I did work out once that if you lived in West London, investing the £100000 or so it costs to buy a peerage from Blair or Cameron was quite good value for money - you could live off the expenses quite comfortably, a much better investment than a pension.
I am afraid we get the politicians and policies that the most stupid 52% of the country deserve. I am beginning to suspect that social media actually makes democracy impossible, rather than before when it was just difficult. Government of the twitterati by the Murdoch readership.
The only bright spots this week have been Goldsmith out - two cheers for the Richmond electorate - and the Daily Mail’s holding group having to report that profits and assets are at risk due to leaving the EU - which they campaigned for.
I’m unhappy that they’re allowed to spy on parliamentarians at all. Leaving aside the “exempting themselves” bit for a moment, I would much rather that a Prime Minister didn’t have the ability to deploy the awesome power of the surveillance state to ratfuck the democratic opposition. Because that’s been a thing in some countries at some times, and it sucks.
Of course, I’d much rather that the Prime Minister didn’t have the ability to deploy the awesome power of the surveillance state to do anything, but I think holding this up as an example of the establishment protecting their own is a little historically optimistic.
This bit is truly important. It’s easy to hate the unfairness of the self-exemption, but, in the long term, allowing spying on MPs will only cement the powers of the intelligence apparatus.
Hacker: You mean we are bugging Hugh Halifax’s telephones? Sir Humphrey: We were. Hacker: We were? When did we stop? Sir Humphrey: [checks his watch] Seventeen minutes ago.
It has been estimated that under Blair and Cameron the donation cost of a seat in the Lords was about one hundred thousand. Just promise to vote the right way…
But then one of the KGB people responsible for handling foreign agents remarked that the great thing about capitalism was how little it cost to get someone to betray their country. So there is that too.
… like just driving a bus round with a facile lie plastered across it
If the 20th century repeats itself, I wish to be alive to read the books explaining who was up to what and how they did it. Then travel back to now and chase 'em down.
Almost the first thing Krushchev did after he took over was to have Beria assassinated. That was when people knew he was serious about reforming the Soviet System.
May has, in effect, just promoted Beria. Why wouldn’t the secret services spy on politicians? They want to find out which ones have some vestigial attachment to civil liberties, so they can be neutralised.
You get a vpn! You get a vpn! Everybody gets a vpn!
Time to start seriously thinking about getting a decent vpn i think. But what defeats me, defeats me, about this is that MPs like diane abbott and jeremy corbyn were put under surveillance themselves (as well as others) and they fucking abstained from voting. Why? The public and the media seem to be waking up to this now but it’s too late, there’s more concern for the fucking tallow that’s in the new fivers.
Labour safe seat here and he just fobbed me off with the official gov line over this shit, his predecessor seemed somewhat more open to the privacy concerns.
It would be easy for a cynical observer to interpret “exemption” as “placebo”, so that information gathered on this population has just one more layer of opacity to them. And the people doing the intelligence gathering have deception built right into their job description, so there’s no reason to expect a straight answer from them.
