Storm in a Teacup

This week, some Conservative MPs were photographed making a cup of tea and brandishing a massive bag of Yorkshire teabags. Innocuous enough you may think. The Yorkshire Tea company said that they had nothing to do with the placement. And in the olden days, I guess that would have been that. But no. This has turned into a massive storm. A storm in a teacup, you might say. Countless hours have been spent online by people screaming to boycott Yorkshire Tea. This, in the week that Julian Assange goes on trial for telling the truth, and faces extradition to America, where he will no doubt just be left to rot, on top of the momentous psychological torture that he’s going through now and has been for years.

Last night there was a meeting in London with speakers bringing attention to this case. But a look at Twitter, and more people are upset about the Yorkshire Tea situation than they are about the very real possibility that we’re about to lose the right to free speech and a free press.

All Assange did was tell the truth. In the media it is generally assumed that if what you’re printing is the truth then it’s good to go. But if it’s a truth that they’re trying to keep hidden, then you’ll end up in Belmarsh and be handcuffed eleven times and strip searched twice on a day in court where you’re locked in a bullet proof box.

What’s the point n handcuffing someone locked in a box? He’s not an escape artist. He’s a journalist. The liberals are all over Twitter, literally losing their minds over the use of teabags. But it takes a group of grassroots campaigners, the Gilet Jaunes and the other prisoners at Bellmarsh to draw attention to Julian’s plight. At the meeting last night, led by the brilliant Peter Lovell, the leader and deputy leader of the Worker’s Party of Britain were there giving emotive and rousing speeches, but not one other member of any other party.

The place should have been packed with press, but it wasn’t. The mainstream media were nowhere to be seen. It is left to RT to broadcast this meeting, left to the organisers to publicise it.

Meanwhile, another storm is brewing over Mahari Black accompanying a drag act to read to primary school children. Firstly, what the hell? And secondly, an MP that initially seemed pretty legit has shown herself to be ruled by those old identity politics. Why the hell does someone’s sexual orientation have to be splashed about now? Why does it matter? Who cares?

It’s getting ridiculous, and it’s getting dangerous. And it’s deliberate. They’re pointing our heads in the direction they want us to go. Distractions, lies, confusion, political correctness, all designed to make you scared, scared of causing upset, scared of causing offence, and accepting the safe arguments over tea instead of the real arguments that we should all be paying attention to.

In this bullying culture, free speech can be misused. Katie Hopkins a case in point. And she abuses that privilege by just being mean for the sake of it. But she’s tabloid, and so that’s ok. That’s “acceptable”.

But Assange, telling us proper truths, revealing atrocities, exposing the world for what it is, and Chelsea Manning, locked up for refusing to give evidence against him, are punished royally. Yet the world churns out it’s insane arguments daily, the press send our attention to where they wish for it to be placed, and along we go.

All that energy bullying a teabag company who did no wrong, which could have been spent on paying attention to the actual crisis of the week, an actual human being who did no wrong. Because if Assange is extradited, there will be no freedom to scream at tea willy-nilly. You’ll lose the truth. It’ll be gone forever. Will you care? Will you fight? Or will you all just switch to coffee?

If we look at this on a local level, we see that the council are upping the council tax. We also see that local councils aren’t submitting their accounts. As regular readers know, my OPD planning appeal is coming up. Appeals cost the council a lot of money. Another OPD locally has been turned down in the last couple of weeks. They are also having to go to appeal.

Pembs County Council seems determined to stop OPD in its tracks. And as the story unfolds I’ll be telling you all about it here, in the interests of transparency, and in dedication to Julian Assange. There is plenty going on behind the scenes and as I become more aware of it I become more determined to ensure that you, the taxpayer, knows where your money is going.

A landowner who has just got planning for multiple properties on his land told me the other day that he was upset, and so were the rest of the community, about the small amount of social housing also being built in the proximity. We don’t know who we’re gonna get, seemed to be the attitude. You don’t know who you’re gonna get in the private houses either. You think anyone local will be able to afford those plots or houses once built? Shouldn’t have thought so. But they’ll all complain when the Saesneg move in.

The council have been invited on numerous occasions to undertake OPD training and enter into discussions with the One Planet Council. OPD is a policy which is here to stay, yet the council are spending massive amounts of resources on doing what they can to stop it; that is, going against policy. On whose authority? Huw George’s?

And as I’ve written previously, with the potential to be so useful in the tricky question of social housing, why aren’t the council looking at OPD more seriously? They declared a climate emergency, yet they don’t seem to be doing much to honour that.

There’s an awful lot of paperwork and mileage associated with these appeals and refusals of planning permission. If the planners got into a parlance with applicants then solutions could be found and compromises made that don’t cost taxpayers a fortune, but the planners prefer instead to spend their time conversing with objectors and neighbours, the kind of people that can afford the aforementioned private housing, and this information only becomes available once you’ve been through the rigmarole of putting in a freedom of information request, which they also fight tooth and nail to avoid giving you.

The word is that Boris wants to ban FOI requests. Better get them in quickly then. I have encouraged all of the people currently having agro with the council regarding their OPD planning to put in FOI requests to see what’s been really happening. Let’s get some truth on the go.

And free Julian Assange, so that we may continue to do so.