This bit about 'dual flagging' and putting the union flag at the top over the saltire etc is designed to boost the Union I would guess.

I can see it pissing off a lot of people.

ftfy

Yes I'm sure the Scots will get the message...
:rolleyes:

How much on eyebrows??

Home Office tweets

@ukhomeoffice
Newspaper FACT CHECK:

It is wrong to claim the Home Office expenses that have been circulated today are the Home Secretary's.
They are department wide and for vital equipment like PPE.
It is completely false to say the Home Office has spent money on beauty products, it was PPE.

We make no apology for buying PPE to keep our staff safe during the pandemic.

The expenses included £3.8k restaurant bills, £864 to a hairdresser closed due to lockdown, £669 to a cake maker, £900 to a pub when pubs were closed, £2k for a diet consultant. We're not mugs!

Also, why was this 'PPE' bought on a credit card and not via normal procurement routes/contracts? And why is a beauty company being used for PPE provision for a government department?

how on Earth is the home office spending £77 grand on "Beautiful brows" which seems to be a nail and eyebrow bar in Cardiff?????

Also just for the record, you can't fact check yourself, that's not how this works.

Jay Rayner renowned restaurant critic tweeted

@jayrayner1
Hive mind: help myself and @MarinaOLoughlin with a mystery. There's a restaurant called Pollyana in which the Home Office has spent thousands of pounds. We can not find it.

Govt looking at plans “to end the impartiality of the UK civil service”.

Proposals include govt getting complete veto over all senior appointments breaking the traditions & structure of the British civil service impartiality dating back to Victorian times.

Ah, that's be more of the post-Brexit "democracy" and "sovereignty" that the Brexiteers are so enthusiastic about. Far better than the EU.....

Beautiful Brows, the company Priti Patel maintains did not do her eyebrows for £77K were dissolved in July 2018!

So how did she use the a home office credit card to buy £77,269.40 of "PPE" from them in March 2020?

Strange that there was £30,000 of PPE Contracts the next week to a different company name at the same address.

Even Beautiful Brows themselves used 'Global Beauty Products' as a name on their website from 2018!

£10,043.15 was spent in the Pollyana Restaurant on the same card.

It doesn't seem to exist.

So the Home Office saying it was 'overseas training'.

Also, why are such huge amounts being put on a credit card?
Usually they need to go through a process involving a purchase order, and accounts department etc.

I think you answered your own question there.

Someone checked the most recent Tory party manifesto, and found there were no flags in that either.

NEW: Voting intention from Deltapoll

Conservative 44% (+2)
Labour 36% (-2)
Liberal Democrat 6% (-)
Other 14% (-)

Sample: 1,610 GB adults
Fieldwork: 25th - 27th March 2021

We still have another foot we can shoot!

What went wrong? Patel should demand her money back. Perhaps use it to fix her teeth instead, if one were unkind.

None on the Astra Zeneca vaccine either, as excitedly promised by a trembling with glee Matthew Hancock.

Now she's gone into detail about it:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politi...rcuri-23798478

I presume this will have as much effect on Johnson as it did last time i.e. none at all.

Just because he got sacked twice for lying, cheated on his first wife with his second wife, cheated on his second wife with Jennifer Arcuri then his future third wife, doesn't mean you can't trust him.

No wonder he looks like he's aged twenty years.

How is Johnson still PM?

Only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that a man with his lifestyle and reputation surrounded by so many scandals would have got anywhere near public office.

Not to mention, as I've seen asserted on Twitter, that given his obvious disdain for using condoms (evidenced by the uncertainty over how many children he has fathered), and his wide range of sexual partners, that he is quite likely to be responsible for his second wife's cervical cancer (which is often caused by HPV, a sexually transmitted virus). On the other hand, she must have had some idea of his proclivities.

IMO it's not just an acceptance of this kind of thing among the British public. A different politician who had done the same things would have found their career ended, or at least significantly curtailed.

There's something about Boris Johnson's scatty toff act that enough of the electorate like to keep him in post - unfortunately.

PM press sec Allegra Stratton says of Boris Johnson: "He does believe in the wider principles of integrity and honesty.

"He acts with integrity and honesty and he follows the Nolan principles when conducting himself in public life".

She has insisted he followed "all legal requirements" in his alleged affair with Jennifer Arcuri - so that's all right then!

She said the IOPC report found claims of impropriety against him were "untrue and unfounded".

the IOPC never looked at this. They left it to the GLA Oversight committee to see if there had been any breach of Nolan principles.

Has Allegra Stratton ever met Boris Johnson or even know who he is?

The Nolan Principles (I had to look it up):

Selflessness.
Integrity.
Objectivity.
Accountability.
Openness.
Honesty.
Leadership.

He denied in an interview with Andrew Marr that there was any interest to declare.

I thought they were:

Dancin’
Romancin’
Givin’ it all tonight.

What an interesting thing to say. I'd parse that as "Even though he isn't honest himself, or exhibit integrity he does believe that such virtues exist".


Another interesting thing to say. Presumably this means that he doesn't act with integrity and honesty or follow the Nolan principles in his private life.

Of course he doesn't in his public life but at least he's prepared to admit the former. ;)

So not strictly illegal then ?

btw, who was he cheating on at the time ?

No, silly. Boris was talking about the Nolans.

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE

Satire

Are we familiar with the youtube work of Mark N'est Francois Pas/Michael Govern Ready from Twitter? It's very funny

Another current affairs topic for today is the report being submitted recommending that the term 'BAME' be replaced, as covering too wide a range of various ethnic groupings.

I spotted this neat clip of MP David Lammy on LBC today pitted against 'Jean' who tells him he is 'not English' and that England is being 'polluted'. Lammy is impressively articulate. How he remained patient is incredible to behold.

https://twitter.com/DavidLammy/statu...073735683?s=20

'Jean' who is of the older generation so Lammy makes allowances for her, because people's beliefs are shaped by the times and mores they live in but I was really amused when Jean (or was it someone responding to his thread) disputed a claim that the Queen was 'not English' due to the Saxe-Coburg line, to which came the reply she is very English as King Alfred the Great is 'her 32 great-grandfather'.

To people like Jean, she just doesn't get, as Lammy explained to her, that England is a mixture of many different ethnicities, and as he says, Danes and what have you. Nobody likes being 'all lumped together' so it is hard to see the attraction of white supremacy when in itself it contains multiple ethnic identities.

London taxpayers.

Hahaha, brilliant.

It's depressing how many people think English is an ethnicity rather than a nationality. What nationality do they think Lenny Henry is? Or, indeed, the current Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mayor of London?

Or even the current Foreign Secretary.

The weird thing about 'Jean' is that she claims she knows she is English as she researched that her name goes back to the middle ages. Clearly, she is not aware many immigrants adopted new names - for example, refuges from Nazi Germany, Poland and the Baltic States - to assimilate and to avoid further persecution, although many did not.

And to actually ring up someone on LBC public airwaves and tell them they are 'not English' is appallingly bad manners.

The hundreds & thousands of pounds UK govt paid to Jennifer Arcuri due to her relationship with Boris Johnson has created a fuss the real story is the amount of of undisclosed money funnelled to Arcuri which could be over a million.

We should be asking is how a bankrupt waitress being sued for $100 000 in unpaid student fees ended up with a million dollars plopping into her company which had no assets or income apart from the govt grants Boris arranged for her.

2004-8: University, Wisconsin
2008-11: Works at a restaurant in California
2011: Moves to London, meets Boris
2012: Starts IT firm on public money
2018: No business generated income but $1 million drops in her account

Where this money came from?
What did the provider of this money receive in return?


ETA
More like $2 million if you combine both of her companies, Innotech and Hacker House.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's senior adviser on ethnic minorities is to stand down, it has emerged.

Samuel Kasumu will leave the role next month. He had previously handed in his resignation in February, before retracting it.

Downing Street sources rejected suggestions his departure was linked to the findings of a government-commissioned report on race.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56601166

I hope he has too much integrity to take any hush money offered

There is more to this than meets the eye. The Murdoch /Barclays press have known all about this since at least 2016 when Johnson was Mayor of London, so you have to ask why is it all only coming to roost now? They waited until 'Brexit' was done and that the people had voted in the referendum and the General Election the way their newspapers had told them to vote. Acuri declined to confirm an affair in her TV intterview last year but now she is gushing away like a river bursting its dam.

Either she is suddenly covering her own back, fearing she herself is under investigation for serious financial issues so she is pointing the finger at Johnson to wriggle out of it.

So now Murdoch and Barclays seem ready to turn on their hitherto 'golden boy'.


Watch this space.

Tony Sewell, head of the commission is laughable with his theory that race inequality is due to single parent families and all to do with self-help. Any sociologist can tell you that idea went out with the dinosaurs.

Luckily the authors overstretched in a memorable way that will discredit them.

With their idea to look for the positives of the slave trade

I wonder if this works both ways.

My father's side of the family came to "the Colonies" in 1640. Before that little is known of the man who settled here beyond his having been a tailor in London, but the surname suggests an origin somewhere on one side or another of the Scottish border. Probably a recent origin, considering the politics of the time and his desire to get the hell out of England.

On my mother's side, by coincidence the year was the same, but the circumstances were different, a middle class Puritan whose English lineage was traceable for at least a few centuries before he came here.

I might be more English than "Jean".

QE2 is also descended from William the Bastard and his great-great-great grandfather Rollo, an even bigger bastard.

Brexit and the playing to the blind xenophobic Brexiteers.

It's all one with the current hagiographic white-washing of Churchill.

The CEO of Operose - the UK wing of the American health giant Centene that is taking over GP practices across London - has been appointed as a health policy adviser to Boris Johnson.

And so it goes on and we are helpless.

Yes, some of the really old English aristocracy regard the royals as neophytes.

Weirdly, like QE2, as claimed by 'Jean' on LBC, I too, am a direct descendent of Alfred the Great, King of the Anglo-Saxons, (30th g-grandfather) however, nothing to do with England at all, it's through my Finnish descent. Perhaps Jean didn't spot the reference to 'Anglo (Angles) - Saxons'. His offspring soon married back into them.

In fact, the USA, early colonies was swarming with second sons, who went to the New World colony to establish estates there as they had nothing to inherit in the old country, so yes, I can well see you could be 'more English' than 'Jean'.

That is hilarious. Black people benefitted from slavery by having an opportunity to share British culture. It reminds one of the rather offensive joke about the Germans sending the Jews a gas bill after the war.

Most, if not all, people in Europe probably are, too. Being able to trace the lineage is a different question, of course.