Who remembers the bizarre insistences of teachers at school that we must all wrap our textbooks in wallpaper?
That - both the wallpaper and the textbooks - were two of the many scholastic rituals I was thrilled to leave behind when I finally got through my 12-year incarceration of government schooling, and I didn't expect to be willingly re-participating in either once well into adulthood, but a few months ago, I found myself on Amazon (yes, yes, I know) ordering a school textbook.
The textbook in question was AQA A-Level Law, and the reason I made this purchase (I did not purchase any wallpaper) was because it occurred to me how shaky my understanding was of the process by which laws - laws which I am then apparently obliged to live under - are constructed and passed, and I wished to have a better grasp.
A-level Law is not about teaching you how to become a lawyer (and in fact, several top law schools prefer applicants not to have it), but rather, is about teaching you how the law-making apparatus of the country work. In short, how do laws get made, and then how are they interpreted and applied?
The reason I wished to educate myself on this subject is that it had become increasingly clear to me that politicians and policymakers relentlessly exploit poor public understanding of political process and law-making in order to manipulate people.
I've seen this many times around local council elections (which the majority of the public don't even know are taking place, never mind how to get meaningfully involved and exert influence), and more recently, I've been seeing it in Westminster, too.
As we all know, a very high-profile "Assisted Dying" (state-sponsored suicide) bill has recently passed the third reading stage at parliament.
But what does "passing third reading" mean?
Does that mean it will now inevitably become law?
No, it doesn't, and there is still a possibility this bill can be stopped, albeit it's now a slim possibility.
How could it be stopped?
Every adult in the country should be able to answer this question as easily as they can answer such things as "where does the Prime Minister live" or "how many Kardashian sisters are there".
The fact that infinitely more can answer not just the former of those questions, but the latter, than explain how their own country's laws are formulated, is an alarming - and very intentional - indictment. It's not a complex process and there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be taught to all sixteen-year-olds before they leave school to participate in the world that is governed by these laws, yet the establishment chooses to keep us in the dark for a reason.
In short, to become law, bills have to go through a number of stages in the House of Commons - first reading, seconding reading, committee stage, report stage, third reading. If a bill passes all of those, it then goes on to the House of Lords, where it must then go through all those stages again.
That's where we currently are with the Assisted Dying bill. It's passed third reading in the House of Commons, and will now be passed to the House of Lords.
The House of Lords can't permanently block bills that parliament wants to pass, but it can delay them, by rejecting them and thus forcing them to be returned to parliament the following session, which can ultimately result in the bill being defeated - as, for instance, happened with the ID Cards Bill (2006-2010) that ended up being scrapped due to repeat rejections from the House of Lords.
If, therefore, the House of Lords rejected the Assisted Dying bill, then - it having passed third reading in parliament with such a small majority - there is a possibility the bill would not ultimately pass as law... including and especially if there was a new government in place by the time the bill came back to the House of Commons.
So, this is my current hopeful theory: that the House of Lords will reject the bill and necessitate its return to the House of Commons, and on this occasion, it will be thrown out by the new Reform government...
I am not hopeful about a new Reform government, you understand. Rather, I am entertaining the (admittedly optimistic) possibility that the Assisted Dying bill was never really meant to be passed - that that is why it is so shockingly crude and clumsy, meant to arouse maximal public outrage - but rather, that the whole thing is a sort of elaborate publicity stunt for Reform.
That is to say, I believe that the Labour government has been so excruciatingly "incompetent" on purpose. At that level of politics, where enormously wealthy and powerful people exert their most malign influence, actual "incompetence" doesn't exist. Everything that is done, is done entirely on purpose, and the "bumbling idiot politician" role, as perfected by Alexander "Boris" Johnson, is simply a ruse to manipulate the public mood.
"Poor old Boris, he's so stupid and doesn't know what he's doing" being a far less threatening public sentiment than "Boris Johnson is a ruthlessly intelligent psychopath who knows exactly what he's doing".
Keir Starmer's job, therefore, was to make himself and his government as detestable as possible by pressing all of people's most sensitive political buttons, via freezing old people, starving disabled people, and now killing vulnerable people.
We're meant to react to this with utter revulsion and fury. That's why all of these issues have been so high-profile, receiving acres of media coverage, rather than simply being passed on the quiet with zero public debate, as is the case with most bills.
On average, parliament passes between 25 and 50 bills every year, and very few of them get any public scrutiny at all.
Hence, had parliament wished to quietly pass Assisted Dying legislation through without arousing mass public outrage, they could have done so by simply keeping it out of the media (the government and the media being owned and controlled by the same people) and the wider public sphere.
Instead, they literally plastered adverts for it all over the tube, adverts that appeared intentionally designed to be as insensitive and outraging as possible.
There are ways to get the public to be more sympathetic to assisted dying, but images of healthy-looking, vibrant young women literally jumping for joy at the thought of their state-sponsored suicide, are not it. Believe me that advertisers - some of the most dangerously intelligent people in the world - know this.
So it's eminently reasonable to assume that these advertisers were pursuing an effective PR strategy... but said strategy is not to get people to sympathise with assisted dying.
So what is it?
Is it, perhaps, to actually get people completely disgusted with it, so they are particularly rapturously grateful when political saviours, Reform, take over government and throw it out?
In other words, is this a long-game strategy to boost Reform's popularity and support base?
In all Punch 'n' Judy politics, you need a pantomime villain and a fairy tale prince.
Keir Starmer is obviously the villain. He's obviously been made to be as villainously unlikeable as possible.
Is Nigel Farage - likeable, relatable, pint-swilling, cig-puffing Nige - our princely hero?
Note that Farage not only voted against Assisted Dying at both second and third reading (to only vote against at third reading, as Lee Anderson and ex-Reform Rupert Lowe did, is effectively meaningless, for reasons that become clear when one reads an A-level Law textbook, with or without wallpaper).
Farage has also already promised that if the Assisted Dying bill passes through the House of Lords, his government will repeal it, should they come to power in 2029.
As it stands, the Assisted Dying bill is not due to become active law until 2029, so there does seem to be reason to be cautiously optimistic that this hideous bill may never actually become our political reality, and that, in fact, perhaps it was never meant to.
Perhaps it was always meant as an - albeit rather gruesome and grisly - publicity stunt for Reform (ditto the decriminalisation of late-stage abortion, that Farage has also promised to repeal).
And talking of publicity stunts for Reform...
Regular readers will know that I have been of the opinion for some time that the Lucy Connolly story - "woman jailed for Tweet" - is not true, and is some sort of elaborate PR stunt. I've alluded to the case, and its many flaws and anomalies, in a series of articles, which I won't rehash here, other than to focus on the "publicity stunt for Reform" angle.
Given that so many people championing the Con-or-lie story are rampant Reform cheerleaders - and that one of Reform's biggest donors runs the fundraising platform that Connolly is using - this seems a rather likely hypothesis.
We are meant to think, "oh my God, the Labour government is so evil, it sends lovely middle-class mums to prison for Tweeting! Our lords and saviours Reform would never do that!".
I detailed in my last article that my - as she called them - "batshit conspiracy theories" on Lucy Connolly had come to the attention of Telegraph journalist, Allison Pearson.
(The Telegraph, by the way, had to issue an apology this week for literally making up stories.)
Ms. Pearson also ascribed other unflattering, bovine-based epithets to me, and so, knowing as I do what a draconian attitude The Telegraph takes to its staff sending unfriendly Tweets (it having fired cartoonist Bob Moran in 2021 for doing just this), I decided to write them a letter of complaint.
Well, to everyone's great surprise (newspapers usually doing a stellar job of vigorously ignoring me), The Telegraph replied, with their legal team assuring me the complaint had been sent on to Pearson "for her information", but stating that no further action would be taken since the complaint related to her Twitter account and not to the Telegraph newspaper.
So I replied:
Dear Telegraph Media Group,
Thank you for acknowledging my complaint and for passing it on to Allison Pearson.
However, your remarks about her Twitter account appear ambiguous and inconsistent when contrasted with The Telegraph's treatment of its former cartoonist, Bob Moran.
Bob Moran was fired from his position at The Telegraph for remarks he made on Twitter, not remarks he made in The Telegraph newspaper.
So please could you qualify why, if you are suggesting Ms. Pearson's Twitter is her personal space and thus nothing to do with you as her employers, this standard wasn't also applied to Mr. Moran?
If The Telegraph's current editorial policy is that its journalists may say what they wish on their personal social media accounts without penalty from you as their employer, may I assume that you will be offering Mr. Moran his job back?
If you will not, please could you provide me with a detailed explanation of your policy on social media use by employees, so that I can understand why such a harsh penalty was applied to Mr. Moran for his Twitter remarks, yet none at all will be applied to Ms. Pearson.
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Miri Finch
Funnily enough, they have not replied to that...
Meanwhile, the Con-or-Lie operation rumbles on on Twitter, with multiple people around the world claiming to regularly email the woman in prison, therefore conjuring up images of poor old Luce perennially chained to a keyboard, frantically typing away Jessica Fletcher style, to keep up with all the randos from Twitter she's never met, rather than using the limited time she has available to communicate with actual real-world friends and family.
Or maybe, to communicate with the woman who's writing a book about her.
The woman who's writing a flattering biography of a living person she's never met.
One thing that Allison Pearson inadvertently gave away in her bizarre tirade against me was that, whilst she has taken the time to make the acquaintance of Lucy's kitchen table, she has never actually bothered to meet the woman herself.
Let us remember that, despite the kind of images conjured up by the hysterical hyperbolic press, Lucy Connolly is not in fact in Guantanamo Bay. She's in Drake Hall, a category C women's prison described by the Daily Mirror as being "more like a glamping resort" than a jail.
So why doesn't Ms. Pearson simply jump on a train to Stafford (1 hour 42 minutes from London Paddington) to see her?
I think I would probably manage to spend a few hours meeting someone if I was writing a book about them, but perhaps that is simply part of my demented bovine nature as so vividly evoked by Ms. Pearson.
Or perhaps it's that you can't actually visit in prison, someone who isn't really there.
Anyway, I do hope they aren't going to do a Jeffrey Epstein on poor old Lucy, although heaven knows that would be brilliant publicity for Allison's book, and for the fundraiser, too.
Now standing at over £152,000, some of the funds "to help Lucy Connolly rebuild her shattered life" have gone to her husband Ray to enable him to buy a dishwasher.
This, we are told, is because he is incapable of competently washing up.
Ah, you see, this is what happens to these poor helpless men when their wives are absent, they simply can't run homes and families alone...
The heartstrings are being deliberately pulled at here, and so I strongly suggest to MI5 that they don't try the ultimate way of pulling them by making Lucy's absence more permanent, because, quite simply, nobody will believe you. We already have a meme on hand and everything, we just need to replace Jeffrey Epstein's name.
The problem MI5 seems to have, however, is that I'm not entirely sure they actually have an actress on hand to play Lucy. After all, if they did, wouldn't they have wheeled her out for high-profile "prison visits" by now, like they did with our Tommeh?
So, at present, I think what they plan to do is, when she's "released", claim she is not allowed to give any media interviews as a condition of her release, and that she just wishes to disappear into obscurity - maybe under a new name - after her terrible ordeal. We're already being prepared for that by some of her "friends" on Twitter.
So, one way or another, they seem to be trying to make it very clear to us that we are never going to directly see or hear from Lucy herself at any point in this saga.
So what was the point of the op?
Firstly, to scare you into silence, by manipulating you into believing that you too could be condemned to chokey for a Tweet.
Rupert Lowe, who has just launched a petition to have Lucy's case debated in parliament (it gained the required 100k signatures in less than a day), has literally said it: you could be next.
That's what you're meant to think, so you modify and censor yourself accordingly.
But why is Lowe taking this to parliament? The government didn't sentence her, after all, a judge did.
He's taking it to parliament to highlight the fact that this happened under Keir Starmer's Labour government, in order to elicit even more hatred and revulsion for them.
Who can save you from this political evil where middle-class mummies go to jail for Tweeting?
Reform...
Yes, I know Lowe has had a spat with Reform, but he knows as well as anyone they're the only credible opposition to Labour, and so by highlighting yet more of Labour's deficiencies, he is driving more people towards Reform, especially because so many of the big names involved in the Connolly case are diehard Reform supporters.
So, in short, all the current high-profile political issues - assisted dying, late-stage abortion, Lucy Connolly - could ultimately all be confected stunts to swell Reform's support base to ensure they win the next General Election with a huge supermajority and are - initially at least - immensely popular.
An immensely popular government, of course, being far more dangerous than a hugely unpopular one.
Reform would be to us what MAGA/MAHA is fast revealing itself as being to Americans: a sly and devious ruse to win people's trust and then betray them.
While we will all feel deeply grateful to Reform for throwing out evil legislation like assisted dying and late-stage abortion, it could actually be the case that these things were never meant to become active law at all: that it's all strategic manoeuvre to win trust and approval for the persons set to next take over the political theatre.
Equally, if Reform change the law to "stop people being jailed for Tweeting" we will be starry-eyed with gratitude...
When it could very well be the case that people never were.
This could all be nothing but devious, deep-state propaganda to build public support for regime change.
It could all be about ensuring the planned political pendulum swing to the right - in line with that in the USA - for reasons I have elaborated on before.
As always, though, they need your consent to make these changes, and they're manufacturing it through a number of high-level strategy games.
Needless to say, nothing of any consequence will actually change with a Reform government. They will ultimately pursue all the same agenda items as Labour and the Conservatives, they will simply use different actors and tweaked rhetoric to do so, just as Trump and MAGA are doing in the USA.
In short, changing to a Reform government is simply an elaborate form of changing the wallpaper on an already-written textbook.
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