No they don’t.
The Good Law Project is taking the government to court re the Abingdon Health contracts.
See my post
under Another Thundering Cock Up.
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He is also under a cloud with regard to money being directed to his Richmond constituency which is intended for the poorest towns in UK.
They do don’t they?! I find this utterly bizarre. He’s a revolting creature.
Izzy x
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It’s power I think - people with power, or who convince others that they have it, always seem to be seductive to certain sorts of people
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I still have a vote in the UK. Boris bashing? How about
It is reported that Johnson is a liar, a serial adulterer, involved in a violent assault on a journalist, steered grants and trips towards one of his girlfriends, spent millions of public money on a vanity project, spent thousands on water cannons to be used on the public and then has to sell them off cheap as they were illegal in the UK, and he advised the queen to act illegally to prorogue parliament.
His party won an election on the promise of an immediate departure from the EU but failed to mention of the down side of doing so. He moved into No. 10 with his pregnant girlfriend, excuses and condones bad behaviour by his ministers and advisers, authorises expenditure without tender, appoints cronies to positions of power and continues to lie to parliament.
Wow
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But apart from that Richard… he’s a top bloke 
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About twenty years ago, I conceived and curated an art exhibition called Reconstitution for S Africa’s National Festival of the Arts (the continent’s annual equivalent of E’bro - tho with much smaller budget).
I’d found a huge collection of old law books from the old Apartheid-era Constitution that had been stored in the projection room of the Art Dept’s lecture theatre. Initially I was a bit pissed off that the University’s Law Dept appeared to have just dumped them there as being obsolete.Never found out who gave them permission. Anyhow, having established the LAw Dept didn’t want them, I invited the country’s leading artists to choose a book and make an art work with it. Each book recorded a year of legislation in the SA Parliament and one thing that was immediately apparent was that at the start of the twentieth century, the books were very thin, but by the 1950s, there were two fat volumes of new laws for each year. In addition there were alphabetical indexes of the laws, often with unintentionally resonant titles like ‘From Natives to Police.’!
Because I never directly experienced Apartheid, I always felt unable to comment on it through art,because I couldn’t say how I would have behaved if (like my wife) I’d been born into a fairly wealthy white SA family, therefore my contribution to the exhibition was a law book re-bound with two spines, so it couldn’t opened - the work was called ‘The Book of the Ignorant Foreigner’. Very appropriately, given SA’s unbelievable crime levels, it got stolen during the exhibition!
!
Geoff, you (and others?) might appreciate the A4 press release at
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e2i2klve3xap964/Reconstitution%20Press%20Release.doc?dl=0
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Love it! It’s a closed book to me!
Reminded me of the epiphany in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby:
Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”
(I couldn’t get the Dropbox link to work though.)
Thanks, the press release text is below
RECONSTITUTION
Artists: Bruce Arnott, Dina Zoe Belluigi, Rookeya Gaardee, Mark Haywood,
Mark Hipper, Vusi Kumalo, Fritha Langerman, Brent Meistre, Jan Nell, Ilse Pahl, Colin Richards, Gerhard Schoemann, Usha Seejarim, Dominic Thorburn, Mark Wilby, Gavin Younge.
Curation: Usha Seejarim, Penny Siopis, Gavin Younge. Concept: Mark Haywood.
Be it enacted by the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Senate and the House of Assembly of the Union of South Africa, as follows:-
The above phrase, varied only by the substitution of ‘King’s’ for ‘Queen’s’ prefixed the statutes that defined and amended laws passed in the ‘old’ South Africa. They were formally set out in The Statutes of the Union of South Africa , a large set of leather-bound volumes containing all laws passed by the pre-1994 governments. These books remain a common sight in lawyers’ offices, and were the basis on which the law was interpreted and enforced.
Law however is not static, but evolves by mirroring changes in society; a country’s legal history is therefore a reflection of its moral, social and political history. In the case of South Africa, not only the statutes, but the books in which they were contained illustrate this relationship. Those from the first decades of the twentieth century were slim volumes, whose pages depict a country in the early stages of industrial development. New laws were being passed that regulated evolving primary activities such as mining, railway and harbour construction. Occasionally more sinister statutes made reference to the ‘regulation’ of ‘Natives’ and ‘Asiatics’; these not only reflected the Victorian inheritance of the Cape Colony and the earlier Dutch East India Company, but contained the ominous seeds of future legislation. Later, and far more overt were the volumes that listed the laws by category rather than year; their spines display what are today serendipitously symbolic conjunctions such as From Land to Master and Servants’ and From Natives to Police.’
As the century progressed the amount of legislation doubled, but the growing complexity and legal refinement of the new statutes meant that the pages devoted to their description increased tenfold. It is tempting to see these fat, swelling volumes as symbols of an increasingly repressive burden on the inhabitants of the country, yet to do so would also be an oversimplification. Although most of the laws were highly discriminatory and gave form and authority to the principles of apartheid, some were progressive, establishing for instance, elements of the welfare state and early ecological safeguards. The benign nature of this latter legislation is demonstrated by the fact that many of these statutes survived the abolition of the constitution under which they were created. Similarly the statute books themselves, though apparently outdated, remain informative social documents that chart the development of South Africa, and their formal bindings have an emphatic presence, whose sombre gravitas is a telling revealing contrast to the upbeat appearance of their present-day equivalents.
We habitually refer to books as ‘texts’ yet in so doing can easily forget that books are also objects. Artists from around the country were invited to choose a book of statutes and by whatever means they wished, transform or reconstitute it into an artwork. The artists’ acts of physically re-constituting the law books that regulated the lives of all South Africans, are tiny sutures, which may hopefully contribute to the much greater transformative process of healing.
Yes - book-objects are part of the reading context that is in play in the reader’s production of meaning from texts. Publishers aim different editions of the same text at different markets, they appear in different bookshop sections according to the way they are presented and described - say in ‘Fiction’ or ‘Literature’ - and are accordingly understood differently - and often by different people.
Fitzgerald is again an interesting example: he received an early draft book cover design for Gatsby from Scribners and wrote it into the text- where it subsequently became one of the most celebrated ‘literary’ passages in the novel (the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg pasage).
I too left that country years ago, and would never return. But like many others, all my income is taxed in the UK and l have friends and family there, so l do ‘give a toss’.
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Meanwhile, back in Westminster, things are hotting up…
Even the BBC reporting ploy is being used “other countries are even more corrupt”.
I have to say though John I dislike this kind of reporting in The Guardian (which as you know I do like - a lot - for some of it’s brilliant independent-minded columnists like Aditya Chakrabortty and George Monbiot).
The problem is there is no depth of analysis in it’s specifically Westminster-bubble based reporters. Starmer’s inquisitions at PM’s questions are completely irrelevant to most people - who don’t see anything of them. That kind of cut-and-thrust-of-debate is beloved of a clique - what actually filters out though is only a general stench of corruption among the men in suits, and the impression that ‘they’re all the same’ - ie. all it achieves is the right-wing aim of disengaging people from politics: it is - and to some extent The Guardian is, in the end, complicit with this aim.
Meanwhile, people - millions of them - are actually engaged elsewhere: in the ‘transition towns’ and other environmental movement initiatives, in various protest movements around BLM, the Policing Bill, etc, in food banks, in resisting precarious employment standards with Uber, etc, - and in many other ways. But Westminster - and, sadly, Starmer - is almost completely absent from this - the real politics.
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Agreed. I wonder whether it goes back to ?when the strong regional councils began to be emasculated? It always seemed a shame that happened - yes I know there could be regional corruption as well - but it seemed to be an excellent breeding ground for strong politicians who gained a lot of experience on the ground and understood their territory and could take that understanding to central government if they stood for election at a national level.
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There are too many politicians who have no experience of ‘real life’.
They come straight from university having read PPE and become parliamentary aides and then get elected.
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It’s just sketch writing Geof, I think Crace is very funny at times, and as for Marina Hyde - priceless. I consider it a bit of light relief compared to the very real issues you list.
Ah I see - yes I agree Crace can be funny - I didn’t read this particular article - that’s why I said ‘this kind of reporting’ - my comment was aimed at Westminster reporting in general, which doesn’t really interest me, and which moreover, I think, assumes that what goes on in parliament is of great importance - which I don’t think it is.
When Starmer was elected Labour leader The Guardian’s political staff (and other centrist commentators in The Independent, the BBC, etc) got really excited about how good he was at PMQs, as if this was going to make any difference - I remember thinking at the time how naive they were. Now a year on, with the Tories way ahead in the polls, and probably about to win Hartlepool and seats in the local elections, it is grating more and more on me.
But worse is the complicity. They continue to be shocked by the lies and corruption - and it really is shocking of course - but they imagine a public sphere in which if you’re caught out justice will triumph, rather than one in which most people have either a daily struggle to keep their heads above water, or are comfortable but immersed in dating or family, soap operas or shopping.
Most don’t hear much beyond the off-putting arguing; the Tories want the arguing for this reason - the last thing they want is lots of politically engaged and active people - and the media plays their game.
Meanwhile, those who are politically active are not interested in Westminster for their own very different reasons - because it seems to have no relevance to their own political concerns (which are indeed about all the really important things: climate/ecological breakdown, increasing inequality, social injustice, etc).
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Yes, I’ve long had my doubts about Laura Kuenssberg’s objectivity. I suppose they’re afraid of being frozen out, as CH4 pretty well has been.
No!!!
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It says it all when Channel 4 News says that they have asked for someone to appear on the programme but no one was available.
Too frightened and that’s why we watch it…
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