Doomsday

I’m sick of seeing Jeremy Corbyn brandishing sheaves of paper to ‘prove’ the nastiness of the Tories. A bundle from Russia-with-love to prove that Boris Johnson is about to sell off our NHS to “Trump”. The evidence appeared to consist of a wad of thick black lines, the content redacted, obliterated and unreadable. But no matter. When today is over we might not have to see it again.

A few days ago BBC News featured a Corbyn rally (in Bristol, perhaps?) Corbyn, again waving papers before an adoring mob. This time, the front page of the Mirror featuring four-year-old Jack being “treated for pneumonia on the floor because there were no beds in Boris Johnson’s hospital.” Behind the anointed one, a comedy bobble-hat rose up, very slowly from beneath the podium to reveal the wearer - a photographer. Had the prospect of a Corbyn led “gov’ment” been less catastrophic, this slow-motion ‘photo-bomb’ might have added a moment of slapstick hilarity. I wish the intruder was an absurdist performance artist, but I expect the chap just wanted a shot of the great man from an unusual angle; the back of the head.

The confusion about the four-year-old boy-on-the-floor drags on. Speculation abounds. Who took the photo? Why was it taken in the first place?  The plea not to politicise it -  from the boy’s mother and from Jeremy Corbyn, whose very insistence that he wasn’t politicising it was effectively politicising it, something of which he must have been perfectly aware.

The assertion that the boy was ‘being treated for pneumonia’ on the floor, yet the drip was plainly not in use; but was it a drip or an oxygen thingy?  Whatever had happened, it was all due to callous Tory cuts. 

The editor of the Yorkshire Post has written some dubious hyperbole in the Guardian 

 “His mother, Sarah Williment, found herself in a moment of panic: her baby needed her. Moreover, her baby needed medical care from the amazing doctors and nurses at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) but such was the demand from patients, he had to be made as comfortable as possible – on a pile of coats on the floor – until a bed and care became available.

Is a four-year-old technically a baby? Well, I s’pose, to a parent, one’s adult offspring are still babies, at a stretch. 

Was he waiting for ‘a bed and care’ or had he already ‘had’ care? If he hadn’t been seen yet, who supplied the drip cum oxygen mask? P’raps they brought one with them from home? This is getting ridiculous now.

“With only good intentions, Williment contacted her local newspaper, the Yorkshire Evening Post. In times of trouble, people often turn to their local newspaper. In this instance, Sarah only wanted to others to see just how stretched the team at LGI was, and humanise the impacts of too few hands at the pump.

As you do when you think your child baby has pneumonia. I’m not going to go on and on, much as I could.  I must try going to my local newspaper in my time of trouble - but will the Western Morning News care that a bunch of antisemites are running the country?

Stephen Pollard is thinking what I’ve been thinking for ages. I can’t even remember if I’ve written about it before, but I’m pretty sure I have. Pollard, from his piece in the Telegraph:

"The truth is that I can now barely bring myself to contemplate what this election says about my fellow Brits' willingness to tolerate Jew-hate. Whatever share of the vote Labour ends up with, it's safe to predict that over a third of voters have no problem with the concept of installing as prime minister a man who is repeatedly labelled an anti-Semite, not least by those like Dame Margaret Hodge who have worked alongside him.
[…]
In 2017, it was possible to argue that they didn't know about all this. That's impossible now. The issue of Labour's anti-Semitism has been given a full and comprehensive airing both during and long before the campaign. 

[...]The worst of them all are the so-called moderate Labour MPs. In the four years since Mr Corbyn was elected leader many of them have tweeted and spoken a lot about solidarity with the Jewish community. But when an election was called and they had to make a choice, they chose – actively, consciously and unambiguously – to ignore the pleas of the Jewish community, and to side with the Jew haters. Their campaigning was not to stop anti-Semitism, it was to put the leading anti-Semites into power.

Momentum-inspired aggressive behaviour of the baying mob is spookily 1930s-like.

On an odder note, have you noticed, Jeremy Corbyn himself has succumbed to the fashionable Labour glottal stop. He suddenly started using the famous Labour Party pronunciation, referring to the organisation as The Labour Par’y.  

Might Angela Rayner impose the ‘silent T’  as part of Labour’s revolutionary educational policy: “Equality Rules for Dumbed-down Schools”?