Government insider says announcement about abolishing licence fee was not expected this weekend
… Six Conservative MPs had publicly called for
Johnson’s resignation by late Sunday and one backbencher said that he
knew there were “a lot of letters written but not necessarily sent yet”
to the chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee demanding a confidence
vote.
The MP said the mood in his “red wall”
constituency had gone from “anger to ridicule” and that Johnson had
become the butt of jokes among some who voted for him in December 2019.
The backbencher said “the term ‘shitshow’ was used a lot last week [by
Tory MPs]” and that they were waiting for the forthcoming report into
the partygate scandal before deciding what to do next.
James Johnson, a Tory pollster, delivered a similar insight into popular revulsion with the PM on Sunday when he tweeted the findings from focus groups
carried out with long-term Conservative voters, and people who backed
the party for the first time in 2019, and he reported that calls for the
PM to quit were “almost universal”.
On this day, 28 January 1942, Australian troops armed with machine guns, rifles and bayonets attacked striking Chinese sailors in Fremantle.
Around 500 Chinese sailors on six ships had gone on strike and sat down on deck, demanding equal pay with white Australians, as well as better conditions and a guarantee that they would not be sent back to Japanese-occupied China.
On January 28, the 5th Garrison Battalion attacked the workers, killing Tong Youn Tong, 44, with a bayonet and shooting Ping Sang Hsu, 22, in the back. One of the workers managed to grab a rifle and shoot back, injuring one of the sailors, before eventually the workers surrendered. The strikers were then arrested, sent to a concentration camp and then most were drafted to the Chinese Labour Corps and used as forced labour for the Allies fighting against Japan in northern China. The Australian press described the workers in stereotypically racist language as being “of a cunning, ruthless type never before seen in Australia”.
Around the same time, a Chinese crew aboard a Norwegian ship tried to disembark, and several were then shot by Norwegian guards. Elsewhere, after a Chinese ship fireman complained that an Australian had kicked him in the mouth, the whole crew walked off the ship in sympathy.
Chinese sailors’ struggles continued and in 1944 a new agreement was reached in which Chinese workers’ wages were increased to be 80% of whites’.
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Pictured: two of the striking sailors https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1908786699306471/?type=3
