas, they shot the shit out anything that moved or appeared in front, to the sides.... thousands of innocent civilians and their homes were raked with live rounds..

Then a year later it was being discusse in heroic, glowing terms as a suitable subject for a Hollywood movie.

7. ALL WAR IS CHILD ABUSE December 2018

My response to the odious 'celebrations' of the 'Victory' claimed by British Empire in November 1918. Nobody wins in war, apart from the war supplies industries. I wrote this song that summer, and blogged it in November 2019, with a more detailed piece exploring all the ways in which warfare is related to child abuse, from training young boys to become killers, to towns and cities destroyed, from comics and propaganda to toy soldiers and war movies.

I understood long, long ago that vast quantities of money that could have been used for social benefit was being wasted, and grifted into the bank accounts of already obscenely rich oligarchs.

We had known that environmental degradation, air pollution, climate change and poverty were becoming immense problems that really needed to be addressed. But no.

"We are going to war, so PAY your taxes to guarantee our borrowings for this war!"

Afghanistan 2021 - USUK end the 20 year war, but deny it's harms.

In truth, nobody ever wins war. Everyone exposed to it loses, apart from the weapons suppliers and other material production logistics essential to the prosecution of any war.

Now, in August 2021, as the disastrous, pointless USUK and NATO war in Afghanistan is supposedly coming to an end and we witness yet again the reckless nature of the Governments involved. As it happens White Christian English Europeans have been importing war into Afghanistan for close on 200 years.

Given the most recent utter folly exposed in the awful, bungled, stupefyingly callous mismanagement of the 'withdrawal' of USUK/NATO Military forces (even as they still hold the threat of air warfare over the incoming Taliban as a future 'bargaining chip)' it should be blatantly obvious that the entire premise of imposing Democracy at the point of a gun is just a banal evil.

Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Johnson, May, Cameron, Brown and Blair and their Cabinets are all War Mongering Hierarchs to the core. Watching the English Parliament discuss Afghanistan last week was sickening. Repeated claims that the mission was honourable defy all notions of honesty. These people are utter hypocrites. They do not represent ordinary, decent people and their dishonesty is repugnant, makes a mockery of the very idea of a healthy and honest democracy.

Refusing to acknowledge that their war mongering allows evil behaviour to prevail, collecting a wage from the tax payers.

Clive Lewis

Here's an honest interview with MP Clive Lewis, who was in the Territorials, a Reserve of the British Army, and who is a combat veteran of Afghanistan, where he did one three month tour of duty.

One three month tour of duty, among men who had to do, who were ordered to do many, many more. I feel for the terrible burden those troops have to bear, to know they were placed where they had to kill or be killed, to endure loss, pain, woundings and grief and rage, and it turns out to have been a failure, because it was wholly illegitimate, even as they fought in good faith.

He speaks openly and honestly, informed by that experience and a wider understanding of the issues evolved since then. The theme was Afghanistan and his exclusion from being asked to speak in the House of Commons.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Apologia: Distal Power does not Apologise as we know it - we the ordinary folk pay the price, bear the costs, the Rulers retain their Power.

The Dominic Cummings road show is back in town. Cummings is spilling the beans on some of the inside stories around this English Government. Cummings is as culpable for the avoidable harms not avoided as any in office today. He remains unrepentant. His apology rings hollow, even as he eviscerates his colleagues in public.

He should be prostrate on the floor, tears streaming from his eyes, wailing his sorrow for what he has occasioned since 2016, on so many matters of critical national political behaviour, action and outcomes. He should be begging for forgiveness, for his part in rejecting Elimination of Community Transmission strategy.

Cummings should be opening up to tell the fullest truth telling possible, in order to bring to an end the non-avoidance of avoidable harms, in order to cease this headlong rush towards a health disaster for the English population, in order to make the case for elimination strategy that expert epidemiologists, public health professionals, nurses, doctors, teachers, parents up and down the country know we need to implement and resource, fully and at pace.

He's none of that. He is still playing everyone. His outing is not altruism or genuine honesty.

One of the threads that I have been following for some time is the resonance down through history of what appear to be repeating patterns. It is not that history repeats itself, so much as bullies behaviour does not change much. Including publicly made apologies for long denied historical harms caused to masses of people by callous Governments, the purpose of which is to retain power, status and position rather than address the harms caused as they ought to.

I have written about the similarities in English Government attitudes, behaviour, policy and outcomes when mass trauma events 'occur' at different times in History. Some situations were genuinely events that could not have been avoided, others were events entirely man made or natural events made much, much worse than they needed to be. The difference between a Volcano erupting and a war breaking out. The difference between a crop failure and a famine.

An honest study of the Irish and Bengali Famines of the Late Victorian era will reveal similarities in English Governance attitudes towards the adverse outcomes for ordinary people vis a vis the Iraq War, the COVID19 epidemic and pandemic, Hillsborough, Grenfell, Orgreaves, collusion in Northern Ireland, arming, training and maintenance of Saudi War Planes in Yemen, and the years of support for anti-Syrian violent militia who literally destroyed most of that country.

What is seen is a callous disregard, born in part by distance and class consciousness and in part by venal greed, a dismissal of the value, the human meaning of the lived experience of the most vulnerable people, harmed by the policy decisions made by the most powerful. The men and women who occupy positions of executive authority and who control a distal, leveraged institutional power are not vulnerable in the same way those who live where the policy has its greatest impact. Asymmetric has meaning in this context. An insensitive jackboot and a vulnerable ant.

"Many more loved ones will die!"

I have written about the way the people in power use apologia to defend their position and status, without changing their behaviour. They make public apologies, yet they never suffer indictments, trials, convictions or incarceration. The people who occupy distal power are immune to social material civil and criminal justice. They apologise, and reparations are not made or if they are made they are piecemeal and delivered late, after many years, to exhausted survivors who are largely forgotten, obscured by the passage of time.

Apologia - a defence of one's assumed power.

And so we read in today's Guardian News Paper the story of the Apology by the English Government of Tony Blair, issued in 1997, for the behaviour of the English Government during the Irish Famine. Blair did not write it, he did not sign off on it and he did not speak it, he did not mean it and neither did the English Establishment. It was the usual publicity promotional event, nothing more. Apologia. Sorry, not sorry.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/tony-blairs-apology-for-irish-famine-written-by-aides-papers-reveal

“The key sentence in your message is the acknowledgment that the British government at the time could have done more to prevent the tragedy. This is no more than a statement of fact, and falls well short of an apology, but the British government have been reluctant to say much about this in the past,” added Holmes, who said he had checked with “all and sundry” including press secretary Alastair Campbell that it was right to make such a reference.

“I hope this does not cause you any problems. It should go down well with the Irish, and I cannot see anyone here or in Northern Ireland seriously objecting.”

The text was honed by No 10 aides from a draft by the Foreign Office. An implicit apology was exactly how it was interpreted by the welcoming Irish press who saw it as an attempt to inject fresh goodwill into Anglo-Irish relations and encourage the peace process.

That the Irish Establishment were so ready to accept it as such speaks to their submission to desired myth rather than their ability and willingness to face reality, honestly. But of course, faced with a neighbour far more powerful than they and understood to be more than capable of inflicting harm (collusion in Northern Ireland, false convictions of innocent Irish citizens jailed for decades in English jails, the financial power of the City of London were all well known to the Irish Establishment) upon anyone who challenged them, their readiness to accept the apology at face value contained some wisdom. It's not a good idea to confront a more powerful bully with the truth, in International politics. And when both leaderships are steeped in NeoLiberalism, it's even less likely that a confrontation with the truth will happen.

That said, the truth about the Famine and how it was 'managed' remains. Some harms are so great that they can never be forgotten, not least if those who caused the harm remain unapologetic. The Irish establishment tries its best to say something of the truth, without going the full hog, as this RTE article outlines.

https://www.rte.ie/history/the-great-irish-famine/2020/0902/1162846-the-truth-about-trevelyan/

First and foremost, Trevelyan saw his role as essentially limiting the financial exposure of the British exchequer to funding relief for the Irish poor whose lives were devastated by the failure of the potato crop over successive years after 1846.

What he shared with the politicians and indeed the British Establishment as a whole was an ideological outlook that saw the Great Famine as an opportunity to bring about far-reaching reform of Irish society, clearing the land of the poor, developing commercialised agriculture, and making the Irish economy more ostensibly modern.

Sir Charles Edward F. Trevelyan, K.C.B. Engraved by D.J. Pound from a photograph by John Watkins, Parliament Street. Image: Getty Images

Let the Herd take it on the chin, protect the Hoard. The past 18 months described in one sentence in the 'United' Kingdom.

Others tell it like it was.

Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect."

https://www.amazon.com/Ireland-1845-1850-Perfect-Holocaust-Perfect/dp/0989610616

"This book, alone, provides the covered-up facts of 1845-1850 Ireland. There was no famine in the ordinary sense of that word. It was genocide perpetrated by more than half of Britain's army (67 regiments of its 130 regiments total). They removed, at gunpoint, Ireland's abundant meats, livestock, and food crops to the ports for export; thus starving the people. The book's colored map shows the locations of lengthy deployments of each of the sixty-seven regiments while they removed livestock, meats, flour, oatmeal, and other food crops to the ports for export. The same map names the locations of some 180 of the resultant mass graves."

The impoverished Irish native Catholic population, subsiding on potatoes, working for their Anglo landlords, were left to rot as their crop rotted. There was plenty of food, readily available, within spitting distance. It went to market, under armed guard. The Irish workers were deliberately impoverished by centuries of 'Austerity' policies designed to impoverish them, render them submissive and weak.

'Toraidh' is an Irish Gaelic word for a certain kind of egregious thief. It is also the roots of the English word 'Tory'.

Credit where credit is due?

Blair did not initiate the Northern Ireland peace process. It was initiated by Catholic and Protestant women finding solidarity in each other, building a peace movement, confronting the men of violence in their communities, building bridges across the divides, even as the British Security State was waging covert warfare from within both groups of paramilitaries and their communities. These women persisted with their humane struggle to bring the violence to an end. Mo Mowlem, Jeremy Corbyn and others followed pathways worn in by the ordinary women, the mothers, aunts and sisters of Northern Ireland.

Blair took the credit that others built up over decades.

The English Government of 2020/21 is no different.

They and those they truly represent are not bothered by the costs they have imposed upon the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish peoples by their rejection of Elimination Strategy. They have no plans to ameliorate the situation going forwards. Herd Immunity is now the obvious strategic position, and by mass infection.

Even as they claim kudos for the 'world beating' vaccination, developed by a pan European collective effort, administered largely by the NHS and volunteers, of which the best that can be said is the Johnson administration did not impede it in the same that the way they have impeded effective find, test, trace, quarantine and isolate systems that could suppress community transmission of the virus.

We have ample evidence of this Government exploiting the epidemic to enhance their own power, to enrich themselves and their crony associates, to bring in profound and damaging changes across social and health care provision, to avoid dealing with climate, environmental and other pressing problems.

Their latest wheeze is to recruit the youth in this task.

Disco of Malign Intent.

Saying to young people, whose development of their frontal cortex is yet to complete, and in the middle of an intense national level surge of infection via a new more transmissible variant that has vaccine escape, that they can and indeed should (to save the night time economy, do your patriotic duty) attend night clubs, knowing the frustration and intense desire of that cohort to socialise, to 'party like it's 2019' again, given the pressures they have had to endure these past 16 months of daily mismanagement, misinformation and blatant grift, suggesting that they 'take personal responsibility' rather than the government delaying opening up, maintaining legal provision (so called legal 'restrictions') to prevent spread of the virus and then say that in one and a half months time, for Health and Safety of the whole community, they would need proof of double dose of a vaccination to attend club nights (as a 'nudge' to increase vaccine take up) shows that they really do not care about the adverse effects of their policy on people - they want people to endure mass infection in the hope or gamble that this latest scheme will work.

That is the real meaning of Freedom Day!

It really doesn't have to be this way.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-virus-will-eventually-force.html

The question is simple - the economic costs of zero community transmission strategy and quarantine borders with known benign outcomes vs the human and economic costs of slow spread towards herd immunity, with repeated cycles of re-opening and shut down as the viral infection spreads in waves, wave after wave into an indefinite future of unknowable adverse outcomes.

The Virus will eventually force governments to adopt Elimination Strategy. Duty of Care applies universally.

The Virus will eventually force governments to adopt Elimination Strategy.

Breaking community transmission is the go to evidence led, grounded, proven strategy. It works.

Here's a solid report, with references, on the evidence that Elimination Strategy prevents the harms associated with Mitigation policy.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00978-8/fulltext

Study it, share it. Stopping the spread of the virus is spreading the love

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."