Author: zittrexstore

The idea was simple, even though it is based upon a thoroughly false premise. Drain Russia in every possible way that doesn’t involve too much blood and treasure of your own using another nation to do this. Then, when the job is done and Russia is weak enough its present governing elite can be relatively easily be usurped and replaced. 

Within the premise above is the  erroneous projection that Russia has the intent to take all of Ukraine. This was never true (though the practicalities flowing from western insistence on keeping the conflict going may well result in this outcome). The premise is that those governing Russia presently wish to reconstitute the Soviet Union. Whether the projection or premise are believed 100% by all within Washington and beyond or are only tactics used to instill fear, obedience and consent doesn’t affect the way a world war may eventuate from such tactics.

Attempting by every means possible to weaken Russia is an act of war in and of itself and upping the level to which you attempt to do this amounts to seeking to “bring on” a world war whether this is the conscious intent or not. Russia however, neither wishes to take all Ukraine or to reconstitute the Soviet Union. Russia wants to keep NATO away from its borders and safeguard the security of the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass in perpetuity. That is about it. Defeating the present regime in Kiev will effectively bring about the secondary goals, of de-Nazifying and de-militarising Ukraine. The president and government taking over from the present incumbents will certainly NEVER allow a repeat of past event.s

The agenda at work in Ukraine however, does not emanate from within Ukraine, it emanates primarily from the USA and in particular from President Joe Biden, supported by a group of rabid U.S. neoconservatives and by America’s allies, the UK, most of the EU plus New Zealand and Australia. The ‘Global Majority’ though, stand increasingly against this clearly perceived elite push for endless war from the USA. Despite this opposition there is no sign to date of any reduction in the fervor to maintain this war effort by the USA, still glued to false narratives, premises and projections as described above. This urgent do or die response by western elites seeing no alternative course to secure the continuance of their power and its increase can only be ended by their total defeat.

The Russian authorities must now surely be fully aware of the agenda behind all of the above, that is, to strengthen the power and influence of the West that badly needs shoring up, that this is a do or die situation for them and is fueling all we see happening now, and has done since 9/11. The Russians must now surely see there will be no end to the provocations, to the aggression, to the epithets thrown or the lies told, to the creation of hatred and loathing, or the to the demands for consent to ever more war… no matter HOW much it all costs. Sense has departed. Logical thought has been dispensed with. A wild and desperate western elite rage to keep what they have and have so much more that they want and a determination to do everything possible to get it, has replaced all true rationality among U.S. political and media elites.

While western leaders simply repeat the same memes and tropes that keep their misguided prejudices firmly in place, those on the Russian and Chinese side have strove constantly to keep cool heads, to strategize against the manically irresponsible and desperation-based policies of the West. Akin to taming a terminally wounded animal that senses its imminent death, this is far from an easy task. That wild animal has no rational impulse inside its being except to survive, this overrides all else and it is this that generates the adrenalin-infused attacks it makes wherever its imagined enemies lie.

Russia will, despite everything,l see this episode through to its final end. The only alternative to this is to allow the destruction of Russia by the forces reigned against it. Therefore there IS no choice but to see this through by every means required. In saying this it must be done while retaining the keenest eye on the most effective means of doing it. And this is what we have seen from Russia since February 24th 2022 and ever since the West-assisted coup in Kiev of 2014. Russia has been playing its cards very carefully as those it is playing against are both powerful and ruthless. Those western political and media elites, taken over by mass irrational impulses through desperation regarding the potential loss of their power, status and influence, are willing to contemplate ANY action now.

Russia may yet be defeated in this duel to end all duels now taking place in Ukraine. If so then we move forward to the projection that is ultimately desired by the U.S. elites, a totally weakened Russia that can be hollowed out, carved up and made amenable to take over by individuals aligned firmly with the West. The western powers then apply similar tactics to China, another even more delusionary goal than that currently being forwarded against Russia. Endless war with its attendant mass deaths and destruction doesn’t faze U.S. neoconservatives a bit. Bring it on they would say. Happily for us the ‘Global Majority’ now aligned ever more firmly alongside both Russia and China will, unless there is some further unforeseeable catastrophic occurrence, stop the West’s ultimate goal in its tracks. 

The wild, fatally-wounded animal of the West, in its rage to keep its power and stave off its diminishment is inadvertently only creating more and more opposition to its retention of that power. The majority of the world rejects the brutality and total selfish nature of that power, its unending desire to gather ever more to it and the completely unrelenting addicted nature of that quest. Having emerged from under its threatening grasp the global majority is moving ever closer toward those who offer vitally protective sanctuary. The wild beast that is the western world and more specifically the commonality of its elites, can harm the world less each day that now dawns.

None of this stops western elites for playing out their utterly dysfunctional mental states and fomenting the continuance of their activities that will continue to cause mass death and destruction for some time still to come. But the period of time within which they can continue is rapidly shrinking. You can almost feel it now in the air, the time of their demise has come, the end of their brutal period of dominance is ending…and almost every move they now make only hastens their demise.

Damn, we really wish the rest of America would please just come to its senses and fall in love with Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) like we have. The name is a big part of the problem. “Inflation reduction” was a concession to get Joe Manchin on board. Can laws get better names retroactively, maybe something as simple as the “American Climate Plan”?

It’s the biggest climate action the US has ever taken, and while it got attention recently on the first anniversary of its signing, we sometimes think we should be going up to people in the street and telling them just how much it’s already doing in moving the US toward a renewable energy economy. That long-delayed transition is no longer a “gonna happen,” it’s a “happening right now” — just this week, the London-based energy think tank Ember released an analysis that found roughly half the world’s economies are “five years past peak fossil-fuelled power generation” (silly British spelling!). Obviously that’s not due to the IRA, from just over a year ago, but it’s a measure of progress.

Automakers All In On New EV Battery Factories. Thanks, Joe Biden! And Joe … Manchin?

Stupid Inflation Reduction Act, Growing Economy And Decreasing Emissions And Capping Grandma’s Insulin And

Have We Mentioned Just How Amazing The Climate Bill Is? Let Us Do So ONCE MORE

As Yr Wonkette has reported previously, the tax incentives in the IRA — both for buyers of EVs and for manufacturers — have already led to a boom in planned US battery factories, as well as a lot of other clean energy investments. Goldman Sachs estimated earlier this year that, since the programs run through 2032 and have no spending cap, total IRA investments in clean energy will approach $1.2 trillion over the next decade, spurring Crom only knows how much in spin-off investments, jobs, and growth.

On Thursday, Heatmap published an update on another tranche of spending built into the IRA, its $110 billion in grant programs, of which the administration has awarded the first $11.8 billion so far. But what a range of grants! Let us nerd out together:

There’s more than $100 million for protecting the Pacific Ocean’s salmon and steelhead fisheries.

Hundreds of millions more to plant urban canopies in Atlanta, Phoenix, and dozens of other cities.

$1 billion for two new weather research ships for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and tens of millions for mapping the best “fuel breaks” — roads, rivers, and other natural features that will slow wildfires in Colorado, Wyoming, and other states.

Most initial funding has gone to existing federal programs, to fund climate programs in the Agriculture Department, to upgrade the nation’s national energy research labs, to hire more conservation scientists for US Fish and Wildlife, to make federal buildings more energy efficient, and so on. The second-largest single grant, around $3 billion, has already gone to the Postal Service to fund an entirely new fleet of delivery vehicles, the vast majority of which will be EVs. (They should start hitting the streets in 2026.)

US Postal Service To Go Electric, Like Dylan At Newport

So far, new programs created by the IRA are still ramping up, and haven’t yet started funding grants, because that’s how government programs do unless you’re trying to shovel money out during a pandemic to prevent an economic crash. (Yes! You can absolutely say the climate crisis calls for similar alacrity, albeit with more oversight to prevent grifting.)

Heatmap offers some for-instances where the programs are still coming on line:

The EPA has yet to start making grants from its $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for instance, a multi-purpose fund which will eventually help capitalize dozens of green banks and provide loans to cut the cost of rooftop solar.

The EPA has also yet to disburse money from its new programs to reduce air pollution from ports, cut methane emissions from oil-and-gas infrastructure, and help environmental-justice organizations.

The IRA also provided nearly $10 billion to the USDA to help rural electric cooperatives decarbonize their power plants; that money has yet to flow as well.

But that doesn’t mean everyone at EPA just farts around all day reading Wonkette and picking fights on Twitter, because a lot of people have already moved to Bluesky. (Here’s a little Easter Egg for attentive readers: I had five Bluesky invite codes for alert readers, but they are all now distributed. Read Wonkette carefully and you may spot the next bunch I give away!) Rather, the White House explained in a statement that it’s already “launched” $70 billion in IRA grant and rebate programs, which Heatmap translates to mean that the feds “may have opened up applications to receive funding from those programs, but not yet awarded any money from them.”

For an analogy, consider the the pace of another major Biden climate program, this one under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Its $5 billion “National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI)” program granted states funds to build out a network of EV charging stations. Joe Biden signed the BIL into law on November 15, 2021, but that didn’t make charging stations just start popping up like itinerant preachers on college campuses on a nice spring day.

The Departments of Energy and Transportation had to design the NEVI grant program, then states had to apply to for approval of their plans, set up their own bidding processes and determine where stations would go, and all that. That’s why it took not quite two years after BIL passed for Ohio to announce last week (without even thanking Joe!) that it had become the first state to break ground on a fast-charging station funded by the program.

Gov. Mike DeWine (R) Very Proud Of New EV Charging Stations Ohio Building All By Itself!

Joe Biden Signs Infrastructure Bill! Everyone Thank The Last Guy For Some Reason We Guess!

People should start seeing NEVI-funded charging stations around the country in 2024 going forward. Oh, hey, want to see how your own state’s doing with its EV charging station progress? There’s a federal website for that! Thanks a lot, Biden!

In other words, look for the pace of IRA grant spending to pick up in the coming year and beyond, and for example, for those rural electric co-ops to start greening up, at least in places where Trumpers aren’t fretting that solar panels will poison the groundwater. (They won’t.)

There’s some concern that IRA money needs to go out before the end of 2024, to get climate progress into the pipeline before any chance that Donald Trump might return to the White House and mandate that coal be served with all school lunches. The IRA would have to be repealed by Congress to fully reverse it, but any Republican administration could certainly use the levers of executive power to effectively gut much of it, as that “Project 2025” wet dream for dismantling democracy from the Heritage Foundation lays out.

Of more immediate concern to many Democrats is that some of the IRA’s key rebate programs for home energy upgrades — particularly a program promoting energy efficiency/weatherization, and another focused on electrifying homes — aren’t yet available to consumers. The Energy Department hasn’t yet finalized the necessary rules, which leaves states waiting for the funding that will help them set up and administer the rebates.

As a result, some of the rebates won’t be available until next year, which has led to frustration for consumers who want to green up their homes and for companies who’d be happy to install insulation, better windows, efficient appliances, and smart circuit breaker panels. Potential customers are holding off on projects until the rebates are available, and that in turn means companies aren’t yet staffing up to meet the demand.

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That will of course get worked out, the sooner the better, and there are other factors — especially current high interest rates — that are holding back some parts of the energy transition. (My personal pet theory is that the Energy Department regulators might be doing their damnedest to bulletproof the rules from legal challenges, and that takes time and deliberation. This is pure speculation on my part, but informed by the rightwing reaction to many other federal programs like Obamacare, EPA regulations, and Biden’s student loan forgiveness proposal.)

Happily, Heatmap notes, while consumers and contractors await the availability of those grant programs, another IRA program is already up and running that’ll augment the green transition: a “$200 million program meant to train home contractors to install heat pumps and other home efficiency measures” will begin awarding grants on November 1.

Oh no, jobs, clean energy, and economic growth! Sounds like hell, huh?

[Energy Mix / Heatmap / Grist / Politico]

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For the third consecutive year, a dark and sinister force is at play, abetted by a cynical right-wing press, attempting to present Europe’s biggest conservation charity as some kind of dangerously radical cake-and-countryside organisation.

It’s that time of the year again, the run-up to the National Trust’s AGM, when 5.37 million members can have a say on the work and management of Britain’s best-loved heritage institution. But for the third consecutive year, a dark and sinister force is at play, abetted by a cynical right-wing press, attempting to present Europe’s biggest conservation charity as some kind of dangerously radical cake-and-countryside organisation, to sway public opinion, and, ultimately, to control direction.

Unlike other British cultural and environmental organisations such as Kew Gardens, the V&A, and the National History Museum, which use a supposedly unbiased public appointments process but conveniently find themselves stuffed with Tory cronies, the NT’s board is decided by members. It can therefore only be infiltrated should members vote for the infiltrators. As such, Restore Trust (RT), the opaquely funded, ‘anti-woke’ pressure group, has devoted its entire three-year existence to National Trust (NT) infiltration.

Founded in 2021 following the publication of a report by the Trust that highlighted connections between 93 of its historic places and slavery, the group is backed by multi-millionaire Tory donor Neil Record, who funds the Tufton Street charity Global Warming Policy Foundation. Restore is opposed to what it sees as the National Trust’s “modish, divisive ideologies.” There has been speculation, which the organisation rejects, that its real motivations are to stoke up culture wars and to see the NT relax the environmental protections it has on its 620,000 acres of land.

Despite its best efforts, so far, Restore infiltration has been futile. Undeterred by last year’s failed bid to take control of the Trust, when none of its candidates were elected onto the council, RT has returned with another candidacy panel, to ensure it ‘rescues’ the Trust; to, in its director Zewditu Gebreyohanes’ own words, ‘save it from ‘wokery.’

Among the candidates seeking to impose such change is former Supreme Court judge and historian Lord Jonathan Sumption. While an improvement on 2021’s RT candidate, Stephen Green of Christian Voice (perhaps even Restore realised that lobbying for someone who had lobbied against the criminalisation of marital rape and defended laws proposing the execution of some homosexuals made them look bad), Sumption’s candidacy is still worth critical scrutiny.

Described as a ‘conservative neo-liberal and libertarian,’ in the 1970s Sumption worked with Tory MP Sir Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), of which Joseph was a cofounder, along with Margaret Thatcher. The CPS is of course a ‘Tufton Street’ resident that regularly publishes work by climate science deniers.

You often see Lord Sumption’s name tagged onto articles bleating out typical right-wing waffle in the usual Rightist places. In a recent piece in The Spectator, Sumption argued the case for leaving the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).

A well-known critic of lockdown, in November 2020, he wrote for the Daily Mail that it was ‘morally wrong for government control freaks to tell us what we can do at Christmas.’ You get the picture.

In the run-up to this year’s AGM, the Telegraph, a longstanding National Trust opposer and Restore crusader, alongside GB News, and the Daily Mail, has been working itself up into a predictable apoplectic state.

In September, the newspaper was quick to promote Lord Sumption’s candidacy for the National Trust’s council. The article cites Sumption’s claims that the charity is being ‘undermined by woke rows.’ It continues how ‘despite his experience, he [Sumption] has not been endorsed by the Trust as one of the five preferred candidates and The Telegraph understands he was not even interviewed by the nominations committee.’

A spokesman for Restore Trust told the Telegraph: “Lord Sumption is one of the finest legal minds of his generation, as well as an exceptionally gifted historian with a passion for historic buildings. It is unbelievable that the National Trust is not jumping at the opportunity to have his advice and expertise.”

Perhaps that’s because the NT is determined not be penetrated by right-wingers who oppose some kind of imaginary ‘woke’ agenda? Instead, it is opting for candidates who are more aligned to its actual values and aims, such as James Dixon, a former civil servant and CEO of Peak District National Park Authority, who has said that his priorities include ensuring NT “properties are viable and heritage is maintained to the highest standards.”

The other independent board candidates backed by Restore Trust are Philip Gibbs, Andrew Gimson, Lady Violet Manners, and Philip Merricks.

You might recognise Andrew Gimson’s name, as he is the Telegraph’s former sketch writer, and a contributing editor to ConHome. One of his most famous ConHome pieces had to be when he argued that we are ‘suffering the excesses of woke capitalism because the Sixties generation has captured business.’

In his pitch for NT election, Gimson claimed that in recent years the Trust has “strayed from its proper purposes.”

Fellow Restore-backed candidate is Lady Violet Manners, daughter of the UKIP-supporting Duke of Rutland. The family’s estate, Belvoir Castle, has hosted fundraising events for the party. Lady Violet, a former Dolce & Gabbana model, has warned that “the Trust has become distracted by a political agenda that detracts from its mission.”

As part of its Restore profile-raising content, the Sunday Telegraph ran a simpering interview with Manners, who said she was so sick of the “wokeness” and “politicisation” of the National Trust that she was putting herself up for election as a candidate to its advisory council.

And guess who is a good friend of Lady Violet? Nigel Farage no less, who, according to Yorkshire Bylines, has been a dinner guest at the Duke of Rutland’s castle. Farage is one of several high-profile, right-wing, climate change denial political figures that want to see the National Trust under new management, along with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Susan Hill, the Tory candidate for mayor of London. In September, arch Brexiteer Farage announced he was throwing his weight behind the renewed attempt by Restore to capture the Trust.

“I hope that Restore Trust knocks a bit of common sense into what was once the great National Trust,” he said.

Which brings me onto the subject of common sense.

As well as the likes of Lord Sumption and Lady Violet, Restore Trust is the natural fit for the Common Sense Group, an ultra-traditionalist group of 60 or so MPs. Since forming in the summer of 2020, the group has become synonymous with the UK Right’s ever-growing assault on their ‘woke’ enemies. Determined to persuade the notoriously impressionable Boris Johnson that Tories must engage in an all-out culture war, the group’s chair Sir John Hayes wrote “The Battle for Britain has begun… it must be won by those who, inspired by the people’s will, stand for the common good in the national interest.”

One of the first actions of the group was to write an open letter to The Telegraph, berating the National Trust for its efforts to present the multiple historical perspectives surrounding its properties (as any half decent historian would tell you. Perhaps Lord Sumption was a better lawyer than he is historian?)

The group accused the NT of being in the grip of “elite bourgeois liberals” because of the charity’s report that acknowledged links between its properties and slavery. They also called for a Charity Commission investigation into the Barnardo’s children’s charity after it published an article explaining white privilege.

The letter read: “History must neither be sanitised nor rewritten to suit “snowflake” preoccupations. A clique of powerful, privileged liberals must not be allowed to rewrite our history in their image.”

Like Restore Trust regularly spouting their anti-National Trust propaganda, Hayes and his Common Sense group have frequently published opinion columns in the same right-wing newspapers. Writing in the Express this month, Hayes argued that the ‘liberal elite are out of touch with ‘common sense.’
I won’t depress you with too many extracts, but here’s one:

“Too many twitterers and bloggers, trapped in echo chambers of their own creation, are a world away from those who know very well that, as Home Secretary Suella Braverman declared, foreign offenders should be “booted out of Britain” or that, in the Prime Minister’s words, “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman.”

More depressingly still, is how the Common Sense Group’s aim to push the government in a more hardline direction on a range of ‘culture war’ issues seems to be paying off. Our current prime minister, looking down the barrel of almost imminent electoral defeat, seems more focused on right-wing campaigns related to culture wars, migration and opposition to environmental initiatives than his two predecessors were. Then there’s our Home Secretary, the darling of the Tories’ right for her attack on ‘woke’ politics, and uncompromising approach to migration. With Sunak and Braverman leading the charge, this year’s Tory Party Conference was preoccupied with culture wars, with coherent policies on immigration, the environment and other pressing issues facing the country, taking a backseat.

Striving to stop discussions of issues like the slave trade and promote a fake and sanitised version of British history, is not unlike what Vladimir Putin and his cronies are up to in Russia. Russia’s propaganda model has been described as the ‘firehose of falsehood,’ due to the high numbers of state-run channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. Then there is Hungary, where Victor Orbán drives a similar right-wing authoritarian propaganda machine through state media that spurns out what has been labelled as ‘ready-made fiction direct from the government.’

Of course, discussion around culture wars and promoting a sanitised version of history inevitably leads us to America, where culture wars have polarised Americans. In recent years, US conservative politicians have increased efforts to ban books on racial and sexual identity.  A recent report by Pen America, a non-profit that supports freedom of expression in literature, found that book bans in US public schools have increased by 33 percent over the last school year. The authors whose books were targeted were “most frequently female, people of colour, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals,” read the report.

While blatant book banning has yet to arrive in Britain, there is a growing sense that this could soon change. In April, research by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip), the UK’s library and information association, found that a third of librarians had been asked by members of the public to censor or remove books and have also faced threats in discussions about the removal of books. The most targeted books involve empire, race and LGBTQ+ themes. This not to say that tastes do not change and what was enjoyed by and found acceptable to earlier generations, has much less resonance in our own age. Books, films, television programmes, and pop songs are not sacred texts, immutable to change. Reinterpretation and modification have been going on probably since the written word emerged in the ancient Middle East. That though, is long way from the kind of book banning and burning that happens in today’s America and Russia.

Restore Trust and its bid to wrestle control of the National Trust because it sees it has some kind of threat for simply maintaining a commitment to historical and cultural truths, concurs with the foreboding sense that Britain, under culture war-obsessing Tories, is creeping towards authoritarianism.

Right-Wing Media Watch – Poland’s ‘populist nightmare’ is over, but gains little attention in Britain’s right-wing press 

A sigh of relief could be heard in Brussels, as the xenophobic, populist nationalists in Poland were defeated by a broad coalition of progressive parties in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. Such relief doesn’t seem to have been replicated in Britain, where reporting of the story has been notably absent, at least from the pages of the right-wing press.

Out of the nationals, only the Guardian’s frontpage made reference to the hard-right ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) heading for defeat in elections, which attracted a record turnout of 72 percent, the highest since Poland’s transition from communism in 1989.

While there is a lot of other stuff going on, it almost stands to reason that our right-wing newspapers wouldn’t want to draw attention to the booting out of a hard-right party that was allied to the Tories when Britain was in the EU. In 2009, David Cameron formed a new right-wing fringe group in Europe, known as the European Conservatives and Reformists. Labour accused the Tories of moving to the extremes of Europe after the party confirmed that its 26 MEPs would sit with Poland’s homophobic Law and Justice party, among others on the Right.

Since it came into power in 2015, the nationalist-conservative party has inflicted colossal change and damage on Poland. As Anne Applebaum writes in the Atlantic, such change has included turning state television into a propaganda tube, using state companies to fund its political campaigns, and politicising state administration. This is on top of turning the country into a combative anti-EU power, and attempting to overhaul Polish judiciary, which it believed was filled with corrupt communist-era judges.

The damage gives us a taste of what a seriously right-wing party can do. And with the Tories arguably heading that way, what it could do to Britain.

In a comment piece in the Guardian about the unseating of Law and Justice, historian and political writer Timothy Gardon Ash describes Poland’s ‘populist nightmare’ as being ‘almost over,’ noting how it is still early days and there are tough tasks ahead. Exploring why the opposition won – the largest opposition party being the Civil Coalition, which is led by Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council – the author says some voters were alarmed by opposition warnings that the ‘anti-Brussels course of PiS might lead to Polexit.”

While the threat of a Brexit-style ‘Polexit’ reportedly spooked Polish citizens into not voting for the anti-EU ruling party, the pro-Brexit Express framed its reporting of the election as being “a bitter hammer blow to many in Poland with PiS being supporters of the country leaving the European Union.” The report splashed with the headline: ‘Anti-Brexit Donald Tusk declares election victory in Poland.”

Meanwhile The Times’ acknowledged how the Polish election is ‘proof that liberals can beat populists…’ but… this ‘is no watershed’. Putting a damper on the hope that the defeat of the hard-right nationalists in Poland will mark a new brighter future for Europe, the analysis states: ‘First, the gloomy tidings for Europe’s centrists and liberals; there is little reason to believe that the Polish election heralds the beginning of a broader anti-populist fightback,” continuing that “national elections tend to be just that – national.”

Whether Britain’s anti-EU Tory press like it or not, the demise of the hard-right and change of government in Poland will almost inevitably have huge implications, both at national and international levels. Nationally, the return of Donald Tusk as the country’s next prime minister, promises to undo much of the damage, including paving the way for billions of EU-funded euros that has been withheld by Brussels over rule-of-law concerns. On an international level, Poland’s move away from populist nationalism will provide a cheery boost to mainstream parties across Europe, eight months from the pivotal EU Parliament elections. No wonder the story was given minimal editorial space in Britain’s pro-Brexit, right-wing media.

Woke-Bashing of the Week – Suella Braverman doubles down on ‘woke’ policing crackdown

The Home Secretary, who loves to shout out her contempt for the ‘wokerati’, has vowed to double down on ‘woke’ policing, calling for officers to be ‘patrolling the streets, not policing pronouns.’

The comments were made at the annual Police Federation of England and Wales Conference, where Braverman said she was fighting a “campaign against political correctness in policing.”

“I’m not fighting my campaign against political correctness in policing only for the sake of the law-abiding majority who want to see officers patrolling the streets, not policing pronouns on Twitter. I also know that’s what the majority of you signed up for, too,” she told officers.

She added that anything that distracts from investigating every crime is ‘unwelcome,’ saying, “whether that’s enforcing non-existent blasphemy laws unnecessarily recording a non-crime hate incident or joining in with political demonstrations.”

Referring to Baroness Louise Casey’s findings in a review earlier this year that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic,’ the Home Secretary said: “I don’t believe that term is a useful one or an accurate one. It is not a term that I use when describing the police.”  

The comments follow Braverman’s earlier assault on ‘woke’ police, when she said officers are not paid to ‘dance with drag queens’ or ‘wave flags.’ The remarks appeared to criticise the way officers policed LGBT+ Pride events and were made after the Home Secretary ordered a review into ‘political activism in police.’

When Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister in October 2022, he too promised to stamp out ‘woke’ policing.

The PM had made the same remarks during the Tory leadership campaign, when he said police should tackle street crime not Twitter jokes.

Ministers’ deciding that rising levels of crime in Britain is down to ‘wokeness’ in the police force is just another example of the preposterous nature of right-wingers’ all-consuming and half-baked war over ‘wokeness’ that has been escalating in recent months. It is also further proof of how desperately out of ideas the government seems to be. They can’t exactly argue that crime is on the rise because 13 years of Tory rule, marked by detrimental funding cuts, which have let the crisis spiral out of control. It’s much easier to blame ‘wokeness’ and distract from the real causes.

As for making the police less ‘woke,’ when you think about the many reports of lewd banter, and ‘everyday misogyny’ in the Met, it seems there are a number of police officers who could do with being a little more ‘woke.’

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

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