Category Archives: The BRISTOLIAN Says

Editorial comment

SLEEPWALKING INTO TOTALITARIANISM

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While MPs and the media wring their hands and weep over a stabbed tory, it was not lost on us that during the same week it was reported in The Guardian that “[a] University of York study found that there had been 57,550 deaths due to austerity in the four years following 2010.”

This is slightly less than the British Medical Journal reported in 2017. They linked an extra 120,00 extra deaths to austerity cuts. These are not the only studies and the figures differ slightly but they all show a lot of deaths of the poor and ill. 

This MP, who everybody said was a good bloke and cared deeply for his constituents, voted time and time again for cuts to welfare and services. But there’s hardly a word in the mainstream press about any deaths due to this. Not a single crocodile tear was shed in Parliament. No one minute silence for any human being lost to their families early due to decisions in Parliament.

What this one death means, at the hands of a lone nutter, is more security measures and less opportunity to engage directly with your MP.  Not that that achieves much anyway. 

The eagle-eyed might have noticed that the Tories are also trying to curtail our rights to judicial review.  Even David Davies – remember that old twat? – calls it “an assault on the legal system” and “an attempt to avoid accountability”.  But why the need to hold our leaders to account?

Well, deaths from austerity might be one reason. Another is that the Tories have just voted not to stop pumping raw sewage into our rivers.  Apparently, it’s too expensive for the poor companies in charge of our water supplies who have already paid out billions in dividends to wealthy shareholders.

This vote came after our new-found freedoms thanks to BREXIT and the end of European environmental protections.  Now we are free to swim and fish in our own shite. Not that we could have known because the government are refusing to allow access and scrutiny of any legal advice relating to BREXIT.

How has BREXIT gone so far?  We have Northern Ireland, labour shortages, empty shelves, increase in prices, businesses going bust and disputes about fishing. We also have the £350m per week for the NHS but the Tories forgot to tell us that we would be paying that with National Insurance increases, which hits the low-waged worse. So that’s alright then.

And who needs scrutiny over the government’s response to COVID, the worse pandemic in living memory?  That all started with the lack of PPE in care homes and the overstretched NHS releasing COVID positive patients into care homes. 

The contract to oversee test and trace was given to Dildo Harding. The app did not work. They did not employ enough tracers but did spend £22 billion on consultants. Some racking up more than £6k a day, while Dildo Harding didn’t do too bad in her pocket either.  I wonder how many of these twats vote Tory? In the meantime we have the highest death rate per head in Europe. 

All through the pandemic the Tories handed their mates and donors contracts for millions of public money. Mainly to do stuff that they couldn’t do while ignoring the underfunded NHS who had the skills and resources to complete the tasks the private sector fatcats couldn’t. 

Like testing. We have all heard about the 43,000 wrong results given for PCR tests in the South West.  But then we are told that this has nothing to do with the sudden surge in cases. Really?

Who suffers? Us. Again.  If they bring back a lockdown, it will not affect those in their country piles, fancy townhouses and gated communities. It will be us, in our tower blocks, terraced houses and apartments with a lack of living space. All watched over by state sponsored muggers, better known as the old bill, trotting about giving out fines. 

There’ll be no chance of public scrutiny and don’t think public protest will be welcomed.  Instead, the Crime and Policing Bill is curtailing your rights to peaceful protest.  Not that the old bill ever lets you have a peaceful protest. They wade in as soon as it’s dark. 

Like the recent Kill the Bill protests in Bristol.  Remember how cops claimed to the press that they were provoked and injured by the violent protesters?  Then later they had to admit that there were no significant injuries among the coppers on duty that night? A fact which received considerably less press.

Although the press did manage lots of outrage against anyone caught up in the police attack.  Some have received serious prison time, including two women, who were kettled and needed a piss. Nine months each.  Needless to say they were not granted Legal Aid and, like most working class people now, they had to defend themselves in court against a criminal charge.

It’s all a right mess and we are the victims.  At the beginning of COVID, a leaked after dinner speech by a chinless Tory spoke of “useless eaters” in the care homes.  They mean you and your family.

Is it enough yet?

SMART CITY WATCH

SMART CITY WATCH

On September 12 the Reverend Rees launched the city’s Smart City Strategy at the ‘Bristol – Sweden Future Cities Summit’. This five-year strategy, “sets out how Bristol City Council will support Bristol’s smart city journey” and, “aims to ensure smart city projects will provide opportunities to more people and communities to assist in the city’s inclusive growth and help towards solutions to issues such as public safety, traffic congestion, energy poverty and health and social care”. But what is a ‘Smart City’ and what are ‘smart city projects’ and why do we need them?

When you see the word ‘smart’ prefixing an object it means one thing. Deploying the internet – originally devised by the US military as a weapon – to collect as much behavioural data about the ‘Smart’ device owner as possible so that the data can be used to predict, suggest and, increasingly, control the user’s actions. Often through ‘nudging’ victims into better corporate citizenship if not outright threatening them with extra-judicial sanctions.

It began with the smart phone. A mini computer in your pocket beaming detailed behavioural data about your life back to unaccountable tech firms and their government and corporate partners. This is the ‘big data’ you hear about or what Google call ‘data exhaust’ as if it’s a harmless waste product without value. If you’ve got one of these phones, then you’re likely to be providing real time information to unaccountable corporations about where you are and what you are doing. And, rest assured, this information is being stored and analysed by tech companies, the government, security services and various corporate third parties.

The smart phone has been so successful at collecting your data and making tech corporations money through the ruthless competitive dynamic unleashed by big data that there’s a huge economic imperative to produce more ‘smart’ products to collect more data about you and your family. Silicon Valley has given this all out assault on your life and privacy a cuddly name, ‘The Internet of Things’.

Cars, homes, public services, exercise aids, finance, shopping, health products, utilities, white goods and much more are all in the firing line for a ‘Smart’ makeover. Google even owns the tech to know what’s in your smart fridge. (Imagine visiting your GP and being told you have been struck off because you had too many pies in your fridge contrary to your ‘Smart Health Agreement’?)

However, to collect this huge amount of behavioural data from the digital crap being foisted on us, you need a ‘Smart City’ infrastructure. A dense mesh of 5G transmitters and receivers throughout the city that can upload and manage the huge amounts of real time behavioural data the ‘Smart City’ prophets require for their big data society.

This is sold to you as “innovation” that will create “jobs and sustainable growth” while delivering personal benefits such as faster internet speeds to download a movie to your handheld screen or the quicker uploading of holiday photos for gran.

Don’t be fooled. The internet is a weapon and the smart city aims it at you.