Battle for Britain: Fighting the Tory Government’s Vile Ideology

As Boris Johnson encourages employers to urge their workers to return to the office, to revive the businesses that serve office workers, and to keep the real estate business happy, I look at how recent research has established that just 13% of workers want to return to the office full-time. I also point out that office workers are not the only ones causing problems for businesses and their landlords, with the collapse of tourism also playing a major part.

Marking 3,000 days since I first set out on my bike on a daily basis to take photos of the changing face of the capital for a project that became known as ‘The State of London.’ On the fifth anniversary of the start of the project, I began posting a photo a day on Facebook, where I have now posted 1,176 photos.

My response to the good news that the appeals court has ruled unlawful the British government’s patently unlawful — and cruelly immoral — decision last year to strip the citizenship of Shamima Begum, a British citizen who was just 15 when she travelled to Syria to become a “jihadi bride.”

An update on the coronavirus crisis, looking in particular at the difficulties accompanying the lifting of lockdown restrictions, with a positive focus on reduced office use and an end to overcrowded rush-hour public transport, but cautionary reflections on a general economic over-reliance on mass tourism, which afflicts London almost as much as it does other overcrowded holiday destinations like Venice and Barcelona.

Today marks three years since the Grenfell Tower fire, which led to the deaths of 72 people, and which only occurred because those responsible for the safety of the residents put cost-cutting and profiteering before their lives. Three years on, shamefully, no one responsible has been held accountable.

As Boris Johnson defends Dominic Cummings’s shameful flouting of the coronavirus lockdown rules back in March and April, the outrage shows no sign of diminishing, as is entirely appropriate. Cummings has shown contempt for all the people who observed the lockdown rules, even when it involved great sacrifice and personal loss, and his refusal to resign – and Johnson’s defence of him – shows how both men believe, very fundamentally, that there is one rule for them, and another for the rest of us. Both of them must go.

Here’s a link to, and description of my most recent radio interview – about Boris Johnson’s lamentable victory in the UK’s recent General Election, and also about Guantánamo – with Chris Cook on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, Canada. Chris has been interviewing me on and off for ten years, mostly about Guantánamo, but occasionally about other topics, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk about the dangerous state of British politics in the wake of Johnson’s victory.

My post-mortem on Thursday’s depressing General Election, which delivered a majority for the Tories under Boris Johnson, largely because of Johnson’s simplistic hammering home of a false promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ at every opportunity. The slow and agonising reality of getting Brexit ‘done’ may, however – if there is any justice – eventually derail his shallow and deeply mendacious premiership.

My call to arms for tomorrow’s General Election, urging people to vote tactically to get the Tories out, and also calling for urgent reform of our profoundly unfair and unrepresentative first past the post voting system.

A cross-post, with my own brief introduction, of a powerful open letter to the British home secretary Priti Patel by over 70 medical professionals from around the world, warning of their fears that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison, and facing extradition to the US, may die in prison, and needs “urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health.”