Corbyn – why does he still have a job?
THE latest revelation about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party goes right to the top and involves Jeremy Corbyn himself. This time it is not about what he may think of the Israeli government or how just he may think the Palestinian cause but about what he thinks of British Jews.
A speech he made in 2013 has come to light. In it he remarked that “Zionists” who had lived in this country for many years, “probably all their lives” did not understand “English irony”.
I do not think I need add any comment to that but I certainly ask a question: how on earth can this man be leader of a mainstream British political party? Just how? SO the biter is bitten and one of the great goddesses of the #MeToo movement, Asia Argento, is herself accused of sexually assaulting a minor to whom she apparently paid hush money.
If she is guilty then she is the arch-hypocrite of all time but if she is innocent, as she asserts, then she now knows what countless men have been through when faced with made-up allegations.
So perhaps she would like to start up a #MeToo for men?
Well I couldn’t care tuppence
I AM old enough to remember farthings, halfpennies and threepenny bits. The latter were, of course, pronounced ha’pennies and thruppenny bits.
Sixpences, shillings and florins are still with us but renamed while the half-crown has gone the way of farthings and halfpennies.
Currency often changes and if one and two pence pieces disappear, as is proposed, then we will soon cease to miss them and future generations will find them as quaint as we find the notion of guineas.
FIRST of all, the contents had already been published as long ago as January, so what’s new? Second, all the predictions in it are hedged about with caveats, including a frank admission that the model used by the Treasury might not be suitable for short-term predictions. The supreme irony, however, is that Dominic Raab who the day before was making a statement about preparing for a no-deal scenario, was vastly more alarmist, suggesting even that expat pensioners might find it difficult to access their pensions. Yet Raab is seen as a hero of Brexit (despite signing up to the Chequers Plan) and Hammond as public enemy number one. Do calm down, dears. Surely it is not too much to expect our parliamentarians, of all people, to analyse coolly what is in front of them instead of producing enough knee-jerk reactions for a Cossack dance. Anyway, with a big surplus and unemployment at its lowest for 40 years, I’d say the Chancellor is doing a pretty good job. Perhaps that is because he just gets on with it instead of, in that wonderful phrase loved by our ancestors, thinking every bush a boggard. APPARENTLY Wall’s vanilla ice cream contains neither cream nor vanilla and that brand is not alone. A Unilever blushperson, referring to Wall’s, says “we meet the ice cream regulatory standards”. Either I am the only person in the country who expects vanilla ice cream to be what it says or the regulatory standards are in urgent need of revision.