Chris Whiteside's Blog

It is not all that often that you find a balanced and nuanced perspective on a political or religious issue in a tweet on X, formerly Twitter. Nevertheless I found one this morning. I rarely have as much sympathy and understanding for the position of people who have come down on the opposite side of an issue from me as I have over the attacks on Iran. (Brexit was another but let's not open that can of worms.) I explained yesterday  here , the position of the Conservative leadership, which I agree with. I quoted in that post the statements by Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel. I have read the opinion by the shadow attorney general on why he believes the attacks on Iran by the US and Israel were justified under international law, which I will repost on my blog shortly, and his argument convinces me, though I respect those who take a different view. The views in the rest of this post are my own and not necessarily those of the Conservative party. My view, on balance, is that the Iranian t...

  “It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” — Charles Dickens , Great Expectations

Since the present regime in Iran came to power in 1979 and consolidated their position with a wave of executions, they have 🔴Violated the immunity of our legation in Tehran 🔴Abducted and assaulted British diplomats 🔴Pronounced a fatwa against a British citizen 🔴Kidnapped British naval personnel 🔴Seized a British tanker 🔴Backed Houthi, Hezbollah and Hamas terrorism 🔴Supplied drones and missiles to Putin 🔴Sponsored at least 15 terror plots on UK soil  🔴Arrested British citizens and after a mockery of a trial, imprisoned them on patently false charges And after beginning their hold on power with a massacre of Iranian citizens suspected of not supporting the regime, they have over the last few years massacred men, women and children for protesting against the tyranny of the regime. I have no idea how many dissidents the current Iranian regime has butchered but there is plenty of evidence that it is a large number, almost certainly in the thousands. This is what Kemi Badenoch s...

Whitehaven and Workington Conservatives were out campaigning today, most of us in Workington but also some work done in Moor Row and there was also some mutual aid to colleagues in Penrth where there is a council by-election coming up. For all those who were out campaigning today, here is some music to relax to.  

 

In the days when the Green party regarded having a "leader" as too hierarchical, they had two "Principal speakers" and Darren Johnson held that post from 2001 to 2003. He was also a Green member of the London Assembly from 2000 to 2016, the party's candidate for Mayor of London in 2000 and 2004, and a Lewsham councillor. In December 2024 he resigned from the Green Party after 37 years' membership. On why most of the people who people who represent what the Green Party traditionally stood for have mostly, unlike himself, remained members as the party changed out of all recognition, he had this to say on X today: " With the Greens descent into ludicrous left-populism ("Zionism is racism" "abolish landlords") people ask me why other longstanding Greens have remained. After years in the wilderness, you've got to remember how intoxicating winning can be, even if your new activists are batshit. " Challenged in relation to yesterd...

Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them. As I've said many times before, we are a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. If you stir up grievance politics between groups based on religion or race, as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great.  Our country is not broken, but this by-election showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending. Reform telling people you can't be British if you aren't white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalise crack-cocaine. Clearly this election was not about who would be the best MP. But there was only one sensibl...

‘For a country to hand over its territory to another country free of charge could be construed as misplaced benevolence. To insist on paying for the pleasure suggests some sort of international humiliation fetish.’ Stephen Daisley , in a Telegraph article this week on Labour's Chagos Islands surrender deal.

"My apprenticeship changed my life. I gained real skills, earned a wage, and was building a future without debt. That’s why Conservatives will create 100,000 new apprenticeships a year with our New Deal for Young People backing choice, skills, and opportunity." Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch , Conservative leader.

 

 

(Lord) Dan Hannan had this to say today: "The Green Party, for the sake of a by-election campaign, risks igniting the sectarianism that blows countries apart. We do not sufficiently appreciate the extraordinary and, in its fashion, beautiful, way in which British communities of South Asian heritage avoided the lingering feuds which still influence Indian and Pakistani politics. I read several eye-witness accounts of the 1947 intercommunal violence some years ago, and don’t like to think about, let alone write about, what happened. Nirad Chaudhuri was one of the most expressive writers of his generation, but he could find no language for what he had witnessed: “ I have weighed nearly all the words and phrases which the murderous ferocity of man, as distinct from his warlike ferocity, has contributed to the vocabulary of European peoples: massacre, pogrom, lynching, fusillade, noyade, St. Bartholomew, Sicilian Vespers, Bloodbath of Stockholm, Bulgarian atrocities, Armenian massacres...

 

The passage below is another extract from one of his articles tweeted on X by Stephen Pollard, Stephen Pollard on X: here ,  this time from his Daily Telegraph piece on today's Prime Ministers' Questions. Is there a more pathetic sight than Sir Keir Starmer? "Is there a more pathetic sight than Sir Keir Starmer, the Black Knight of politics, at PMQs?   Every week he arrives for his joust with Kemi Badenoch, and every week he leaves after doing his impression of the character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As one deadly Badenoch barb after another slices limb after limb off, on he ploughs: “Tis but a scratch.” It’s a truism that Badenoch has found her voice at PMQs but, in recent months, she has been presented with a weekly Michelin three-star menu of topic choices, all of them lethal. The obvious choice this week would have been Peter Mandelson, whose downfall Badenoch has both hastened and deepened with her expert cross-examinations of the former director of public...

 

"I am grateful to each of the 107 countries that stood with Ukraine today in defense of life at the UN. The General Assembly adopted our resolution in support of a lasting peace, with clear calls for a full ceasefire and the return of our people. These are the right and necessary steps. And we will keep working actively to achieve peace, together with our partners." President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine Below is how the UN's member nations voted.  

Stephen Pollard posted the extract below on X from an article he has written in the Jewish Chronicle. You can find the full article at Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has built a career on the back of being an ‘anti-racist’. Say no more - The Jewish Chronicle - The Jewish Chronicle A couple of days ago Yasmin Alibhai-Brown published a tweet attacking the appointment of Margaret Hodge to follow Michael Grade as chair of the regulator Ofcom on the grounds that they are supposedly both "Uber-Zionists." Like Michael Gove my initial reaction when I saw the tweet was was to wonder if it was really from the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown or from a parody account. Yes, it really was from her. Yasmin alibhai-brown on X: "Uber Zionist Margaret Hodge will, we hear, become Ofcom chair after uber Zionist Michael Grade steps down. A two step solution to ensure the Palestine & Palestinian suffering are denied proper coverage. And the Israeli state gets away with atrocities." / X This is...

  Four years on from Putin’s illegal invasion, we stand united with the people of Ukraine. Now and always.

 

Continuing the "Pink Panther" theme, the song " Meglio Stasera, " known in English as " It Had Better Be Tonight " was performed by Fran Jeffries in the original 1963 "Pink Panther" film. The music was composed and performed by Henry Mancini and his orchestra with Italian lyrics by Franco Migliacci and English lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Although Fran Jeffries steals the show and holds your attention with her superlative singing and dancing in this clip, if you look carefully at the background you can also see some excellent acting from the film's protagonists, David Niven (suavely enjoying the song) and Peter Sellers (bumbling along as Inspector Clouseau.)

"Student loan repayments have become a scam. You work hard but you get "rewarded" with high interest rates. How is that fair? Conservatives will reduce interest rates for hundreds of thousands of graduates. That's just Step 1 in our New Deal for Young people." Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch

 Rishi Sunak says Zelensky showed him real-time casualty data from the front in Munich. - 80% of Ukrainian kills are from drones - Russia is losing 1,000 soldiers a day. His conclusion: Europe is not ready for this kind of war.  This was Frazer Nelson's summary of a piece Rishi Sunak has written for tomorrow's Times which I a certainly going to read. I think he's right Our soldiers, sailors and aircrew must never again be put in the position of trying to fight the next war with the weapons and tactics of the last one. War has changed and our defences must be updated to reflect the new reality.

Joani Reid MP, Char of the All-Party-Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism, and a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has issued the statement below about the ban by West Midlands Police preventing supporters of the Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C attending the team's match with Aston Villa. It is now beyond reasonable dispute that the process West Midlands Police followed to arrive at this decision was egregiously flawed and that they made a whole serious of factually incorrect statements about it, including some given in evidence to the Home Affairs select committee by the then Chief constable, such as a false statement about the extent to which Birmingham's Jewish communities had been consulted and the release, presented as fact, of AI-generated details of a supposed Maccabi TA match involving crowd trouble which had never actually happened. West Midlands police also gave an account of a violence associated with a match in Amsterdam, which was seriousl...