Sunday round-up (?)

George Eustice is my MP. He has been made plenty of use of since his promotion last week when he was anointed secretary of state for flooding. The current severe flooding is a baptism of fire; he’s in much demand to defend the PM’s apparent dereliction of duty in not showing up in his wellies to commiserate with the unfortunate people of Yorkshire.

"Where is the Prime Minister this week?"

With widespread flooding, @SophyRidgeSky asks Environment Secretary George Eustice why @BorisJohnson hasn't visited affected areas or been seen in public for 9 days.#Ridge pic.twitter.com/Br6kVvxaIg

— Sophy Ridge on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) February 23, 2020

Good old George seems unflappable. I’d quite like to see him being vocal and unflappable on certain other matters too, given time. His predecessor Theresa Villiers was a reliable supporter of Israel and participant in relevant HoC debates, but I think the likelihood of George following in her footsteps, in that area at least, is next to nil.  

“British officials have pledged to urgently review the tens of millions of dollars in aid the UK provides to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, after an investigative report found that a majority of the funds have been going to schools in the West Bank and Gaza Strip which use textbooks that incite violence against Israelis. 

According to a Friday report in the UK-based Daily Mail, the Department for International Development and its secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, vowed to raise the issue with the Palestinian Authority, adding that London was working to carry out an independent review of the Palestinian textbooks.”

It’s bad enough allowing our own textbooks to spout inaccurate and antisemitic material, but it beggars belief that any of my hard-earned wages go towards gifting UNWRA with $427 million worth of incitement to murder my kith and kin.

As I was saying, George Eustice was on good form on Sophy Ridge and on Andy Marr immediately afterwards, having evidently been teleported to the BBC studio.

Sophy Ridge gets more ‘senior’ people on her show these days than the BBC seems able to attract, despite being a bit of a shallow interlocutor, even in comparison with Andrew Marr whose Boris-related comeuppance seems to have taught him a lesson. (Thinks: Are the Conservatives actually implementing ‘semi BDS’ on the Beeb?) 

(I don’t know how many times my autocorrect - autoincorrect - has changed SopHy to Soppy. I’ll just leave it in future.

You have to watch these things on a Sunday, and I stuck it out all the way through to The Big Questions. I was surprised to see Andrew Doyle sitting in the front row. (Identifying familiar faces in the front row is the first thing you have to do when you switch on TBQs.) (It’s downhill from then on.) 

Up first, the question of race. Of course, we’re all racists, although one might contend, as I do, that it’s not necessarily based on skin-colour, (except, perhaps in India where they use the Pantone shade-card as a guide) 

I’ve heard of Adam Rutherford but I didn’t know much about him. Lefty, isn’t it? 

Anyway, I think I’ve learned a new thing. The Labour Party is a race with its own language. (Just think. It nearly had its own state.) This was beautifully demonstrated for us on this programme by  a lady called Maya Goodfellow (Maybe later, do something about that gender-specific surname?) 

The Labour Party Language is a form of English, built around rigorous abstention from the percussive sound that native English-speakers usually use to articulate the written letter ’t’.

This does hamper fluency and makes pronunciation and comprehension difficult, but once you ‘get your ear in’ it’s almost possible to get the gist of most of it. The knack of delivering the language with true conviction seems to be in forming a kind of impenetrable word-barricade while beating time with talon-like nail extensions, a signal that these non-proletariat hands are unsuitable for chores, playing stringed instruments or any demeaning form of DIY.

Then I watched a bit of 'Homes Under The Hammer,' which used to be one of my favourites until Lucy Alexander who knew stuff was replaced by token diversity who apparently doesn’t.