Kay Burley - Sky News seeking partisanship over Covid

Why is Kay Burley of Sky News so determined to undermine a two party consensus on the broader strategy of tackling the covid-19 epidemic?
I think both Conservative and Labour politicians should complain when a news presenter seeks to politicize constructive criticisms by politicians such as Angela Rayner into hostile declarations of responsibility on deaths which should best be delayed until the public enquiry on the coronavirus pandemic in the UK os held next year.
For now we have to combat the virus together.

Polish democracy in crisis

As someone who has spent more than 50 years of his life campaigning for a free democratic Poland in a free democratic Europe, I am especially saddened by the current attempts of the Polish government to take advantage of coronavirus restrictions to ram through parliament a total ban on abortion, the banning of sex education in schools, reintroducing children into blood sports and conducting presidential elections on May 10th by an improvised untested method of universal postal voting. This dramatic change in the voting system was introduced with barely a month's notice, contrary to the constitutional requirements that any changes to electoral law should be made at least 6 months before the next election. Also this election disenfranchises all Polish citizens living abroad in countries where there is also a lockdown and social distancing measures.
These proposals are very controversial while the obsessive obstinacy in holding the election in the middle of a universal lockdown is justified solely by a need to retain power and reimpose by the back door "traditonal Polish values" on society. It forms part of the government's unilateral attempt to self-exile Poland from all aspects of EU traditions and values while still retining its access to generous EU regional and agricultural subsidies.
The sad thing is that I recognize these so-called "Polish values" as being outdated values common in the UK and other Western countries only 30 years ago, but long since abandoned as outdated.. There is nothing innately "Polish" about them. They are in contradiction to Poland's traditional call for "Your Freedoma and Ours" and are not shared by a large section of modern Polish society. They signify not the indigenisation of political culture in Poland but its anachronism.
Unfortunately pursuing this election and this controversial legislation while the Sejm is not fully functioning could also undermine public confidence in those vital measures rightly taken by the same government to combat Covid-19.

Sluggish UK response on repatriation

Dear Editor of "i", 11th April 2020

The “i” has been exceptionally generous in giving Dominic Raab the benefit of the doubt as to his fitness to be First Secretary of State at this trying time during Boris Johnson’s illness (“Johnson is released from intensive care but remains in hospital” “i” 10/04/2020).
Promoted largely because of his Brexit fundamentalism and betrayal of Theresa May while her Brexit negotiator, Mr Raab has misled the public over Mr Johnson’s apparent “hands on” control of Cabinet meetings while in hospital and shown himself singularly uninspiring in his major current task as Foreign Secretary, namely to repatriate UK citizens from abroad. The “i” reported in early April how he still had 50,000 UK citizens waiting to be brought back and he fumbled in his replies on the issue in the House of Commons.
Other countries have been far more effective in repatriating their citizens. Acting on behalf of the Polish government, for instance, LOT Airline was able to repatriate 54,000 Polish citizens from 71 airports around the world in 388 flights. From the UK alone 21,000 passengers were flown back to Poland and last Sunday LOT even carried two plane loads of UK residents waiting for 3 weeks to be brough back from Warsaw to London. I had expected a more effective response by our “acting Prime Minister” in Westminster.



Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

(unfortunately not published)

Landscape After the Virus: 15 ways the world will change

Here in the UK our world has been turned upside down in the last month. The sinister coronavirus Covid-19, which originated in the wet meat markets of Wuhan in November and has then spread from Asia to other continents, most notably, to Europe, the Americas and Africa, has infected by today more than 1,434,426 and killed more than 82,220. In the UK alone there are 55,242 recorded infections and 6,159 deaths. Because of delayed testing the amount of infections is much higher. One third of the world’s population is undergoing various stages of lockdown, with international travel suspended, the economy in freefall, massive injections of state money pouring in to support private businesses, while on the front line health workers battle to save lives without adequate personal protection, delayed testing equipment, insufficient number of beds and respirators and no vaccine available to cure the disease before next year.
In the UK, because we are all affected to one degree or another by the pandemic, there is a sense of solidarity and equality in society to a greater extent than before. That may help us live through it in the short run, but social tension and real economic hardship may increase in the months that follow if there is no visible reduction in the number of infections and deaths. In order to maintain social cohesion, the government may even invite the opposition parties to join. We do not know how long this danger will last and whether our health, our economy and our personal sanity will survive. But if most of us come out of this at the other end alive and economically active it will still be a different world from the one we inhabited just a month ago.
Firstly, the government is likely to go for an exit strategy on the new social controls on social distancing only gradually with the option of enforcing them again in case the casualty and infection rates rise again. In the UK we are likely eventually to see our original freedom of movement restored even if we have to wait for the eventual vaccine early next year, but in other, more authoritarian so-called “democracies”, like Russia, India, Egypt, Turkey or Hungary the emergency legislation could remain in force for many years. If those governments had proved incompetent, they could face considerable unrest and even revolution.
2/ However, the radical economic measures taken by governments, including the 80% job guarantees, the tax and mortgage holidays, the nationalisation of rail and airlines, could remain in force for longer as the government supervises the recovery of a fragmented economy. In Europe and America $8 trillion worth of state loans and tax holidays have been promised to business. The public will want to see a new post-virus UK economy without the economic austerity and social inequalities of the past. A form of coalition government, state control of many industries and services and a planned centralized economy could stay in force for a few years more. In fact the governing Conservative Party may split over when and how this new centrally managed economy should be dismantled. This may cause a new election and a Labour Party committed to maintaining a planned central economy in order to maintain the more egalitarian and socially cohesive aspects of the crisis, including a higher taxation rate fairly distributed between the more and the less wealthy.
3/ The health service budget is likely to replace military spending as the main priority of the government in the UK and in most Western countries. Protection against viruses will replace protection against missiles as the primary concern of security as predicted 5 years ago by Bill Gates. The health industry workers and international research scientists will form the new elite of society and the new media celebrities.
4/ Second only to the health service will be concern over constant modernisation of information technology, accessible broadband, artificial intelligence and defence of cyberspace. Increasingly decisions will be made at video conference meetings within government bodies and commercial companies, both nationally and internationally. More employees will work online from home. IT experts, especially in the field of security, will replace the current dominant role of accountants on company boards.
5/ The need for commuter and international travel will be reduced and airlines and transport companies are likely to be used more for personal recreation and tourism rather than for business travel.
6/Nevertheless, border restrictions may be retained to ensure no transmission of an epidemic from country to country.
7/ Education at school and at university level will be more reliant on IT skills and online individual teaching.
8/ The high street will wither away unless it becomes an entertainment hub as well as a shopping centre; retail shops without online sales will become obsolete.
9/ Future governments would be wise to acknowledge the role of manual labour in maintaining the health service, the care industry, refuse collection, strategic industries and agriculture by ensuring them a decent level of income and social status.
10/ The current reduction worldwide in the use of transport and industry will bring a welcome pause to global warming but the need for reindustrialization and the continued challenge to climate control by the United states, Russia and Brazil could undermine any gains from that pause.
11/ With the onset of world recession and the growing threat of the coronavirus in poorer third world countries with limited medical resources and lack of adequate urban space for social distancing, the resulting Covid-19 pandemic could be accompanied by major famine and the increasing pressure from economic and health refugees seeking out a safer new life in the more prosperous countries of Asia, Europe and North America. Consequently, interventionist international cooperation, such as the proposed World bank $160 billion loan to poorer countries next month, and a moratorium on third world debt, is likely to grow at global and regional level despite the challenge of nationalism.
12/ Globalism will be less reliant on uninhibited free trade and more on centrally managed international strategies. International summits like the recent G20 based in Saudi Arabia are likely to be managed by world leaders attending through online conference calls and will be as concerned with health, education and information technology as with the economy.
13/ Faced with hostility from Russia, China and the United States, the European Union will struggle to retain its relevance. It has to challenge the nationalist agenda in each country, agree to the issue of coronabonds to supports the weaker Mediterranean economies, maintain outside EU borders against newer migrants and take a lead in ensuring a resilient health service fighting these and future epidemics in each country. Otherwise it will die.
14/ Because of continued US withdrawal from the role of a world leader under its current president, the XXI century is likely to be a Chinese century. China, having survived the coronavirus epidemic so quickly, continues to supply medical expertise and supplies throughout the world, and gives crucial low interest loans to third world countries increasingly struggling with the virus. Chinese style intensified social control, cybersecurity and lack of human rights will increasingly become the model for the new world order.
15/ The Western liberal democracies will no longer be the universal model for development and will be under constant challenge from authoritarian regimes and nationalist movements.
It will all make a brave new world.
Published also on You Tube 08/04/20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Hu_g0YcVs&lc=Ugy_bBgMm3DSfirGX2F4AaABAg

Boris Johnson's Northern Ireland Brexit Fallacy

Quoted from BuzzFeed
"Boris Johnson says: “Actually Northern Ireland has got a great deal. You keep free movement, you keep access to the single market.”
Boris Johnson spoke to local Conservative members in Northern Ireland on Thursday 19th March about his Brexit deal and it was… interesting. A video of part of his speech has gone viral — not least because the prime minister said how much of a “great deal” Northern Ireland was getting by staying in the EU's single market and keeping “free movement”, unlike the rest of the UK.
Johnson also insisted there would be no checks at all on goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. But questions have been raised about some of his assertions — as well as his delivery, which some people likened to a drunk uncle at a wedding."

My comment on above:
I cannot accept what the PM is saying. If there are no border controls after December 2020 between GB and NI and NI continues to be part of the EU single market then every self-respecting smuggler or sharp trader will know that:
1/ EU goods can be delivered to an NI address without border checks or payment of tariffs and then shipped unchecked on to GB pretending to be NI goods:
2/ any GB goods can be delivered to an NI address without border checks and then shipped without paying any duty to the EU via Ireland by pretending to be NI goods
3/ Any manufacturer or trading company producing goods in the USA or Australia or any other country with which the UK will make a trade deal in the next couple of years will be able to deliver goods to NI via GB and pretend they are NI goods which can then travel into the EU via Ireland unchecked
4/ Similarly EU goods could cross into NI without paying tariff and eventually reach any of the UK's new trading partners pretending to be NI goods if no controls between NI and GB.
Agricultural goods in particular could be traded in this way.
Possibly this could be checked by customs officers checking documents internally wuithin NI and GB but that still amounts to customs control between NI and GB even if not at the actual border.
Boris Johnson's former Brexit Secretary of State Stephen Barclay admitted as much but he is now First Secretary to the Treasury and has no longer commented.

Johnson as pupil of Trump or Kaczynski

Letter to Editor of "I"

Dear Sir,
Kate Maltby rightly draws a parallel between Boris Johnson’s political inclinations and the more authoritarian forms of majority rule democracy practised currently in the U.S., Poland or Hungary (“Number 10 threatens media war” “I” 06.02.20).

Boris Johnson may be a social liberal with a romantic view of the United Kingdom, but that does not stop from having an authoritarian streak. This streak does not just cover the discrimination within the press lobby. In the agenda set out for Boris Johnson by his single-minded adviser Dominic Cummings, Johnson is keen to tame or otherwise diminish the role of the BBC both in his direct attacks but also by decriminalizing the non-payment of TV licences and not subsidizing pensioner’s licence fees, in the hope that the BBC will eventually become more malleable to promoting the government’s view.

He is considering the political appointments of judges in order to ensure the judiciary will not challenge the government again and to further curb trade union rights to strike, starting with the rail industry. Environmental protest groups are to be classed as terrorist organizations. Plans are afoot to bring in a different form of civil servants based on "wierdos and misfits" who bypass the normal recruitment and examination process and are handpicked by Mr Cummings himself. Johnson has also removed the possibility of MPs voting on his eventual Brexit trade deal or supervising the Brexit process in Northern Ireland even though the current clumsy customs settlement could make Northern Ireland a future smuggler’s paradise.

His American, Polish and Hungarian mentors must be congratulating him on these first steps away from the inclusive parliamentary democracy that operates within the UK's current unwritten constitution.

Yours faithfully
Wiktor Moszczynski
Published 07.02.2020 "I"

Letter to Russian Ambassador over Russian falsifications

22 January 2020
His Excellency Mr Andrei Kelin,
Russian Ambassador,
6/7 Kensington Palace Gardens
London W8 4QP


Dear Ambassador,

The Federation of Poles in Great Britain which has represented the Polish community in this country since 1946 wishes to express the anger and dismay of its member organizations, and particularly those representing Second World War veterans, at remarks made before Christmas by President Vladimir Putin concerning the role of Poland at the outbreak of the Second World War and his suggestion that Poland collaborated with Hitler.

While President Putin is right to draw attention to the harmful impact of the Munich Agreement in 1938 in encouraging Hitler to pursue his aggressive policy towards Czechoslovakia, the Polish government and the Polish people played no part in the making of that agreement. Once Germany had decided to break the Agreement and invade Czechoslovakia, the Polish government felt it incumbent to prevent the Germans from taking over the Cieszyn district which had been Polish ethnic territory seized illegally by the Czechoslovak army in 1919. However, Poland can take no responsibility for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Western Powers.

In the meantime, may we remind you that it was Poland that had first wanted to remove Hitler with a joint military operation with France in 1933, although the French government did not support the proposal. At this time a resurging German Army was actually being trained and equipped in Russia. France’s refusal to stop Hitler caused Poland to maintain non-aggression pacts with both Germany and Russia in order to retain a balanced peace in Eastern Europe. Later it sought to protect Russia from invasion by refusing to support Hitler’s plan for a joint invasion of Russia by Germany and Poland.

However, the immediate catalyst for the outbreak of the Second World War was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which encouraged Hitler to invade Poland aware that the secret protocol would cause the Soviet government to assist Germany in a joint invasion of Poland. It is Russia’s cooperation with Hitler, and not Poland’s, that was the final cause for the outbreak of war and Russia must take its share of blame, along with Germany, for the death of more than 6.5 million Polish citizens, both military and civilian, who perished in that war and for the devastation that left Poland in ruins.

May we also remind you that during the Second World War at least 560,000 Polish citizens perished at the hands of the Russian government. These included the 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and other members of the Polish elite who were brutally shot by the NKVD directly on the orders of the Politburo in Katyn, Mednoye, Kharkov and other execution sites. However, these statistics did not include the 111,000 Soviet citizens of Polish ethnic origin executed with equal brutality by the NKVD in the genocide of 1938/1939 which immediately preceded the War. Also, at least 1.2 million Polish citizens were brutally deported in the first two years of the War to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other outlying areas of the Soviet Union and barely half survived. These Russian crimes were coordinated in a common policy with Nazi Germany of destroying Poland’s elite and removing Poland from the map.

We are aware of the great suffering and eventual heroic struggle of the Russian people against Nazi Germany’s invasion after 1941 when 25 million Russians perished. We are aware too of the role of Russian soldiers in pushing the German army out of Polish territory and liberating the German death camps. This common struggle and suffering could have caused Russia and Poland to resist and defeat Nazi Germany together. Instead the Soviet Government chose to introduce a reign of terror in Poland, having earlier betrayed the Polish freedom fighters and the civilian population during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. With extraordinary cynicism the NKVD kidnapped the 16 leaders of the Polish Underground state, which had resisted the German occupation since 1939, and accused them of being German agents. Soviet Russia imposed a puppet regime on Polish territory and forced Poland to introduce a moribund economic system that only augmented the massive material losses incurred during the War. Poland was only free after Russian troops finally left Poland in 1993.

We are very concerned that President Putin’s comments undermine the improved Polish-Russian relations that had grown during the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. We fear that President Putin’s latest remarks could be seen as an example of the negative way that Russian government spokesmen and Russian media are reinterpreting Russia’s role in the War. We remember that President Putin has already expressed regret in the past at the abolition of the Soviet Union, even though to all the countries neighbouring Russia the existence of the Soviet Union was seen as a threat to their sovereignty, their culture and their economy.

We hope very much that Russian and Polish relations can improve but we are concerned that such a hostile attitude to Poland’s past could reflect a more hostile attitude to Poland today. We fear that unless such misinterpretations of the past are re-evaluated it will cause the Polish community in the UK to continue to distrust Russia’s present day intentions towards Poland, its neighbours and the United Kingdom.


Yours sincerely,

Włodzimierz Mier-Jędrzejowicz, Ph.D.
Acting Chairman
Federation of Poles in Great Britain C.I.O

“Scotland and Aye” by Sophia Wasiak Butler

This is a cheeky title for a jewel of a book. Concise yet filled with a cocktail of worldly wisdom that bubbles and delights but belies the mere 25 years of the young author’s life span until now.
She begins the story as an adventurous city bred ingenue, enriched by her mixed Polish-Scottish heritage, embarking on a new relationship both with a somewhat older Scottish boyfriend and with the call of nature in a lonely farmhouse embedded in the rolling terrain of the Scottish lowlands. Unlike perhaps other cautious young people finishing university, anxious to start a career somewhere, she seizes opportunity with both hands to satisfy a dream of country living, prepared to undergo whatever hardship it takes to make a success of it for herself and her new partner. It begins with the expected delights and traumas, including the arrival of a pair of mischievous goats who consume all the new plants she had laid out in her grow bags and littered her whole garden with their droppings. Eventually their tiresome presence and head-butting abilities in breaking down the surrounding fencing leads to the nightmare of an incursion by a cow into their little paradise and the subsequent need to palm off the animals to some helpful nuns.
The goats are but a sample of her rural vicissitudes and strengthens her philosophical acceptance that where there is the pain of failure there is also the reward of experience. She has the same approach to other aspects of her life, whether physical, emotional or spiritual as she continues her quest for self-discovery. She seeks it not only in her relationship with her partner, William, and not only in the rural retreat which she had hoped to idealize, but also in lavish therapeutic sessions, including on a remote Greek island, in the wilds of Canada, in Hawaii and earlier in the mountains of Poland. Each ordeal is grasped in full, celebrated and then analysed as she absorbs the energy of nature’s seasons and the wisdom of her teachings and readings. She sucks out any new experience to the full and wrings it dry in her colourful description of each sensation.
She is not old enough to be an Earth Mother. That is more the role of her worldly and sensuous mother. But she is an Earth Princess, delighting in each manifestation of nature’s beauty and cruelty, and reflecting the changing moods of the season, but displaying at the same time a true knowledge of the fauna and flora that surrounds her. She draws too on the wise comments of her barefoot Scottish neighbourly guru, Hamish, who invades her life and appears like a deus ex machina to guide her in moments of doubt.
Yet the text is also peppered by a massive lists of “bon mots” from authors and song writers, steeped in Eastern as well Western traditions, with which she can comment on her musings on weddings, on fatherhood, on the need for elegance, on friendships, particularly with her delightful collection of Polish “mongrels” in the Snob Club, on unexpected catastrophes such as the plane crash which kills the Polish president, on death and on the breakup of a relationship (as William fades further and further away in the course of her story). Although it would not suit the nature of such a short book, one could imagine that she could have provided a two-page index simply of people she has quoted in her text. She scatters this eclectic mix of quoted pearls of wisdom like a coating of raisins to enrich the literary cake that she has baked and presented between the covers of this delightful and imaginatively illustrated book.
Wiktor Moszczynski