Der Fuhrer Speaks!

Hm. But is he moving about divisions which have ceased to exist, or is he merely starting to feel his oats?

Meanwhile, in a far foreign land, entrepreneurial capitalism rides to the rescue. Yay! I have now rented myself a dog. Said crossbreed german shepherd currently looking at an immediate future of being the best fed but most exercised pooch in southern Spain. Plans to tunnel out have been put on hold…

Has he reached the dribbling on his cardigan stage?

Do we know any friendly MPs who could sneak through a Bill of Attainder while Parliament’s distracted? Failing that, a friendly psychiatrist to section him? It’s for his own good and the good of the country, even if it does reduce the fun on here.

“I suppose even Dictators have their chummy moments, when they put their feet up and relax with the boys, but it was plain from the outset that if Roderick Spode had a sunnier side, he had not come with any idea of exhibiting it now. His manner was curt. One sensed the absence of the bonhomous note.”

No wonder Obersturmbanfuhrer Kartoffel didn’t feel out of place on his visit to Dachau.

The public mood has shifted very noticeably towards everybody mucking in to help others, and accepting that the government don’t have all the answers, but are doing their best. Certain Politicians, ‘activists’ and panic stoking Media are so out of touch with that mood that there has to be a backlash once the dust settles.

Get helping, or get the fuck out of the way. Murph, his collection of poisonous little failures, and others who are getting in the way or acting opportunistically will be judged on what they have been doing for a long time to come once this is all over.

Does the UK actually still have a Communist Party? Maybe neo-reformed Maoists? He’d fit right in..

We have seven “communist” parties of various Pythonesque Marxist hues, and at least nine Trotskyist groups. We’ve got two hard-left Socialist Parties just in Scotland – the Scottish Socialist Party (bright orange) and the Socialist Party Scotland (who are the latest version of the tartan bit of Militant Tendency).

@SurreptitiousEvil.

And yet they chant “the workers, united, will never be defeated”. More like the workers united would be a bleeding miracle. Nothing quite so fissiparous as the left wing.

Surely it won’t be long before someone decks the obnoxious insulting cvnt:

Barry M says:
March 22 2020 at 4:22 pm
These are unusual circumstances where people and businesses are restricted in their activity to meet a common good. Restriction or discontinuation of activity is not a choice.

Using such circumstances to impose conditions as you have suggested is as unconscionable as requiring party membership for any promotion, education etc. in communist days. Or religious adherence in other times and places.

No thanks, you haven’t persuaded me. We don’t have it, and I’m glad.

Richard Murphy says:
March 22 2020 at 4:53 pm
With respect, stop being a crass idiot

And look up what idiot means to find why I say it

@Grikath

Does the UK actually still have a Communist Party?

Yes

This is a surprise

Few have been putting these points more authoritatively than Susan Michie, 65, a member of the Government’s (pre-existing) pandemic influenza advisory committee and Professor of Health Psychology at University College London.
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On the Andrew Neil Show, on Newsnight, on the World At One, to name just three of the many programmes on which she has appeared in recent days, Professor Michie has supported the Government’s policy of relative restraint, with its aim of ‘smoothing’ the graph of coronavirus cases, rather than trying to stamp it out altogether with radical measures — only to face a sudden spike of infection when people re-emerge and re-congregate.
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When Ian Lavery, the hard-Left Labour MP and former President of the National Union of Mineworkers, tweeted that the ‘Johnson strategy’ meant ‘accepting the end of life for many elderly and vulnerable people’, Professor Michie tweeted back: ‘No, the opposite. The idea is to save the lives of elderly and vulnerable people.’
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This spectacle of Professor Michie defending Boris Johnson’s policies (and therefore those of a Tory government) against the former NUM president is extraordinary. And here’s why: although it has never been mentioned in any of the broadcast interviews with the professor, Susan Michie is a leading figure in the tiny British Communist Party, of which she has been a member since 1978.
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She was previously married to Andrew Murray, who, the Mail reported, ‘worked during the Cold War for the Soviet news agency Novosti . . . [and] has written in defence of Stalin and of the despotic totalitarian government of North Korea’.
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Murray left the Communist Party in order to become an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. His ex-wife, while remaining in the CP, urged its members to support Corbyn. She made a speech to this effect in 2018 to fellow members at the Marx Memorial Library, while standing next to a bronze bust of Lenin. Michie began with the words: ‘We, the working class …’

Actually, Susan Fiona Dorinthea Michie is the granddaughter of the 2nd Baron Aberconway, an Eton-educated industrialist; and when her mother died in 2007, she left £52 million in her will. (There’s loads of brains in the family, too: her father, Donald, was a brilliant computer science pioneer who worked with Alan Turing as a wartime codebreaker at Bletchley Park).
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I have been trawling Professor Michie’s Twitter feed over the past week or so, to see if there are signs of her true political views. It yielded one remarkable post in which she responded to someone praising China’s extreme measures of social control in dealing with coronavirus.
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Michie tweeted back: ‘China has a socialist, collective system (whatever criticisms people may have) not an individualistic, consumer-oriented, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neoliberal economic policies. #LearntLessons.’

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It is all the more welcome, I suppose, that in her capacity as a senior member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), Professor Michie fully appreciates that the Chinese approach of enforced mass detention cannot be applied to a people — the British — who have always put the highest value on their liberties.
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This may apply particularly to elderly folk who, confronted with an instruction to ‘self-isolate’ for many months, will argue they would rather keep seeing their families and avoid loneliness.
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As 91-year-old Rosamund Davies told the Guardian: ‘At my age, the only people whose health I worry about are my children and grandchildren. If I catch this virus and shuffle off this mortal coil, then I’d be perfectly happy.’
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The Prime Minister would naturally sympathise with that fierce independence of mind. So far, in a most unlikely double act with Britain’s only high-achieving Communist, he has held the line against draconian social measures in the fight against coronavirus. I for one will be sorry if our elderly are now ordered (rather than merely urged) to disappear for months — even if it is ‘for their own good’

Well done Susan Michie for putting country before ideology

Fuhrer? Ritchie always always put in mind of the fat evil buffoon Reichsmarschall Goering.

Oooh Rob, that’s cruel – but I’m not sure who it’s most cruel to, the Green Party or the Murph !