Tory – Observations and Misunderstandings

The Sun Shining Out Of It’s Own Arse

23/10/2020 Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Are you ready for me to state the obvious, because I’m going to. I’m going to do it now. The Sun newspaper is full of shit. Yes I know everyone knows it but some forget and it allows them get away with things. The danger with them getting away with things is that they are the number one read newspaper in the UK, owner Rupert Murdoch is a scumbag and also unfortunately people both believe him and vote the way he wants them to. The reason I bring this up is because Facebook‘s algorithm decided I might like to read this article on a man at a school who “could be 40”. To confirm the success of the algorithm I clicked on the link because it sounded ridiculous and because sometimes I have dreams that I’m back at school in sixth form and my mind related becoming curious in the process. It turned out not to be the silly article I originally thought it would be.

The headline – “Worried parents demand answers over new pupil who ‘could be 40’ joining school after moving to UK” – was not on the original link but the nature of the story becomes clear with it. The article goes on to pander to a narrative that child refugees or child migrants are not actually children or more precisely under eighteen. It would be worth mentioning that sometimes this does happen. I don’t deny it but it is important to understand that it’s not rife and it should not discredit the claims to refuge that minors, many of them unaccompanied, make. The article brings up the story of some Iranian who wasn’t under-18 who spent six weeks at a school in Stoke in 2018 before tests confirmed he wasn’t a minor. Without any proof it then uses this example as evidence of guilt in regards the second person with a thinly veiled implication that feeds racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Confirmation bias is a very real thing. We pay more attention to information that confirms our pre-existing understanding of the world. It is very hard to avoid confirmation bias because we’re all susceptible to it’s subtly. This unfortunately is simple and blatant propaganda. It reaches millions of people and the end result is things like Brexit and a majority Conservative government. The people voting for such things will not benefit from them but owners of newspapers like The Sun will. The independent media and the people are at war with powerful vested and influential interests, and themselves. You can’t overcome real power without the people, but first we need to overcome ourselves. I don’t just lay the blame on others, we’re all to blame. Just please don’t buy or believe this crap.

Incompetence, Really?

08/08/2020 Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

There comes a time in a man’s life, a woman’s too I imagine, when they look at incidents of Tory incompetence and realise they happen so frequently they may just not be incompetence at all. The Times newspaper, a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece which interestingly is becoming less fond of the current Government in power, published an article a few days ago about ministers spaffing £150 million on worthless masks with the wrong kind of straps, as part of a £252 million deal with a little known investment firm Ayanda Capital in April. Ayanda Capital are incidentally registered in Mauritius for tax purposes but perhaps a piece on Tory link tax evading companies will be for another time. It does seem a strange choice, a financial services company with no history of supplying the NHS for this rather important of jobs. Calls of incompetence ring the air. Well they do until you delve a little deeper.

As has already been mentioned, Ayanda Capital have links to the Tory Party through The President of the Board of Trade Liz Truss who was approached by Ayanda Capital through her friend and adviser Andrew Mills. But again there is more because for something to happen once is incompetence, but as the image below suggests, once is not entirely accurate.

At what point does that stop being incompetence. Once or twice at most if we’re being generous. After that well, either they’re severely mismanaging public funds and should be out of office or they’re actively corrupt and not just giving jobs to the boys, but funnelling the money to them directly. Let’s look again at Andrew Mills then shall we. As mentioned he is good mates with Liz Truss, but interestingly enough he’s also an adviser to the Board of Trade and coincidentally you guessed it, sits on the board of trustees for Ayanda Capital.

It is long known about the powers of a sleight of hand, or the importance of using an event or person to distract from other events, think about the idea of what they’re not reporting to be the real and important news. In this case the current government have managed to create the perfect formula; place someone on the throne of government who gives off the impression of being a clown and when accusations of corruption are made, allow them to disappear into the performance of Boris the Buffoon. These are not stupid people. They’re clearly highly intelligent and calculating. Surely there are now far too many examples of incompetence for that to still stand as a genuine accusation. Boris is the sleight, while the hand keeps taking.

A Union of Secession

15/12/2019 Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I’m going to attempt to recreate the main points of a conversation I’ve just had with my Dad. For context he is both pro-Brexit and pro-Union. These ideas discussed have come up in the past but seemingly have taken a step further with recent events.

The Tory party in the UK won a stonking majority of some forty seats and in Scotland the SNP won an equally stonking forty-eight out of a possible fifty-nine seats. Both of these result can be and have been spun in numerous ways but arguably what it does do is give a mandate for Brexit and a mandate for a second referendum in Scotland on independence. It is hard to argue against either of those things when Brexit and Scottish independence were the main priority of both parts respectively. However as with everything in politics this is not as straightforward as it seems. We in the UK have a voting system called First Past The Post, which allows for people to win seats once they get a certain number of votes but which for numerous reasons too many to get into here, creates a voting system which arguably favours the larger parties, creates a two party system like we have in the the UK and in the US too and which often allows for a larger percentage of seats that percentage of the vote.

The point is that while this may have been a Brexit election the Remain supporting parties actually received more votes in total than the Brexit supporting parties yet received vastly fewer seats. The same can be said for Scotland which has so many tight marginal seats that can be won by less than one hundred votes, the SNP received a far fewer percentage of the vote than percentage of the seats, which also equated to fewer pro-independence votes than pro-union. The argument made by my Dad was that the SNP don’t actually have a mandate because were there to be another referendum they would lose it because of this share of the votes but it is also an argument which can be made back in regard Brexit.

Put simply; the unionists want to maintain one union while breaking up another while the separatists want to break up one union while also maintaining another. The unionists believe they have the mandate to break from the EU because they hold a resounding majority in the UK parliament but not break up the UK because the majority of those voting in Scotland voted for parties not pushing for independence, whereas the separatists want to break from the UK because they hold a majority of Scottish seats in parliament but maintain the connection with the EU because the majority of Scottish voters voted to remain. Confused? You should be.

Ultimately that is the more ridiculous nature of politics and power. We pick and choose what we want to see and believe depending on what fits our narrative. We have a belief, we see facts, numbers, ideas which support this belief and fervently repeat them even in the face of contradictory points we choose not to see. I don’t doubt I do this too and hope one day to develop the self-awareness to stop. It’s just both amusing and depressing to see both sides using the same argument against each other and being oblivious to the fact its exactly the same argument. And whats worse, this road of obliviousness appears to stretch from one horizon to the other. This madness has always been, the question is then, will it always be?