POSITIVE ATTITUDE - Whoever thinks they can take over from the Conservative Big Dog in seeking to deflate the British economy, needs to have testicles the size of a space hopper. Homes, transport and energy are all issues to be decarbonized.

Nuclear power is more expensive than renewables, and what about radioactive waste management, that is impossible to say is safe - for hundreds of thousands of years. It never was, and never will be. Perhaps what should be happening is to make electricity cheaper for renewable consumers and more expensive for oil, gas and coal. Corruption that is undermining a fair society must be swept clean.

Despite pledges to limit support, governments around the world spend more than $420bn (£313bn) each year subsidising non-renewable (fossil fuel) energy, according to the UN Development Programme. They are working against the common cause. But to survive, we should all be working together. Not the elite rich, working to get richer as they burn up the planet.

MOVIE & HISTORY - The tomb of Marcus Nonius Macrinuswas was discovered north of Rome, close to the ancient Via Flaminia, which connected Rome to the Adriatic Sea on the Italian east coast and parts of it had fallen into a tributary of the River Tiber.

Macrinuswas, was from the northern Italian city of Brescia and is named in ancient Roman times as a 'proconsul of emperor Marcus Aurelius'.

Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome between AD161 and 180 and Macrinus was said to have been a particular favourite of his and part of his inner circle as he won numerous battles for him.

Director Ridley Scott won five Oscars with his movie Gladiator which was released in 2000. In the film, Macrinus is General Maximus Decimus Meridius and is played by Russell Crowe. Marcus Aurelius is played by Richard Harris.

The film said that Macrinus was a 'general who became a slave, slave who became a gladiator, gladiator who defied an emperor.'

In the movie, Crowe takes on evil Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) who murdered his emperor father Marcus Aurelius to take control of ancient Rome.

The two battle it out to the death in the Colosseum with Crowe not only avenging the murder of his friend the emperor but his wife and son who were also butchered by Commodus.

Growth is a word that is used by politicians to make the electorate feel good and get themselves elected on natural human greed. A lust for unearned income that has caused our planet to reach exhaustion in terms of what levels of exploitation it can take. Blue growth, is sustainable growth, not to be confused with growing the ocean economy, that is also described as blue. But both expressions mean that any expansion of an economy on land or at sea must not harm the planet.

Net Zero is the new challenge facing our economic warriors, Zero Emissions, Zero Inflation and Zero Growth. These are hard targets, make no mistake. We need Gladiators like Maximus Decimus Meridius, taking on Commodus. Commodus represents the coal and oil baron climate deniers. Maximus represents the underdog, conservationists, trying to save the world against enormous, immoral, opposition and deck rigging. And just like the tobacco giants, they have been spinning out stories to confuse the public for many years.

It is a balancing act, where corruption and exploitative profiteering has no place to hide - once the facts are on the table. Meaning, that many politicians, bankers and business people will not like it. Including their investors. Indeed, they will veto it as hard as they can go, despite such resistance being irresponsible in climate terms. But the smart money will re-invest in renewables like wind, solar, green hydrogen and methanol. As prime examples.

The G7 and G20 are mostly responsible for the policies that are cooking the planet and financially raping their own citizens, and many more in other geographical locations that are defenseless against capitalism and at the mercy of banks and venture capitalists seeking to generate huge profits for themselves and their wealthy shareholders.

That means that the rich get richer on the backs of the poorer members of society. Typically, those starting out in life with nothing but an education and the will to live.

Banks will do their utmost to enslave these newbies. Enticing them in with free banking and loans for their first car, conditioning their thinking, to believe that banks are there to help them, when in fact, they are working to control the population with another layer of taxation - being interest charged on money loaned, so that big business can rape them financially. Mercilessly shaft them for the rest of their lives. With the lure of borrowing money, based on an income from a job or career.

It does not help that consumerism makes people want goods they do not need, from advertising products relentlessly using intelligent algorithms from internet searches, emails, television and radio. Then credit cards allow purchases that many cannot afford, leading to debt and insolvency.

Kleptocratic politicians are no different. They want more than their country can sustainably afford, so they borrow sums without any hope of being able to pay them back - in a situation where we need reductions in output, not growth. But they were too stupid to see that far ahead - falling into the trap of believing their own bullshit, and the spin of climate deniers and oil/coal company lobbyists.

BUILDING A LIFE 

The next major shafting, comes when you try to buy a home. Firstly, house prices are grossly inflated by corrupt councils. This is because of the lack of affordable accommodation. Meaning that you will have to borrow significantly more, than you'd need to, if there were the choice. About three times as much.

Council and property developers work to prevent the build of low cost housing, by not making cheap building land available as per National Planning policy requirements. The law needs to be changed, to force dysfunctional councils to buy land for those who want to self-build using flat-packs, for example. That is how houses can be built cheaply and quickly.

Compulsory purchase powers already exist. Land for affordable houses may be obtained much cheaper, once it has been earmarked as being for social housing. At the moment land is changing hands for far to much by way of overvaluing it, far above the real value. The problem being that councils will not identify area as being for affordable units. For fear of upsetting local landowners, mostly farmers and estate speculators who are trading land way above agricultural value - as in what it is worth for dairy, beef and lamb production - or growing wheat, vegetables or fruit.

If that is the stumbling block, as it appears, maybe then, this should be a task for national government. Take the brakes off net zero housing, and apply the brakes on traditional bricks and mortar.

Rating values are also the subject of council corruption.

NEW STATESMAN 12 January 2022 - Boris Johnson’s rule-breaking and risk-taking have finally caught up with him

The loyalty of Leave voters had hitherto given Johnson cover for his style of leadership – but their fealty has begun to wane.

Boris Johnson’s attitude to risk has shaped British politics for the past three years. It made him Prime Minister in July 2019 and then helped him overcome the parliamentary impasse over Brexit by the end of that year. But his risk-taking has now eroded his authority to such an extent that he might not lead the Conservatives into the next election. 

Even after the years of cultivating his “Boris” persona – as a journalist and as mayor of London – it was in 2019 that Johnson’s personality really started to have a serious bearing on British politics. Prior to the EU referendum, he behaved as any Eurosceptic Conservative MP ambitious to become PM might have done. Politically friendless, Johnson needed a grand cause to challenge the then chancellor George Osborne for the party leadership when David Cameron stepped down before the next general election: nothing was so obvious in the circumstances as advocating for Brexit. 

But, after aborting his campaign to win the Conservative leadership election in the summer of 2016, he shrank. With Theresa May’s ability to deliver Brexit always in doubt, Johnson did not spend any of his Brexit capital acquired during the referendum to improve his position for any future contest to replace her. Most notably, he remained in May’s cabinet when, in December 2017, the backstop provisions agreed with the EU on Northern Ireland made it clear that she was pursuing a withdrawal agreement with no chance of being passed in the House of Commons. By March 2019, Johnson was voting “yes” on a meaningful vote where “no” won a majority of 58.

The elections for the European Parliament in May 2019, when the Tories won just 9 per cent of the vote, rescued Johnson. An idea took hold in the party that only a chancer such as “Boris” might deal more effectively with the EU and the House of Commons and so save the Tories from permanent annihilation. Johnson delivered. He got the Irish government to move on Northern Ireland and shrewdly reckoned that the more resistance to Brexit he invited in parliament and the Supreme Court, the easier it would be to prevail in a general election. 

Having secured Brexit and resurrected the Conservatives, Johnson could not have confronted a turn of events less conducive to his temperament than Covid. The pandemic has been a reckoning: on his own confession, years of ill-discipline with his diet and lifestyle contributed to his near-death experience in 2020. With respect to public policy, he had little choice but to introduce the politics of rules in ways that have been more intrusive in daily life than anything ever seen in postwar Britain. 

The question of whether Johnson was temperamentally capable of keeping to the rules he enforced on the public has overshadowed his entire political future since the first lockdown in March 2020. It is not possible for national leaders to ask voters to sacrifice their normal lives – their relationships, jobs and the need to be with loved ones at the end of life – without them being willing to follow the rules too. At the end of 2021, this new reality finally damaged Johnson after stories emerged (and are still emerging) about parties and gatherings at No 10. When it did, Johnson’s reputation was especially vulnerable since the Queen, in her obvious loneliness at Prince Philip’s funeral, had demonstrated to the country what it meant to suffer in the name of respecting the rules.

The loyalty of Leave voters had hitherto given Johnson cover for his style of leadership – delegating the specifics of managing the pandemic to others. After all, it was the Leave voters’ anger in 2019 that made Johnson. He became the last hope that the referendum result would prevail. Like them, he too was cast as the villain for voting to leave the EU in 2016, which they did not wish to repent. Now, he appears just like any other politician who thinks he is more important than the voters. Unsurprisingly, Conservative support among Leavers has crashed, and Keir Starmer is enjoying his first set of regular Labour leads in the opinion polls. Nor does Johnson have any Leave cards left to play to win back those voters who have deserted him. Just as the future of Northern Ireland could not save Remain in the 2016 referendum, a crusade about whether the European Court of Justice should have authority in the province will not work with disaffected English Tory voters from 2019 in the next general election. 

Whether Johnson’s luck is exhausted may be determined by the net zero target, which aims for a huge increase in green energy. He is a proponent of net-zero’s transformative possibilities, and appears indifferent to the extraordinary economic and political difficulties that realising it will entail. But here the “can-do regardless” spirit of “Boris” is aligned with the broader parliamentary consensus, the climate commitments of the EU and the Biden administration, as well as the financial institutions funding green investment.

Johnson’s weakness remains that sustaining net zero requires the kind of strategic thinking that can maximise the opportunities for levelling up while containing energy inflation, which he seems incapable of doing. But any plausible rival for the Conservative leadership will struggle to do much better. Johnson also still has an advantage: with the energy revolution, “Boris”-like displays of conviction that “there must be a way” are probably a necessary condition of getting very far at all.  By Helen Thompson 

THE INDEPENDENT 4 OCTOBER 2021

"UK electricity to be powered by clean energy sources from 2035," Boris Johnson says. All electricity in the UK should be produced from clean sources by 2035, prime minister Boris Johnson has announced. All hail Bojo, the eco prime minister, with, it must be said, confusing messages.

The target means a rapid switch from the remaining coal and gas-fired power stations to wind, solar and nuclear energy with, with fossil fuels used only with carbon capture and storage technology to avoid pollution. Indeed, carbon capture could take on a new lease of life with methanol as a possible contender to shipping and heavy goods vehicles.

The problem being with carbon capture, as in the biofuel (wood pellet) station, that trees are not being planted in sustainably managed fashion as required by conditions. Hence, we are back to square one - with permission being granted by the back door, unless strict enforcement of agreements is the name of the game.

Despite pledges to limit support, governments around the world spend more than $420bn (£313bn) each year subsidising non-renewable (fossil fuel) energy, according to the UN Development Programme.

This is not just politics. Politicians should wake up to the fact that this is the real world - and it is on the brink of a climate catastrophe.

Financial slavery must cease as part of an anti-corruption drive to cleanse politics of fraudulent white collar crime.

THE BEDWETTERS - MARCH 2020

Conservative politics is based on delaying economic shortcomings by robbing Peter to pay Paul. Another example of which is over-paying for roads, with only 5% of your hard earned taxes going to road building and repairs. That is why we have so many potholes: hence, pothole politics. The evidence for which on on the streets and highways in your area.

In Sussex the busy A271, makes commuting to Hastings or Hailsham dangerous, where the tarmac is narrow and flooding is likely to increase. Why is it so bad? Because under Cameron, May and now BoJo, they are turning our villages into housing estates, without the proper highways infrastructure. See Suicide Junction, as a prime example of planning madness.

DOWNRIGHT DANGEROUS - We pay our taxes but get no value for all our hard earned pounds. Don't forget that our income is taxed along with just about everything we buy. Even buying a house is subject to stamp duty and dying also costs money with death duties. Shit! How are they getting away with bleeding the electorate dry like this? Fuel is taxed, drinks are taxed (that's okay by us), and using roads is taxed. Then there is car tax of course. We heard they are thinking of taxing sex, based on the length of your Johnson. What you may have noticed, is that since Brexit, the roads have not improved. Nor has the NHS, so what was all that bollocks bravado the public actually swallowed.

LINKS & REFERENCE

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1078229/Found-The-long-lost-grave-Marcus-Macrinus-real-life-inspiration-Gladiator.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/59233799

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1078229/Found-The-long-lost-grave-Marcus-Macrinus-real-life-inspiration-Gladiator.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/59233799