The Sunday Ishmael: 01/12/2024

Looking, as usual, like a depressed but stoical tortoise, Pat McFadden attempted to interpret the sacking of Louise Haigh this morning on the Sunday Show without Laura Nose but with Victoria Derbyshire. This was evidently a most serious issue for the Government in that Pat was sent into the front line to deny everything, stoutly declare Nothing to See Here and move along. 

McFadden, who glories in the middle name of Bosco, was born in 1965 but has really not aged well.

A Glasgae lad, he represents Wolverhampton South East, but hasn't lost that trick they Scottish bastards have of Disapproval. He's worked for Blair and Brown and is now Starmer's man - he's Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the highest ranking minister in the Cabinet Office, second only to the Prime Minister. He attempted to Disapprove Victoria Derbyshire into shutting up about red-headed Haigh. 

Although, to be dead honest, he didn't mention the hair. You'd think, though, that if he was going to Disapprove anything, it would be the hair. But maybe it isn't common in Glasgow and south Wolverhampton. But it is. Common, that is.

Anyway, I've been puzzled by this news story since Starmer sacked the girl on the 28th November. And then McFadden being used to whitewash the issue? Well, you had to wonder. The story seemed to be that Haigh had been out on the lash one night in 2014, when she was the victim of a mugging. She gave the police a list of items stolen from her, one of which was her work phone. She subsequently found the phone in a drawer at home and told the police she'd made a mistake. Whereupon she was prosecuted and received a Conditional Discharge for the offence of Fraud by False Representation. Bit harsh, you'd think, being prosecuted for an honest mistake whilst pissed. Haigh herself minimised the gravity of the charge by telling the world that the Magistrates imposed the lightest of all sentences. Well, actually, no. The least sentence is an Absolute Discharge. A Conditional Discharge requires the offender not to commit any more offences for a specified period of time, and if you do, the Court can deal with the offence for which the Conditional Discharge was imposed as well as the new offence. Haigh says she told Sir Keir all about her criminal past in 2020, prior to her being appointed to the Shadow Cabinet. And him being a former Director of the CPS and a lawyer, that's alright, then. It's just those nasty Tories making a fuss about nothing. Getting their own back for the times that Haigh denounced them and called for their resignation. She thought Theresa May should resign in 2017 for running a "shocking campaign" in the general election. The following year she had a go at Amber Rudd for "deliberately misleading parliament over targets for removing illegal immigrants, saying " she has to go. If your only excuse is gross incompetence than you cannot remain in post." In March 2022 she directed her rage at dear old Boris (I've ordered his book on Audible, but he hasn't finished recording it yet - can't wait to have Boris in my ear), "the man who repeatedly flouted (the Covid rules) ...should resign". Ms Haigh also accused Boris of "deceiving the police" in the House of Commons in 2019, suggesting he had "seriously breached" public trust by "politicising serving officers".

Except there's a little murk hangs over the circumstances of that 2014 conviction. Minimal research by me revealed that Haigh's employers, Aviva, who had issued that work phone supposedly stolen by the muggers that night in 2014 were formally investigating Haigh after establishing through their tech wizardry  that the supposedly stolen phone was being used to call Haigh's existing contacts, including her mum. The police investigation confirmed that the same numbers had been called by the phone before and after the supposed theft. Sky News reported that two sources alleged that Haigh wanted a more modern work phone, like the ones being given to her colleagues, and The Guardian reported that Aviva's investigation was looking into whether Haigh had deliberately mislaid phones in order to get upgrades. Haigh resigned from Aviva.

Starmer should have taken one look at that hair and realised she was just not Cabinet material. Then there were the rude things she said about P&O Ferries.. 

After returning to the back benches, Haigh then voted for the Assisted Dying Bill the next day.

I wasn't going to talk about the vote, but I found myself in agreement with a telling point made by Diane Abbott. Pointing out that assisted dying would be fully funded within the NHS, whereas palliative care isn't, the conclusion could be reached that Government will avoid the whole bitter wrangling about funding a National Care Service  by getting rid of all those inconvenient and expensive elderly and disabled folk.

 MPs sobbing in the House over sad narratives of "undignified" deaths (by which they mean, I think, incontinence of faeces and urine) are not to be trusted with legislation of this importance. Hard cases make bad law. Once the principle is established that the government can legally kill you, not for wrong doing, but simply for being human and facing death - what's next? Empty the prisons of all those lifers by reinstating the death penalty? 

I never had the benefit of a scientific education. I'm an arts and humanities girl. You know, the soft subjects. But I've been trying to remedy my lacunae by doing a bit of reading. I'm handicapped by having little math and less quantum physics, I can't read an equation and I resent people who are paid to hypothesize about unknowables.  "Even now, I mind the coming and talking of wise men from towers where they had thought away their youth."

I don't think I have the right sort of brain for all this made-up stuff. Here's mr ishmael sharing some thoughts on it:

 But Why Is There Anything?
A couple of years back, I tried to review a  PBC Horizon show, the debunking, at the hands of some of its creators, of the so-called Big Bang Theory, that piece of nonsense which insists that Every Thing came, in an immeasurably tiny instant, from No Thing. You know how it goes, some smug bug-eyed little boffin smirks that, asking What was Before is the wrong question, Before is a temporal concept and obviously there wasn't any Time until the Big Bang created it, along with Space and Matter, so there was no Before. So fuck off and leave this to crazy bastards, like me, with our many-noughted equations; did you know, for instance, that the transition from Sweet Fuck All to the existence of the Universe lasted 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 of a second?

The thing is, advancing human theorising about time, space and the expanding universe doesn't give a brown baby a drink of clean water. It is summed up beautifully by Gil Scott-Heron in his poem: "Whitey's on the Moon."

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish Plumber, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster.  You can buy the Quartet from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.