The Bolshy Party

102 Uses for a Daily Newspaper

2011-06-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Daily Telegraph was very keen this week to make hay out of the fact that there are apparently 102 criminals who we can’t deport because of the European Convention on Human Rights. This may well be true, although if the Daily Telegraph told me the sun would rise tomorrow, I would want the fact independently verified by a competent astronomer.

I would be much more likely to believe in the Daily Telegraph if it balanced its relentless bashing of the ECHR with some sort of statement to the effect that in any complex area of jurisprudence there are inevitably going to be times when the result of the process is not what you would expect. On both sides of the ledger.

I reckon, for instance, that – given the resources and the budget of the Daily Telegraph – I could probably find at least 102 instances of people who we have deported who we shouldn’t have done, because by doing so we were condemning them potentially to torture and death at the end of their journey.

Such as the Tamil asylum seekers we deported back to Sri Lanka this week despite clear evidence, which it was left to the likes of Channel 4 to publicise, that there was, potentially, genocide committed by government forces against the Tamil Tigers and those allegedly associated with them. One of the Tamils was so concerned about his potential fate that, rather than risk being deported, he tried to hang himself with his prison duvet. A Labour MP who raised the matter in the House of Commons said – quite truthfully in my opinion – that deporting them was akin to “painting targets on their backs”.

I once read somewhere, I can’t remember where, but I daresay it’s verifiable one way or another, that the standard test for the effectiveness of a particular type of toilet was whether or not it was possible to flush a rolled-up copy of The Daily Telegraph down it. If that is true, I would strongly contend that it remains the most useful thing you can do with it.

No dissent, please, we're British

2011-06-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

The possibility of being found guilty of thought crimes came another step nearer with David Cameron’s recent pronouncement that he was going to “crack down” on anyone not espousing traditional British values. Bizarrely, this apparently includes getting Ofsted to spy on universities and educational establishments to see if they are being “radicalized”. As the only difference between Ofsted and a plastic surgeon is that the latter tucks up the features, I can’t see this being a riproaring success.

Still, one question haunts me… would that include the “traditional British value” of free speech within the bounds of the law, Mr Cameron?

Gadaffi your horse, and drink your milk

2011-06-18T08:52:00.000-07:00

Can anyone tell me what we are still doing meddling in Libya?

VAT a Balls-up!

2011-06-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of the IMF’s “endorsement” of George Osborne’s plans for the economy comes the disastrous May figures for retail sales, and Ed Balls making a speech suggesting that VAT be cut back to 17.5% to jump start sales on the high street.

Clearly, our economic waters are confusing and choppy at the moment.
Buried deep down in the original text of the IMF document (point # 9, in fact) we find:

Risks and uncertainty around this central scenario are significant. Large risks to growth and inflation arise from uncertainties surrounding euro-area sovereign turmoil, the housing market, the size of the output gap, and commodity prices. Indeed, unexpected spikes in commodity prices were a significant factor behind revisions to our 2011 inflation and growth forecasts since the 2010 Article IV consultation. Another risk is uncertainty surrounding the size of fiscal multipliers and the degree to which private demand and net exports will be vibrant enough to pick up the slack from fiscal consolidation. Uncertainties arising from key risks are further compounded by the unusually large disconnect between recent weak GDP outturns and other indicators that are stronger (e.g., rising employment, higher-than-forecast tax revenue, and stronger private sector surveys), making it all the more difficult to ascertain the economy’s near-term direction

Translation? We haven't got a fucking scooby.

My interest had been piqued by this, so I rang up the IMF Press Office. I know, I will be for it when the phone bill comes in, living off bread and scrape, sleeping in the dog kennel and no sex for a month (no change there, then) but it was worth every penny.

I wish I had recorded it.

IMF WOMAN: Media relations, how many I help you?
ME: Hi, I am a freelance writer in the UK and I was thinking of writing something about John Lipsky, following his pronouncement on the UK economy. Am I right in thinking he's now the acting managing director?
IMF WOMAN: That's right
ME: And is he getting the same salary as Mr Strauss-Kahn, I mean, given that he's going the same job?
IMF WOMAN: I don't know. Would it be possible for you to put your question in an email to ...
ME: Well, it's a simple enough question, someone must know the answer. Is there a section on the IMF web site where you publish peoples' salary scales?
IMF WOMAN: No.
ME: Is that because it's a secret?
IMF WOMAN: I don't know. If you could just send an email to...
ME: So you are saying that you either don't know or you won't tell me what the managing director of the IMF earns?
IMF WOMAN: Yes
ME: Well, I think that tells me all I need to know about your grasp of economics. Goodbye.

My reason for asking is that I suspect, from Mr Lipsky's bio on the IMF web site, that he is not short of a bob or two. Given his current directorships and his previous posts with various fund managers (hang on, weren't they the ones that caused all this...?) I reckon he's probably got the odd "portrait of Madison" in his safe. And good luck to him.

I also suspect, although, unlike Mervyn King, he hasn't been stupid enough to say that he's probably also of the opinion that unemployment in the North of England is a price worth paying etc etc chiz chiz, whatever the quotation was. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's ... probably ... a duck.

I managed to find out, by a bit more research, what Mr Strauss-Kahn was on in 2007 when appointed. A tax free salary of $420,930 pa [source: Bloomberg Economic Weekly] plus benefits.

So, let us assume that Mr Lipsky is on the same, although if he's still working on a 2007 salary scale, I will masticate my headgear.

$420,903 pa is $8094.81 per week, which, at today's exchange rate, is £4913.55 per week. Tax free.

The current rate of Employment Support Allowance in the UK at the lowest level is £65.45 per week.

Obviously Mr Lipsky is very well-qualified to rubber-stamp Osborne’s assault on the poor and the disadvantaged.

True, there has been one glimmer of hope for the benighted fools in Westminster in the news that unemployment is apparently down. The private sector created 88,000 jobs in three months, apparently. Of course, many of these “jobs” will be part time and poorly paid, with little or nothing in the way of security or workers’ rights. And I still adhere to my previous statement that we haven’t seen the worst of it yet, simply because the effect of the Tory cuts dumping people onto the unemployment register hasn’t percolated through to the bottom line yet.

Into all this maelstrom of uncertainty blunders Ed Balls, attacking the government and insisting that the VAT increase be reversed as a matter of urgency. On the face of it, it should be good news that at least the Labour Party has rediscovered its balls (literally and metaphorically) and is making some sort of effort to attack the Tories.

However, as Ann Pettifor points out on the blog “Left Foot Forward”, by accepting that the underlying premise for the debate is simply “cuts” to “pay down the deficit”, and the only point at issue is how quickly and how deeply these should take place, Balls has in fact surrendered much of the battlefield to Cameron from the start. The whole article is worth reading, but these are the salient points:

Balls began his speech by mentioning Labour’s “emphasis on jobs and growth”, but the speech immediately morphed into Labour’s concession to the coalition, that what is needed is “a steady and balanced approach to halve the deficit in four years”. The implication being that cuts must be matched by ‘jobs and growth’. But the highlight of the speech – the soundbite that his spin doctors no doubt intended the media to emphasise – is a call for a cut in VAT “to boost consumer confidence and jump-start the economy”; Cameron flashed back his retort: “slashing taxes”, he argued, would only make the UK’s fiscal deficit worse. And so Balls is trapped: the debate now centres on whether the deficit can be financed by increasing or cutting taxes, in particular VAT. For most people, Cameron has the upper hand.

‘Of course the deficit can only be financed by increased taxes’ is the consensus. Because we have ‘spent beyond our means’, we have to raise taxes, like VAT. “Slashing” VAT – when it is higher VAT returns that are paying down the deficit – is unacceptable to the coalition, to the Treasury, to orthodox economists and to the bulk of the British public. But that’s only because most have been drilled in the propaganda: “the deficit is like a credit card”. We need to pay it down. To do so, we have to mobilise/hoard ‘savings’, i.e. higher taxes, to pay down the ‘credit card’ – but the government’s deficit is not like a credit card. And nor do we need ‘savings’ to pay it down.

The only surefire way of paying down the deficit is not by government cutting the deficit (which I and others have argued it cannot do), but by employment. Put 2.43 million people back to work, and – hey presto! – the deficit will vanish. Get 2.43 million people, including thousands of skilled and unskilled workers, clever and talented student graduates, to address Britain’s very real insecurities in energy, food and health and – hey presto – the deficit will be financed.

How? By the tax revenues that will pour into the Treasury’s coffers, either directly or indirectly – and by the savings that will be made on welfare benefits.

However, keep 2.43 million people unemployed, keep them feeling insecure, with their purses firmly shut, and you can guarantee an ever-rising government deficit (April’s deficit numbers were the highest on record for that month). And 2.43 million unemployed is sure to make British ‘confidence’ fall and the recession deepen.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

For what it's worth (or "Rabid Davies Raves Again")

2011-06-18T07:03:00.000-07:00

Another cog in the machinery of the relentless Tory onslaught on the ill and the disabled clicked into place this week, in the unlikely form of Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, who suggested that because “disabled” people are “worth less” to an employer, they should have to work for less than the minimum wage, at least until they have “proved themselves” in order to level up the playing field, because apparently this is how things should work in the “real world”.

I've just had a look at this geezer's declarations on the register of members' interests and I see he declares (inter alia) that he earned:

£600 for writing article for Mail on Sunday. Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, Kensington, London W8 5TT. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 29 November 2010)

I make that £300 per hour. Tell you what, I think a slightly more stupid MP could have done that for £250 per hour. If they could have found one. Such a level of part-time income (which I am assuming he declared and paid tax on) says to me that his familiarity with the difficulties faced by people already on the minimum wage may be er... less than nodding. He also claimed (2008/09)£23,886 for staying away from his main home, and a further £11,878 for travelling to and fro.

But yes, I mean, good idea, Davies old chap: why *not* put everyone on performance related pay, and only pay them pro rata according to their productivity and usefulness to the Tory master plan. After all, it sits quite nicely with their *existing* policy on the deserving and undeserving poor... and it's another step down the road to British Air plc, where your oxygen supply is regulated according to how little they can get away with giving you to breathe, and British Families plc, where your mum invoices you for cooking your breakfast. We've already got “thought crimes” and "cracking down" on people who don't espouse "traditional British values" (one of which I thought was freedom of speech, but hey, that's just me). We've already got "work til you drop" if you are lucky enough to still have a job. Why not go the whole hog. After all, it’s much easier to pick up litter in a wheelchair, you don’t have so far to bend!

The only *problem* with a completely unregulated market that only pays people according to what they are "worth" to an employer, instead of treating people with equaity and dignity, is that - if you are looking for “usefulness” and “productivity”, for instance - many of our MPs are among the most useless part- timers, wastrels and oxygen thieves. Motes and beams, mate, motes and beams.
Actually, thinking about it...I can write articles, I am in a wheelchair, so by his argument, *I* could write it instead of him, for say, oooh £500 a pop - just until I have "proved myself", you understand.

I think I might ring them up. After all, the repetitive xenophobic claptrap that fills the pages of the Maily Dail could *probably* be randomly generated by a program*, and it's got to be better than having him wittering on about his opposition to gays and his views in favour of smoking.

I'm gonna spend the weekend looking for a monkey and a typewriter - subcontacting, outsourcing, it's the Tory way, folks. Sorry Mr MP, you've just been downsized and replaced by a chimp on a Remington. For the benefit of Mr Davies, and other hard-of-thinking heartless bastards, I am not knocking the NHS here, they saved my life, it's what happens after you fall off the end of the system that could be better.

This time last year, I was a director of two companies, one of which I owned. I had worked continuously from 1976 to 2010, paid into the system, paid corporation tax in the good years when we were making money. Latterly, since a spat with Barclays bank in 2005/2006, the company I actually owned has had to divert any spare cash to paying those corporate leeches, so I have not been taking drawings from it. But that was OK, while I still had the other directorship, because I was doing well enough to cover the Barclays money out of that if need be. And come 2012, we would be free of them at last.

Bang! Life shook me a seven. July 2010, rushed into hospital for an emergency operation and came out on 7th December in a wheelchair as one of “the disabled”. Will probably never walk again, apparently. In the meantime, I (or rather my post, har har…) has been made redundant, leaving me as the sole director of a company that owes a lot of money under personal guarantee to Barclays Bank, oh, and of course the Halifax still want their £402.66 a month for the mortgage as well.

Yes, I do qualify for benefits, specifically DLA and ESA. The DLA is meant to be for coping with "disability" and motability and stuff like that, but to be honest, it's much more use to us at the moment in its raw form as "money" that can be exchanged for "food" at the "shops".

As for ESA, that has to be levered out of the DWP with a crowbar, because they have a habit of paying it a month or so in arrears or when they get round to it, presumably because it helps the government's cash flow to keep us on tenterhooks about whether or not we're going to be able to hold out for another month.

The council has just decided, after six months of dithering, that because we have too many "assets" (aka millstones) they *won't* after all be building a ramp to help me get in and out of my own house, so in effect, unless I prevail on someone to heave me down the temporary ramps like a sack of spuds, I am confined to two rooms. People in jail have more quality of life and freedom of movement.

I've also found out, during the course of my stay in hospital, that the underlying cause of my previous mobility issues, which didn't actually prevent me from leading an active and useful life up to that point, was facioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy, which is progressive, and incurable. but, as the physio so cheerfully advised me, at my age (56), "something else will probably finish you off first".

Now, the thing is, life can do this to any of us. It would be a good thing if it happened to Philip Davies for instance. If he carries on smoking, it probably will. I have been doing a bit more research on Mr Davies. He is also a supporter of a movement called Interlibertarians, in fact they paid over £1000 for him to attend their conference last year, according to the register of members' interests. I have had a look on their web site, and they appear to be some sort of global alliance of scary, right wing whirly-eyed fundamentalists.

A lot of their web site is in Italian, and I don't speak fascist, so I am struggling a bit, but they have links to the Ausralian Liberal Party for instance, which believes that the disabled should work for "negative income tax", ie there should be no benefits structure at all, and that the gaps in such provision should be filled by a patchwork of "friends, family, private care and charities" - welcome back to Victorian Britain. I suppose as a last resort there is always the Workhouse. So this is the sort of people we are up against here.

People who think that just because you are "disabled" you are "worth" less to an employer and who think that your "worth" as a person, a human being, is the same as your "earning potential".

Well, Mr Davies, I am more than just a tick in a millionaire's ledger, thank you very much, I utterly reject your doctrinaire reduction of my "worth" to a calculation of what I can earn versus what the state provides for people who are unfortunate enough to be ill, and it is the attitude of you and people like you that means I have now applied for over 100 jobs and none of them wants a 56 year old hairbag in a wheelchair, because, thanks to the efforts of Mr Davies and those like him, people only see the wheelchair. His solution is that I accept the situation and agree to be treated as a second-class citizen.

My solution is that he goes and sticks his head in a dead bear's bottom. Except that he'd probably want to put the dead bear on expenses.

Turbulent Priest!

2011-06-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

As far as I can see, the Archbishop is spot on.

Looking back at the last election, both major parties, and the Literal Dimwits, led vacuous, negative campaigns, more concerned with damage limitation and not dropping any major bollocks than with any vision for our country's future, or policies aimed at making things better for us all, despite the dire straits of the near-collapse of the world economy caused by the banks playing roulette with our money...

So instead of policies we got, in effect "don't vote for him, he smells of poo". That, and the unpredictable impact of the television debates, where Clegg came across as young, telegenic, and appealing to a large number of first-time voters who didn't know any better, plus of course Broon dropping the said bollock in the form of bigotgate, produced a result where no one party had a really clear mandate for their policies, such as they were. In fact, the election result was really the population saying, fairly unenthusiastically, "a plague on all your houses".

We then had a weekend of horse trading where the spectre of "what the markets would do on Monday" and the Greek economy (remember that?) was used as a goad to prod the various participants into a coalition of the unwilling.

Since then, the Toriess have pressed ahead with an agenda (previously hidden)of demonising people on welfare, the disabled and the unemployed, while inflicting savage cuts on public services, either directly or at one remove via reduced council grants, and have potentially stalled the economy and are planning to put yet more people on the dole to keep the likes of the IMF happy. The "Big Society" is supposed to pick up the pieces, of course, but it's a steaming pile of doodoos, and was only ever a device to cover up the cuts. Do one thing, while claiming to do the exact opposite, is how Cameron operates.

The Literal Dimwits, whose role seems to be to hand round the hobnobs at cabinet and act as apologists-cum-targets whenever there is something particularly nasty to announce, have proven to be the weakest link, and are left ... with nothing.

Plus, somehow we now seem to be at war with Libya, and Cameron is about to embark on a root-and-branch reform of the NHS which nobody wants, nobody voted for, is going to cost squillions, and will leave the NHS in a worse mess than it was.

In these circumstances, I think anyone has the right to question this government's "mandate" I've been questioning it since day 1, and pointing out to all the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who used to bang on about Brown being an unelected leader, that this government has just as little legitimacy, or probably even less.

It's a great shame that the official opposition is so weak feeble and generally useless, that it is left to the Archbishop of Canterbury, of all people, to point out the logical and moral weaknesses of the policies now being implemented by the Tories, and their effect on the many vulnerable people (economically, physically, socially, mentally) in society at whom they are targeted.

If Rowan Williams keeps this up, I might have to start going to Church again!

Sheffield "Steal"

2011-05-06T03:46:00.000-07:00

Well, Nick Clegg will certainly be crying into his Depeche Mode this morning, and he deserves to be.

The nerve of these people who bang on about Broon having been an unelected leader, when we have this Junta of Boobies "in charge"!

Yes, the Lib Dems have been shafted all ways up, and should have seen it coming, but Clegg was so desperate for power last May he'd have sold his own granny into white slavery for a chance to hand round the hobnobs at Cabinet. Well, tough. I said it would make Balaclava look like a walk in the park. Nobody will ever trust them again. True, Clegg may well have said at the last GE that he would bargain with the largest minority party, but he forgot to add "and I will slavishly prop them up and take the flak for them while they embark on an ideologically driven slash and burn attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society..."

The acid test of how long he has left will be when someone senior in the party like Ashdown or similar says "Nick Clegg has my full confidence". Whenever the words "full confidence" are used in that context, the subject of them is usually gone by the weekend.

General strike or general election. Or both. Soon. With real policies please, to help real people, and if the markets don't like it, let them invade. US Gilts hardly wobbled anyway when Standard and Poors (who were so good at spotting the credit crunch coming...) downgraded them.

Oh, and PLEASE, Labour, wake up to the fact that you have elected the WRONG Miliband, Gromit, and put it right.

Caroline Flint for Prime Minister... va va voom. That'd get the country growing again (well, bits of it...)

Bin Laden Bin In?

2011-05-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

Well said, Rowan Williams, for speaking out on Osama Bin Laden. No doubt you will receive reams of hate mail from the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who read the Daily Telegraph religiously over their cornflakes, but you were quite right.

Everybody seems to be missing the point that the issue here is about the principle of justice. What makes us the “good guys” or is supposed to, is that we believe in this ideal. In any case, I doubt personally that Bin Laden was any more “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks than the Lockerbie bomber was responsible for downing flight 103, but his convenient demise will prevent a lot of awkward questions for the US administration that might otherwise have emerged at any form of trial.

When you get to the stage (which I fear we have now reached) when international justice is whatever the current US President says it is, and is enforced at the point of a missile or bullet, by special forces who act as judge, jury and executioner, then any pretence we had to be more “civilised” than Bin Laden and his cronies vanishes in the wind. We are, as George Bush said (out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…) back in the days of the Wild West.

And if, as some have claimed, it was an act of war, legally I am afraid they are mistaken. Legally, you cannot have a war on a concept and anyway, if it was a state of war, then presumably the Geneva convention applies, and always applied, to Guantanamo Bay?

57 Reasons not to be Cheerful, one, two, three...

2011-04-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

Any large public event is always a balance between freedom of expression and movement, safety, and civil liberty. The “Rile Widding” was no exception. Except it was – it marked a new watershed in the shifting of the balance away from freedom and towards outright repression. I have already remarked that there seems to be a disparity between Brian Haw camping in Parliament Square (not allowed) and thousands of people camping out in The Mall (allowed) and this double standard is indicative of the sneaky, insidious way in which major public events are used to undermine civil liberties. Presumably if Boris Johnson wants to prosecute the people who broke the law on Thursday night in the Mall, he has plenty of CCTV and TV footage to allow him to identify the offenders. I await his next action with interest.

These are the “facts” behind what was “hailed” as a “successful” security operation. I am going to quote this at length from the BBC because it bears some deconstruction. It is a curiously jumbled and un-focused piece that reads as if it is the police official statement merely rehashed and regurgitated.

Scotland Yard has hailed the security operation surrounding the royal wedding as an "amazing success" despite 57 arrests around its security zone. About half the arrests were for breach of the peace and a man was held for an alleged sex assault on a girl, aged 14.

OK, no-one would argue with that. Breach of the peace and a sex assault, it all sounds fairly straightforward.

Ten people carrying climbing gear and anti-monarchy placards were arrested near Charing Cross. Other arrests were for drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, theft and over a suspected environmental protest. Three people were held in the Covent Garden area over the alleged demonstration, police said.

To be frank, I am surprised that the BBC didn’t look into the anti-monarchy and environmental protests more closely. They seem to be accepting of the police lumping these in with drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and theft. In this manner, legitimate protest is subtly criminalised. Were these people charged, and if so, with what?

Anti-terror powers were used to arrest one man who was seen taking suspicious photographs of transport hubs and security personnel in the Charing Cross area.

This is the sort of thing that is an example of the insidious erosion of our civil liberties – and, of course, it will now continue right up to the Olympic Games and beyond, if they can get away with it.

Three others were held over drug offences and four for allegedly carrying an offensive weapon.

OK, we’re back to the straightforward stuff again. But why not make some effort to group the arrests by type? Why mix up protests with criminal activity?

Met Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens said the success of the overall policing operation showed that the force could handle security for next year's Olympic Games. She said her 5,000 officers should be "immensely proud" of their role in the "happy and safe" event. She admitted to pre-event "nerves" and defended the decision to carry out a string of pre-event raids as "entirely justified".

“Entirely justified”? Justified to whom, justified by what? Is she saying she has some inside information that she is not telling us? Were the people who were arrested pre-emptively some sort of terrorist threat? Because I have a feeling that this is just the police justifying themselves to themselves, with no scrutiny.

Officers questioned masked anti-monarchy protesters in Soho Square as a huge security operation took place around Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and The Mall.

So who were these masked anti-monarchy protestors? How many of them were there, were they charged with anything? Are they part of the 57 arrests?

Thousands of police officers created a "ring of steel" around the venues. Snipers took to rooftops and undercover officers mingled among the crowds

Sort of gives the lie to the “carefree, joyous celebration”, doesn’t it?

More than 90 people were banned from the area and up to 80 VIPs were granted personal protection.

Again – “banned from the area” – under what pretext, what law, what judicial process has been gone through to be able to ban people from walking through the streets of their own capital city. If we are getting to the state where we are having people “banned” then we need to be sure this is not just something being done on a whim or on a spurious assumption, there needs to be a proper legal process.

Over the past few days police have arrested three people believed to be planning to behead effigies at the wedding. They were detained by police in Brockley, south-east London, on Thursday night.

These people have presumably been detained under the law which says that planning a terrorist act is an offence? Again, the BBC doesn’t seem to have asked any further questions. Were they charged? What with? Or were they merely quietly released again after the wedding? Am I committing an offence if I am planning to burn an effigy on November 5th?

There were also several raids on squats across London, which drew criticism from one Labour backbencher. John McDonnell accused police of "disproportionate" action, saying the raids appeared to be "some form of pre-emptive strike".

These are presumably the pre-emptive arrests of which Teresa May spoke in her advance trail of the measures she was “considering” after the Black Bloc’s window-breaking protests on 26 March. The people arrested in the squats were arrested for electricity abstraction – bypassing the meter. They have probably been doing it for months, if not years. They could have been arrested at any time for it, but coincidentally, police swooped the day before the Rile Widding. Coincidence? You decide.

As I said at the start, any large public event carries with it inevitable issues of public safety and security, even on the basic level of making sure no one gets trampled in the rush. And yes, I accept that – given that we’ve annoyed every hothead east of the Euphrates and a good many nearer home – there might be some people who want to use such an event to cover terrorist outrages. It’s all very lamentable. And in any large gathering of people, statistically there are going to be a few lags, perverts and ne’erdowells. So yes, policing is necessary. Up to a point. But when it gets to the stage where we’re stifling legitimate protest, we have to say, I think, that it’s time to take a good long hard look at where this is going.

Personally, I would let the protestors protest. In the case of the more zany fringe groups, it would show some of them up for the unsupported talentless loonies that they really are. If the whole world can see that there are only twelve members of “Muslims against Crusades”, that shows the world exactly what you are dealing with here. I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.

And personally, I can’t see how you can describe any event where it has to be stage managed to stifle those who disagree with it, and pushed through at gunpoint by the presence of snipers on rooftops, as in any way “happy”.

Good luck, if you want to pretend that the whole country rose up as one great spontaneous street party and boogied long into the night. It didn’t, but feel free to delude yourself. For my part, the Royal Family is only useful for one thing. As a constitutional wedge to stop the bastard politicians taking over forever and issuing a written list of everything you are allowed to do, and everything else is verboten.

So if we have to have the occasional Rile Widding to keep the unwritten constitution intact, so be it. But don’t use it as an excuse to stifle legitimate protest, and don’t expect me to enjoy it. Just pull my vest down when you’ve finished.

The Undeserving Power

2011-04-30T05:35:00.000-07:00

I have seen and heard quite a few pronouncements on benefits from the Tories over the last year, but David Cameron’s latest “photo-opportunity” asking workers on the BBC News blatantly, outright, if they were happy with the fact that there are apparently 80,000 people on incapacity benefit because of drugs, alcohol, or obesity, takes the biscuit. The nasty implication was, of course, that these people are still continuing this lifestyle on benefits, and being funded in this excess by the hard-working taxpayer. In reality, it is more likely that these people are struggling to cope with the effects of previous addiction, in a landscape where the very programs and funding that might be able to help them are being cut left, right and centre – by the Tories!

We’re a long way from “we’re all in this together.” But then, so is he. His NHS reforms have been savaged, and the previously docile lickspittles in the Literal Dimwits are having trouble keeping the lid on their section of the pressure cooker, as their leadership seems to have finally woken up to the slaughter awaiting them in the local elections, plus there’s the factor of the AV referendum adding extra strain on an already strained relationship. He has very little to cheer about at the moment (which is probably why they seized on the 0.5% growth in GDP over the last quarter – in reality, flatlining, when offset against the previous quarter’s fall – and trumpeted it like it was the Second Coming).

I’ve never seen a more disgracefully, deliberately divisive speech from someone who would do well to remember that the Prime Minister of this country is the Prime Minister of all of us, and he should be doing his best to unite the whole country, even those of us who would rather cut our own toes off with a rusty knife and serve them up on toast to next door’s cat than ever vote for him. But Cameron isn’t interested in me, except as someone whose disability benefits he can possibly cut. He’s talking over my head, to white van man, the man in the pub, to bigot Britain, to the people who support the BNP and the EDL, who think there are “too many scroungers, too many people on benefits, and too many foreigners”.

“We’re all in this together” has been ditched, apparently, in favour of the resurrection of the Victorian idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. In Cameron’s Tory Bullingdon Club world, the idea of a universal entitlement to benefits under a welfare state is anathema. You should earn your benefits, dear boy, preferably by picking oakum in the Workhouse. He’s preaching the same baseless, anecdotal shit that you can hear from any pub bore at closing time in any working class boozer – and around quite a few middle class dinner tables as well. Or you can pay good money and read it in regurgitated form in The Daily Mail. “ A man in the pub told me once that he had a bloke in the back of his taxi who said there are thousands of them claiming benefits that they aren’t entitled to, they’re all immigrants, over here taking our jobs, etc. etc.”

It more or less writes itself, which is why being a Daily Mail journalist in these heady days must be such a cushy number under this regime. All of the statistics on which these speeches and photo opportunities are based are at best, suspect, and at worse, misleading, cooked-up and completely bogus. The figure of 80,000 people which Cameron used, for instance, for people claiming benefits who are victims of drugs, alcohol or obesity, is actually based on a “snapshot” of the figures, according to the original DWP press release.

In other words, they have taken a small chunk of data, analysed it, then extrapolated the results to see what figure they could come up with if all of the remaining data followed the same pattern, and the answer is 80,000. Suddenly, that figure is enshrined in fact as if it was some kind of innate truth.

They followed the Cameron speech with another similar exercise, a story that “75% of incapacity benefit claimants are fit for work”. What actually happened, when you look into the figures behind the headlines, was that, of just over one million applicants over a given period of time, 39% were found to be “fit for work” but then 40% of this 39% actually appealed against these decisions – and won! [Not that there is any work, but that’s a separate gripe, let’s not get sidetracked here.] So the story didn’t go on to say that, because of that appeal, in fact, the real figure that were “fit for work” was nearer 19.5% of the whole sample, not 39% at all. A further 36% (the other bit of the spurious “75%”) gave up their applications uncompleted, and never bothered to pursue them. The implication from the ghastly Tories is that this is because they’d been rumbled and didn’t bother to go on because they knew the game was up and abandoned the claim, quitting while they were ahead.

Having had first hand experience of the convoluted process and the harassed and unhelpful DWP staff who administer ESA, I can imagine a more likely reason for this, easily. Although I am a “newbie” to the world of disability and benefits, I am a reasonably literate, educated, and fairly articulate person, able to fight my own corner, and even then I have struggled against the overwhelming torrent of forms, questionnaires, and bloody stupid fatuous standard letters asking the same old shit over and over again. It’s no wonder that people abandon their claims. Perfectly legitimate claims, I shouldn’t wonder. The system is set up with precisely that aim. To baffle you with bullshit until you snap and say “oh, sod it!” These mythical people that the man in the pub tells you about, the thousands of them that allegedly defraud the taxpayer of £1000s, must do it as a full-time job, and even then, they’d need a secretary and an accountant, just to keep track of all the paperwork!

So, at next week’s local elections, which is, in truth, what this was all about, had Cameron been honest enough to admit it, you have a choice. You can believe and swallow this hokum perpetrated by the Tories as part of their “divide-and-rule” tactics, if you really believe there are “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and “sturdy beggars”, go ahead and vote for him. If you think, however, that those who are ill through the effects of drugs, alcohol, and poor diet are just as deserving of universal benefits on medical grounds as the rest of us, in a civilised society, and that dividing people into deserving and undeserving poor on the basis of lifestyle “choices” is the thin end of an evil wedge (what about smokers, for instance? Cameron kept quiet about them because smokers might be highly represented amongst the white van man target group) then vote the bastards out, and give them the kicking they so richly deserve. It’s not all of us together, it’s us and them, and it always has been, because that’s their choice, that’s the way they want it, whatever they say otherwise.

Privates on Parade

2011-04-24T03:57:00.000-07:00

David Cam-Moron thinks PARLIAMENT should decide on privacy law, not judges. Great idea. While we're at it, let's put Count Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

2011-04-20T07:05:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a long, passionately argued piece deconstructing Cam-moron's recent playing of the race card in his immigration speech, but to be honest, what he was trying to do is so transparent, it's hardly worth the effort of smashing. There is, as always, a subtext with these speeches. I know exactly what he was trying to do, politicians of all parties do it when they are cornered like a rat.

He can see that his party is going to get a well-deserved kicking in the May elections. So he reaches for his dog whistle, looks out over the heads of the benighted fools he knows will still vote for him anyway, and gives a good long toot in the general direction of the British National Party and the English Defence League.

White immigration is good, brown immigration is bad, is what he was trying to say but couldn't in so many words. And why don't they all learn English and integrate (because er, most of them do. I notice he wasn't quick to castigate Tesco when they started to have aisles of Polish food, labelled in Polish!)

Meanwhile, Mr Ed the talking horse, has admitted that Labour may have made one or two mistakes in the way they presented and monitored immigration (such as sucking up the to the middle classes in key marginals for a decade, while your traditional heartlands were recruited en masse by the BNP, you mean, yes, that would be one of the many mistakes...)

Of course, this has been seized on by the Tory press and regurgitated as "Labour: We Were Wrong On Immigration".

It reminds me of that old adage that you can always tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving.

Any politician who says that they can do anything about this issue while we are still members of the EU Political Unity Project, is just that. A big, fat, howling, pants-on-fire, liar. I wish they would get a grip and deal with it properly, instead of leaving it to UKIP, who couldn't run a village fete, let alone extricate us from the clutches of Mrs Merton and President Teacozy.

And furthermore: the argument always focuses on the "shortage" of resources - why does nobody ever ask why there is a shortage of schools, hospitals and affordable housing? What did I pay all those taxes for? To fire missiles at Libya?

Alles Ist In Ordnung!

2011-04-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

A big public ceremony is approaching. Suddenly, in the days before, hundreds of extra police appear, apparently from nowhere. In the days leading up to the event, the streets are cleared of protestors, vagrants rough sleepers and homeless people, the manholes are searched, the surveillance cameras checked, the shadowy men in shadowy bunkers do their comms checks in front of gigantic screens, firearms are issued with orders to shoot to kill if necessary, and known troublemakers are rounded up and arrested.

China? Iran? Saudi Arabia? the USSR at the height of the Cold War? Hitler's Germany?

No, this is once-Great Britain, 29th April 2011.

In a previous blog about the sinister way that major public events such as the Royal Wedding and the London Olympics were being used to further curtail civil liberties and crack down on the most disadvantaged victims of Tory cuts, I wrote:

Finally, of course, following those dickheads from Black Bloc smashing bank windows on Saturday, Theresa May must have been chortling into her Horlicks that night as she seamlessly began the process of tightening up the policing of demos, talking about barring "known troublemakers" (ie anyone who disagrees with Cameron) from the right to protest. Well done, Black Bloc. Home Secretary 1 (black bloc, o.g.) Black Bloc 0. The pretext currently being used for this is the upcoming Royal Wedding, but given that the Olympics is following on in relatively short order behind this, I doubt anything brought in for the Royal Wedding is going to be repealed before the Olympics (or after it, come to that!)

And, true to form, the BBC reported last night that the security forces and police were considering "pre-emptive arrests" of known activists, on the day of the Royal Wedding, to prevent them "causing trouble" - accompanied of course by footage of Black Bloc smashing the window of a branch of Santander [and is there anyone who seriously thinks the cost of that window won't go straight back on next year's bank charges?]

So, we have really come to this. You can be pre emptively arrested, sans trial, judge jury or charge, detained and denied your liberty, because you might cause trouble on the day of the Royal Wedding. Given that there are going to be 5000 police lining the route, I think they have probably got the security overkill well and truly buttoned up anyway, but what do I know eh?

The real danger, the real acid test, the thin end of the proverbial wedge, is whether, once a docile population have got used to the idea, this sort of thing will just become the norm, long after the last Olympian has left Walthamstow.

Local Cuts for Local People

2011-04-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

Eric Pickles is Satan. Or the Antichrist. Or possibly both, if that’s theologically possible. After seeing his performance on Newsnight the other night, I was only surprised that Gavin Essler didn’t start projectile vomiting, or that his head didn’t swivel through 360 degrees. It used to be only Michael Howard out of the Tory top brass that had a whiff of sulphur about him, but this is no longer the case. Roll over Beelzebub, tell Baphomet the news.

Pickles was being grilled on “localism”, which is Tory-speak for “you’re on your own, chum”, as the savage cuts to local government budgets, disproportionately targeted so the heaviest ones fall on the poorest authorities (a point made in the programme) are now starting to bite across the country.

Much of the interview, sadly, focused on “transparency”, which in the Pickles world involves publishing details of expenditure, regardless of any extra cost incurred in so doing. Even more sadly, Pickles was able to deflect the main thrusts of any attempts to call him to account, by focusing in turn on an error in the research, which led Essler to assert that the Department for Communities was only listing expenditure over £25,000 on its own web site, while expecting councils to list all items over £500. It emerged in the course of the debate that the DCLG is now also employing the £500 yardstick. [Actually, there is some interesting stuff on that web site, which repays further study, and I think I will have a closer look, and come back later to report my findings.]

Anyway, this is how localism works. You cut the rate support grant to the councils, taking care to make sure that the leafy suburbs (where the Tory voters live) “friendly” councils (such as the odious regime in Westminster) and key marginal targets are all protected, leaving the brunt to fall on the most deprived areas (coincidentally, many of them traditional Labour heartlands).

Then you meddle, selectively, as follows: when the council, faced with a decision which involves having to make drastic savings, cuts frontline services, and these cuts are unpopular, you make sure (if you are Eric Pickles) to blame the council for the cuts, as if the sudden, dramatic cut in income was nothing at all to do with you. When the council (quite rightly and sensibly) refuses to spend scarce resources on the extra cost of putting the items of their individual expenditure over £500 online, you criticise them for a lack of transparency. [So far, only Nottingham, out of all the councils, has had the cojones to do this. Shame on all the others.]

Funny stuff, transparency. Pickles seems to be remarkably opaque when it comes to admitting transparently that the transparent reason for these councils up and down the country being forced to cut to the bone and beyond, is, er, Eric Pickles. And localism, that’s a funny concept, too. It only works when the local decisions are exactly those which central government would have made and approved of. Central government in the form of, er, Eric Pickles. Any spending decisions taken at local level which don’t accord with the Tory plan for “slash and burn” are dismissed as “irresponsible”.

Of course, the Pickles plan is for the massive deficiencies his cuts will cause in councils to be picked up by the Big Society, for free, and for the massive job cuts in the public sector to be mopped up by the private sector. Neither of which is going to happen. Like all Faustian pacts, it has a sting in its tail. And possibly the horns of a dilemma.

Second Opinion

2011-04-06T02:31:00.000-07:00

David Cameron is going to "pause for reflection" in his ill-judged reform of the NHS. What a pity he didn't pause for reflection before he even started, as he could have saved the money wasted on this project so far. In fact, the more I see of Mr Cameron, the more I wish his parents had paused for reflection.

In fact, I strongly suspect that the reflection, if any, during this period will be more concerned about how the Tories and mini-tories can sell this deeply flawed crock of shite to a) the Liberal Dimwits at large, who have already showed a marked inclination to defenestrate Clegg over this at their Spring conference b) the House of Lords, who are queueing up to amend it with a chain saw and c)a skeptical public, who are being told that we have no money, and yet see us firing rockets costing £800,000 at Libya and giving £650 million to Pakistan, and are starting to ask "what is this reorganisation of the NHS costing?

In his glossy, smarmy, airbrushed election posters this time last year, Cameron said "We can't go on like this - I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS". If the cost of this reorganisation is coming from existing NHS budgets, then that is a de facto cut. And if the cost is coming from elsewhere, then I can think of a thousand better uses for extra money for the NHS than a reorganisation that nobody wants. Apart from David Cameron of course, to whom it is a shibboleth almost as sacred as "The Big Society".

Easy Git

2011-04-06T02:14:00.000-07:00

Oliver Let-Wind has apparently been letting wind again. This time it was out of his mouth rather than his arse, but since he frequently talks out of both of them, any confusion is understandable.

Apparently, and up to the time of writing, he has not denied this, in an argument with Boris Johnson over airport development, he said that he didn't want to see any more families from Sheffield taking cheap holidays.

Notwithstanding that this was a private comment, my first thought, when I heard that this was in the context of an argument, was that it was a pity it didn't escalate and come to blows.

As it is, it shows up the Tory mindset brilliantly. We don't want these oiks having holidays, not people from Sheffield, no, they should work for free as interns, send their children up chimneys, and be bloody well grateful that we're only cutting some of their libraries, schools, police, and refuse collections, and not all of them. We've already got Sir Digby Jones, of CBI fame, suggesting that unemployed people should volunteer and work for nothing, the Tories love this sort of thing. Cut the benefits, starve them into non-existent jobs, or leave them in the gutter to starve. Pardon me, but is this 1811, or 1911 all of a sudden? Only, I thought it was 2011, that's all.

Welcome to the mind of the Tories. Work for nothing, get on your bike, and don't expect a holiday! If it wasn't for the fact that there are no jobs anyway, and many people now won't be able to afford holidays, cheap or otherwise, it would be laughable. As it is, it's a pathetic insult to the low paid and the unemployed.

It's also an insult, of course, to the people of Sheffield, and Clegg has apparently told Let-Wind to watch his mouth - ha ha ha hardy ha. If Clegg couldn't stop the Tories cancelling a loan (a loan, not a grant) to Sheffield Forgemasters in his own constituency, I hardly think Let-Wind is going to be quaking in his boots at anything Clegg says, especially as he probably thinks that everyone in Sheffield says "eee bah goom", keeps whippets in the bath, and wears a string vest, and a knotted handkerchief on their head.

Personally, I think all the people of Sheffield should take a holiday in Let-Wind's garden. And shit in his fishpond, except I don't believe in cruelty to fish, and he'd only put the cost of cleaning it out on his expenses and charge it back to us.

The Streets of London

2011-03-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

I touched on this in an earlier post, but I am definitely seeing signs of a concerted effort to "clean up" London in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. I don't mean sweeping up the rubbish, I mean a concerted effort to crack down on various freedoms and protests, and a further targeting of the disadvantaged, all as part of the process of packaging London for the (increasingly desperate, given Osborne's mishandling of the economy) sales, business, and tourism boom which is what the Olympics is all about these days.

Westminster Council is trying to banish the homeless by banning people from feeding them.

Boris Johnson (aided and abetted again by Westminster Council) is going through the courts to try and get rid of Brian Haw and his anti-war protest in Parliament Square.

There have been various reports on Indymedia about eastern European vagrants in the East End being rounded up and deported back to their country of origin. The UK is allowed to do this to homeless foreign nationals provided they are going back to a hostel or similar in their own country, and apparently the deportation often happens, but the hostel at the other end doesn't.

Finally, of course, following those dickheads from Black Bloc smashing bank windows on Saturday, Theresa May must have been chortling into her Horlicks that night as she seamlessly began the process of tightening up the policing of demos, talking about barring "known troublemakers" (ie anyone who disagrees with Cameron) from the right to protest. Well done, Black Bloc. Home Secretary 1 (black bloc, o.g.) Black Bloc 0. The pretext currently being used for this is the upcoming Royal Wedding, but given that the Olympics is following on in relatively short order behind this, I doubt anything brought in for the Royal Wedding is going to be repealed before the Olympics (or after it, come to that!)

We know already of course, that finding massive numbers of police from the secret deep freeze underneath Scotland Yard where they keep them in cryogenic suspension until there is a foreign tyrant who wants his goon squad to be able to run through London with the Olympic flag, or there's a miners' strike or something, is never a problem for the government. It's only when you are being robbed, mugged or raped that there is rarely a bobby on the beat.

I could be wrong. Maybe it is too early to discern a pattern emerging. But I will be watching this.

You're AV-in a Larf!

2011-03-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

I got my polling card yesterday for the AV referendum.

I have followed the recent debate on AV as a voting system, and I have to say it holds all the interest for me of watching a steward rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

When you have a situation where the major political parties all run vacuous, negative campaigns based on slogans only one step away from "don't vote for him, he smells of poo", which is what we were treated to last May, while concealing their true intentions and keeping all the nasty things out of the manifesto until they are safely installed in number 10, it is no wonder that a cynical and apathetic electorate can't decide which of these poltroons they hate the most, and stays away in droves, refusing to become engaged in the political process. Especially as you are likely to find that the party you thought you had voted for has ditched all its promises and is now helping its former opponents to shaft you.

In that scenario, a set of venal, corrupt, self-serving bastards kow-towing to the bankers and the money markets represents the same outcome for most ordinary people, whether it was elected by AV or first past the post. I genuinely fear for the future of democracy in this country unless politicians wake up and start to have the courage to frame policies that will improve the lives of real people and make things better. People will turn from democracy to direct action if the democratic system fails to deliver this, and the result could be anarchy. I have previously said that maybe we do need the homeopathic solution of a few cobbles through the windows of 10 Downing Street to alert our political class to this danger, but after seeing the way the anarchy at Saturday's march played right into the hands of the media and the Tories, a better solution would still be a general strike, to precipitate a new, and hopefully more honest, General Election, where the parties tell us their real intentions.

Hick-ery, Dick-ery, Bloc.

2011-03-29T02:29:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, 26 March, half a million people marched through London to show their opposition to the savage, ideological cuts being imposed by the Tories, held up by Clegg and his band of merry men, (whose idea of a Robin Hood tax seems also to be to rob from the poor and give to the rich, while in the background, Caroline Spelman puts Sherwood Forest on e-bay).

People from all walks of life were there, people I know, either personally, or online,of all ages, across the whole community, people whose sole aim was that they wanted to demonstrate, peacefully and in a dignified manner, that these cuts in services and funding, affecting the poorest and those least able to manage, were "not in their name".

Unfortunately, none of that got on the news. The news media are often lazy, sometimes stupid, they have a "slot" to fill, and the VT gets edited to fit the time available. All of this is common knowledge.

And so, predictably, on the news on Saturday and all over the print media at the weekend, the story was dominated not by the vast, peaceful, dignified majority, but by two linked, but essentially separate activities - the occupation of Fortnum and Mason's by UK Uncut, and the actions of the so-called "anarchists", all 400 or so of them out of a crowd of half a million, who make up the organisation "Black Bloc".

It was very naive of UK Uncut, to have scheduled an action to take place in the context of this march. In the past, I have admired and applauded their cheeky, non-violent inventiveness in highlighting the part which big companies avoiding tax and shirking their responsibilities plays in the large black hole in Britain's balance sheet. But by doing what they did on a day when anyone with half an amoeba inside their skull must have known that it would be kicking off, they have scored a spectacular own goal, compounded by the feeble performance of their spokesperson on Newsnight on 28 March in failing to condemn the violence. Idiots. It plays right into the hands of the establishment, who now have the brush of anarchy and violence with which to tar UK Uncut. They have set their campaign back years. If they had only had the sense to occupy Fortnums the day after the demo, they would still have hung on the coat tails of the publicity, but the story would then have been the contrast between their peaceful demo and the violence of the previous day.

The "anarchists" of course, are, like the poor, always with us. They tag along at every demo, sticking it to the man by breaking the windows of a bus shelter. Freedom for Tooting, what did the Romans ever do for us? They are beyond satire, and, being bone from the neck up, impervious to it. But they are not that dumb, they have spotted how successful UK Uncut has been at organising and recruiting, and they have now "written" an open letter to them, offering their "support". Well, if you wanted a perfect example of an attempted reverse takeover by a wolf in sheep's clothing, there you have it. I hope UK Uncut have the sense to tell them to sod off.

I could rant for hours about what idiots these people are, but I will leave that for another day. Instead, here's an extract from a post on one of their forums from a trade unionist who was actually on the march, and took the time to register in order to tell them exactly what he thought.

It was a demo. It was supposed to set an agenda and make the public aware that we're not going to accept the cuts. It wasn't a revolutionary moment.

Those red'n'black lot (why do they all dress the same, its weird, like some cult) 'joined' the march at various points (Piccadilly mainly) and made gigantic pricks of themselves by such predictable and irrelevant acts of violence that were utterly meaningless in the bigger picture. Throwing paint and smoke bombs at the Ritz does absolutely zero to further any revolutionary aim.

What it did do however was enable the media to focus on the violence and avoid the issues in question. And, yes, they would have covered it well without the violence. The media have been all over the unions and TUC who organised the march for weeks in advance of this. But now they're ignoring us in the trade union movement and giving all the attention to the perpetrators of violence.

What the actions of the various show offs, self-obssessed and selfish bellends that decided to play revolution for the day managed to achieve was to directly support the objectives of the media. And to detract from the social movement against this government.

Oh and they also managed to scare the shit out of some familes and kids that got caught in the crush outside Fortnums in the process.

Well done. I hope they are very proud of themselves

Says it all, really.

Emergency, War 10!

2011-03-29T02:10:00.000-07:00

The Tories and their stooges in the Mini-Tories have been quick to point out that the cost of the war against Libya will not come out of any existing budgets from Government departments already squeezed by the cuts, cut - in some cases - to the bone, and then beyond.

No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.

Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!

Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!

This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.

Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.

Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.

Gadaffi! Duck!

2011-03-29T01:48:00.000-07:00

Colonel Gadaffi (is it Gadaffi or Gaddafi? It looks wrong both ways) may not be clinically insane, as some cohorts of our media wish to portray him, but I wouldn't be surprised if, at times, he didn't feel more than a tad schizophrenic, particularly on the subject of whether or not he is a legitimate target for the Western military air strikes that are currently pounding Libya. The answer seems to change day by day, and to depend on who it is you are talking to. Sometimes, it changes by the hour.

The UN resolution which is sort of "authorising" all of this activity, as I understand it, speaks merely of safeguarding innocent civilians and ensuring that the cease fire is enforced, things like that. Say what you will, but it can't be denied that, by giving air support to the anti-Gadaffi faction, the West is currently, if anything, prolonging he conflict, rather than seeking to curtail itand bring it to a swift conclusion. And presumably the argument which links regime change to the safeguarding of civilian lives rests on the rather shaky premise that, without a strong dictator at the helm, Libya won't degenerate into a completely shambolic, anarchic mess, post-conflict, with factions fighting proxy wars and Al Quaida using it as a training ground, in exactly the same way as Iraq did after the fall of Saddam Husseuin. We know very little about these people we are helping, but seeing one of them on the news miming the act of putting a pistol to Gadaffi's head doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that they will be rivalling the ancient Athenians as a paragon of democracy any time soon. In these types of circumstances, the lives of innocent civilians are probably just as much at risk, if not more, as they would be if Gadaffi stayed on. All that is different is which set of innocent civilians gets fed through the shredder.

Have we learnt absolutely nothing since 2002?

Doing a Dubya on Libya

2011-03-20T05:28:00.000-07:00

So, we are bombing Libya. As I wake up on this cool, grey, Sunday morning in March, listening to the birds tweeting and some distant church bells pealing over rural England, British service personnel, some of whom probably have a P45 from the government waiting in the post for them at home, are putting their lives at risk once again in the cause of naked political horse-trading and the sort of selective American foreign policy we thought we’d seen the back of when Dubya finally donned his spurs and stetson and rode off into the sunset.

My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.

Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.

Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.

It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?

No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.

What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.

We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.

I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.

But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.

Not in my name.

The Bye-Bye By Election

2011-03-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

It has taken me a while to get down to posting about the Barnsley Bye Election, and specifically about the Liberal Dimwits coming sixth, just above the Monster Raving Loonies. In fact, had Wing Commander Boakes stood, he would probably have beaten them as well, and he is currently deceased.

It would have been a major cataclysm if Labour had lost. They could put up a donkey in a red rosette in Barnsley Central and it would get in. In fact, when you look at some of the Labour councillors on Barnsley MBC, I think they probably have. Whatever their origin, Barnsley Met, as a council, is bone from the neck up. They once sent a poll tax bill to my cat.

Many people outside Barnsley thought that Labour might struggle because of the previous incumbent, Eric Illsley's troubles over his expenses. However, many people inside Barnsley, and they are the ones with the votes after all, core Labour voters, felt that Illsley had been made an example of, and that others had got away with far worse and not been castigated in any way.

In Oldham and Saddleworth, the Lib Dims were stronger to start with and were aided by a strategic lack of campaigning by the Tories. But in Barnsley, there was nowhere to hide. I'm not going to add to the vast mountain of analysis, I just wanted to put down this marker to the effect that the predicted electoral disaster for the Lentil Munchers will indeed come to pass, if these results continue, and, it would seem, soonerrather than later, from the reports emerging from the Liberal Spring Conference in Sheffield about Clegg being humiliated by his own membership over NHS reform. Now let's see him try and square that with the Tories.

Sadly for the Literal Dimwits, however, even if they gave Clegg the Mussolini treatment from a lamp post in Barker's Pool this very afternoon, it would be too late to save them. As the late, great, Bay City Rollers once put it, in another context, "Bye-Bye Baby, Baby Bye Bye..."

A Rose By Any Other Name

2011-03-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

I thought I heard a report during the week that Sir Fred Goodwin had taken out an injunction to stop people referring to him as a "banker".

OK, fair enough. I can appreciate it's a nasty word, and nobody would like to be referred to in those terms.

We need to find something more appropriate for these people, something more politically correct.

How about "septic wart on the bloated arse of capitalism"?

Yep, that does it for me.

A Mess of "Potage"

2011-03-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

I stood amazed, during the week, at the proposal by Westminster Council to ban the “soup run” to homeless people in their area. Of course, on one level, we should not be surprised at a bunch of self-serving, fat burghers and Pharisees have concocted such an idea. They have “form” in that respect, after all. Was it not Westminster Council that banned the run in their hallowed precincts at Christmas the other year? Unbelievably, on that occasion, it was supported by the editor of “The Big Issue” and I wrote to him and told him he was an idiot. He never replied. Perhaps he already knew.

To the councillors of Westminster, it would seem that the homeless are a sort of wilful and tiresome irritation, so obsessed with the taste of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato that they are willing to leave their homes and their jobs, hitch-hike to London, and sleep rough in a doorway in Covent Garden just for a sniff of the stuff. It is an indicator of just how far those set in authority over us take us for mugs, that this kind of bollocks is actually served up as some sort of justification for the ban.

The truth, I suspect, lies nearer to the fact that rich people who live in Westminster don’t like seeing poor and homeless people as they go about their daily social round. It grates on the residual node of what used to be their shame gene, before they had it surgically removed. It reminds them of the fundamental injustice of their continued existence, compared to the people in our society who are really struggling. Johann Hari, writing tellingly about this in The Independent, points to the distant view of Canary Wharf and all its glittering towers, from the perspective of the homeless who “live” – or rather, exist – in Covent Garden.

Anyway, I have written to the Worshipful the Lord Mayor of Westminster asking her what she intends to do about the homeless, because you can’t ban them from existing. Now that no one will feed them, will they be left, in some cases no doubt, to starve in the gutter? I await the reply (if any) with interest. Because, as it says in my Bible, if they cared to look, “the poor are always with us”.

And if you could make horrible nasty things vanish just by banning them, someone would have banned Westminster Council a long time ago.

Testing Times II

2011-03-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

Last November there was a threat by the EU to backtrack on the pledge to ban the selling of animal-tested products in Europe, which is due to come in force in 2013. Thanks to the efforts of people such as Uncaged in publicising the attempted U turn, there has been enough of a public outcry to at least make the EU think again, though I wouldn’t trust those bastards at the EU to run me a bath, let alone do anything so important as implementing an EU wide ban on animal tested products

But just as one threat is potentially deflected, another has reared its ugly head. The prospect that British animal experimentation laws may be explicitly weakened for the first time since the days of Queen Victoria.

A separate EU law, this time governing how all animal experimentation across Europe will be regulated, has been finalised, Now, each member country has to update their own domestic legislation to make it consistent with the new European Law. As with all EU directives, if implemented here, it could have a mixed effect, and may, in some cases, even make things worse. Up til now, the UK government has pledged that it will keep our domestic legislation stricter than the EU requires, but it now emerges that the government is preparing to rip up the rules that give animals at least some protection from the very worst cruelty.

Because time is short, and I want to get this up on the blog quickly, I am doing a straight cut and paste from Uncaged’s site:

Government threatens to cut protection for animals in laboratories
British animal experimentation laws may be explicitly weakened for the first time since Queen Victoria’s day

A new EU Directive (2010/63/EU) to govern animal experimentation across Europe was finalised last autumn. Now, each country has to update their own laws so they are consistent with the new European Directive. In some areas this could reduce animal suffering in British laboratories, but in other ways it may make things worse.
Up until now, the UK Government has assured Parliament and the public that they will keep any British rules that are stricter than the EU Directive. However, we have discovered that the Government is now prepared to rip up measures that give animals at least some protection from the very worst cruelty.

In other words, the Government is prepared to sacrifice British sovereignty and the lives of innocent animals to serve the interests of big business. This could have terrible consequences:

• More primates could be imprisoned and killed in research for trivial conditions such as baldness, hangovers, mild allergies or the common cold.
• Secret proposals to conduct chemical poisoning tests on dogs would be approved without public knowledge.
• The Government could start allowing researchers to inflict excruciating injuries on animals such as head trauma, burns or infected fractures without pain relief.
• Abandoned and stray cats and dogs could end up in vivisection labs once again, over a 100 years after the practice was banned in Britain. This could open the door to companion animals being stolen by animal dealers and sold to labs.
• It will be easier for researchers to repeatedly starve, mutilate, stress, poison and give cancer to the same individual animal.
• The Government could give the animal testing industry carte blanche to abuse animals with impunity, free from independent oversight.
• Animal research establishments will no longer have to even consider whether the pain they inflict on animals is justified by the expected test results.

The impact of these changes would be devastating – more pain, more suffering, more distress and more killing. Human health will also suffer as there will be even less incentive for researchers to replace crude animal tests with more effective and reliable non-animal methods.

The Government is hoping to push these appalling measures through by exploiting a loophole which allows them to change UK laws without Parliamentary scrutiny.

This is a major battle which will affect the fate of animals and medical research for years to come. Please stand up for animals at this pivotal time.

Forest Dump

2011-02-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

I actually signed the online petition to save England’s forests from being flogged off to the highest bidder. In common, it would seem with half a million or so others. The Tories and the mini-Tories got a nasty shock. Unfortunately for them, they ran smack into an organised articulate middle class protest fuelled by Twitter, Facebook and other online resources against a simple, easy-to-grasp and plainly gaga idea. They should think themselves lucky: if this was Egypt, they would now be on the next jet to Sharm El Sheikh.

As it stands, satisfying though it was to see Caroline Spelman having to eat a huge helping of Humble Pie garnished with a jus of manure at the despatch box, and Cameron trying to pretend all along that it was just some kind of extended consultation exercise, this is no time for false complacency. I signed the petition because, like Ewan MacColl’s “Manchester Rambler”, I believe that “no man has the right to own mountains, any more than the deep ocean bed”. But this doesn’t mean, as some people have suggested, that I prefer trees to people. I prefer some trees to some people. I signed because I could see that the government was making a complete horlicks of it, failing even to consult Dame Fiona Reynolds of the National Trust, for God’s sake, and it was an open goal which I was quite happy to help tap in.

But we shouldn’t forget, as I said in the mordant note I sent in reply to the self-congratulatory smug email I received from 38 Degrees, thanking me for my support, that although the trees may be a bit safer (for now) we still have to inflict similar pain on the ConDims over the NHS, benefits cuts, unemployment, the homeless, and the economy.

Then, and only then, there might be some room for congratulation. In the meantime, there is work to be done. Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.

Daily Fail

2011-02-19T06:30:00.000-08:00

The Daily Mail has been at it again. If I was a fully paid up member of the tin foil hat brigade, instead of merely an occasional camp-follower, I might actually believe there was some conspiracy, some link, some hidden, arcane purpose behind the way these articles appear, with the regularity of the first cuckoo in Spring – and in many cases, “cuckoo” is such an appropriate word – just as the government, in the person of Irritable Bowel Smith, is limbering up to have another go at imposing swingeing cuts on people who receive benefits.

But, to give them credit, the Daily Heil has form in this area. They have “previous”. They have been at it for years. In the Daily Mail’s world view, our precious British way of life is under constant attack from unscrupulous foreigners, many of them maybe a bit “brownish”, who creep unnoticed through the Channel Tunnel at night, just for the fun of filling in an ESA form at Folkestone JobCentre Plus. “One-legged Muslim Latvian roofer asylum seeker took my cat swimming in the nude, says Vicar’s wife.” Making up headlines from the Daily Mail. We’ve all done it, for fun. The Daily Mail, however, has people who do it and get paid for it!

Take this headline from 11th February: “Nearly 2 MILLION on sickness benefits for years are fit to work!” Goodness me, you think. How can this be? Yet when you actually read the article, you discover that it is, in fact, the Daily Mail’s own projection of what they THINK the figure might be, if the results of two individual trials of benefit reviews which have been going on in Burnley and Aberdeen are rolled out nation-wide. If.

To be fair, this time around, the Mail does actually say, buried half way down the article: “If the total proportion of invalid claims matches the results from the two trial reassessments, it would mean almost 1.8 million people were receiving benefits despite being able to work.” Yes, it would, very true. And if my Auntie had balls, she would be my Uncle. So what?

The Mail then goes on to reference a previous article in similar vein where it did exactly the same trick, and I posted about it at the time (though not on here) “Last year it emerged that three-quarters of new applicants for sickness benefit were also declared invalid.”. What this carefully-recycled piece of DWP press release doesn’t say in this article, though, is that that “three-quarters” was ALSO three quarters of an initial assessment, not three-quarters of all claimants. Though in both cases the Mail obviously regards it as a slam-dunk that the ratio will be maintained, whereas in fact as I understand it, the early assessment of these cases does initially throw up a high proportion of abandoned claims, some of which were actually made by people suffering with short-term conditions that then cleared up. So they stopped claiming!

But, of course, to the Daily Wail, that’s not a story. It’s almost as much a non-story as “Moderate Muslim condemns hate crime extremist Imam”.

Meanwhile, the readers of the Daily Mail, like the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript in TS Eliot’s poem, continue to sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn, drowsily dreaming of a sepia-tinted England, with spinsters cycling to Matins and cricket on the green, and nary a black-faced benefits claimant or a one-legged Latvian roofer to be seen. Gawd bless yer, Miss Marple, that’s another mystery solved. Order is returned to the peaceful village of Tiglets Frisby. Richard Littlejohn is in his heaven, and all’s right with the right-wing loonies. Oh to be in Mail-land, where the church clock stands at ten to three, and there is always honey for tea. For those that can afford it.

Monbiot Man

2011-02-19T06:19:00.000-08:00

George Monbiot seems to have stirred up something of a hornets’ nest amongst tax lawyers and apologists for the Tories and Mini-Tories with his recent Guardian article about the proposals to change the way in which the UK taxes overseas profits of companies registered here. When it gets to the stage where people are blogging back atcha and calling you “Moonbat”, while simultaneously trying to suggest it’s no big deal, really, this tends to suggest to me that you’ve hit a nerve.

I don’t read The Guardian, and have absolutely no brief for Monbiot - the only letter I ever wrote him remains resolutely unanswered to this day - and I was only alerted to the piece by a tweet on Twitter that was re-tweeted by someone I don’t even follow, so I could well have missed it. As it was, I had to read Monbiot’s article a few times for the implications of it to sink in, but I freely admit that, as someone who failed O Level Maths, numeracy is not my strong point (or perhaps I should say, as Jack Straw did when having his collar felt over his expenses, “accountancy is not my strong suit”.)

Opinion seems divided over whether Monbiot has a point, or whether he is simply over-egging the pudding for effect. All kudos to him, I guess, at least for even bothering to read the adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009! Personally, I glaze over faster than a lump of pork in cranberry jelly just thinking about it. Others have argued that it is just the UK bringing its method of taxing the profits of overseas subsidiaries in line with the rest of the EU. [I have remarked before that it never ceases to amaze me how we always have to harmonize with the rest of the EU, rather than them harmonizing with us, but let that pass for now.]

The net effect of the proposed changes will be to hand big businesses, multi nationals who can more than afford to shoulder the burden of their fair share of getting us out of this mess, a £100M tax break, just at the time when the Government is telling us we are all in it together. Clearly, some of us are “in it” more than others. Some of us are in it up to our necks and sinking fast, while others are allowed to skip gaily over the piles of ordure that lie in wait for the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled and the unemployed, and continue merrily on their way.

And that is really the point behind all of this. What these companies are doing, aided and abetted by HMRC, may well be legal. But that doesn’t make it moral, it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right that libraries and swimming pools and community centres are closing left right and centre while for the bastards in stripey suits, it’s still “trebles all round”.

Any moral government, any government that even purported to care about the people of this country, would not be looking to add yet more loopholes to a taxation system that already resembles a moth-fancier’s string vest. They would be saying “these people can afford it, so proportionately, they should give more than a bloke on ESA in a tenement in Newcastle”.

This is what UK Uncut, with its excellent campaigns to blackguard and shame the tax avoiders into paying something more like a fair share, are all about, and more power to their collective elbow. I wish they were in Parliament, in opposition, right now, instead of the feeble and supine Labour Party.

But, whether Monbiot is wholly right or wholly wrong, or – as I suspect – somewhere in between, but definitely onto something, I suppose it comes as no surprise to find that the Tories are doing something divisive, unfair, and beneficial to big business. Something that was in no-one's manifesto, either, come to that. I do, however, remain amazed at how long the Liberal Dimwits will continue to allow themselves to be bitch-slapped by Cameron and Osborne. Talk about an abusive relationship!

Unfortunately for them, at the next election, whenever it comes, the electorate won’t believe they simply “walked into a door again.” They won’t believe anything the LibDims say. Vote Lib Dim, get Tory. Once bitten, twice shy, Lib Dims, bye bye.

Small is Beautiful, Big is Better, but Both is best of all

2011-02-08T01:15:00.000-08:00

The thing is, we did use to have the Big Society, well, sort of. I remember, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in East Hull, our community did look out for each other and - yes, cliche or not - you could always leave your door open and neighbours were always popping round for a cuppa.

In that scenario, you could never imagine, for instance, a vulnerable pensioner dying on her own of hypothermia and lying there for weeks before being discovered, because somebody would have noticed she was missing from her daily round, hadn't seen her in the corner shop recently, and would have stepped in with a hot meal, a blanket and/or a bag of coal.

Now, that kind of Big Society would be worth aspiring to. The kind of society where people band together and see each other through, behaving altruistically without any notion of payment or reward. The only problem with it is, though, that it's actually the Small Society. It works at a micro level, street by street. You can't scale it up to a national level, though it would be nice to get back to a society which was more caring, more respectful, less self-centred and - frankly - venal in its aspirations, since we seem to be descending more and more into "White Van Man Bigot Britain", encouraged by "dog whistle" pronouncements on things like benefits and immigration.

I say "get back to", because of course the communities that nourished and nurtured the "Small Society" are long gone - the fishing community of Hull being an example, the mining communities of the coalfields, the steelworks or the shipyards in those areas of the country where they were strong, and the docks in places like Liverpool and the East End. And not only have the communities, vanished, the ideas which held them together have vanished too - ever since Margaret Thatcher gave the green light to sheer naked greed for money as the motivating force in society, basically the country was set off down a route where it was apparently OK to climb over anyone's face on your way to the acquisition of wealth and goods, and everything has to make a profit, a philosophy that ultimately leads to your mum invoicing you for cooking your breakfast, or outsourcing the job to a chef in Mumbai.

There are some things that are necessary to be organised on a macro scale and which will never make a profit. Health care, education, prisons and the justice system, defence, transport, the postal system, things like that. The reason that the Big Society is falling apart at the seams is that the Tories, deep down, know this, but they are ideologically attached to the idea that everything must make a profit. This inherent contradiction at the heart of the policy is killing it stone dead.

If they could but bring themselves to abandon that shibboleth, and fund the idea like it needs to be funded, then the Big Society could work. But of course, with Eric Pickles in charge of the budgets, that is about as likely as me lapping Usain Bolt in the 100m at the next Olympics. Not going to happen.

So, as it is, we are left with an empty, vacuous fart of an idea, a trumped-up initiative which relies on wish fulfilment and fairy dust for its success. The idea that you can cut public services to the bone and beyond, remove funding left right and centre, throw thousands of people on to the dole and somehow, magically, the economy is going to pick up and create a lot of wealth that will somehow get given to charities by altruistic donors to pick up the slack. I don't think so. There goes Usain Bolt again.

It's not as if they really mean it, though. Cameron is using the Big Society as an attempt to speak over the heads of most people to those who would like Britain to return to a sepia-tinted era with cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, but the reality is a savage attack on the public service ethos (because the Tories truly think everything can be reduced to a balance sheet) and passing the blame on to councils and charities for not picking up the pieces, when in fact, the Tories have stolen the dustpan and the brush!

I no longer differentiate between Tories and Lib Dims, these days they are all just Tories to me, but I do wonder sometimes how the Lib Dims, traditionally the party of local government, volunteering, and local activism, square their support for this dismal claptrap with their professed stance of caring about communities. And how they sleep at night.

Pass the Parcel

2011-02-04T14:33:00.000-08:00

One thing which was obvious from the start, when the Tories and the Lib Dims agreed their pact made in hell with all the bonhomie of Von Ribbentrop and Stalin breaking out the celebratory vodka, was that the amount of money given to councils by central government was going to be decimated.

The Tories hate the public service ethos, they would much prefer everything to be privatised for the benefit of shareholders and their rich toffee-nosed friends in the City. They hoped of course that “The Big Society” would step in and make good some of the deficit, so that if, for instance, your council couldn’t afford to empty your bin any more, a possee of well-meaning citizens and charities could do it instead. The cuts, however, are damaging the income of charities as well – who has the wherewithal to donate to charity when their own job is under threat?

Now that The Big Society isn’t happening, a reasonable person might expect contrition and a re-think, but the Tories and their catamites are pressing on regardless into the valley of death. Their chief cheerleaders in this divide and rule programme of starving the councils of cash and then blaming them when they are unable to provide essential services are Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps at the Department of Communities. [A misnomer if ever there was one. Department for Dismantling Communities would be a more apposite title, these days]

Pickles operates on precisely the opposite principle to his more famous namesake, Wilfred, who was known for his catchphrase “Give ‘Em the Money, Mabel”. The Tories like to trot him out as their equivalent of John Prescott, but in fact he has fewer appealing attributes and even less charisma and life-experience, having risen in obscurity from the ranks of Bradford Council. Despite the fundamental dishonesty of a policy which denies councils the money to carry out essential services and then blames them for not emptying the bins, Pickles is at least straightforward about what he does.

Grant Shapps was in the news recently for holding up the “fact” that Manchester City Council had a “Twitter Tsar” on their payroll, at vast expense, naturally. When the story was investigated further, however, it was discovered that the “Twitter Tsar” was, in fact, the person who ran the Council’s web sites, and that “tweeting” was merely a small part of what his job entailed.

One of the most damaging aspects of this slash and burn approach to local authority funding by the Department of Communities has of course been its impact on the homeless and other vulnerable people who depend on Council social care.

We’ve seen this happen particularly in Nottingham, recently, where Framework, a local charity working to alleviate the problems of homelessness and deprivation, have been forced to the brink of legal action over budget cuts emanating from central government

Andrew Redfern, Chief Executive of Framework, said:

“We have served ‘letters prior to action’ (the first stage of a judicial review) on the department for Communities and Local Government and Nottingham City Council. There is a deadline for them to respond and we hope this may help them to resolve the issue.

“Framework serves homeless and vulnerable people, including those with mental health, substance and alcohol problems, older and younger people, people with learning disabilities and women fleeing domestic violence. We have a duty to defend the thousands of people who will lose their support and may become homeless because of the cuts. Whatever the outcome of this legal action I hope it will shine a light on the ludicrous nature of the situation.

“In the Comprehensive Spending Review the government announced a reduction in the national SP budget of only 12% in real terms over four years. The actual amount of cash available for the programme next year is barely 1% below the figure for the current year, yet it transpires that Nottingham City Council is proposing a cut of 45% (from £22.37m to £12.93m a reduction of £9.4m) based on its interpretation of the local government settlement. It will ameliorate this with an extra £2m for one year only.

“The department for Communities and Local Government disputes the city council’s figures stating that Nottingham’s SP allocation has been reduced by no more than 11.3%. The department has not yet given a precise figure.

“The argument between central and local government leaves us perplexed. The confusion about the settlement is causing chaos. The city council has issued de-commissioning notices for many of its SP-funded services from the end of March 2011 and reduced contract values on the others to £1 per annum. In view of this we have had no choice but to give notice to over 200 staff working directly with vulnerable people in the city.

“We are receiving more and more enquiries from service-users and concerned members of the public asking what will happen in April.

“The proposed cuts will have a devastating impact on the city. Levels of rough sleeping, crime, anti-social behaviour, ill-health, unemployment and poverty will all increase.

“We have to do whatever we can to stop the cuts. Our decision to seek a judicial review is one of the ways we are trying to do this,” added Mr Redfern.

Councillor John Collins, the leader of Nottingham City Council, has written an open letter to Grant Shapps pointing out the errors in his calculations of the amount by which the Support Grant has been cut. Not that this has made any difference. He may as well have saved his breath to cool his porridge.

The fact is that Grant Shapps doesn’t need the effects of his actions pointing out to him. He knows already what the effects are, and if he doesn’t, then he has (still) plenty of civil servants who can explain it to him. It's not a regrettable mistake, it's a deliberate strategy.

Once again, it is past midnight as I sit here, scribing out these words by the combined light of a low-energy light bulb in the standard lamp and the glow of the remaining coals through the window of the stove.

I can hear the wind buffeting the trees in the garden making them thrash about as if in pain, and I can hear the rain, sounding for all the world like handfuls of gravel being flung against the windows of the conservatory.

In olden days, of course, this sort of weather would be the backdrop for a secret lover arriving at your window in the middle of the night. In a poem by Keats for example, or a novel by Thomas Hardy. These days, we’re not so romantic, and every time I hear the rain driving against the conservatory, I think of those forced to be out there in the night, stuck out in the rain with no choice and nowhere to go.

And I think of those who voted for the Tories and the Liberal Dimwits at the last election, and I wonder if they are happy with this outcome? Happy that people are sleeping out in the perishing cold and the rain?

Is Grant Shapps happy with the results of his actions? Is David Cameron, as he goes back home for the weekend to his second home in his constituency, paid for by us, or to Chequers, with its hundreds of bedrooms, paid for by us?

And again I ask, if you are NOT happy with the outcome, why do you allow it to continue?

For the rest of us, the streets are full of cobbles and there are many, many windows in Whitehall. Given that the official opposition is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, what we need is an opposition to the opposition. What we need is an indefinite general strike against the cuts until the government gives in, and calls a general election!

Double Dip

2011-02-04T14:12:00.000-08:00

Eight months in to the ConDim administration, and we’re starting to see the first damaging effects of the draconian cuts as the economy plunges back into recession, albeit only by 0.5%, but I wonder what the next quarter’s figures will be. They can’t very well blame the snow next time, and if they say it’s due to the increase in VAT, then they are on a dodgy wicket, since that was their idea as well (despite having “no plans” to do it, when asked back in May).

Every time I hear the phrase “double dip” I have this mental picture of George Osborne and Vince Cable, but I guess that’s just me, eh.

So we see, today, Clegg being pressed into service (the Tories always send out an expendable, gullible Lib Dim when they have something evil or contentious or untrue to announce) to give a speech in Rotherham (oh, the irony!) about how the government does really have a plan for growth, honest, it’s just that before we can implement it, we have to slash and burn and decimate and stifle the economy, then when it’s well and truly buggered beyond all recognition, and reduced to broken glass and ashes, well, that’s the time to start thinking about recovery, obviously!

Deficit reduction by cuts is apparently a vital element of the growth plan, according to Clegg, which is a bit like saying that dousing your allotment with paraquat is a vital element in ensuring a bumper crop next year! Either the man is a complete tit or he’s totally dishonest. I suppose there’s an outside chance that he might just be both.

Meanwhile, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Osborne, Cable, Shapps and Pickles, continue scything their way through the public sector infrastructure. 500 jobs here, 1000 there, this year, next year.

I have just one question to the people who support the coalition in its berserker attack on our society and way of life – it’s quite a simple question, and it is this:

Are you happy with the idea of unemployment, repossessions, marriage breakups? Are you happy with the idea of companies being driven to the wall? Are you happy with the idea of the public services being stripped back and cut to the bone? Do you chortle with glee at the thought of people on benefits having their money cut? Are you happy that companies are no longer able to afford to pay their employees? Are you happy, these cold winter nights, about people sleeping in doorways and under bridges? Does it fill your heart with pride and make you glad to be British?

Or like me, does it make you long for a time when it was like Ancient Rome, as portrayed in Macaulay’s Horatius:

Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high,
And the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction,
In battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.

What I want is someone to take us back to the brave days of old. “Brave” being the operative word, since they would be flying in the face of the yellow press and the vested interests of the current swarm of venal vermin who have somehow, unaccountably, (in both senses of the word) misappropriated the levers of power.

So, my Literal Dimwit chums – are you happy with what you are doing to our country by your support of Cameron and his Tory toffs? And if you are not happy, then why not vote with your feet, get out and leave them to it.

Oh - and, do you know, despite all this, despite the fact that their constituents are up against it and struggling left, right and centre, MPs are STILL whingeing about expenses. Still! They just don’t bloody get it. So you can’t claim for everything, so your paperwork gets lost by officialdom, so, it costs you money to do your job. Welcome to the real world, the one the rest of us live in, and shut the fuck up.

Just What the Doctor Ordered!

2011-02-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

The latest reorganisation of the NHS is being brought in despite the lack of a mandate, out of political ideology, regardless of what it will cost – at a time when we are supposed to be strapped for cash – and underwritten by the false premise that what people want is choice in healthcare.

Just taking the last point first, for once; when I collapsed last July with peritonitis, I wasn’t lying there thumbing through brochures from competing hospitals, comparing survival rates from major surgery, nor was I surfing on “Compare the Bedpan dot com”. I needed quick, effective and local treatment, and, fortunately for me, that is what I got.

Of course, to the Tories, freedom of choice is a political mantra, a shibboleth that needs to be pursued to the nth degree, even if it is totally unnecessary, inappropriate for the service in question, and results in a worse experience for the end user. See under railways, and see under (soon) the Post Office, unless they see sense and stop their efforts to sell chunks of it to Deutsche Post and the like. In fact, if they ever did succeed in their ultimate aim of privatising the air we breathe, they would probably still insist that people had the choice of breathing either air or Carbon Monoxide, and that it should be from a variety of different providers.

I have dealt before with the lack of a mandate. Cameron was at pains to say, before the election, that the NHS was safe in his hands. I don’t recall what the Literal Dimwit position on the NHS was, but then it didn’t matter at the time, because they were only ever going to get a sniff of power by abandoning everything they ever stood for. It’s just that at the time, none of us thought they would be venal and mercenary enough to actually go through with it. Personally, I don’t believe that any of this crap being foisted upon us has any sort of mandate – if it has, here’s my challenge to the ConDims. Publish what you have done so far, and what you plan to do, as a manifesto, and go to the country on it. And let’s see you get slaughtered.

So the idea is that GPs, in between looking at your bunions and saying “there’s a lot of it about”, will somehow find time to run the rest of the health service, from the bottom upwards (including Proctology, yes, let’s "pile" on the obvious jokes). The idea is plainly such bollocks that the only reason it has got this far is it seems to be Cameron’s own pet project. Even his own brother in law thinks it’s a non-starter. Clearly GPs aren’t going to be able to do all of this on their own, even if the receptionist does manage to fit in the odd bit of hospital management amongst her more normal tasks of glowering at people and refusing them appointments.

So they are going to have to hire some people to do it for them. And what better people than the people who were actually doing the job until recently, working for the Primary Health Trusts? So basically what you have done is sack one lot of health administrators, make them redundant, close their offices, and then pay for them to be taken on somewhere else and for new premises to be set up, with basically the same people doing the same job.

As an exercise in lunacy it ranks with King Louis paying people to dig holes in the road and then fill them in again, in the dying days of the Ancien Regime. And we all know what happened to him.

When is a secret not a secret?

2011-02-04T14:02:00.000-08:00

There has been a spate recently of rich, famous, influential and politically powerful people being shown up as hypocrites and self-aggrandising idiots, by the likes of the undercover reporters of The Daily Telegraph, and Wikileaks.

The Telegraph upset Vince Cable, by pretending to be constituents and encouraging him to make grandstanding comments about being “at war” with Rupert Murdoch, which ultimately cost him a chunk of his job. And now he is bleating about complaining to the Press Complaints Commission. While I have absolutely no desire to see Rupert Murdoch's empire grow and prosper, the trick is, dear Vince, if you don’t want to be caught out saying one thing in private and something different in public, then don’t have a hypocritical two-faced stance where your beliefs and actions differ according to who it is you think you are talking to. Shimples, as any Meerkat would tell you.

Or to put it another way, if you are so embarrassed that your party is propping up the Tories as they continue in their revenge rape of the country, then don’t pretend apologetically to your constituents that you are at war with them – go to war with them, and vote with your feet. Pull out. As Si Kahn says, it’s not the fights you dreamed of, it’s those you really fought.

Wikileaks has done a similar thing to the Daily Telegraph, but on a much bigger scale of course. They have shown up almost every US diplomat as being a lying conniving two-faced shyster. Many of us already suspected this was the case, of course, but it’s good to have it confirmed at source.

This is why the CIA are so keen to lean on Norway – and indeed to lean on our own legal system – to make it difficult for Julian Assange. Whether or not he is guilty of the crimes for which he is currently going through the legal system, you can bet your sweet palookah that the US would dearly love to see him extradited, wearing a hood and orange overalls, and chained to a latrine in Guantanamo. To them, and to the UK politicians who bleat on about the necessity of being able to keep certain things secret from us, the great unwashed, I have really only one thing to say.

It is the same thing that you said to us, every time a piece of anti-libertarian legislation chipped away yet another fragment of our precious civil liberties.

“If you have got nothing to hide, you have got nothing to fear”.

Hello, boot, may I introduce you to the other foot?

Vegan labelling

2011-02-04T13:58:00.000-08:00

Last year, my wife became vegan. For animal welfare reasons mainly. I have remained, however, resolutely vegetarian, on the grounds that I like milk, cheese and eggs too much to give them up, and would rather spend my time happily chomping them while campaigning for a better deal for cows and chickens. So it hasn’t really impacted a lot on our lifestyle, apart from having to give up on take-aways where we can’t be sure that the contents are 100% dairy-free. The worst bit is having to cook two versions of the same meal sometimes, one with a cheesy topping and one without.

One thing which it has brought to my notice, however, is the paucity of information and patchy labelling of products as being suitable for vegans. If you are a vegan, these days, the situation regarding food labelling is just as bad for you as it used to be for vegetarians twenty years ago when I went veggie. It’s ridiculous that, in this day and age, when vegetarian labelling is mainstream and you can tell by looking at the label that it’s gluten-free or packaged in an atmosphere that may contain nuts, that you still have to scrutinise the list of ingredients, and in some cases look up the contents of individual e-numbers, to find out if something is vegan or not.

Apart from anything else, the people responsible are missing out, big-style. When I do the online shopping order, and I see something my wife might like, I do actually, most times, take the trouble to find out if it is actually suitable for vegans, sometimes even to the extent of phoning the supermarket in question’s customer care line. My wife never does this. If she is shopping, spots something that she fancies, but can’t find out if it’s suitable for vegans or not, she just puts it back and goes and buys something that she knows is suitable. So the manufacturers of the first product, if it was vegan, have lost a sale. All they needed to have done was to put “suitable for vegans” on the outside somewhere.

In time, obviously, people are going to wise up to this, and I hope that “suitable for vegans” as a labelling convention, will become as widespread and mainstream as “suitable for vegetarians” now is. But listen, Sainsbury’s if you are reading this, you are losing sales, and your marketing department may contain nuts. Nuts who don’t realise the commercial value of accurate food labelling. Still, on your head be it.

Testing Times

2010-12-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

Animal testing on cosmetics was banned completely by the EU last year. Big pharma companies such as Procter and Gamble can get round this law, however, by selling cosmetics in the EU which have been tested on animals elsewhere, eg America or China.

Back in 2003, the EU established a deadline of 2013 for the complete banning from sale of ANY animal tested cosmetics in the EU. This has given the industry more than a decade to prepare – and, of course, since a massive amount of cosmetics, out of the global market, are sold in Europe, this will put massive financial pressure on the animal testing companies to stop the cruel and un-necessary process of causing suffering to animals just to tick a box that says they have tested a new mascara!

But now, of course, under lobbying pressure from the big pharma companies, the EU is trying to move the goalposts and delay the implementation of the 2013 ban. Even though they have had 10 years to prepare.

So, we now have a choice. We can let them continue with the litany of pain, even though in my book we should be banning it NOW, let alone in three years from now. We can let them go on imprisoning animals in solitary confinement in wire cages, causing emotional distress and physical injuries; we can let them go on force-feeding animals chemicals via tubes shoved down their throats, at many times the doses acceptable to humans, toxins that cause cancer and other effects; we can let them go on poisoning and killing thousands of baby animals in toxicity tests; we can let them go on duplicating tests because of commercial confidentiality and disputes over results; we can let them go on giving animals a painful and terrifying death in a gas chamber once their usefulness to the company has expired.

Or we can stop them, by lobbying our democratic representatives and letting them no, in no uncertain terms, how unacceptable we find the process, and raise your voices in defence of the ban, insist on the 2013 deadline, in fact, insist on it being brought forward!

If cosmetics HAVE to be tested somewhere, maybe we should test them on Euro MPs. After all, if they can make that crowd look attractive, then we will KNOW they truly work.

All they will call you will be Deportees

2010-11-23T02:34:00.000-08:00

On 12th October, 2010, on board BA Flight 77 from the UK to Luanda, Angola, Jimmy Mubenga, a 46-year-old who had been in Britain for 16 years and had lost a long series of appeals, and who was being forcibly detained by Group 4 Security, working on behalf of the UK Borders Agency, died.

Several witness statements speak of him complaining and undergoing breathing difficulties while under restraint.

What surprises me about this is not so much that Mr Mubenga died. The UK Borders Agency is a singularly uncaring and monolithic entity without a shred of decency, compassion, or mercy; capable, for instance, of ordering the deportation of a terminal cancer patient to certain and painful death. Nor am I surprised at the actions of Group 4 Security. In fact, given the "fine carelessness" and disregard they seem customarily to display in such circumstances, I am surprised that apparently this is the first death which has occurred actually during deportation in 17 years.

But what surprises me most of all, is the total lack of public outcry.

Why isn't this front page news? If it was some vulnerable kid, living in a hovel and neglected by social services, the papers would be full of it. You wouldn't be able to move for waving shrouds, bandwagons, and public enquiries. Politicians would be queueing up at the despatch box to wring their hands and spout sanctimonious claptrap. But someone dies, in suspicious circumstances, during deportation, in front of witnesses, and nothing happens! No-one says a dickey-boo!

In fairness to the UK Borders Agency, they did go so far as issuing a statement, saying that Mr Mubenga was taken ill on board the plane and died later in hospital. But what process of enquiry produced this? Have any of the guards in question been suspended or investigated? Have any lessons been learned in the use of restraints? Will anyone ever be prosecuted?

No doubt, the Borders Agency and Group 4 would like to draw a veil over the proceedings as quickly as possible, to put the stone back in place over the slimy practice of forcible deportation before anything else crawls out.

We, however, those of us who care, can do our part to make sure that the case of Jimmy Mubenga does not get brushed aside without due judicial process. As well as using the normal channels such as letters to the press and to your elected representatives, I would also suggest a total boycott of British Airways and Group 4 and all their subsidiary companies and supply chain, at least until some announcement is made about an enquiry to establish what really happened, since all we can definitely say at the moment is there are suspicious circumstances and a major difference of opinion on the subject. I repeat, that alone is normally enough to excite the attention of the police and the DPP.

It won't bring him back, but perhaps 12 October every year could be remembered as Jimmy Mubenga day, until the UK Borders Agency is no more, disbanded for good, and Group 4 once more recognises that its true level of competence is in losing, or occasionally delivering, overnight parcels (or knocking on the door and leaving a card, even though you were in the house at the time). They were crap at that, but at least they didn't kill anyone.

Get Down, Shapp!

2010-11-22T07:03:00.000-08:00

The Tories didn't really wait so long before showing their true colours.

Since the flawed election, which saw them seize power without a mandate, with the aid of their lackeys and lickspittles in the Liberal Democrats, a slew of hateful policies, proposals and suggestions, mainly aimed at targeting the poor, and demonising the disabled and those on benefits, has poured forth like a sewer from Central Office, or wherever their septic think tank is located these days.

As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that some of these proposals may be not entirely serious, kite-flying by some chosen mouthpiece (other orifices are available, some of them Lord Young) to test public reaction.

Their latest idea is about Social Housing, floated by Grant Shapps, and must surely fall into that category. It achieves the unique distinction of being not only gaga and unworkable, but also running counter to Tory policy as established by their patron saint, the blessed Margaret Thatcher, and her ideology.

In Mrs Thatcher's era, if you lived in a council house and you did well for yourself, and prospered materially, you might get to buy your house, thus denuding the UK's social housing stock, which many thousands did in the 1980s. Nowadays, if you live in a council house, and your material circumstances improve, under this pispotical proposal, you are likely to find yourself being evicted!

The stated aim is to end the concept of council house tenancies for life. Why? What possible good can it do, and where are the people supposed to move to? Grant Shapps is part of the Department of Communities. What has this proposal got to do with communities?

What it is about is, because the government doesn't want to build more social housing, it is making the existing stock "go further" by moving on the people who live there into the private sector, and bringing in people who are on the waiting list!

Compared, of course, to the obvious policy, of just building more social housing to start with.

Accentuate the Positive (Part 2)

2010-11-22T06:52:00.000-08:00

A VISION FOR BRITAIN

Something fundamental is needed to change our society. We are not in Kansas anymore. Capitalism has broken, in fact, in October 2008, we came within a fag paper’s width of the collapse of global monetary systems, and all which that would have entailed. Socialism, true socialism, has never been allowed to fill the gap. I happen to believe, and would argue We need a completely NEW landscape. Something different.

At the poll in May, I argued for a massive boycott of the election, a low turnout of seismic proportions, combined with a comparative “Everest” of spoilt ballots from those who did turn out, I said, would surely send them the signal, all of them, all of the parties, that their ideas, their policies, their proposals, were limp, shrunken, dead and moribund. They needed to go away, and think again.

Sadly, that did not happen, and the three major parties were allowed to get away with sterile and negative policies, although I did, and still do, question the legitimacy of the result. However, that would take us in the direction of party politics, which we have been asked to eschew in this thread, and therefore I will, instead, try and be positive in suggesting some key points of policy where I think things could be different. My vision for the future, if you like.

In general, I think that there needs to be an alternative to the free market and socialism. Especially as socialism in this country has, in reality, meant The Labour Party. As Orwell put it in “The Lion and the Unicorn”

It has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions

Since this is likely to be a very long post I think, rather than risk crashing the software, I will post it in chunks and summarise my main points under each heading.

ECONOMY

I believe that the way out of the debt/deficit jungle is to grow the UK economy and repay what we owe through a fairer taxation system and a growing tax take as the economy grows. Key to this in my manifesto would be the creation of a new sector in the economy: social enterprise. Social enterprise is government capitalism that makes a profit and then uses it for the public good. This is the economic idea which underlies Rooftree, for instance (see under housing). Let us be clear about what social enterprise is not. It is not outsourcing. It is not privatisation, it is the government setting up companies to do things that need doing and to turn a profit out of them, a profit which is then re-invested in the public’s interest.

We should also be conscious, in taking economic decisions, that we govern our own country, it is not government by the markets. Nor is it government by the EU, which takes too much money out of this country for very little return.

DEFENCE

I am in favour of a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think our troops are behaving there with the customary bravery and aplomb which you would expect but in effect all they are doing is being professional targets. My “default” position for the withdrawal would be the White Cliffs of Dover, ideally, but given that we would already be abandoning Afghanistan to the Taleban, we can’t afford for Pakistan to go the same way so we would probably have to retain some sort of presence along the border. Although to be honest, the US should really now shoulder the burden if they want to carry on, along with some of our EU colleagues who have been backwards at coming forwards with men and materiel.

I would keep the aircraft carriers, I think it is an act of criminal folly for a nation such as ours which relies on maritime trade routes to leave itself exposed for a decade with no seaborne air cover capacity. Likewise I would go ahead with the replacement for Trident, reluctantly, with my arm forced up my back, and not really wishing to start from here, but recognising the realpolitik of the situation Blair and Bush landed us in.

Ultimately, I would like to see our army, as indeed I would like to see all the world’s armies, evolve into an international rescue and humanitarian force to deal with natural disasters, coupled with the necessary forces retaimed on British soil for the defence of the realm. These could also double as a civil defence force in time of floods and other disasters.

JUSTICE/PRISONS

I would repeal many of the harsh anti-libertarian measures which have been smuggled through by the government under the pretext of “anti-terrorism” legislation since 2001.

While recognising that things such as CCTV and speed cameras have their virtue in providing evidence, we should not go down the road of over reliance on them, there is no substitute for professionally trained and resourced police officers.

The prisons are full of people who should not be there. I would establish a canon of offences where, if you were found guilty of one of these relatively minor offences you would be eligible for training and eventual release into a civilian civil defence force (see above) but of course if you did anything wrong or illegal while on such a programme you would go straight back to prison and serve the remainder of your full original sentence without the option.

I would consider legalising cannabis (and taxing its sale and supply) below a certain strength, or of certain types. This would free up an enormous amount of police manpower.

EDUCATION

I would like to see a return to the respect for education as a profession. I think that the current situation, the whole system, is posited on the assumption that teachers jerk around when they pull on the purse-strings, whoever they are at the time. Nobody in education seems interested in learning for its own sake any more, only as a passport to money, or a commodity. And if it comes to a choice between pedagogy and pounds sterling, we know which one will win out. I want to see a return to inspirational teaching, a curriculum that allows the teachers some flexibility to tailor the content to bring out the best in each individual pupil and yet still meets recognised national standards, that are not lowered every year.

I would also like to see an end to any special status for schools which is provided by the state. I think faith schools are potentially divisive within society and if people want to found a faith school, then it should be a private educational establishment and not funded by the state. However, I do believe that religion and morality should still be taught in schools, along with other things which kids will actually find useful (how to touch type, and running a bank account, to name but two)

I do not believe that turning schools into academies “levels up” the educational playing field, I believe it actually increases the division between the schools that get all of the resources lavished on them and the bog-standard comprehensive.

I also believe that people do not want “choice”. Choice is the false product of the current inequalities in the education system and what they really want is a good, competent school somewhere near at hand where they can send their children and know they can be educated.

HEALTH

Clearly the NHS cannot be a bottomless pit for ever for everyone. I would like to see the establishment of a series of principles of treatment based on clinical need and decided by the medical professionals in charge of the treatment, not artificially massaged to meet targets or sold between different medical establishments

Other than that it sometimes ties itself in knots doing things that are peripheral to the main causes of illness and death in the UK, and needs to re-focus on its core ideals, I think the NHS is best left alone to do what it does well, curing people. However, one area which does need reform is the provision of affordable dentistry for people who are currently priced out of the market, however that may be achieved.

TRANSPORT

I would re-nationalise the railways over a period of time as the franchises expired and turn them back over to one national network, run by a social enterprise called British Rail.

I would also investigate the economic benefits, as opposed to the ecological demerits, of re opening closed branch lines and/or narrowboat carrying on the canal system.

Ideally, one would want to look at a more local means of production and distribution for materials, to reduce the strain on long-distance motorway freight.

CLIMATE CHANGE

We should be treating this with the same urgency and despatch as Churchill treated the buildng of Spitires and the development of radar in world war two. Action this day! This is a perfect area for the creation of social enterprises to stimulate growth in the economy and potential British exports, too.

IMMIGRATION AND THE EU

I have lumped these together because they are inextricably linked. We need to disengage from the political process of the EU and regain control of our own borders, then – and only then – we can begin to formulate an immigration policy based on who WE want here and what skills they can contribute.

I also believe that instead of locking asylum seekers up and paying them vouchers, we should give them an NI number and let them work and contribute taxes while their cases are heard, but if they put a foot wrong or try to disappear during this process, then they go straight back without the option. In other words, we give them a chance to show their worth to the UK, and hopefully they will be sensible enough to grab it with both hands.

HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS

For the sake of brevity I am just going to link to Rooftree, even though I am taking the site down soon.

http://www.rooftree.org.uk

FARMING AND THE ENVIRONMENT

I would like to see the subsidies paid for set aside paid instead to people who produce organic produce and I would like to see a more humane regime for animals in farming.

I would retain (and indeed, enforce) the ban on fox hunting and I would suspend the badger culling trials and put the effort into finding a vaccine solution for Bovine TB instead.

DEVOLUTION & CONSTITUTION

Abolish the Welsh and Scottish assemblies and bring them back under the control of Westminster, on the grounds that the political identity of the island should be congruent with its geographical identity. Likewise get rid of "mayors" who are another unecessary and costly layer of local buraeucracy.

Put the hereditary Lords back in the Lords, but increase the number of life peers to reflect the makeup of society as a whole

Retain the Royal Family as a bulwark against arriviste politicians with ideas above their station.

Limit MPs' expenses, outside work, second homes etc. and introduce a residence qualification. If you want to represent a constituency, you should have lived there for at least two years first as your primary place of residence.

CONCLUSION

Think of how social enterprises could change the landscape for the people of Britain.

Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit. We need a gentler more tolerant and respectful society like we had in the 1950s, one where people realise there is more to life than a new sofa from DFS

It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will.

And every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Accentuate the Positive (part 1)

2010-11-22T06:38:00.000-08:00

This is the first of two positive posts I will attempt. People have said that my blog is invariably negative and that I don’t have a good word for the Tories or the Literal Dimwits. This is untrue, I have several good words for them, most of which begin with f or c.

It has also been suggested to me that if there was another general election, it would simply result in the re-election of a further Tory government. I wonder, though, are we absolutely sure about this? Because I think if Cameron and Clegg did the honest thing, merged their two parties formally, acknowledging that the LibDims have been swallowed whole by the Orca of the conservative party, instead of riding it like Dolphin Boy or whatever he was called, as they naively hoped, and went to the country on their actual policy, as now revealed, which was not part of their platform last May, they would get decimated. And deservedly so.

I agree with their critics about the Labour party, though. When they were in power they did not do enough to keep the bankers, speculators and rentier capitalists in check, though to Brown’s credit, and this is something you won’t hear me say very often, to Brown’s credit, he was exactly the right person to have in place during the banking crisis of 2008, and he may also have displayed prescience and foresight in keeping us out of the damned Euro.

But yes, I agree, the present Labour party doesn’t have a clue what to do, as it showed recently by electing the wrong leader, a man with the killer instinct of Tim Henman. I did have high hopes that the Labour party would bounce back off the ropes, with Biffo at the helm, and start tearing into the Tory tissues of lies, contradictions and doublespeak.

God alone knows, there is plenty to go at, but it seems that Mr Ed the talking horse was too busy doing to his wife what he is now about to do to the party of the amalgamated wheeltappers and shunters. Very sad. It means that the poor and underprivileged, the ill, and those on benefits will be thrown to the Tory wolves unless someone else comes forward to stop it, and since democracy has failed in this respect, because none of the parties at the last election were willing to engage in the democratic process, then the next step may have to be one of those outbursts of extraparliamentary action which have marked the major advances in British social history from Corn Law Reform to the Peterloo Massacre to the Jarrow Crusade and the march against the Iraq war.

If Labour did win, so the theory goes, then the markets are going to take fright and cause even more unemployment and misery. Ah, well, here I do differ. “There is no alternative” is a mantra which we will hear from the Tories and their stooges again and again, but actually there are quite a lot of alternatives, starting from the doctrinaire Marxist approach of nationalising ALL the banks and financial institutions, down from there to more sensible proposals based on a mixed economy.

It comes down to who you think should run the country, ultimately, the markets or a democratically elected government. Paul Krugman, writing in his NY Times Blog (“The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”) points out that Argentina told the IMF where to get off, and then was able to negotiate a much better package, with fewer drastic implications for cuts, which they subsequently paid off. So it seems that even WITH Government from the IMF, which is often represented as the consequence of Labour’s “shallower cuts, less quickly” approach, you don’t have to take the first deal you’re given.

It is true that people are still using the banks as a convenient “whipping boy” in non-credible alternatives. It is first worth establishing some things on which we could probably agree.

The massive sovereign debts of the advanced capitalist countries are the result of governments converting private debt into public debt, having bailed out the banks and rescued the system. Worldwide, the cost of this unprecedented bail-out is estimated to be US$10.8 trillion (£7 trillion). Some estimates have been as high as US$14 trillion. So it is not merely a case of Gordon Brown alone being on a one-man mission to wreck the economy, in fact it may turn out in time that it was him who saved us from having to queue in the streets for loaves of bread thrown off the back of an army lorry, however useless he may have been as a politician in many ways (too stubborn, badly advised, and not media savvy) and ill-fitted to be Prime Minister.

In Britain, an eye-watering £1.5 trillion was thrown at the banks, equating to 94.4% of the Gross Domestic Product. Much of this money was for guarantees against banking losses, which have since been recovered. Into the bargain, the government was forced to nationalise Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland. However, the total cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be £815bn, or £31,000 per household.

Although these banks were formally nationalised, in reality, the bail-out meant the nationalisation of the debts and the privatisation of the profits; in Britain, ordinary people are being attacked in order to reduce a budget deficit of £149bn, while nobody can deny that bankers continue to receive millions in public subsidies and bonuses.

As I said before, if I were a Marxist (biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy boom) I would be calling for the nationalisation of the entire sector. I am not, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t share more of the burden than is presently the case, since they caused the problem in the first place, and it is unfair and unjust to expect poor people to pay for the mistakes of the rich – see below.

Classic Marxist theory holds that sooner or later, the market becomes too narrow for the continuous outpouring of commodities; everybody already has two mobile phones and a new sofa from DFS. The capitalist system faces a crisis of over-production. If you look at what happened in 2008, it is quite a compelling analysis.

The capitalists attempted to delay this crisis, the Marxists say, by creating the greatest credit bubble in history. At bottom, the restricted consumption of the masses prepares the way for crisis under capitalism. The market is therefore restricted by the amount of money that people have in their pockets to spend on goods and services, as well as the excess capacity that has built up throughout the economy. Today, the world is awash with excess capacity. The market is saturated and the capitalists have had to cut back on production. Their attempt to overcome the crisis by credit has reached its limits. The productive forces have outgrown the limits of the capitalist system.

There are figures to illustrate how far credit was used to put off the crisis. A recent report on debt in The Economist stated that, “average total debt (private and public sector combined) in ten mature economies rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008. There were even more startling rises in Iceland and Ireland, where debt-to-GDP ratios reached 1,200% and 700% respectively” (26th July 2010).

In relation to consumer credit, The Economist reports that:

“At the end of the Second World War in 1945, consumer credit in America totalled just under $5.7 billion; ten years later it had already grown to nearly $43 billion and the party was just getting started. It reached $100 billion in 1966, $500 billion in 1984 and $1 trillion in 1994, or around $4,000 for every man, woman and child. The peak, so far, was almost $2.6 trillion in July 2008. Household debt approached 100% of GDP in 2007, a level seen only once before, rather ominously in 1929. America was not alone in embarking on a debt spree. In Britain, household debt rose from 105% of disposable income in 2000 to 160% in 2008” (ibid).

This huge expansion of credit was made possible by banks and governments (which is where Brown could be held to be culpable, with lax regulation, though the problem goes back much further, over several administrations) encouraging people to take out cheap loans, mortgages, and credit cards; hence the growth of “sub-prime mortgages”. However, this debt-fuelled party could not last forever. In the United States in 2006, people started to default on their loans. Consumer demand dropped. Producers could no longer find any consumers to sell their commodities to, and capitalism was faced with a classic crisis of over-production.

I have resisted the temptation to precis this analysis because again it shows that, in terms of the credit crunch itself, what Broon claimed was largely true, that it was a global problem and not simply something home-grown coming home to roost in our own back yard. Broon may have done some dumb things (eg selling off the gold reserves) but 2008 wasn’t one of them.

People speak about the current situation as if the ideas behind it were somehow new. The idea of governments running a deficit and accumulating sovereign debt is not unique to the current period. Even at its lowest point in the last 30 years, the UK debt was 26% of GDP, and before the current crisis, in September 2007, the UK debt stood at 36% of GDP. The government regularly borrows money to make up the deficit between public spending and money received from various sources of tax. In fact, the British government has only recorded a budget surplus in six of the last 36 years, generally overspending by between 2% and 5% of GDP.

Governments raise money for their deficit by auctioning government bonds, or “gilts.” The government pays interest on these bonds every six months, up to the “maturity date,” at which time the full value must be paid back. The majority of British debt bonds have a maturity of 15 years, and currently the government pays £42bn per year in interest payments, making interest payments the fourth biggest source of public spending after benefits and pensions, health, and education.

Greece was charged 40% interest on its gilts as the lenders (i.e. speculators) began to get worried about the possibility of sovereign default, as happened in Iceland in late 2008. Demands were made for public spending to be dramatically cut, and the EU and IMF came in, to outline the austerity measures that were to be imposed. Similar demands are being made of Britain. The Con-Dem coalition is now embarking on a merciless austerity package to slash public spending, pre-empting what it thinks the IMF wants to hear - a very different solution to public debt: draconian cuts. The programme of austerity in Britain (following on from Greece and Ireland) is seen by some as a test-bed, internationally. If the coalition can carry out such brutal attacks on the British working class, then governments elsewhere will have no qualms about carrying out equally severe cuts on theirs.

However: the UK Debt Management Office breaks the ownership of UK debt down as follows:

39.8% - Insurance companies and pension funds
35.1% - Overseas investors
17.8% - Other financial institutions
2.9% - Households
2.9% - Banks
1.5% - Others

From this, it is obvious that the overwhelming majority of the public debt in Britain is owned by financial speculators (insurance companies, overseas investors, and “other financial institutions”, e.g. hedge funds, etc.) who are looking to make a profit out of Britain’s debt crisis – a crisis that was created by bailing out the very same bankers and speculators in the first place – another reason why they should shoulder more of the burden.

Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman, rightly warn that the effect of such deep cuts will be to reduce demand and usher in a “double-dip” recession. They are correct; the cuts will exacerbate excess capacity and over-production. However, simply increasing government expenditure is also not viable. Continuing government stimulus to maintain the economy would just inflate public debt, driving up interest rates on the debt and would end up pushing national economies further towards default. That is why I am calling for a completely new sector of the economy, the social enterprise section, to sit in between the private and the public sector, to employ people so that they earn money on which they pay tax, increasing the tax take, and some of which they spend, stimulating the economy, and producing a public good for all of us – in my example, increasing the social housing stock, as opposed to paying the brickies, sparkies and joiners to stay at home on the dole.

The Keynesians also point out (again correctly) that governments have had much larger debts in the past. This is true; the UK’s public debt was above 100% of GDP for most of the inter-war period, and peaked at over 250% after WWII. However, the reduction of the national debt after the Second World War was achieved on the basis of economic growth, which in turn was possible owing to the destruction of capital during the war and growing world trade, and investment in the profitable new technologies that had developed as a result of wartime research and development. In some ways we have similar conditions today with the fight against climate change. I think we should be treating that as a “war” and developing new British technologies which we can lead the world in, and export to every corner of the globe (not that a globe has corners, before anyone who has got this far without the mogadon kicking in points this out).

Many within the trade unions and the Labour Party, support Keynesian “alternatives” to the programme of Coalition austerity. They argue that the working class did not cause the crisis, therefore they should not pay for it. This is what I have said all along. They argue however that the £149bn deficit can be plugged by taxing the rich and cutting spending elsewhere.

• £25bn is lost through tax avoidance, in which the rich find legal loopholes in order to avoid taxes.
• £70bn is lost through tax evasion, where the rich just don’t declare certain income.
• Replacing Trident (nuclear missile submarines) will cost between £15bn-20bn.
• The UK budget for defence spending is currently £37bn per year.

Their proposals, therefore, are to eliminate tax evasion and avoidance, scrap Trident, and reduce “defence” spending. Adding up the money from these measures results in a potential £152bn that could be raised. Personally, I do not agree with the latter two premises, but -along with a higher rate of income tax for those on high incomes, a tax on financial transactions (also known as the “Tobin tax” or “Robin Hood tax”) and greater corporation tax, it seems that we should have no problem in finding ways to plug at least £95bn of the deficit.

The government has a choice – it can either cut spending, and/or raise taxes, and, for ideological reasons, Cameron has decided that it shall be by cutting, and by targeting those cuts largely on those least able to bear them, that the deficit shall be reduced. I would be more convinced that it wasn’t purely evil ideological spite if they had announced some plans for restoring levels of public spending once the deficit has been tackled, but they haven’t!

So: as I said elsewhere, SOMEBODY has got to challenge the spurious “mandate” of this shower, and I am not happy with the concept of them going unchallenged and people dying as a result. Normally, one would look to the Labour Party for this, but they are feeble, useless, supine, and leaderless. I leave the last word, therefore, to my hon. friends, the Marxists.

A mass movement must not only challenge the Con-Dem government but must challenge the system itself. Open the books! Let ordinary people see how much of their money is wasted on outsourcing services to private companies and on fees for management consultants! Let workers see how much profit the giant monopolies make! Let us see how many millions are spent on bankers’ bonuses! If the books are opened, then we can really see the rottenness of capitalism. Drastic times call for drastic solutions.

Under the current conditions, the demand should be for the trade unions to call for a public sector strike, followed by a 24-hour general strike. After the long period of low activity in the class struggle in Britain, a day-long general strike would act as a demonstration of strength and could help to give the working class a sense of their power, thus raising consciousness.

Foggy Compo, Clegg.

2010-11-17T03:19:00.000-08:00

There has been a predictable outcry by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Conrad Blackshirts about the proposal to settle claims for compensation out of court with the victims of Guantanamo Bay.

What these people fail to grasp is that if someone is wrongly imprisoned, probably illegally, and tortured to boot, and our government is responsible, then it's only right that the injustice should be compensated. It's what makes us the good guys. Still. just.

If we were really interested in being the good guys of course, instead of sinking to the same level as Al Qaida in the first place, seizing people, sandbagging them, holding them against their will and applying mental and physical pain, we wouldn't have done it, but at that time we were wedged so far up George Bush's chuff we couldn't see daylight.

I wonder if there would be as much fuss if the people illegally detained and tortured were called "George", "Henry" and "Cyril" instead of Mohammed. I suspect not. Brown people getting compensation of any kind, even compensation to which they are legally entitled and which will presumably save the taxpayer money if it is an out-of-court settlement, always gets the bigots frothing.

People who argue against this proposal often link the issue of torturing detainees with the 7/7 bombings. Errr. Am I missing something here? What does 9/11 and 7/7 have to do with Guantanamo Bay, except that we colluded with the US in a like for like response that dragged us down to the same level as the bombers?

Are they claiming that in some way 7/7 was caused by Guantanamo detainees? I thought it was three guys from Leeds and one from Reading. I am not following the process by which they are linking the two. Or are they claiming that, if only someone had turned up the current a bit on someone's ghoulies out in Guantanamo, this would somehow have magically prevented 7/7 taking place?

Sadly, it is excrescences like Guantanamo that CAUSE radical idiots to get more and more radicalised, until they start strapping bombs to themselves, and by following George Bush down the primrose path to dalliance, we played right into their hands. We're lucky that we didn't have more than one 7/7. We may well yet have further cause to regret it.

Orwell, of course, in between wishing he could fly, way up in the sky, once famously said that all that keeps us free is that rough men stand ready in the night to do harm, and this is the crux of the question. There ARE people out to destroy our way of life. I would contend, however, that helping George Bush in his ill-starred "War on Terror", with things such as Guantanamo, has ADDED to their numbers, considerably, rather than deterred them.

Also, I question the worth of any of the intelligence gathered by means of torture. If you turn the current up far enough, your victim will tell you whatever you want to hear. It would be instructive to know really how many threats have been neutralised since 2001 by this method of intelligence alone.

I suspect the answer would be very few, because the agencies concerned probably rely on a patchwork of intelligence from different sources, of which torture is only one, which again leads me to question its worth, compared to the problems it causes us by giving radical idiots something to latch onto and radicalise other idiots.

The intelligence agencies are unlikely to tell us the truth, however, because their interest is in making it seem as if there are hundreds of plots every day, which are only averted by shipping people off to CIA deniable "black" prisons. That's how they keep us cowed, and get us to accept the loss of more and more of our own civil liberties to anti-terror legislation.

By the way, just because I am opposed to us lowering ourselves to the depths of torture, doesn't mean I am automatically against the use of lethal force against (for instance) an invading force in a declared, legal war. If Al Qaida were massing at Dunkerque in their invasion barges, I would be reporting for duty on the White Cliffs of Dover, but the War on Terror is a different matter: an undeclared dirty war on a concept.

People also argue that we are now at war against the whole Third World, and this requires desperate measures.

I think that "the third world" as a whole is much more occupied with scrabbling for food in the dust and trying to prevent their children dying of malaria every 40 seconds than mounting a sustained attack on the west. What you are talking about is one convoluted strain of Islam, espoused by a radical bunch of beardyweirdies originally in Saudi Arabia, latterly living in caves in Tora Bora, that objected to the US bases in their Holy Land, and to US policy in Israel. I agree, though, that since 2001, the west in general and the US in particular, seem hell-bent on increasing the number of people who hate us as quickly as possible

And anyone who thinks torture (or collusion with torture) isn't still going on under a ConLibdimwit government is living in cloud cuckoo land.

The Road To Weakened Fear

2010-11-16T07:58:00.000-08:00

While I have been stuck in hospital over the summer, I have been struck by a new phenomenon, deliberately engineered by the government, to keep us all cowed and apprehensive. Austerity anxiety.

I feel many people are cowed and anxious over what the future will bring, because the government has been deliberately pumping up the volume over the cuts, precisely in order to keep people in a subdued mood and stop them asking awkward questions like "why should poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people?”

Their other trick is to practice "doublespeak" by insisting that "we are all in this together" while simultaneously spreading scare stories about so--called "benefit scroungers" to divide and rule the opposition and promote disharmony in society.

It is a fundamentally dishonest and evil policy, and it is quite deliberate, as you would expect from a fundamentally dishonest and evil government. I would echo Bevan's comment about "lower than vermin", pace Harriet Harman, but I don't want to insult the vermin.

I see that the Daily Mail is reporting Rowan Williams' attack on this idea as "Archbishop attacks proposals to make the workshy pick litter" or some such headline.

The workshy? Excuse me?? The WORKSHY?????

Who the HELL are Daily Mail journalists, with their louche lifestyle, their excesses of alcohol and drugs, their credit card bills, which they happily write about in their columns, who the HELL gave these LEECHES the right to call the long term unemployed the "workshy".

I'd like to see them do a ten hour shift in a call centre for nothing, as an "interview" for a job, only to be told the week after that "you haven't been selected for the next round", as scandalously happened recently to my friend Phil, unemployed now for getting on two years and desperate for anything in a South Yorkshire economy that is collapsing round everyones' ears because of CleggTory cuts. It’s a great way to get workers for free without any tiresome H&S, tax, PAYE or wages. I wouldn't be surprised if the bastards aren't holding "interviews" every day!

How DARE the Daily Mail? Whilever Phil is reduced to digging up his garden and growing his own winter veg to survive on the dole, there should be public burnings of the Daily Mail outside every labour exchange.

Here's my question to anyone who thinks the long term unemployed are "workshy" :-

*W H E R E * A R E * T H E * J O B S ?

Where are the jobs in
Rochdale (84% unemployment)
Middlesbrough (67% unemployment)
Sparkbrook, Birmingham (63% unemployment)
Birkenhead (62% unemployment)

Where are the jobs in Grimethorpe? Where are the jobs in Rusty Lane, West Bromwich?

I have recently been re-reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, and SOS: Talks on Unemployment by S. P. B. Mais, two books which in their own way bookend the unemployment crisis of the 1930s, appearing in 1937 and 1933 respectively. One of the most telling passages is where Orwell discusses the unemployment figures. It is worth quoting at length:

When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed people in England (for everyone on the dole or thereabouts is underfed) as being, at the very most, five millions.

This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the dole — that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the real number of people living on (not drawing) the dole, you have got to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage. Allow for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners, the destitute, and other nondescripts, and you get an underfed population of well over ten millions.

Some things have changed since 1937, such as the ratio of family heads to dependents, but a similar calculation could still be done to show that the “real” consequences of unemployment are far higher than shown by the official figures.

"Underfed" might nowadays be substituted with “badly fed” though Orwell also drew attention to how easy it was, even in 1937, to buy cheap, bad food to cheer yourself up while unemployed. In that respect, Phil is doing himself a favour by growing his own veg rather than buying Micro-Chips from Iceland.

And though things have may changed in some respects since it was written, what is really chilling about going back to The Road to Wigan Pier after a period of time, as I have done, is how much of it is startlingly prescient of 2010. To look for the philosophical antecedents of David Cameron, George Osborne, and Nicholas Clegg, you have to go back not only to Thatcher, the obvious model for driving a chariot with knives on the wheels through the ranks of public service, but also to the 1930s.

I shouldn’t be at all surprised, when you add the 600,000 redundancies which may result from the cuts to whatever the current announced “public” unemployment figure is, to see hunger marches again. In fact, before they become necessary, I think we ought to re-enact them, to remind this government, which has no legitimacy, and which was cobbled together over a weekend on the back of some spurious rumour about Greece and the Euro and the markets which everyone has now conveniently forgotten, of the consequences of its actions.

Since unemployment is likely to assume huge proportions in the lives of many of us over the next year or so, as the cuts begin to bite, it is worth devoting some time to an attempt at analysing some of the common causes and solutions, if any, and also what resonances there are between today’s causes and remedies and those of the 1930s.

Unemployment and the Impact of Mechanisation

This is chiefly only felt on manufacturing industry. There are plenty of “jobs” needing doing that are not affected by increased mechanisation, and never will be. What we are really arguing about here is the nature of work itself, and the value of different types of work. Of course, it is futile trying to rank different types of work by value. One might as well try and rank potatoes and apricots. But it doesn’t stop the boors, bores and bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” and “real jobs”, as if digging a hole in the road is somehow to be ranked higher than, say, cleaning a ward in a hospital, when in fact they are just different.

Globalisation, localism, and niche marketing

The question of how far it is reasonable to expect someone to travel a) in pursuit of a job and b) to commute to work once they have got a job, is critical to the argument of “on your bike” as a means of solving unemployment. Much as the Tories and their Liberal stooges would like to see the sort of “flexible” jobs market I described earlier, where people do a little bit here, a little bit there, and travel for hours in between, there are limits of practicality. There are some jobs where catching a bus for two hours, doing and eight hour day, and then catching a bus home for two more hours, is going to be a borderline decision. True, it is (for some strange reason) always easier to get a job when you have already got a job, than to get one when you are unemployed, but that in itself is not a reason for taking a borderline job.

There is also the issue of quality of life. Otherwise, if quality of life did not matter, it would be easy for an unemployed man to go and get a job at the other end of the country, live in a hostel, and just send money home. But what sort of a life is that, when he is reduced purely to a unit of economic production and never sees his family from one month end to the next.

Globalisation merely extends this principle. If the work is in China, then get on your rickshaw, and go and get a job in China, and Fedex the money home to Bolton every week, taking the “on your bike” scenario to its nth degree. Where is the quality of life in that? I would love to see some of these fat, sleek, Tory and Liberal MPs whose life is organised for them to the last minute, put up with such disruption and inconvenience! What – no way of getting back to the constituency second home at the weekends? Why, that would never do!

The other side of the globalisation coin, of course, is that there are more than enough Chinese people in China wanting jobs already, all of whom are happy to work (probably) for far less than the incomer would require.

And that is reflected in the end cost of their products, as well. So our poor old unemployed British worker is hammered from two directions. Maybe the only job he can get involves massive sacrifices of quality of life in return for not-massive amounts of money, and moving far away from home and all that it entails, all his ties, friends, neighbours, and familiar haunts. And in the end, if he does go down the sacrificial route, he may find that he is only earning slightly more than he would have got on benefits anyway. (The Tory answer to that dichotomy is of course to seek to cut the benefit, rather than raise the wages!) He is unlikely to get a job in “mainstream” manufacturing now, because so many of our household items, goods and chattels are manufactured much more cheaply in China, or somewhere similar.

So what can we do to overcome these particularly thorny issues of globalisation and unemployment? Under the old Domestic System of Industry, of course, in England before the Industrial Revolution, most people found work in the immediate locality. The weavers, in my own West Riding of Yorkshire, found their work waiting for them downstairs! It would be good in many ways to get back to a situation where goods were made in the locality where they were needed. It would also be more sustainable. It would save us having to ship goods half way round the world in container ships and airliners. So, one solution would be if we all made what we needed, but this is hardly practicable in that it doesn’t allow for the unemployed worker to make a second bowl and sell it. Nor does it compete with the fact that it is cheaper, quicker, and more efficient, assuming you have the money, to just go and buy a plastic bowl made in China, in the local hardware shop, than to carve yourself one out of a large lump of teak, rosewood or mahogany, however satisfying the latter might be as a craft exercise.

Clearly, what is needed is for people to be able to manufacture something which is desired, useful, economic to produce in these Islands with our western overheads, and unobtainable elsewhere. This is where niche marketing, and the role of the internet, can come in. And maybe the products could be something to combat climate change?

This solution could perhaps be used to solve, or partially solve, another situation which S. P. B. Mais was criticised for, another by-product of unemployment, which is that if the unemployed take up manufacturing something at a lower rate than the existing manufacturer, or providing a service, for that matter, at a lower rate, they are undercutting commercial enterprises and potentially spreading unemployment there as well. The trick again is to manufacture something novel – more so now than in the 1930s, because now, the unemployed are unlikely to be able to undercut the wholesale prices of Chinese manufacturers anyway, and the competition is no longer between the unemployed miners’ workshop making cut price toys for the kiddies and the local high street toy shop, but rather between the miners and a factory in Shanghai. A unique product, however, sets its own price.

At he end of the day, however, perhaps we shouldn’t be over-concerned about protecting the interests of industry from the efforts of the unemployed to become entrepreneurs. We should remember what Michael Foot said, on the campaign trail in 1983.

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do

Women in the Workplace

This was a big issue in the 1930’s. S. P. B. Mais devotes a whole programme to it in the scripts of his talks. Even though the effect of WWI had been to emancipate women in the workplace, there were still some antedeluvian voices in 1933 arguing that women should stay home and raise children (not that there is anything wrong per se with mothers who choose to do this). In fact, there are still some antedeluvian voices who say this today, but I don’t think that the genie of Mrs Pankhurst is ever going to go back in the bottle.

Today, though, what may be called the “women” argument about unemployment has been largely replaced by the “immigrant” argument. This is often simplistically represented as “there are three million unemployed and there are three million “guest” workers here (or whatever the figure currently is) – immigrants from the EU and elsewhere – send them all home, and we could have full employment!” This ignores two things: - one, that whilever we are signed up to the EU and its political projects, we have absolutely no control over our own borders. Secondly, that the jobs thus vacated would need to be in the same areas where there are native British citizens unemployed, and that the native workforce would have the equivalent portable skills to be able to step in and fill their shoes.

Neither of these is evident, or automatically true, but again, this doesn’t stop those who, from either ignorance or design, seek to conflate migrant workers, asylum seekers, and non-white British citizens, and who propagate the view that unemployment is somehow exclusively a racial issue. There is currently common ground between race and unemployment, in that certain ethnic groups are disproportionately more highly represented in the unenplyment figures: young black males for instance. But this is due to social and economic factors. They live in areas of high social and educational deprivation, lacking opportunity, many of which are the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the 1980’s, and they suffer also the peer pressure of the American “gangsta rap” culture, which makes it “uncool” to have a “job” that doesn’t involve drugs, fast cars, or pimping. They are not unemployed inherently because they are black.

I have long argued that the only immigration policy which makes sense is to look at the range of skills and talents we need here in the UK, particularly those we are short of, and to adjust our own UK immigration policy accordingly. So much so that, as far as I am concerned, if asylum seekers have the skills we need, it would be far more sensible to let them work and pay tax and make a contribution to the UK while they wait for their cases to be decided, rather than spend public money locking them up, policing them, and deporting them. If they renege on the deal, of course, that’s it – they go back, without the option. Anyway, I digress. One important point to stress, though, is that when I say “British Jobs for British Workers”, I mean “British Workers, whatever the colour of their skin”, whereas of course the likes of the BNP mean “British Jobs for White British Workers”.

Waged versus Unwaged

The recent Tory proposal to compel the long-term unemployed to pick litter in return for their benefits, or lose the benefits, once again provides another correspondence between the modern situation and S. P. B. Mais’s 1933 SOS Talks on Unemployment. This is basically the issue of whether or not the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and off the back of that, whether the unemployed should do things voluntarily in return for training and experience, either on a compulsory or a voluntary basis. Back in 1933, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement opposed the many philantrhopic and well-meaning schemes which SPB documents (toy making, furniture making, allotments) on the grounds that these voluntary clubs were merely a sop to the idea of keeping the unemployed occupied, at any cost. They also opposed the larger schemes, where unemployed men did heavy work such as marsh draining or tree felling, in return for a free meal or a new pair of boots.

Even though, in many cases, the 1930s schemes were not compulsory, and were mainly paternalistically aimed at improving the skills and employability of the attenders. George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, also documents the opposition of the NUWM to these schemes, on similar grounds.

Although the NUWM ceased to exist in 1946, if it objected to the 1930s clubs run by well-meaning colonels and local busybodies, it would be apopleptic about the modern-day proposal by the Tories. Indeed, it is difficult to defend it in any rational way, but then it isn’t a rational policy. A rational policy would be that if you have to do the work, in order to receive the corresponding remuneration, it should be paid at the legal, minimum wage. Plus, of course, those officious prodnoses at the Labour Exchange whose job it is to harrass the unemployed by ensuring that they have been seeking work, shouuld be forced to acknowledge that, lacking gift of bilocation, the unemployed can’t be picking litter and actively seeking employment at one and the same time.

One area of S. P. B. Mais’s work, however, which perhaps does bear reconsideration for the 2010 unemployment crisis, is that of allotments. There is a great deal of wasted land in the UK, which could be turned over to the cultivation of healthy, organic vegetables and fruit. All that is lacking is the organisation and the political will. If someone on unemployment benefits wants an allotment, they could be given one in some sort of bargain over their arrangements which would allow them the leeway to devote some time to growing their own and their family’s food while still seeking work. It would, today, as in the 1930s, get people out into the open air, teach them new skills, and save them money on food.

Of course, this Tory proposal isn’t serious – at least I hope it isn’t. The answer to long term unemployment in areas of chronic economic crisis and disadvantage (again, much of which was caused by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) is not picking up litter. Or at least, not on those terms. If the government wants to create proper social enterprise companies to pay people a living wage to do socially useful work that benefits the whole community, that is, of course, a different matter. That is one of the fundamental tenets behind Rooftree. Indeed, social enterprise is one major way in which the government could start to get us out of this mess, by creating a whole new sector in the economy. But, in reality, I view this proposalas nothing more than another strand in the government’s “divide and rule” policy of simultaneously insisting that “we are all in this together” while sowing discord and disharmony and rumour, with deliberate but baseless stories of “benefit scroungers”, straight out of the “man in the pub” manual of journalism, and lapped up and reprinted almost verbatim, of course, by the likes of the Daily Mail.

On Your Bike – or way off the Bus Route?

The litter picking proposal is not the only wacky Tory solution to unemployment being bruited abroad at the moment. Tory bastard Iain Duncan Irritable-Bowel Smith seems to think that full employment is only a bus-ride away. When he was in charge of the whole shambles, a few years ago, he styled himself “The Quiet Man” and, to be fair to him, he has a lot to be quiet about. I sometimes think the Tories won’t be happy until the entire jobseeking workforce is lined up by the side of the road, with their possessions on their back, their children and their livestock, ready to ride off into the sunset on the first bus that comes along, in the hope of a few hours; fruit picking on the Gower Peninsula, then maybe over to Kent for some hopping, up to Skelmersdale for some PCB assembly, and so on. The fact that this would all be piece work, un-unionised, with minimal health and safety, and gangmaster wages, is not lost on me, either. It would be the Tory bosses’ vision of hog-heaven, freed from the schackles (as they see them) of the only progressive achivements of Blair and Brown’s era.

Again, like the litter-picking idea, I hope this is just specious nonsense and kite-flying to appeal to Middle-England bigots, but I suspect, in this case, that they may actually be serious. I think old “Irritable Bowel” really means it. So, let’s take him at his word, just assuming for the moment that this “Son of Tebbit” policy has some practical merit. Let us assume that (if you live in a rural area) there even is a bus to take you where you want to go. Where are the jobs? We come back again and again to this central mantra. Where are the jobs? Where are they?

Osborne is going to add something like 600,000 people to the dole queue as his planned cuts bite and take hold: how is the removal of so many previously economically active people from the daily round of commerce, the weekly supermarket shop, the knock on effect of their spending power – how is that going to stimulate the economy? How is it going to create any more jobs? In the same way as Orwell quite rightly noted the “hidden” numbers of unemployed behind the official figures, so there are hidden figures of “employed” whose jobs depend on other people coming into their shops and spending money.

It is all too easy, as I sit here writing these words, safe in my warm bed (yes, I am sitting writing this in bed!) listening to the wild winds of winter howling and wailing outside, and hearing the rain flung like handfuls of gravel at the window – it is all too easy for me to deride and poke fun at these stupid Tory proposals. In fact, it is all too easy to deride and poke fun at them whether you are in bed or not!

In the 1930s, S. P. B. Mais reported on rough sleepers in the iron working areas sleeping out on the slapgheaps at night, for warmth, after the furnaces had been emptied. But, out there, in the night, even now, are people who are the victims of these Tory policies. They are bedded down in doorways or under bridges, desperately trying to keep warm so that they will see another dawn. Let us be perfectly clear about this, make no mistake, as a result of these laughable yet evil policies, targeting the poor and vulnerable while safeguarding the rich, powerful and influential, people will be driven to despair, to anxiety, to homelessness, and people will die. This winter, out in the cold, in once-Great Britain, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, people will die, as a result of Tory cuts, propped up by the Liberal Dimwits. And I, for one, would like to hear the government justify to us how they manage to sleep at night, when they know this is the case, or indeed, why they should be allowed to, until something is done about it.

In case we are in any doubt about unemployment, these chilling words are from a letter sent to S. P. B. Mais after his book was published in 1933. Seventy-seven years later, it goes a long way to explain those “houses where the curtains stay closed all day” which George Osborne was keen to tell us about in his first broadcast as Chancellor [the one where he claimed we were all in it together.]

Glad of a rest, the unemployed man does not yet begin the frantic hunt for a job – a week’s rest will do me good, he thinks, and after that, I will have a look around. I shall soon get fixed up somewhere. But even while he thinks this, the chill of doubt strokes at his heart. A week or so later, he is saying to himself that he never dreamed times were so bad. The fruitless, despairing search for work which simply cannot be found has begun … See him now that some months have passed, with hope gone. He lies in bed longer each morning, keeps to the house more, is less tidy in his appearance, though unaware of the change, the chin is sunk lower, the face is half ashamed, the glance has become wavering and irresolute. He is losing his morale … like some wounded animal, creeping to a hole to die.

This is a very accurate assessment of the life of what Osborne calls “benefit scroungers”. I know which rings truer for me. I doubt that even the most ardent long-term adherents of benefits celebrate the lifestyle. All you can possibly hope for is to reach an accommodation with each grim grey day of disappointment and low horizons that comes around.

We cannot allow the government to go on sabotaging the economy. The only remedy for this parlous state of affairs, to stop these fools in their tracks before they inflict such damage on the economy that it takes a generation to recover, is a General Strike against the cuts, starting now. Yes, in fact, let us have a GENERAL STRIKE to protest against the cuts. And if a few stray cobbles end up being thrown through the windows of 10 Downing Street, so much the better! You have nothing to lose but your P45s!

Home is where the work is

2010-07-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

I have already told the joke on this blog about people who live in a council house in Hampstead having another council house in Wales that they go to at the weekends, but now the Tories and MiniTories seem determined to make that lunacy reality, with their latest wacky wheeze.

According to Iain Duncan Smith (remember him? The Quiet Man? With a lot to be quiet about?) people who are on benefits and living in a council house in, say, Sunderland should be willing to up sticks and move to a council house in Plymouth, in search of a job.

I can only see two problems with this. There are no spare council houses. And there are no jobs. Apart from that, it’s a great idea, a bit like world peace and unlimited funds for Donkey Sanctuaries. In practice though, if you actually believe in this crap, how do you feel about Santa Claus?

The other issue of course, even assuming it worked and there were itinerant troops of welders ranging the countryside, looking for work, moving from town to town, is what happens to their original home areas that they left behind. Even more decay, urban neglect, eventually degenerating into a sort of scrubby badlands as nature takes over again.

Yes, when the nettles grow through the broken windows of the housing estates of South Yorkshire, Iain Duncan Smith can rest easy, knowing that he has finally completed the work begun by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Just Can't Budge It

2010-06-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, for about a nano-second, a tiny bit of me feels sorry for the Literal Dimwits. I mean, they sort of go back to Gladstone, they are sort of a part of history. That's also their problem, though, now. Since Clegg bet the house on vingt et un bleu, and it came up, they don't stand for anything any more.

And at the next election, unless they are VERY stupid (always a possibility) Labour are going to be shouting from the rooftops, VOTE CLEGG, GET CAMERON! and even those not taken in my that must, perforce, wonder what exactly they would get if they ever voted Lib Dem again. I'll give you a clue, it's wearing a poke, it's covered in mud, and it likes haycorns. Voting Liberal Democrat is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.

Either Clegg hasn't realised that he's been so comprehensively shafted by Cameron (who is still wandering around with the slightly glazed air of someone who can't quite believe it ISN'T all a dream and he ISN'T going to wake up any moment in the shower with Sue-Ellen) or he has realised and, slut that he is, with his political knickers metaphorically round his ankles, he just doesn't care. Because 20 seconds of power is so worth sacrificing 150 years of principles for.

He's seriously underestimated this Forgemasters thing though. Not only is it a PR disaster akin to crapping on your own doorstep then treading in it, in Sheffield, but people in the Lib Dims at large are starting to ask, "hang on, if our glorious leader couldn't stop the Evil Tories cancelling a LOAN (not even a subsidy or a grant, a LOAN) to innovate manufacturing technology in a city for which he is one of the MPs, what exactly, apart from being the convenient whipping boys and patsies for announcing the Tory cuts, are we GETTING from this coalition?"

The rot, as far as the Tories/Mini-Tories are concerned, starts there. That is the only good news, as I confidently expect that by this time next year, dynamiting hospitals will be on the agenda and we will all be queueing in the street to catch loaves of bread thrown off army lorries. We just have to hope the rubber wheels fall off quickly, before they can do too much damage to the recovery, to British industry, and to jobs.

Seventy years ago, if you had a policy of blowing up Britain's infrastructure and deliberately wrecking its economy, you would have been tried as a traitor, stood up against a wall, and shot. How (sadly) times have changed.

The run-up to this budget has deployed the classic black propaganda technique of making people think it was going to be worse than it actually is. Although it is worse than it seems, when you look at it in more detail, the real damage to the economy will come as some of its key measures start to kick in, in the autumn, and in the new year, assuming the coalition lasts that long.

Before the election, the Liberal Dimwits opposed any increase in VAT, calling it a Tory tax bombshell. Osborne “failed to rule out” a rise in VAT, which told us all we needed to know really. And now the Liberals have helped the Tories achieve it, because of course there are some things which are so much more important than having principles.

So, in the autumn spending review, and in the departmental budget cuts of 25%, there is going to be a steep rise in the unemployment figures. The more so, when you factor in the effect of local government redundancies as well, as councils, unable to raise council tax, shed jobs instead, to cut costs. All of these people thrown out of work in the public sector will end up on the dole, drawing benefits, instead of earning money, paying taxes and putting spending power into the economy to drive the private sector revival. That revival is now in peril, as a result.

This budget is a victory for the small-minded, short-termist bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” in the public sector; arrogant, ignorant people who talk as if mixing cement was in some way more worthwhile than balancing the overtime budget of a busy social work department, or emptying bins, or educating children. People who think the amount of income tax you pay should dictate your say in society. These people still just don’t get it, they think that it’s possible to separate the public and the private sectors, that somehow they aren’t both part of the same economy. That you can somehow decimate one, without damaging the other.

But let’s just assume for a moment that this wacky idea has validity. Are ALL of these suddenly unemployed public sector workers going to get jobs in the private sector then? Where are these jobs? Where ARE they? And by putting VAT up to 20% in the new year, adding to inflation, transport costs, and depressing retail sales, how is any of THAT going to create or sustain a private sector revival?

Housing benefit is to be capped, so anyone who is unfortunate enough to find themselves out of work will now be squeezed in that area as well. The medical test qualifications for disability benefit are going to be extended and accelerated, again as a sop to those in the Tory camp who believe the concepts of “the sturdy beggar” and “the undeserving poor”, the sort of people David Cameron now refers to as benefit scroungers (now that he is showing his true colours). As if rotting on benefits, because of a complete lack of hope, prospects and opportunity, to the point where it becomes inured in your culture, is some kind of career decision! I also find myself wondering, has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis on whether the COST of all this additional medical testing will outweigh any savings to be made? Because this government has a habit of talking tough, but being equally profligate and stupid in its own way as Labour was. After announcing the bonfire of the Quangos, we’ve now got a new Quango for budgetary responsibility, and a couple of Quangos to monitor international aid, and now presumably there’s going to have to be a body of some description to organise this medical testing, unless it’s going to be outsourced, and who knows what expense? And of course we can always find taxpayer money to give to whirly-eyed fundamentalists or yummy mummies who want to set up their own school because they think they can do it better than the teachers.

The DWP’s figure for fraudulent DLA claims is about 0.05%, whereas the government are expecting something like a 20% reduction in claims as a result. That disparity can only mean that a lot of people currently eligible for, and deserving of, DLA, will no longer get it. And the net result might be to make it impossible for them to continue to work, and to pay taxes.

And of course, the Tories and their stooges think that all these people can be got off benefits and into jobs in the private sector. Again, where ARE these jobs going to be created? Where are these jobs? Quite how “bipping” people off benefits and not giving them any alternative employment counts as “protecting the vulnerable” is lost on me.

The Tories seem to think that cutting corporation tax will make rapacious international capitalists and entrepreneurs re-invest the savings, in employing more people in the UK, especially with the prospect of not having to pay NI. They won’t, they will just pocket it with a self-satisfied “kerching”, into a nice little offshore account in Belize. Just like, when the housing boom was in full swing, all those Tory politicians protested so loudly at the time that the housing bubble was unsustainable and all their chums in the city were getting usustainably rich and filling their unsustainable boots.

Fact is, if there was political will, there is the resource and the necessary plan to provide affordable housing for all in this country and to wipe out homelessness and reduce the pressure on the existing social housing stock.

Trouble is, we are NOW stuck with an unelected government which thinks it has a mandate to dynamite disused public buildings instead of converting them into social housing, because George Osborne got the idea from some redneck seal-clubber over a beer and a whaleburger in Tokyo.

It is, of course, the same old same old from the Tories, and no doubt those who have had their compassion bypassed at birth will be chortling about it and engaging in the usual triumphalism. I am surprised, though, that the Liberals haven’t had sleepless nights and considered suicide. Usually people who rat and re-rat that much suffer dreadfully from remorse and guilt. At least if they retain a spark of humanity. They have immense mental problems and guilt, because the gulf between their own innate compassion and the contradiction of their actions drives them over the edge. I can only observe that in the case of Clegg, Alexander and Cable, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving, bunch of people. The disused lift shaft awaits.

The standard Tory line is that there was no alternative, and that the finances inherited from Labour were a shambles. Labour had many faults, but nevertheless, there was another way. There still is another way. One which continues to attempt to grow the economy, while protecting the services which we all use and the benefits on which so many depend. And if the markets and the ratings agencies don’t like it, well, they can bloody well invade. They weren’t that good at picking winners when the bankers (who have got off far too lightly in this budget, but again that is only what you would expect from the Tories) were buying imaginary derivatives with non-existent money.

But the only way we will get this quickly, is if the coalition implodes. The only glimmer of light at the moment is that there are some Liberal Dimwits who are waking up to exactly how far Clegg has sold them down the river. Let’s hope they start rowing back upstream, and soon. Let’s hope they rediscover that they used to have a conscience, and that when they said they went into politics to make a difference, it wasn’t by dynamiting hospitals.

Back in the days of Thatcher, I used to have a foam rubber stress "brick" that I could throw at the television (in place of a real one, which would have been rather expensive in televisions)

Watching Osborne on telly just now, I think I may need to go and find it up in the attic.

"You shouldn't have to go off to work in the morning and see your neighbour's blinds drawn down as they spend their life on unemployment benefit"

Apart from the fact that you probably wouldn't have to do it for long, because this budget will soon result in BOTH houses with the blinds drawn down and the occupants on the dole, let's just unpick the thinking behind that statement.

How nasty, small-minded and divisive. Words calculated to appeal like a dog-whistle to those who harbour inbuilt prejudice towards the unemployed. What a gross over-simplification of the many and complex reasons for lack of opportunity, poverty and deprivation.

How *deliberately* calculated to appeal to the "there's too many of them over here with their benefits and their plasma TVs" brigade. People who have never known, or have forgotten, what economic deprivation is and who caused it (in South Yorkshire, it was the Tories)

And without offering any solution, either. So they are going to stop the benefit of the guy with his blinds down all day. What's he going to do? Get a job in the blind factory? I don't think they are hiring, right now.

Anyone who has the sheer gall and effrontery to utter such an evil, twisted, divisive message and then in the next breath to claim that we are all in this together really DOES deserve to be struck by lightning, and soon.

To those who say if we don’t do this, we will be punished by the markets,
I am sorry to say I disagree. Disregarding the fact that I think these people have no moral authority to dictate how we run our country anyway, and very little skill and judgement in financial rating anyway, at least from the evidence of their past performance, would the down-grading of the UK's rating, assuming it happened, lead to an immediate closure of any "money tap" - I don't believe it would. I believe it would make it more difficult, but not impossible, to get out of this mess.

Again, I think this is a matter of perspective. It's not surprising that having weathered the international banking crisis of 2008 when the whole of the financial sector was teetering on the brink of sliding off Canary Wharf and into the river, the nation's finances are in poor shape. But we've always had a National Debt, since the days of Walpole. And look what a mess we were in after the second World War, when basically we were in hock to the US up to our eyeballs. The difference then is that we had politicians of skill courage and vision, who in the teeth of that, established the Welfare State.

I am also becoming very skeptical about this analogy with Greece. It's trotted out regularly to explain the Damascene conversion of Clegg and Cable to the Tory hard line - the story being that, somehow, over the weekend of the coalition cabal, they also carved out the time to receive a detailed briefing on Greek economic matters and realised how bad it was. If you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy? Greece doesn't have control over its own economy, because it made the misguided decision to join the Euro, and now it's in the same position we were in on Black Wednesday, of having to take medicine that is not appropriate for it, because when it comes to the Euro, one size fits all, for good or ill. We are not, thank God, stuck with the Euro and all its problems and we do have control over our own interest rates, should that be necessary.

I have said enough on here before now about how stupid Labour were, wasting money on things like illegal wars and ID cards, and I have seen at first hand on a smaller scale how profligate government was. I also contend that at the end of the day, this lot are probably wasting just as much money in their own way, they are just wasting it on different things (unecessary new Quangos, re branding the DCSF, etc)

I have no objection to the principle of adjustment in the abstract, but I do, strongly and bitterly, resent the idea that the poorest and weakest must adjust the most, that this needs to be done with unseemly haste just to placate "the markets" - which even if this were true, then begs the question "Who Governs Britain" and once again I question this assumption that the recovery will still happen despite mass unemployment approaching three million, job losses, bankruptcies, reposessions, people being forced off benefits on the premise of non existent private sector jobs, VAT increases and the risk of high inflation.

If there were five jobs for every applicant, instead of the other way round, then George Osborne might have a point. He would still be a smarmy little squit whose face I would never tire of punching, but he might have a point. But it IS five applicants to every job, and it's going to get worse.

WHERE ARE THE JOBS?????

I often hear the phrase, when benefits are being discussed

“Those who choose not to work”

It’s an interesting concept. We're back to sturdy beggars and the undeserving poor here again. I contend that, given the chance and the opportunity, anyone and everyone wants to work, but that generations of people have been beaten down by lack of motivation, lack of opportunity, and lack of any idea how to go about it. Usually in areas of former heavy industry, where there is very little "choice" involved because there ARE NO JOBS.

I take issue with the word "choosing". But I do agree that those unfortunate enough not to be able to find work should be financially supported by a state benefit system, yes: I believe it's what sets us apart as a civilised society. Or one of the things anyway. Housing Benefit has been fuelled by the housing boom which was created by unsustainable offers of credit from irresponsible banks to people who didn't know what they were getting into, encouraged by lax regulation all around and - let us not forget - not one Tory voice was ever raised to object to this because their pals in the City were all busy filling their boots, thank you very much.

I am a little bit unclear about what people are supposed to do though, if there's no point in them applying for jobs and they "choose" not to work, and they don't get any benefits, I guess it comes down to .... oooh, a couple of days on their grouse moor for those with private incomes, and the rest ... er ... begging, I guess.

People who advocate this sort of thing do, however, make a point about the Labour market which is generally overlooked, which is the need to re-think what we have got along the lines of socially useful companies run at a profit by and for the public good. It is called Social Enterprise. This is a viable "third way" that would solve many of the problems and get people away from this "public versus private sector" class war which Osborne seems hell-bent on encouraging. I doubt, however, that he has ever heard of it.

And finally, today, we have had the most breathtaking example of doublespeak of this whole government so far, when they talk of "Revitalising Retirement"* by making old people work even longer! I feel really revitalised!

*In the same way as you could revitalise child care by sending them up chimneys (Oh, hang on, that's in NEXT year's budget)

How long, I ask, can these charlatans, this unelected government with no mandate to wreck our economy, be allowed to continue causing this damage without being challenged?

The only sane response to this budget, I think, is that of Quellcrist Falconer in the Harlan’s World novels by Richard. K. Morgan. I couldn’t put it any better. George Orwell couldn’t put it any better.
J B Priestley and S P B Mais couldn’t put it any better. So here it is.

So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous makes the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL. Well, fuck them. Make it personal

Don't badger the badger

2010-06-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

From an animal welfare perspective, one of the most depressing things about the Tory/Torylite Junta is its insistence on restoring fox hunting, and on carrying out a badger cull in England under the pretext of dealing with Bovine TB.

The arguments over fox hunting have been well-rehearsed, of course. Anyone who wants a summary of the case against, just send me a stamped addressed envelope. It is to be expected of the Tories, of course, as the party which is propped up by the landed gentry, that they would try and reverse the hunting ban. Not that the hunting ban was ever properly enforced in the first place, anyway. It’s amazing, isn’t it? We always seem to be able to magic lots of extra policemen out of thin air when there is a miners’ strike, or when a fascist dictator wants his goon squad to be able to run through central London alongside the olympic flag, but when it comes to the law of the land, we are seemingly more selective. Anyway, I digress. If fox hunting had been a working-class sport, it would have been abolished 150 years ago.

Bovine TB has, it is true, been a proverbial thorn in the side of British dairy farmers, who have, it is equally true, been quick to blame the badgers. And yes, badgers do have a reservoir of bovine TB in the wild. So far, so true. But badgers are not unique in this. Other wild animals, including deer, also incubate the m. bovis strain. This is my first problem with just culling the badger, as a strategy. It ignores the existence of other potential sources of the disease in the wild. Quite deliberately, else otherwise the proponents of culling would have to admit that the only effective cull strategy would be to cull everything. Turn the countryside into a nuclear wasteland, and concrete over the green fields of England, right up to the farm gate. Farmers don’t like admitting that this is the logical conclusion of that line of logic, because it clashes with their self-assumed mantle as guardians of the countryside. Yet it is true, nevertheless.

Even assuming culling badgers alone was the answer, that in itself is still fraught with illogicalities and inconsistencies. Badgers have no idea of human boundaries. So supposing you decide to set your cull area to a particular boundary – parish, area, council, it doesn’t matter – two things will happen: surviving badgers in the area will decide to move on to safer climes and wander off elsewhere, taking any infection which may be present with them, while new badgers from outside the area will move in, when they realise there is less competition for food in an area of fewer competitors.

So, in fact, far from making the bovine TB situation better, a cull may actually make it worse. Don’t take my word for it, though.

A report in Nature (Donnelly et al, Nature 439, 843, Feb 2006) based on a large scale and randomised field experiment recently provided strong and significant evidence that culling badgers actually exacerbated the problem by raising the incidence of TB in cattle living nearby.

The Independent Scientific Group (ISG) on Cattle TB concluded (16/6/2007) that culling the wild animals would not halt the spread of the disease by any meaningful extent and "may make matters worse." This report is the summation of 10 years of scientific research, costing 50 million pounds, which saw the killing of 11,000 badgers in the Randomised Badger Culling Trial.

Instead, the ISG advised that substantial reductions in TB can be achieved by improving cattle-based control methods, including electric fencing around farm buildings, better controls on cattle movement through zoning or herd attestation, strategic use of gamma-interferon blood tests in both routine and pre-movement testing, quarantine of purchased cattle, and shorter testing intervals, to name but a few.

The problem is that the NFU didn't like the conclusion, because country folk always know better than they there townie scientists. It came as no surprise that this independent scientists' report was immediately and forcefully attacked by the farmers and NFU which claimed, with no basis, that the ISG's suggestions would be worthless if the cycle of re-infection from badgers was not broken.

Given the Tories' penchant for jumping on bandwagons, and given their disregard for animal welfare generally (see also under Fox Hunting above) they obviously saw this issue as an easy way to hoover up votes in rural constituencies, which is how we come to be here today. It's nothing to do with a burning desire to eradicate bovine TB or make intensive farming more humane on the part of David Cameron.

What a shame badgers don’t get to vote

One Laws For Them

2010-06-05T08:25:00.000-07:00

The State Opening of Parliament is one of those traditional events, full of pomp and ceremony, flummery, ancient language, Heralds in tabards walking backwards, and men in tights, that we British do oh, so well. The majesty of the Lords and Commons, all gathered together, under the Lion and the Unicorn. It is all too easy to poke fun at it, as many have done in the past, and will no doubt continue to do so.

But behind all the pomp and circumstance, behind the processing and Black Rod banging on doors, we shouldn’t forget that Parliament does stand for something. It stands for the Law of the Land, it stands, ultimately, for Freedom. It stands for the unwritten, fudged, but nevertheless durable covenant of compromise between the Sovereign and the State, the people, and those whom we elect to govern us. So much so, that these days, of course, Mr Speaker is only ceremonially dragged to his throne, a distant reminder of those far-off days when his reluctance to end up potentially in either the Tower of London, and/or with his head and his body in two different geographic locations, was all too genuine!

It stands, in short, for Liberty. And this year, this first Queen’s Speech of the new Parliament, was, for once, strong on libertarian ideals. Presumably this is as a result of the brave new world of Liberalism, a package of concessions wrung out of David Cameron by the Literal Dimwits in their gaderene rush for power, which he was quite happy to grant them as part of the greater process, which they don’t seem to have realised yet, towards becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Cameron-Ashcroft empire.

We were promised a veritable Great Reform Bill, no less. Sweeping away many of the anti-libertarian measures, post-9/11. ID cards would go (well, actually, to their miserable credit, even Labour had eventually got it through their ignorant skulls that ID cards were a bad idea, and had already decided to rein them in, but hey, who’s counting) less CCTV coverage, - again a good idea in principle. Though it is sometimes a provider of useful evidence after the fact, CCTV does not prevent crime, it just exports it to other, usually less fortunate, areas, where there is no CCTV.

Things such as control orders and the “thought crime” offences of “acts preparatory to terrorism” still remain, of course. But one of the measures proposed was a restoration of the right to protest, which can only be good news. All good stuff, and surely even a curmudgeonly old commie like me should welcome it?

Except that nobody seems to have told Boris Johnson about the last bit. With masterful comic timing, coinciding with the Queen’s Speech and the announcement of all these measures, Boris Johnson and Westminster Council sent in the plod to arrest Brian Haw for obstruction, and disband the democracy peace camp which has sprung up alongside his one man anti Iraq war protest in Parliament Square. Haw, who has maintained a lone, and famous, vigil in the square in protest about the Iraq war, was charged with obstruction. Quite what, or whom, he is supposed to have obstructed is unclear, especially as you have to take your life in your hands and cross four lanes of traffic to even get near him.

The latest I hear is that he may be charged with trespass. I thought that Parliament Square was a public place, so presumably if Mr Haw is guilty of trespassing on it, we all are. Similarly, they can’t – as I understand it – just do one person for trespass. Anyway, other, finer legal brains than mine will no doubt look into it.

Westminster Council are also complaining about Mr Haw’s rag tag followers, who had put up some tents, brought in a chemical toilet, protested against homelessness, amongst other things, and planted an oak sapling. (How very dare they, how dare they plant our national tree on an otherwise neglected and unused patch of grass in the middle of a roundabout a stone’s throw away from our national Parliament. The cads and bounders!)

This is the same Westminster Council, lest we forget, that demonstrated its own concern for the homeless one recent Christmas, by cancelling the Christmas soup run, so that rich bastards living in Westminster wouldn’t have to look at homeless people on Christmas day. So kind.

So there you have it. It remains to be seen how many of those lofty ideals actually make it into law. I get the impression that Cameron may already be regretting letting Nick Clegg stay up beyond his normal bedtime and have one too many hobnobs and a glass of tartrazine. We shall see. But hey, they are going to restore the right to protest, and if you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy?

At more or less the same time, Laws of a different sort have been dominating the news. David Laws, to be precise, who stands accused of taking 41 large ones out of the public purse and giving them to his partner in the form of rent, from 2001 to 2009. Leaving aside the obvious comment about “rent boys” - I do have some standards, you know – I have to say there is something distinctly homo-erotic about the cast of this coalition overall. Watching the Knave and Dick show, when they did their joint love-in in the rose garden at Number 10, I found myself thinking that all over the country, owners of Christian B & Bs would be pursing their lips, narrowing their eyes, and slowly shaking their heads as they watched it on TV.
Personally, I don’t care if David Laws’ partner is gay, straight, or a one legged Hottentot transsexual on a unicycle. What I do care about is “what part of don’t rip us off” are these muppets struggling with, precisely? In this case, as well, it’s not as if Mr Laws couldn’t have funded his own place in London from his not inconsiderable personal wealth. Maybe even build a hotel on Mayfair.

The schadenfreude, the glorious irony of it all, is not lost on me. Far from it. Resisting the temptation to punch the air and shout “Yes!” I refrained from such vulgar triumphalism and just contented myself with humming “Oh Happy Day” under my breath as I went about my daily round. The Tory lickspittle, the cats-paw, the patsy who they had got lined up to deliver the death of 1000 cuts, policies that mean already that people on marginal incomes are worrying about whether or not they can afford to keep a cat, for God’s sake, has, himself, allegedly, had a hand in the till. Even if it turns out that his “interpretation” of the rules about partners is right, did it never occur to him to check it out at any time? What a staggering combination of hubris and stupidity.

Further proof, if proof were needed, that this sort of thing, which all the main party leaders threatened to stamp out, is still rampant. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

As with the right to protest, so with the issue of expenses. One “Laws” for them, and one law for the rest of us.

There is Nothing Like A Dame (School)

2010-06-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

Amongst the many preposterous things about this misbegotten coalition (if you can call the Literal Dimwits becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Tory Party a “coalition” in any meaningful sense of the word) surely the most preposterous is that Michael Gove is now the Secretary of State for Education. Almost his first act was to ordain a (presumably expensive and completely unnecessary) re-branding of the DCSF back to the Department for Education.

At a time when the rest of us are being asked to tighten our belts, and given that it would have been perfectly feasible to have had a different policy, but kept the name the same, this is a waste of public money. How much public money, remains to be seen. I have written to my MP to ask, and if I get a reply, I will post it on this blog.

His capacity to cause havoc to the educational system, however, extends far beyond his choice of logo, colour swatches, web site and stationery. Because the Queen’s speech has shown us that the Tories are determined to press ahead with their policy of “Free Schools” and also they have demonstrated their intention to increase the number of Academies.

The “Free School” idea is the misbegotten spawn of that most nebulous and amorphous of Tory policies, “The Big Society”. What it means is that the government, in effect, is abdicating responsibility for large swathes of what it used to do, ie “governing”. And abdicating funding, as well.

So, from now on, if your local park is full of dog poo, instead of the government funding your local authority to clean it up, you are expected to round up a like minded citizen possee of pooper scoopers, to clean up this durn town! If Granny Smith can’t get out to do her shopping, you’re supposed to alert the social services or the WVS. The Social Workers can’t do it, because, fed up with cuts; low pay and hiring freezes, they are all now stacking shelves at Tescos for more money and less chance of getting crucified by the Daily Mail and the Conrad Blackshirts if they make a mistake.

So much for the Big Society. In education terms, specifically, what it means is, if you don’t like the school your state provides for your kids, then go and start your own school, and stop bothering us, we’re too busy filling in our expenses to run the country as well, you know!

There are, of course, already lots of schools that already are schools that were started in this manner. They are private schools, misleadingly called “public” schools, although Joe Public has about as much chance of going to one as I do of flying to the moon. But these public schools are not publicly funded. They are education’s private sector. What Gove proposes, however, is not only to allow people to form their own schools, for whatever reason, but to be allowed to use public money doing it.

In practice, I can think of only three categories of people who are going to be even faintly interested in the idea. The vast proportion of parents, it has been demonstrated time and time again, just want a good local school to teach their kids. Some of them, of course, also extend their definition of “teaching” to include parenting, baby sitting, moral guidance and discipline as well, because they are too lazy or inept to do it themselves.

But the categories of people who are going to be most interested in this proposal are Religious Nutters, Big Business, and Yummy Mummies in West London, who don’t want Tarquin and Jocasta mixing with the common children at a comprehensive. The Religious Nutters element worries me the most, to be honest, since it will inevitably mean schools run as Madrassars, and schools run by whirly-eyed fundamentalists who think that Darwin faked the fossil record. Using public money, let us not forget.

There is already too much interference in schools from Religion. Faith schools get a massively disproportionate amount of resource pumped into them (see also under Academies) and, to be honest, prolong the existence of religious differences and divides. I would much rather see all faith schools, and all schools for that matter, forced to abandon their faith status and instead to teach comparative religion as a compulsory subject. That would do much to dispel fear, distrust, and xenophobia in society at large.

Big Business, of course, is only interested in producing cannon-fodder for the factories, the fast food outlets, and call centres. When questioned, in a radio interview on the Today programme about what he would do to ensure that the Free Schools idea was not hijacked by those with their own agenda, Gove replied that they would have to demonstrate they had a “robust business plan” and that anyone who had what he called a “dark agenda”, would be prevented from going ahead. Leaving aside the fact that this answer showed that he is more interested, seemingly, in their business plan than in their proposed curriculum, I am intrigued by the idea of a “dark agenda”.

Who decides what is a “dark agenda”? How dark is dark? Obviously, anyone wanting to set up a “Free School Taleban Training Camp and Islamic College” is going to be seen to have a “dark agenda”. But supposing I decided to set up a school to teach children a curriculum based on, oooh, let’s say Socialist principles, relative morality, ethics and animal welfare. Given its pro-hunting stance, I would imagine the government would regard that as a dark agenda. But if McDonalds, whose slash and burn antics have been widely discussed in ecological circles, wanted to set up the Ronald McDonald Free School and Burger Flipping Academy, would that be dark? Because it bloody well should be! And how would the darkness vary if they promised to employ all of the alumni of such an establishment?

None of this would matter, of course, or it wouldn’t matter so much, if it wasn’t public money. People have a right to their own opinions, however dopey or bizarre, and they are perfectly at liberty to start schools, using their OWN money, which would then stand or fall by their own merits, ability and reputation, depending how many gullible parents they can find to pay the fees. But this Quixotic enterprise, where every whirly-eyed demagogue can cause further fragmentation and unnecessary waste and duplication in public education, is going to be funded by us. At a time when, if money is that tight, economies of scale should be the way to go, surely.

Which brings me to Academies. There seems to be an ongoing recent idea in education, which survives with a dogged and insidious persistence, akin to that of Japanese knotweed, that elitism in education for its own sake is a good thing. Inequality of opportunity is something to be striven for, apparently. Every time this idea is shown up to be bogus rubbish, it springs up again in another form, like the many-headed Hydra.

Its latest manifestation is the philosophy behind Academies. I would still mind, though I wouldn’t mind so much, if they just admitted that the prime driver behind Academies is once more to shift some cost off the public sector and on to the private sector’s balance sheet. But it’s always dressed up in the claptrap of Academies good, failing Comps bad. The latest philosophy is that each Academy, as it speeds unerringly upwards in its ceaseless progress through the concentric spheres of academic excellence, should “take a failing school with it”. I suspect that this , in practice, will devolve down to letting the oiks use the Academy’s playing fields once a week.

To those who believe that Academies have some sort of intrinsic superiority over all other forms of school, I lay down this simple challenge. Take the average, bog standard, failing inner city comp, and lavish upon that school for three years all of the advantages and the resources of an Academy. Then, at the end of that process, we will be able to see, once and for all, whether it is the format, or the funding, that makes the difference.

In the nineteenth century, well-meaning old women started schools to keep the children of those who could afford it, occupied, while the parents earned a living, combining in effect babysitting with a rudimentary study of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Every time I think of Mr Gove, which is as infrequently as possible, and his proposals, I am inextricably drawn back to this: Mr Gove may not himself be a dame, but his educational policies are almost certainly a pantomime, and a pretty Widow Twanky one at that, as the late, great, Dr Spooner might have observed, had he been there to observe it.

Cats' Cradle

2010-05-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

Hard on the heels of hearing Lucy Verall’s story of being at the cat shelter and seeing a family having to bring in their family cat for re-homing because their house had been reposessed, I heard today about someone who is a bipolar sufferer now having second thoughts about offering a home to a shelter cat because she is concerned about being “bipped” onto a lower rate of benefits by Iain Duncan Smith’s so-called welfare “reforms” (ie making poor people pay for the mistakes of the rich)

And reading things like this, stories of people having to hand in their pets to the shelter because their houses are being repossessed, and stuff like that, makes me wonder what country I am living in sometimes.

It's not Britain anymore. It's not England, that's for sure. England, Britain, that I knew, was a place of tolerance and compassion. A place where people looked out for people. A place where, of all the countries in the world, you were likely to get cut a bit of slack, on the understanding that you, in turn, would cut slack to others should it be necessary. Give us this day, our daily slack. And forgive those who trespass against us.

Not a place where people would respond with "well you've only yourself to blame, snap out of it, can't expect the state to provide you with a pet, why not get a stick insect, they're cheaper yadda yadda yadda"

Jesus H Christ on a unicycle. What a mean, spiteful, petty, shop-thy-neighbour society we are creating. I thought Labour were bad enough, but...

Animals are always the first casualties of any recession

An animal charity hit by the rise in abandoned pets during the recession has issued an urgent appeal for help as it fights for its future.
The Hastings and District branch of the Cats Protection League is struggling to cope with the number of cats and kittens it is now being asked to care for.

The volunteer-run organisation has issued a desperate plea for funds as the demand for its services carries on growing.

It is the second local cat charity facing an uncertain financial future after the RSPCA Bluebell Ridge cattery, Chown's Hill, revealed cashflow problems late last year.

Experts say the recession left many pet owners unable to care for their animals.

Peter Hepburn, chief executive of the Cats Protection League, said one branch received 100 unwanted kittens in just a few weeks.

"This surge in unwanted cats is extremely distressing. It is a crisis for the cats and it piles additional pressure onto our volunteers. Our network of branches and centres are already stretched to the limit looking after the cats in their care.

Well done, Tories.

To all those who say Iain Duncan Smith’s “reforms” are necessary to get scroungers off the dole and into jobs, I have a simple question

WHAT jobs? WHERE ARE the jobs?

Literal Dimwits

2010-05-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

So, we have had an election, and we have got a government. Of sorts.

The inconclusive result of the election has stirred up a veritable hornets' nest of demands for electoral reform and changes to the voting system.

I find myself thinking that the result reflects not so much the defects of the system, as the defects of the candidates. The major parties all fought dishonest, nasty, negative, vacuous, campaigns, based on "policies" such as "vote for me because I am not him!", "don't vote for him, he smells of poo!", and "if you don't vote for us, the bogeyman will get you!".

It is hardly surprising, when faced with such rubbish, that a suspicious and already angry electorate has been unable to demonstrate conclusively which of them we hate the most. The choice on 6 May was like trying to decide if you should have emergency bowel surgery in the woods using a rusty nail or a piece of broken glass. Ideally, you wouldn't want to be in that situation to start with.

Here's my solution for electoral reform. Given the economic storm heading our way, Brown should have stayed on as a caretaker, to at least make an effort to clear up the mess. But only because he has experience in that area, and for no other reason.

There should have been another election within six months, based on some real policies this time. Policies of vision, courage, leadership and social change. Plus, the parties should all have levelled with us beforehand about how truly ghastly the economic situation, and their proposed remedies for it, were.

I am not that bothered who is actually leading the parties, to be honest. I think an election should be about policies, and not a beauty contest. If we have politicians of the highest calibre, who believe in things, and have the courage to fight for them and to take others with them, and who don't take us for mugs and insult our intelligence, they will win an election under whatever system. We don't need a better system, we need better politicians.

But in any case, we didn’t have better politicians, we had the Liberal Democrats. Or ToryLite, as it seems we now must call them.

I find it difficult to express my utter disgust and contempt at their party, demonstrated by their complete abandonment of principles, in a naked grab for power, following the inconclusive result. Although I am not one of them, indeed I am not a member of any political party, the people I feel sorry for are their local party activists who pounded the streets of each constituency, delivering leaflets that said “only the Liberal Democrats can win here”, like they did in the Colne Valley, who have now seen their party turn overnight from being in favour of an amnesty for illegal immigrants to being in support of a cap on non-EU immigration; from being opposed to the automatic renewal of Trident to now supporting it; and from being opposed to nuclear power stations to providing the Tories with a Minister for Nukes! I find myself wondering, if the Tories had a policy of stamping on kittens, whether they would have signed up to that as well!

I hope they feel proud to be propping up the Tories at a time when they are poised to take £6BN out of the economy, targeting the poor and the disadvantaged, and potentially tipping the country back into recession.

I sincerely hope their party gets decimated in the next election. How can anyone ever vote for them again, when they now know that if they do, they will get something diametrically opposed to what they wanted?

And, talking of the “next election”, could I just add that attempting to install yourself in power for five years unchallenged is the sort of behaviour we have previously condemned on the part of military Juntas and other non-democratic regimes across the world. If I wanted to live in North Korea, I would bloody well move to North Korea.

Make the most of it while it lasts, Liberal Dimocrats, because your own supporters are going to be leaving in droves between now and whenever it comes, and when it comes, for the Liberal Dimocrats, always assuming they haven’t merged formally with the Tories in the interim, and they do still exist, that, I am afraid, will be that. Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for annihilation!

The Lib Dimwits have sold their birthright not for a mess of pottage, but for a “pot of message”. They not only ratted on their policies, they also re-ratted and ratted again. And their constituents will be queueing up, come the next election, whenever that is, to administer the Warfarin.

Boycott the Election!

2010-04-11T04:18:00.000-07:00

“Future” and “Change” are two words we hear bandied about a lot by people who would like us to vote for them in this election. But I have looked at their ideas of future and of change, and they are bogus, empty and counterfeit. They can be weighed, and found wanting. They are as a sounding brass, or tinkling cymbals. Because they have neither faith, hope, nor charity.

What they are really saying to us is “please be stupid enough to vote us in on a pretext, so we can have five years of power.” Five more years of the same, even if someone different gets in.

None of them has any vision. None of them has any ideas. The best they can come up with is “vote for me because I am not him”, leavened with a few veiled references calculated to appeal to deep seated prejudices and entrenched positions (of all sorts) and in some cases, garnished with xenophobia.

What a choice lies before us in this election! What a choice!

I am reminded of that old 1960’s pacifist slogan “Supposing they gave a war, and no-one came?”

I find myself thinking “Supposing they gave an election, and no one came?” And a dangerous idea has begun to form in my mind. In the past, I have always dragged myself out and voted, because of the respect I have for the democratic tradition, and for the people who died so that I would be able to live under a free democracy and not, for instance, a Nazi dictatorship.

But respect has to be earned. And it should be mutual. It is quite clear that the political classes, of all colours, have no respect whatsoever for the people who put them there. No sense of thanks, no sense of obligation.

So, I am wondering if, in the absence of anyone who can carry our great country forward, in the absence of anyone with the necessary bravery to say THIS must be done, and the will to carry it through, whatever the media thinks, then maybe we should just either boycott the election altogether, or write across our ballot papers “think again!” None of the above.

In some circumstances, not voting, or refusing to vote, can be a deeply political act, provided it is done for the right reasons.

Of course, even if many millions of people did either spoil their ballot papers or boycott the election, there would still be a result. There would still be a government. But it could hardly claim, as governments have done in the past, to have a mandate of any description. If we boycotted them properly, they would be hamstrung from day one. They would have to go away and think again. Think of some better ideas, and come back to present them at a REAL election.

They would have to go away and re-think the ideas of “future” and “change” until they came up with something that WAS radically different.

Something fundamental. We are not in Kansas anymore. Capitalism has broken, and socialism has never been allowed to fill the gap. We need a completely NEW landscape. Something different.

A massive boycott of the election, a low turnout of seismic proportions, combined with a comparative “Everest” of spoilt ballots from those who do turn out, would surely send them the signal, all of them, all of the parties, that their ideas, their policies, their proposals, are limp, shrunken, dead and moribund. They need to go away, and think again.

Think of how they could change the landscape for the people of Britain.

Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit.
It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will.
And every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Don’t do it for your sake. Don’t do it for my sake. Do it for the sake of those who will be the victims of this election, otherwise. Do it for all of us, Do it for Britain, for the people who are crying out for a change from the same old same old… Do it for their sake.

Do it for their sake. Do it for God’s sake, and for God’s sake, do it on May 6th!

That Lobbygate Statement in Full

2010-03-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome this opportunity to set the record straight regarding my recent interview with Sting Productions Ltd for the post of imaginary lobbyist to Freshco Supermarkets Inc (“A Whole Lot More Than You Bargained For!”)

In retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, the absence of any framed photographs of Mr Gordon Sumner in reception, and the fact that the company’s address on its letterhead was given as “c/o H. Hill, Freepost You’ve Been Framed” should perhaps have heightened my perception that all was not entirely as it should be.

However, I can reveal today that I have been diagnosed with a very rare medical condition, which has what scientists call a “cluster” in the geographical area of London SW1, called Dementia Cashblindia, where the sufferer’s judgement and vision is temporarily impaired by the dazzling reflection from huge piles of currency.

I also accept that the fact that the interviewer was a nubile young blonde strumpet, who smelt vaguely of patchouli, giggled at my jokes, and had a chest like a bouncy castle, may have led me on this occasion to make exaggerated claims about what I could achieve for Freshcos in return for a daily jiffy bag stuffed with fivers.

Now that I have been found out, I have of course referred myself to the appropriate authority, the Maldive Islands Tourist Board, and I am sure that my honourable friends will hold a full and frank enquiry around the public bar of the Mog-Mog Hotel, before retiring to the pool terrace to consider their verdict. Lessons must be learned, and this iniquitous system, so dreadful that I could barely bring myself to fleece it, must be replaced with a public register of spoof film companies, so that a man knows at the outset who he is talking to.

I would also like to point out to members of the public, who perhaps are fortunate enough to have nothing more to worry about in their everyday lives than queuing up in the rain for the bus to the jobcentre, just how difficult and demanding the work of an MP can be, with the constant need to manage a complex, shifting portfolio of sources of huge wads of cash.

I would like to thank my wife, who is standing behind me in this matter, as so many times before, calmly twitching and brandishing a carving knife, and I would ask that my privacy, and that of my solicitor, be respected at this difficult time.

Thank you.

Another Bit Falls Off Great Britain

2010-02-28T05:32:00.000-08:00

Another lump falls off Britain. Taking 1700 jobs with it. RIP Redcar blast furnace, and another part of the steel industry. Well, I saw it happen in Hull with the fishing industry, saw it happen with Steel in Sheffield and Rotherham, and Coal in Barnsley, now it looks like they are picking off what's left, one by one.

The trouble is that an industry that can mean life or death to a whole community has been allowed to become a tick in a millionaire's ledger.

What was that Nye Bevan said?:

This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.

Yet, by tearing down our traditional industries and also by letting the EU trample all over our fishing grounds, we seem to have achieved just that. We used to make stuff. Out of metal. Time we started again. Yes, I am sober (for once) and yes, I am angry.

Industries rise and fall, and time goes on, etc. But I would like to think we have moved on from more primitive times, and we should be able to consider the effect of such seismic changes in industries against the wider sense of the community of which it is inextricably linked. The buzzword phrase these days is “corporate social responsibility” – the recognition that you cannot just operate an industry in isolation from the locality which provides it with a workforce, and which it in turn feeds by pumping money back into the local economy.

The coal mines were closed because the coal was cheaper from abroad. Or gas was cheaper, or Orimulsion was, or something – to be honest, it wasn’t exactly the proverbial level playing field anyway. But sometimes, of course, "cheapest" and "best" can be in opposition, because the effect of the blight caused by generations of unemployment and lack of opportunity never gets costed in anywhere.

I have yet to hear a serious counter argument to the assertion that Thatcher and Heseltine closing down the remaining pits in 1992 during the dash for gas was anything other than an act of political vandalism and spite aimed at the working classes, that actually damaged our country and made us more vulnerable to foreign oligarchs turning off the gas.

People say that the pit towns were kept together by limited horisons and lack of opportunity, but in truth it is much more complicated. They were kept together by a complex web of community, the pillars of which were chapel, music, brass bands, sunday school, the union, the Labour party, nonconformism, self-education the WMC and the Co-op. There's no reason why the same can't be resurrected today, in fact things like Facebook make it easier to have a sense of community. The internet is just a tool like a screwdriver, you can use it to make something useful or you can use it to break a car lock.

And in that phrase "we buy it cheaply from China" has anyone factored into the equation the cost of three generations of unemployment and social deprivation in Grimethorpe for instance - the cost to the benefits system, the cost of medical treatment. Again, it would probably have been cheaper OVERALL if the government had kept the pits open, even if the coal itself was more expensive (in fact they rigged the market so that gas seemed to be cheaper anyway)

In the case of Redcar, I think the way forward here has to be socially useful employment. If the government re-nationalised this steelworks, and paid the people who were running it a bit more than they would get on the dole to carry on making steel, even if we only put it partly or wholly into a "national reserve of steel", against the day when we might need some, it would be socially "better", surely.

And they could specify that the steel has to be used in the structure of any new government or public sector buildings, instead of buying it in from India or China or wherever, with all the attendant carbon footprint issues. And aren't we supposed to be building two new aircraft carriers or something - made of steel, I guess?

Crash barriers on motorways and major roads - all need steel, and the better they are, the more lives are saved and the less pressure on the NHS. I am sure there are lots of uses a source of local, cheaply manufactured UK steel could be put to.

Again, I ask, has anyone done a cost/benefit analysis into the true "cost" - what about the cost of 1700 people now on unemployment benefit, and the knock on cost of them no longer paying PAYE, the cost to the local economy of them no longer doing their weekly shop, etc etc etc. And in any case, it makes it more secure for the UK to have its own supplies of steel. Again, I ask, what happens if we need lots of steel suddenly, say we have to build a lot of ships or something?

I think we really have to start re-thinking what we consider to be the true meaning of words like "cost" and "profit" and get away from the idea that something that makes a loss is automatically damned and worthless. We need a new set of definitions and a new definition of capitalism.

Some would say, of course, that keeping the works open on reduced wages would be less than the minimum wage and that the Unions would never wear it. Well, in that case, it would have to be the minimum wage or slightly more I guess, but it would still probably cost the country less than the effect of having to pay 1700 people Unemployment Benefit for a long while, not to mention the wider knock on effect of the loss of the tax revenue, the collapse of the local economy and so on.

I agree that it's not a perfect situation, far from it.

As to the Unions, I don't doubt it. Someone would have to remind them that the purpose of a trade union is to safeguard the interests of its members and it is more in the interest of their members to keep a job, and keep the works open, albeit on reduced rates, than to have it close down altogether, throwing 1700 of their members on to the dole. And if they don't see the sense in that, then we need a new union, as well as a new government.

Meanwhile, let’s have one last rousing chorus of “Steelos” – with actions!

Dunna let it cobble, it'll tear the place apart!

Bully for Him

2010-02-22T14:07:00.000-08:00

This whole imbroglio stinks.

Firstly, I am not surprised that Broon occasionally has tantrums and throws things. If I had the problems he is facing (many self-inflicted, admittedly) and the crowd of dismal boobies who currently make up the cabinet and the Labour Party, facing the poison chalice of an election in three months, I would be hurling staplers across the room and pushing printers off the desk.

But is that "bullying"? I always thought that "bullying" had to be aimed at someone, and to be intentional, and belittling, and undermining. What Broon seems to be indulging in is more like primal scream therapy!

I have worked in places and for bosses where letting off steam in that manner was an accepted method of coping with anger management. Or rather, not coping with it. But that is not "bullying" - not as I understand it.

The woman who has blown the gaff on the confidentiality of her charity has made a bad mistake. She must have realised - or maybe she really is that naive - and she didn't realise - that the forensic glare of the media would be turned on HER and that emails about her charity's relationship with the consultancy firm would be made public, and that the details about her late filing with the Charities Commission would come out.

There's a certain tang of schadenfreude here - confidentiality works both ways, if she had wanted to keep that quiet, then she should have stayed below the parapet and respected the confidentiality of those she has now - potentially at least - "outed".

I'm not surprised her patrons are resigning. The trustees of the charity are meeting tomorrow and I confidently predict she will be gone by teatime. That would be a shame, though, because then that part of the story would die, and I for one would like to know more about what/who put her up to it, coincidentally on the weekend Labour launches its campaign... someone less charitably inclined than myselfy to think the best of people, might suspect a sub-plot here to which we are not yet privy.

Which brings me to David "call me Dave" Cameroon. A bandwagon came rolling by, and on it he clambered. "There should be an enquiry!" "Yes", says little Nick Clegg, "I agree!" as if anyone gives a stuff what he says or thinks about anything.

Pathetic. God, give me strength.

The Week's Good Cause

2010-01-25T13:24:00.001-08:00

And now on Radio Four, a special appeal for the victims of the Goldman Sachs disaster.

It is all too easy, these days, when our TV screens are full of pictures of lazy Haitian people, lolling indolently amidst the ruins of their shanty towns, expecting people to fly half-way round the world merely to provide them with whimsical luxuries such as food, water and medical supplies, to forget who the REAL victims are, the TRULY unfortunate people in our society today.

Gerald is an investment banker, formerly in charge of a thriving, luxurious hedge fund. Unfortunately, in the autumn of 2008, owing to a staggering combination of greed, overconfidence and sheer brass neck of a kind only seen maybe once every fifty years, Gerald's hedge began to wither, and when harvest time came, Gerald, and many others like him, were unable to pick the juicy bonuses which were their staple diet, and on which they had, in previous years, gorged themselves to the point of gluttony.

Sadly, Gerald is not alone in his plight. His colleagues Tarquin, Peregrine, Toby and Ambrose are all in the same predicament. Each of them is heavily reliant on aid from the taxpayer, and down to their last Ferrari. (Except Tobes, who has a Lamborghini. Yah!)

Please give generously today, as much as you can afford. Even a donation as small as ten pounds would give Gerald the much-needed ability to re-light his cigar, while twenty pounds would allow him to resume his acquaintance with Columbian marching dust, and give up Shake N Vac. Fifty pounds would provide him with something to stick down the knickers of a Polish lap dancer, and two hundred pounds would provide him with some welcome refreshment, in the form of a bottle of his favourite vintage bubbly!

Please send as much money as you can, preferably in a wheelbarrow, and let us put some of the sparkle back into Gerald's existence, so he can once more resume his rightful place as a wart on the bloated underbelly of capitalism.

Thank you.

And now, the weather...

Dear Anjem...

2010-01-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

Dear Anjem

I have read your open letter to the families of British troops who have died in Afghanistan, and I hope you won’t feel it presumptuous of me if I reply with an “open letter” of my own. I have one or two points in addition to those covered in your letter, but I think the best starting point if probably if I quote your letter, with my response underneath.

May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon those who follow the guidance.

Thanks, same to you, but I will reserve my judgement until I find out what “the guidance” consists of. Plus, why are we limiting peace and blessings only to “those who follow the guidance”, whatever it is?

Following the public announcement of an impending procession by islam4uk (a branch of Al-Muhajiroun) through the Market Town of Wootton Basset we thought it only appropriate that we provide an explanation and a little more about the purpose behind the procession, especially to the family and friends of those who have died there and who may have been led to believe that it is merely an act of incitement or provocation.

Well, I don’t think it is “merely” an act of incitement or provocation. I think you have other intentions besides merely incitement or provocation.

We begin by inviting all non-Muslims to Islam, the perfect and most beautiful way of life, a favour from Allah (God) to mankind to take him out of the darkness of worshipping his own desires to the exclusive worship, submission and obedience of Allah alone, without partners and to testify the Messenger-ship of the final Prophet Muhammad (may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him). We urge you to embrace Islam and save yourselves and your family from the hellfire and not to believe the lies and distortions which the Western media and non-Islamic regimes would have you believe about Muslims and their true intentions. Islam means submission and the Muslim is the one who submits to the will of God in his life. Verily the Messenger Muhammad told us that whoever heard his name from the Jews and Christians and did not believe would be held accountable for that on the day of judgement.

Yeah yeah yeah, yadda yadda whatever: heard it all before, from the Catholics, I am afraid. It doesn’t scare me, I’ll take my chance. God knows I have striven to find him and keep up a relationship with him all my adult life, despite my many imperfections, and if he’s really all-knowing, all powerful and all-merciful, he’ll cut me a bit of slack on judgement day. Next!

We start by pointing out what many wise people already know i.e. that the British public have once again been lied to by their politicians about the war in Afghanistan. What began as a fight for freedom and democracy and to protect the human rights of the civilians and to find Sheikh Usama Bin Laden (by the use of B52 bombers) has today become a campaign to protect the security of the British public back home and it has gone from being a campaign which could be completed without firing a weapon within 3 years to one which could go on for 40 or 50 years with a heavy cost to the participants.

We seem to agree about the origins of the war in Afghanistan at any rate. I am not sure about the B52 bombers, I rather think the Americans use a variety of more modern aircraft. War aims do have a habit of shifting as the situation develops, though. One of the other things we are currently supposed to be doing in Afghanistan is establishing a secular democracy as an alternative to the Taleban. Surprisingly, I also agree with you about the fact that the security of the UK cannot be guaranteed by fighting on the streets of Helmand. In fact, in that respect, we are probably making the situation worse because we are creating more fundamentalist nutters by being there, and in truth, the only real reason we can’t just pull out and leave you to it is that if we did, Pakistan would be the next to go.

In actual fact the foreign policy of the USA and UK is not about protecting the rights of Muslims or propagating democracy and freedom nor is it about the threat posed by the people in Afghanistan to the British public at all, but rather it is to establish their own military, economic, strategic and ideological interests in the region. The rich resources of Afghanistan, its position on the cusp between the Indian sub-continent, Southern Russian, Asia and China and its populations call for the Shari'ah are the real reasons why the military has sought to establish a permanent role there, no matter what the cost to the lives and wealth of the indigenous people or indeed their own.

The “rich resources of Aghanistan? " You are kidding, right? – the place is an inhospitable shithole with a medieval infrastructure. If it was that great, we’d all go and live there. I prefer to live in Yorkshire. That tells you all you need to know about Afghanistan. And “its population’s call for Shari’ah” - does that include all the women who are denied opportunity under the Taleban’s version of Islam?

Pivotal in this is the desire to prevent Muslims from running their own affairs and establishing an Islamic State if they so wish but rather to maintain a puppet in the area (Mr Karzia) to maintain and protect Western interests.

The problem with that assertion is that however much you may dislike Karzai or think he is a puppet, equally I can’t see the Tabelan allowing a free election where the population are allowed to put up anti-Taleban candidates, can you? So the depressing choice for the ordinary people of Afghanistan seems to be between a US puppet government that may at some point lead to a secular democracy, or backsliding into authoritarian rule by a set of humourless beardy twonks making up rules on the spot to oppress women, gays and anyone else who they decide their imaginary friend has told them not to like. A group who would be ridiculous if it weren’t for the fact that they have access to weapons and high explosive.

In order to create an atmosphere where these greedy objectives can be accomplished the Western and even Eastern media have constantly shown atrocities being committed against the ordinary people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in markets, universities and public gathering places and have then blamed these on the perceived enemy, in order to discredit any legitimate struggle for liberation and in order to demonise them in the eyes of the world and thereby justify the occupation and real intentions. The truth about such bloodshed and mayhem is only now becoming public knowledge after information about the real perpetrators has emerged (such as the CIA related agency Black Water). The billions of dollars paid to the Pakistan regime by the USA/UK alliance and to the Secret services in Pakistan, their army and to the Karzai Afghan regime by way of bribes has led them to slaughter their own citizens with the help of the USA/UK and to then blame the Taliban in an attempt to subdue those seeking liberation to fulfil their right to run their lives by divine law and to protect the US/UK military and economic interests.

I am a great one for conspiracy theories, but even I draw the line here. So the Taleban are entirely blameless and the people who are shooting at our troops and setting roadside bombs are actually the CIA and Blackwater. If you believe that, how do you feel about the Tooth Fairy, Elvis working in the chip shop, and the B-17 bomber on the moon?

With additional atrocities being committed by the USA and UK through indiscriminate air raids and other operations the number of ordinary Muslim men, women and children who have been killed has reached horrendous proportions. Not to mention the torture and abuse of basic rights by the occupiers in Afghanistan, such as in Bagram Air Base, the case of Dr Affia Siddiqui being a clear and brutal example.

I agree it is regrettable that when it comes to targeting, the USAF sometimes seems as if it couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo, and I would remind you that our troops have suffered from this as well.

There is no doubt in most people's minds that the final conclusion to the current conflict in Afghanistan has already been written. Ultimate victory for those fighting in their own backyard, familiar with the mountains and plains and their supporters who struggle to protect their sanctities from the foreign aggressors cannot be denied. The signs for this are already appearing with incohesive thinking among the British and American chain of command, the crippling effect of the war on their economies back home and the depression of the soldiers realising that there is no real moral or ethic reason for them to murder innocent men, women and children to fulfil their politicians agenda. Blaming a lack of equipment is one of the ways in which politicians have tried to shift the focus. It is noteworthy that unlike among the US and UK soldiers, there has not been one reported suicide or attempted suicide among those resisting occupation.

I don’t think either side has the capacity to win outright militarily in Afghanistan, and “ultimate victory” would depend on our forces withdrawing. And the fact that our soldiers may have committed suicide probably indicates that unlike the Taleban, they have a conscience and think about what it is they are doing.

As a consequence this can only mean much more destruction for the USA and UK sons and daughters sent by their uncaring leaders to their deaths. After all this would not be the first time that this region has acted as a grave yard for empires in history, notably the British and Russians.

Yes, and the professionalism and dedication of our armed forces means that they will stick it out as long as they are asked to.

It is worth reminding those who are still not blinded by the media propaganda that Afghanistan is not a British Town near Wootton Basset but rather Muslim land which no one has the right to occupy, with a Muslim population who do not deserve their innocent men, women and children to be killed for political mileage and for the greedy interests of the oppressive US and UK regimes.

You can’t fool me, I have an A level in Geography. Nobody deserves to be killed for political mileage on either side. Tell it to the Taleban and Al Quaida.

The procession in Wootton Basset is therefore an attempt to engage the British publics minds on the real reasons why their soldiers are returning home in body bags and the real cost of the war. The conflict in Afghanistan is not an ‘honourable' defence of British values and a cause for the British to remain secure,

Insofar as is about exporting democracy, it is a defence of British values of a sort, though again I agree with you that it is not making us more secure.

rather the presence of the US and UK forces in Afghanistan is the cause of instability in the region and a cause of insecurity for the British people back home. The parades, the speeches about soldiers doing their duty and the feeling of patriotism has obfuscated the reality of the conflict and the murderous crimes being committed by the occupiers and their agents. The British public is blissfully unaware of what is being done in their name by the Blair/Brown regimes and were the truth known no doubt the pressure to withdraw all troops immediately would be much greater.

I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, but it is perfectly possible to be proud of the armed forces and their professionalism, and our country, while disagreeing with the current rationale for the war. Also, please remember, our troops are bound by rules of engagement, whereas the Taleban are free to plant bombs wherever they want and undertake random acts of suicide bombing, safe in the knowledge that if by any mischance they also kill a few innocent civilians, they can rely on useful idiots like you to blame it on the CIA. Fortunately, I don’t know anyone who has died in Afghanistan, but I do know that the son of someone I work with was badly wounded out there, including possible permanent damage to his eyesight, in an explosion. He was trying to help a wounded Afghan when it happened.

It is our desire to end the cycle of violence and the quagmire in which we find ourselves in today in Afghanistan.

Well, I am with you there. However, I suspect your methods and motives would be more likely to create a similar style war on the streets of the UK, rather than ending one in Afghanistan.

For the British public to do their duty and force their regime to save their children from death and destruction, from an oppressive and costly campaign and to stop the occupation of Muslim land. We realise that, especially in times of war, we are up against a very sophisticated propaganda machine and no doubt raising awareness about the painful truth of this conflict will unleash a torrent of abuse from the media and government against us, who have their own predetermined agenda, however the world is today also small enough for those wishing to verify the truth to be able to do so via the many news and information outlets.

Well, you surely knew when you announced the intention of marching through Wootton Bassett that you would unleash a veritable shitstorm of abuse and hatred, which of course you immediately seize upon for your own ends to prove the supposed anti-Muslim hatred you believe in and see everywhere, to provoke precisely the response you received from the dimwits and meatheads who make up the BNP and the English Defence League, and who have started the “Stop Islam4UK” pages on Facebook, where morons a-plenty have been posting semi-literate racism. You must have been chortling into your beard at all the additional publicity, when previously you were the decorative border on the edge of the lunatic fringe and, if truth was told, you probably represent about a dozen people, if that. Moderate Muslims have certainly distanced themselves from you, although of course this hasn’t been picked up by the media you purport to despise so much, who have in fact preferred to speak to you instead of the more moderate practitioners of your supposed faith.

So it’s a bit rich to be complaining about the reaction to your announcement when in fact, getting precisely that reaction was precisely your aim in making the announcement in the first place!

In common with many people, Anjem, I must admit I was a bit hazy about you and your group, in fact I was under the impression that it had been banned. I have had a look at your web site and I have to say it cheered me up no end. I am not saying some of your ideas are beyond Barking, let’s just say they are a long way off the A12. The chief religious justification seems to be that Shari’ah law is a good thing because Allah said so, and because Allah said so, that makes it a good thing.

We had a group of people in this country who used to think like you. They were called the Puritans, and it was 300 years ago. Since then, we’ve developed universal suffrage, democracy, healthcare, women’s rights and free speech. You ought to give it a try. Meanwhile, my answer to your posturing on the web site is the same one as Shakespeare put into the mouth of Feste in Twelfth Night, talking to Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Obviously, the irony of the fact that it is only in the UK, whose values you seem to despise so much, that you have the freedom of speech to spout such tosh, is completely lost on you. Try posting anti-government propaganda web sites in Iran, or having a provocative march through Teheran.

Well, for what it’s worth, Anjem, I think they should let you have your march. And I think the people of Wootton Bassett should come out and line the streets in silence, just to show you that this is what makes Britain different. We do, still, just, have free speech and you can demonstrate to make your point, however unpopular, as long as you do it under the rule of law. The same law that applies to every citizen equally, established and refined through nine centuries of practice and precedent, not handed down by some beardyweirdy cleric and made up on the spot. I’d also like you to hold your march because I would like to see, once and for all, just how many supporters you can muster. I would guess at about 15.

Which is why I find it very depressing when I see your views represented as being those of Muslims. There are apparently 2.4 million Muslims in Britain today, the vast majority of whom want to get on with their lives in peace. That is anathema to you of course, because your raison d’etre seems to be to foment disharmony and conflict and stir up hatred of Muslims, in the pursuit of some mythical “Islamic” state that neither they, nor the remainder of the population, apart from you and your acolytes actually want.

When the Puritans couldn’t get their own way, they eventually packed up and sailed off abroad to find a new world. Sadly, though, not before their legacy led to a bitter and divisive civil war for two decades in England.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that you would do likewise and sail off into the sunset, before your calculated stupidity causes something similar to happen again?

Nicker Vicar?

2009-12-24T05:01:00.000-08:00

Father Tim Jones of York preached a sermon recently where he said that, if you were in desperate straits. and you were faced with a choice of burglary, prostitution, or shoplifting, in his opinion, shoplifting was morally less of an evil than the alternatives.

Needless to say, he was pilloried for it by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, to the extent that even his Diocese felt the need to distance themselves from his words by posting a slightly inaccurate version of what he said on their web site.

Well, I am afraid I have to disagree with them. I think he should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. For the record, here is the full transcript of what he said:www.yorkpress.co.uk/

...As you will see he actually says that for those in desperate straits, shoplifting is the least morally damaging option when the alternatives are suicide, burglary, or prostitution.

he says:

Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift. The observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are.

But why let the facts get in the way of a good story, eh?

He's right though. The dichotomy between the glittery, gleaming, gadget ridden, food-stuffed consumer M & S advert Christmas and the grim reality for people on the dole or homeless is obscene, and it IS a grim indictment of society's values.

And these supermarkets who are bleating about it today, such as Asda in York, who described Fr Jones as being "one prayer short of a sermon", would they be the same supermarkets who regularly SKIP huge amounts of "waste" food because of sell-by dates, and would they be the same supermarkets who are ######ing up the planet by flying in dwarf beans from Kenya? Motes and beams, mate, motes and beams. Good luck to Fr Jones, I say, at least he's put it higher up the news agenda, despite every paper reporting it in precisely the opposite way to what he intended.

It would be better if the supermarkets, instead of bleating about the words of an Anglican priest, channeled some of their huge profits back into bolting on an extra "leg" onto their existing logistics network, which already exists and is geared up for the overnight transport of consumables, so that the stuff which currently ends up in the skip at the back of the shop, goes back in the otherwise empty delivery lorry instead, once it's been unloaded at the shop, to a central depot or depots and thence into a separate distribution network run in conjunction with, say The Salvation Army to those who need it.

Funded by the supermarkets. Then people wouldn't need to shoplift out of desperation (though I agree some may still do it for other reasons) which in turn cuts down some of the supermarket's need for CCTV and security, and associated costs etc etc. Win-win.

The only "supermarket" I regularly shop at these days is the Coop attached to the garage in Brockholes, which doesn't stock cats, which is just as well, because they would have to remain unswung if it did, but even so, I would happily forego my divvy for a few years or indeed forever, if the money went into such a network instead.

We HAVE to have a SERIOUS rethink about all this stuff. Since the banks went mammaries uppermost, we are NOT in Kansas anymore.

Now is the hour. Now. We have to start thinking along the lines of SOCIALLY USEFUL CAPITALISM, hopefully with the consent of those enterprises who want to be seen as having corporate social responsibility to the community that gives them their profits. The yardstick is not how big your share is, but how much you can share. There's a song in that somewhere...

PC Bill Barker, George Medal

2009-12-24T04:55:00.000-08:00

It will never replace him in the lives of his family, but I still think that PC Bill Barker, who died in the Cumbrian floods in Workington (he had gone to the aid of a motorist on Northside Bridge in Workington when it collapsed, carrying him away) should get a posthumous George Medal.

Top Bloke Awards

2009-12-24T04:42:00.000-08:00

Another couple of candidates for the "Top Bloke of 2009" award:

The first is cafe boss George Anderson of Banff, who plans to open the doors of his cafe on Christmas Day so that homeless and elderly folk don't have to spend the day alone.

And despite those who tell you there is no such thing, - they will also get a free lunch.

Mr Anderson and his staff are giving up a day off from the kitchen because they feel they have something to offer the community. He is appealing to other businesses in the town to help out by donating foodstuffs and other treats that will make the day memorable.

"We are going to be open for anyone who is displaced or who has no one to spend the day with, because no one should have to be alone at Christmas," he said.

"There are people living in homeless accommodation and elderly people with no family for who Christmas is a really sad time of year. It's not a happy time at all.

"We would like them to come and spend the day with us and have some lunch. If someone is elderly and can't manage out, we will even deliver their meal."

"As a community, one way or another we all have something that we can offer, and I firmly believe that we should all be trying to do that little bit more, especially at this time of year."

Good for him.

The second candidate is a taxi driver today who battled through blizzards to deliver vital blood to treat cancer patients.

Abdirashid Issa was taking the supplies from Southampton to Winchester and Basingstoke when he was caught up in Monday's snow in Hampshire.

He made the drop in Winchester but was forced to abandon his car due to tailbacks and walk four miles from the M3 motorway to the North Hampshire Hospital in Basingstoke in "horrible" blizzard conditions. He was then stranded overnight and had to sleep on a waiting room chair before he made his way back to get his car.

Father-of-one Mr Issa, who works for Central Shirley Cars in Southampton, moved to England from Somalia six years ago with his wife Iasha.

He set off with the blood at 5pm but he did not reach Basingstoke until 11pm.

The taxi driver told the Southern Daily Echo said: "It was very important. It said 'urgent blood' and if someone needed it I had to make sacrifices because they might be dying.
"I could have stayed in my heated car but I had to do it."

A spokeswoman for the North Hampshire Hospital in Basingstoke said: "We have sent a huge thank you to Mr Issa, who went well beyond the call of duty to deliver blood stocks to Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital.

"The delivery included platelets needed for our leukaemia patients and other blood stock which enabled the hospital to continue with planned major operations on Tuesday as well as maintaining an adequate stock for emergencies."

I don't know! These immigrants eh! What are they like?

Wonderful, Wonderful, Copenhagen

2009-12-24T04:17:00.000-08:00

I had very low expectations of the outcome of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, and even then, I was disappointed. Seeing the various squabbles and shenanigans, the cabals and the backroom deals, I think the best thing from now on for anyone who is worried about climate change is to buy a CNB suit and some really thick sunglasses.

What cracks me up, though, is that some people still deny it's happening. Of course, those remarkably dim boffins at UEA, artlessly discussing whether or not to fudge their data, have not helped matters, and I cannot but wonder that there is an untold story there about how that was hacked and released to the media, just on the eve of the conference starting.

I am not a scientist. I dropped physics like a red hot brick in the third year, despite, paradoxically, being quite interested in it now. So, I don't understand the data, I don't understand the graphs.

What I do see, though, is a tedious concentration on the single issue of temperature. Almost to the angels-on-pinheads stage. Is it getting warmer? Is it getting cooler? It's the warmest decade since etc etc etc.

Anyone with half a brain can see there's SOMETHING wrong with the weather. We never get hot summers any more, every winter we always get catastrophic floods, like those in Cockermouth and Workington, and in other parts of the world, eg Indonesia, it's much much worse. It's more extreme. It can't ALL be caused by Barrats and Wimpeys building yuppie-hutches on the flood plain.

As I sit here typing this, we are in the midst of the coldest snap in the UK for about 20 years, which has been gleefully seized on by media wits along the lines of "what price global warming now, then, hur hur!" God, how tediously short sighted these idiots are, not to recognize that it is all part of the massive disturbance of weather systems. I'd like them to spend a few weeks filling sandbags in Cumbria, they might buck their ideas up then.

Irrespective of whether it's warmer or not, SOMETHING is screwing up the weather and making it more EXTREME, so I would be grateful if all the learned boffins could kindly roll down the sleeves of their lab coats, stop arm wrestling about the temperature and shouting "Lower!" and "Higher!" at each other like they were at a screening of "The Price is Right" and actually work out what it is that is DISTURBING the weather systems.

You can drown in warm water or cold water, Even I, as a non-scientist, know that.

Insurance Proposal

2009-12-24T04:05:00.000-08:00

Given that some of the people in Toll Bar and Hull who suffered in the 2007 floods are still arguing it out with the insurance companies, I would like to propose a simple solution to stop the same thing happening in Cockermouth, Keswick, Workington et al. This could only apply to people who have insurance in place, but at least it's better than nothing.

Given that they need help STRAIGHT AWAY, but the insurance companies are going to be overwhelmed by claims and given that (from experience) I know that even a simple claim will be bitterly fought in a sort of hand to hand, house to house, Stalingrad style resistance until finally you have to go round their office, grasp them by the ankles, invert them, and shake them til the ££ drop out of their pockets, to get them to pay up, I think the banks should take up the slack in the interim.

Since it's all our money anyway these days, what the government should do is to declare a specific disaster zone, then any business with insurance within the zone who has been damaged by the floods can have a visit and a desktop valuation from the bank. Say for instance, you have insurance which will cover a claim, and the bank agrees that the claim is £50,000. They advance you the money as an immediate interest free advance. This allows you to get up and running again QUICKLY, so that your business can start generating income again. In the meantime, you pursue the insurance claim, and when it comes through, the money goes to repay the bank. If there is any shortfall between the bank;s desktop valuation amount and the actual insurance payout, that is transmuted to a fixed interest rate fixed term loan, underwritten by the disaster fund. Say the bank advanced you £50,000, but the insurance when it came through was only £47,500, the £2500 gets transmuted to a fixed loan.

Since the banks seem to have a never-ending appetite for taxpayers' money, and will never be happy until they are wearing a suit made entirely of money and sitting down to a dinner of roast money in a money sauce with a side salad of money, I think it is the least they can do.

I'd also suggest that next summer every tourist attraction within the National Park asks for an additional voluntary contribution/tax of 50p per adult visitor, to be passed on to the disaster fund. This money could go towards alleviating the plight of the people who were unable to get insurance because of previous problems with flooding, of which I understand there are a substantial number.

The government needs to step in and take over the process of obtaining advances quickly, for those in the defined zone, until the insurance companies catch up. I am being charitable to the insurance companies here and assuming that they will catch up, setting my own experiences aside for now. Make the most of this unexpected leniency on my part. I must be going soft.

Builders, electricians, etc., etc., still have to do the work, and they too are in limited supply.
Once again, the state could organise gangs of them and get them bussed up there, I am sure there is an army of skilled tradesmen, brickies etc in the rest of the UK on short time or with no work because the construction industry is in the doldrums, who would welcome a tour of four weeks paid work in the Lakes. Open up some of the mothballed space at army camps and RAF stations within driving distance of the disaster area to provide accommodation.

The scale of this thing is going to require a Dunkirk Armada of White Transits heading up the M6, and a promise of organised, guaranteed work for a term at the end of the journey. Sort of like Auf Wiedersehen Pet, but bigger.

Rooftree

2009-12-24T03:20:00.000-08:00

This blog has been rather neglected of late because I have been working on trying to start a movement called ROOFTREE. I have hinted at something similar in this blog before but I was galvanised into more direct action by a strange course of events.

I was doing some research on the history of the old Hull and Barnsley Railway and in particular Drewton Tunnels, a rather spectacular set of Victorian tunnels under the Yorkshire Wolds near Riplingham, in the East Riding. My research led me to a site called 28dayslater.co.uk, which is dedicated to the pastime of Urban Exploration. Urban Exploration is apparently the practice of exploring derelict buildings and associated sites.

I was staggered, literally staggered, to see how many of these derelict sites there are in the UK. Often large, publicly owned buildings, sometimes hospitals, with (presumably expensive) medical equipment still inside them. This set me thinking, and the result was what I call the Rooftree Letter, the text of which is below:

We have a country where some people are homeless. This is unacceptable. We have a country where some people who need it, cannot access affordable housing. This is unacceptable. We have a country where hundreds, maybe thousands, of sites are derelict, many of which feature large, substantial. public buildings which we, the taxpayers, own, in effect, and which are being allowed to deteriorate to the point of no return. Finally, we have a country where many bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and electricians, roofers and tilers are either now unemployed or on short time, as the credit crunch bites.

I would like to propose a solution to deal with all of the above. The Government, and/or the relevant local authorities, should compulsorily purchase these sites. They should then use any existing structures on the site to provide either accommodation and or core services to support a “settlement” in the grounds, based on the existing modular timber-framed prefabricated structures of the technology favoured by Walter Segal, to provide a source of low cost, affordable housing. The central core building could provide a local source of combined heat and power technology based on a combination of waste incineration and anaerobic digestion.

People have told me this is impossible. Too expensive, compared to building new houses on greenfield sites. That is as maybe, but “expensive” is a relative term. Does it take into account, for instance, the cost of having all of those unemployed builders, bricklayers, architects, draughtsmen, carpenters, roofers, plasterers, tilers, electricians, and plumbers? No, it does not.

Basically, my idea is this: you take the central building on the site and turn it into tenements to house people along the lines of those produced by the Victorian Architect HENRY ROBERTS and also the central building houses the communal waste incineration leading to CHP unit, the anerobic digester, the other communal facilities, and then around it you scatter these individual bungalows, modular timber framed buildings built by the Walter Segal method, which draw their heating and other services from the central building, enhanced by solar panels on the individual houses themselves. Each house gets a stake in the communal allotments which are laid out over any spare land left over which is too small to build on.

It seems to me that most of what Henry Roberts did would be consistent with building regs anyway, I would have thought that the major stumbling block would be cost in his using (for eg) slate for the floors etc. My idea is to start a *campaign* (doing what I do best, allegedly, pontificating and badgering people) to pressure the authorities into changing the building regulations on socially useful housing to make it easier to do this sort of development; to pressure the government to acquire these sites, many of which, I repeat, belong to us, the taxpayers and are currently standing empty, decaying, and prone to vandalism, some of them (the ex-NHS ones) still containing presumably valuable equipment, and many of them having extensive grounds, which could also be utilised; and to pressure the government and the authorities to provide the wherewithal, the seed capital, to allow these communities to come into being, on the grounds that they will eventually recoup the cost in rent and show a profit, and of course they will have the site on their books as an asset, owned for and on behalf of all of us; it would reduce pressures on social housing elsewhere in the system, and building on brownfield sites that would otherwise be derelict is much better than tearing up green fields and trees; and finally that it is socially useful to have all of the construction workers, brickies, electricians and joiners who would otherwise be drawing the dole, actually working.

We just need 1000 sites housing 63 people each, or 500 sites housing 126 people each, or 63 sites housing 1000 people each, and suddenly that figure of 63,000 homeless people in the UK last Christmas becomes much less daunting.

Now is the time, with the property market still depressed, for the government to step in and compulsorily purchase these sites. Say at £2M a site on average, that is £1BN. Small change, compared to what we have been chucking at the banking system.Rooftree is not a charity, not a company, it’s not an anything really. It’s a movement, in the same way that Solidarnocz was a movement. We don’t even have a web site unless someone wants to donate one to us. But what we do have, is a desire to build the new Jerusalem, one brick at a time, one site at a time, until there is no one left sleeping out in the cold.

Please join us. Go to the ROOFTREE Facebook Page or ROOFTREE Facebook Group, (enter “Rooftree in the search box) or sign our petition on the Number 10 web site (search under “Housing” or "Rooftree")

Anyway, that is what I've been doing. Just in case you thought I had been slacking or anything.

80 MPs are appealing (not from where I’m sitting)

2009-12-24T03:16:00.000-08:00

My flabber has been gasted once again by the news that 80 MPs may be considering appealing against the assessment of their expenses by Legg.

How many times do I have to say this?

Welcome to the REAL world, MPs. The world where the REST of us live, where things get changed arbitrarily and retrospectively, and we just have to put up with it and lump it. Welcome to the real world, members of parliament, for a much-needed dose of reality up the jacksy. Welcome to the world where, if you are late with your CT600 Corporation Tax return, the HMRCE fines you £500, and you can't get away with writing a letter saying "accountancy isn't my strong suit". Welcome to the real world. wake up and smell the coffee, shut up, stop whining, and get on with running the country.

If they have the brass nuts to try and claim for moat cleaning, duck houses, and bell tower repair on the public purse, they deserve EVERYTHING coming their way. If they want respect, they should shut up and earn respect, instead of whinging about "having to live on rations". As to their pay, a) most of them have several other jobs and b) if they don't like it, they can shove off and join the poor unloved bankers who are going to throw their teddy out the pram and all move to New York or Geneva. I'll do their job. I'll be an MP, for that money. Three times what I earned last year, before tax. Yes please.While there is still ONE homeless person in Britain these cold nights, I would REQUISITION MPs' second homes for emergency accommodation, and make them sleep on cardboard boxes in a sleeping bag under Westminster Bridge, until they do something to end it.

And as for the bankers, I've already said what I would do with those ######s. Tax their bonuses at 150%. Their bonus is that they still have a job, and we allow them to continue breathing until such time as they have paid us back.

Gill Sans

2009-10-27T08:38:00.001-07:00

It used to be ERIC Gill that outraged people, what with his wacky lifestyle involving incest, bestiality and stone-carving, but it seems that A. A. Gill, with his pathetic "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die" sub-Hemingway piece about shooting a baboon just for a laugh, is intent on carrying on the tradition. Well, watch out A. A., one day, thanks to the magic of search and replace, you might find yourself sitting on a cloud, twanging a harp, and reading this:-

So I’m in Hampstead, in a hat, with dark intentions and a truck full of guns and other blokes in hats. Josh the Baboon said: “Why don’t we shoot A. A. Gill?” All nonchalant, looking out of the window at the amazing Tanzanian acacia scrub that drifts into the Serengeti plain. What about A. A. Gill?

And here’s the thing. If you tool around the beautiful and unruly bits of Africa long enough in the company of gangs of Baboons in purposeful hats, sooner or later you’re going to do A. A.Gill. You think you’re not, you think you’re the exception, you’re going to just say no, but pretty soon it’s the monkey on your back. I should have worn my Stella McCartney hat.

So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. Now, despite all indications to the contrary, A. A. Gill isn’t stupid. Well, no stupider than Piers Morgan. They know that Baboons in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, going back to their Hampstead homes where they enjoy riding their mums like little jockeys. And then they stand around in bars and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses, like a lot of Millwall supporters down West Ham. Ha!

But neither A. A. Gill nor Piers Morgan are smart enough to have invented telescopic sights. So there was this little weedy bloke leaning against a menu, picking his fingernails, a nerdy geezer sitting in the restaurant with his tuxedo off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run into the kitchens, hang on for grim life. They die hard, restaurant critics. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his fellow diners. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot. I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this.

There is no mitigation. A. A. Gill isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun. They might, at some unspecified theoretical future date, eat birds’ eggs, young impalas and dik-diks — they are opportunist omnivores, but that very much depends on “Today’s Special”. You wouldn’t trust A. A. Gill to baby-sit. But then everything has to eat. I noticed that, when he was alive, I thought about A. A. Gill as a thing. Now he’s dead, I’m posthumously anthropomorphising him, and that was one of the reasons I killed him. It was strangely satisfying.

The Resounding Clang of the Stable Door, Vol 97

2009-10-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

The Financial Services Authority, God bless them, have decided at long last, that irresponsible lending should be disallowed. Fine. Stop the banks lending to people, let them just KEEP all of the money we've lent them to get them out of the shit. They can spend the long winter evenings gloating over it.

Meanwhile, perhaps we could ALSO consider that we PERHAPS should be asking for our bonuses back. Because, to be honest, punishing poor people for wanting to borrow money is not REALLY the way forward. Perhaps you SHOULD, MAYBE, have been stopping the banks in the first place, from spending OUR money on imaginary fucking derivatives, you bunch of stripey-suited WANKERS.

Bunch.

Of.

Arse.

Happy as a Sandbag

2009-10-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

It is not often that a story where the Government is involved has a happy ending, still less so when that story involves Iraq. However, I can report on one such occurrence, albeit one in which no credit at all is due to the Government in the matter.

I am referring of course to the rescue of three dogs and one cat from Baghdad and Umm Qasr, and their safe return to the UK. The animals in question were Sandbag, a dog, and his puppy, Christened “Dirtbag”, another dog called Royal, and a cat known as Hesco. All of these creatures had previously become attached to various UK units serving in Iraq, in each case becoming unofficial “mascots”.

When the units concerned had to withdraw, in each case, the question was asked, could they bring their mascots back to the UK with them, and in each case, the answer from the MOD was “no”.

Sandbag, in particular, became something of a cause celebre as a result of this. At one point, he even had his own Facebook page, and a petition was drawn up on the 10 Downing Street web site, asking for him to be repatriated. Needless to say, the answer was again, “no”.

This is actually a classic illustration of how badly Gordon Brown is being advised, and why he is going to go down at the next election to a crashing defeat that will make Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade look like a peaceful canter in the park. Just pause to think for a moment what would have happened if BLAIR had still been Prime Minister. He would have had that dog crated up for air freight before you could say “Pedigree Chum” and he would have then invited the world’s assembled press onto the tarmac at Brize Norton to watch him give it a medal and hand it a bonio.

Anyway, be that as it may, thanks to a coalition of the willing (where have we heard that before) involving a South Wales Animal Welfare charity, Baghdad Cat Rescue (surely the single most thankless task in cat welfare, at least from its title) and The Blue Cross, funds have now been raised to bring Sandbag, Dirtbag, Royal and Hesco back to the UK, and they are now currently in quarantine for six months, but at least that is better than being turned out to wander the streets of Iraq's war-torn capital, which was the alternative.

So, Gordon, if you are reading this, which I very much doubt, you, or rather your advisors, might like to ponder on the fact that the British are a nation of animal lovers, and your opponent, Mr Cameron, has already said that he will allow a free vote on repealing fox-hunting if he gets in next year. Why not start asking him some awkward questions on his record regarding animal welfare, instead of continuing to miss this endless procession of open goals?

That BNP Manifesto in Full

2009-10-22T06:09:00.000-07:00

On immigration: Britain is full, go home, unless you are able to prove in writing your ancestors were present at Ye Greate Moot of King Eggbound the Unready in 1085. We’re also looking for British volunteers to leave, especially those who might, er, withstand the sunny climates of foreign shores better than, say, those with, er, fair skin. And while we’re at it, we don’t want none of them mixed marriages. Stay within your own village and look for a marriage partner. Or better still, your own family.

On health: owing to acute staff shortages in the NHS caused by repatriation, see above, there may be some interruptions to normal service for the next 20 years until a new generation of indigenous British doctors and nurses can be trained up. In the meantime, call our self-appendectomy helpline on XXXXX
{Your call is important to us. Please ensure you have plenty of Dettol and hot water close at hand}

On defence: yes, we’re quite happy sitting here, thank you.

On climate change: Ooooh, that’s a toughie. Let’s see. Carbon, hang on, carbon is black, right? So it’s a BAD thing. Oh, wait, though, Carbon EMISSIONS, right, that’s pushing out the Carbon, isn’t it? OK, pushing out the black stuff? Yes! we’re all in favour of that. Put us down as a “yes” to Carbon Emissions!

On postal services reform: white envelopes good, BROWN envelopes bad. Next?

On foreign policy: it starts at Calais.

On Europe: see above.

On agriculture: in future, cows can only be black, or white. And kept in separate fields. Not black AND white, and certainly not Swiss Brown. And if you have a dangerous dog, you’ll have to “muzzle-im” Ha ha! Muslim! geddit?!?! Especially Afghans.

On crime and justice: fiery torches and pitchforks will be provided.

On industry: Er… oh.

That’s all, Volks!

Geert back to where you once belonged

2009-10-17T05:21:00.000-07:00

I dunno, these bleedin right wing Dutch bigots, comin' over 'ere, takin' jobs and doin' work that could be done by ethnic white British bigots, it's a bleedin' scandal, Guv, and no mistake.

I 'ad that Nick Griffin in the back o' my cab once.

Everything Must Go!

2009-10-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

I despair of Gordon Brown.

We are £175 billion in debt and he announces the sell-off of public assets to the approx value of £16 billion.

What's the point? All you are doing is replacing assets with cash. OK, you may be £16 bn less in debt but the other side of the ledger is £16 bn down in assets. Go figure.

No Expenses Spared

2009-10-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe some MPs are still thinking of contesting and quibbling over the amount of their expenses they are being asked to pay back.

Welcome to the real world, the world the rest of us are forced to inhabit, where the goalposts are moved daily, with no redress.

For instance, if you were someone who had been unfortunately overpaid by the CSA owing to their ineptitude, you would have already been in receipt of threatening letters from the DWP telling you to repay those benefits or risk prosecution. This is the sort of shit your constituents have to put up with, day in, day out.

It’s not even about the money. You can bloody well afford it. Most of you have got two or three other lucrative jobs alongside being an MP.

Look. How can I put this nicely?

Just deal with it, and move on. You have got off lightly. Stop whinging, shut up, pay up, and get on with running the country. You haven’t got a Legg to stand on.

Oh Say Does That Star Spangled Banner Still Rave

2009-10-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I may have been a chump for giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. I ought to have known that history teaches us that the appearance of a charismatic, young, new broom who promises to sweep clean and transmogrify everything for the better, is inevitably followed by disappointment. God knows, if we wanted an example of the syndrome in this country in recent years, we have only to look at Blair.

But I didn’t expect him to go quite so wrong, quite so early. I refer of course to the totally hypocritical hissy-fit which the US administration has thrown over the release of the Lockerbie suspect.

Personally, I think it’s very decent of the Libyans to let us have an innocent guy to lock up and save people having to ask awkward questions about who really dunnit, but then no doubt all sorts of side deals went down at the time and they were richly recompensed, one way or another.

Anyway, Obama knows much better than I do, because presumably he can toddle along to the CIA and look at the files any time it takes his fancy to do so, that Al-Megrahi is innocent. Just for the avoidance of any doubt though, here’s an interesting point from a chap called Robbie the Pict, from the Lockerbie justice group based on the Isle of Skye, examining the key point on which the Crown’s case against Megrahi rests.

A Sensible Person’s Guide to Semtex
(and why it was not present on Pan Am 103) Semtex is the trade name of a composite high explosive which combines two chemical substances, PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) and RDX (Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine). The American and English equivalents are ‘C4’ and ‘PE-4’ respectively.High Explosive is a substance which explodes at more than 1000 meters per second (mps). Semtex explodes at about 8000 mps, over 5 miles per second.Heat of Explosion is the amount of chemical explosive energy contained within the explosive mixture, measured in joules per gram(J/g).

The term is more from chemistry than physics.Temperature of Explosion is the maximum temperature possible if no heat is lost to the surroundings. It can be thought of as the starting temperature on detonation. The exploding temperature of Semtex is given by the manufacturer as 3,800 degrees Centigrade. This is physics.Detonation is a chemical process involving spontaneous decomposition of explosives molecules, the breaking and forming of trillions of bonds. It is supersonic combustion in which a shockwave through the explosive material compresses, heats and ignites it.

The ignited material further propagates the shock.Deflagration is subsonic combustion (i.e. burning) that propagates through the explosive material by thermal conduction. Semtex burns at approximately 3,800 degrees centigrade or 6,832 degrees Fahrenheit. That is the estimated temperature of a sunspot. Carbon itself melts at 3,720 degrees Centigrade. This is roughly ten times the auto-ignition or self-kindling point of paper. Plastics, solder, shellac (circuit board material) and cloth shirts have auto-ignition points much closer to paper than to carbon.

All these items would be rendered into white hot gas at 3,800 degrees C.Zone of Uniform Velocity is the distance in all directions not obstructed through which the blast from an explosion continues without losing speed. This factor has been determined in laboratory conditions as being as high as a 4/25 ratio where 4 represents the diameter of the charge (explosive) and 25 the distance the blast reaches without losing momentum.

However, explosive engineers prefer the 2/5 ratio as a practical guide. Explosive Effect is therefore that a charge of Semtex the size of a pound packet of butter will render everything in a sphere the size of a basket-ball an invisible, white-hot gas measuring 6,800 degrees F expanding at over 5 miles per second in all available directions. That calculation is based upon approximately 300 grams, the figure first announced by ‘investigators’.Since then commentators with dubious agendas have more than doubled that figure to as much as 650 grams.

That would mean a charge the size of two and a half pounds of butter and, using only the 2/5 ratio, would result in a sphere of combustion the size of a child’s Space Hopper, expanding at about 20,000 miles per hour in all directions at the temperature of a sunspot, 6,800 degrees F.The Crown conspiracy theory asks the public to join the Judges in believing that a page from a Toshiba instruction manual made of paper, a shellac circuit board, soldering, a piece of shirt cloth and some other combustibles survived the explosion experience. Very funny, — and very stupid.

Well, Robbie the Pict puts it a lot better than I could. But given that Megrahi was almost certainly innocent, and given that all sorts of deals have probaly gone down once again, this time over his release, in a grotesque mirror image of those which went down over his conviction, it ill behoves the White House to be lecturing us on justice, and it ill behoves the American public to be boycotting Scotland, when the US is determined to exercise its rights under the criminally one-sided extradition treaty between the US and the USA, and prosecute Gary McKinnon in the US courts.

Gary McKinnon is the archetypal nerd. In fact, he is the nerd’s nerd. He hacked the computer system at the Pentagon, looking for evidence of UFOs. I don’t know if he found any, but he certainly pissed off the pointyheads who are in charge of security over there. Instead of congratulating him for showing up the loopholes in their pathetic firewall and offering him a job, they want to extradite him to the US and prosecute him to make an example of him. Sadly, our government doesn’t seem to have the balls to tell them that – since he committed the crime on UK soil – Gary McKinnon should stand trial in the UK. And they should go suck a zube.

It’s all part of a depressing pattern, which follows on from the previous instance of the US forces refusing to allow the evidence of their gun cameras to be played to the jury in the inquest on the sad death of Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, in a friendly fire incident. But then, the Americans probably think that Her Majesty’s Coroner for the County of Oxford is an extra in a chorus by Gilbert and Sullivan.

I didn’t expect much of George W Bush, a man whose concepts of justice probably involved nooses, white hoods and fiery crosses. But I did expect much, much better of Barack Obama.

Afghan Wounds

2009-09-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

The latest spike in the casualty figures from the dismal conflict in Afghanistan has provoked a flurry of comment and criticism from all sides. At one end of the spectrum you have the armchair warriors who say we must never surrender to the Taliban and who will willingly fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. And on the other end, the troops-out peaceniks of the Stop the War Coalition and similar organisations.

What is the ordinary person to make of it? By persuasion, by calling, I am of the peacenik party. I was against the Iraq War. I called it the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong enemy, for the wrong reasons. I had my reservations about going into Afghanistan. Picking a fight with the Taliban because they refused to surrender Bin Laden was a big ask. Did they even have the power to surrender him in the first place? Did George Bush even care, as long as the TV audiences at home could see US bombs falling somewhere, on someone vaguely Muslim, in retaliation for the lamentable failure of US foreign policy that was 9/11?

The reasons for being in Afghanistan today are a lot different from those advanced in 2001. The original reason, to flush out Bin Laden, has been unsuccessful largely owing to the porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the lack of sufficient resource to do the job, and the fact that the mission got deflected, along the way, into a larger mission to win over the hearts and minds of the population. Quite how you win over the hearts and minds of the population by invading and bombing them has become an increasingly problematic question, and one to which there is no answer. In using violence to try and change the culture of radical Islam and in attempting to use it to weld together an uneasy amalgam of warlords to a government that many feels lacks legitimacy, the UK/US forces in Afghanistan have probably radicalised more than they have converted. We’ve created an unholy alliance of the Taliban and Al Qaeda where none existed before. In short, we have incited every hothead east of the Euphrates with access to an AK47 or a grenade-launcher to take a pot at us.

It is often advanced by the Prime Minister that our military presence in the area is somehow making us safer from terrorism. The problem I have with this approach is that the people who perpetrated the worst atrocity on British soil since the dark days of the IRA were actually from Leeds and Reading. They were moved to carry out their actions by our presence in Iraq and, er, Afghanistan. So far from being a preventative measure in the circumstances, I feel that our presence there is exacerbating the situation.

Silly Buggers and Silly FOCAs

2009-09-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

I was not amazed at the story which emerged recently of the News of the World allegedly using snooping agencies to try and tape the voicemails of the rich and famous. After all, there was a court case about it a while ago now, and someone even went to jail as a result. Whether he was the right person of course is a moot point, given the wider prevalence of the practice now being suggested. It was not even surprising that the practice was more widespread. After all, the speed and ease of modern digital communications has made mass e-mailings and mass SMS-texting a reality. No, what amazed me is that allegedly the police knew all about it and did nothing! I am not a lawyer, but I would have thought that snooping on someone else’s voicemail must contravene some statute or other, even if it is only the Data Protection Act, which local authorities and call centres are so fond of quoting whenever they want to get out of actually being helpful.

I am not surprised, either, that the News of the World – if they did it, which is still unproven – actually got away with it. In general, the tabloid press in the UK has an incredible power, frequently misused. Their constant mixture of dirty tricks and surveillance with “celebrity” news and gossip makes for the worst of both worlds and risks eventually bring down a draconian “privacy law” on the heads of all the media, which will prevent even legitimate investigation of stories which are in the public interest. To a certain extent, we get the press we deserve, or so runs the well-rehearsed argument. But I am not so sure that the tail does not wag the dog. After all, it’s not as if there is any real choice of an alternative media to peruse and choose instead, for those of us who don’t want salacious red-top tittle-tattle about who is currently going to be evicted from the Big Brother House.

I would love to hear the excuse used by the police for not pursuing this, and I look forward to a successful private prosecution opening the floodgates for many more of the same.
*

I wonder if any of those allegedly bugged by the News of the World’s agents were bishops? Specifically, I wonder if they were the bishops who seem unusually exercised by the word “bugger” in alternative connotations. I refer of course to the Fellowship of Committed Anglicans, or FOCA for short, the hard-line faction within the Church of England who have set out to challenge the authority of Rowan Williams by “upholding” “traditional” Anglican values (such as being anti-Gay). This of course is just what we need in the world today – yet more gay-bashing religious fundamentalism. As if the Taliban were not enough! What really irks me about these people is not so much their fundamentalist views – they are, after all, entitled to their opinions, however loopy. It is the fact that the whole “are gays OK by God” argument (and its offshoot on women bishops) is so massively irrelevant.

I don’t know what it is that gives FOCA the right to assume they are more “committed” than any other Anglican (unless the “committed is taken in the legal sense and they have all been getting pissed on communion wine or fondling choirboys); and in any case, the idea of an Anglican fundamentalist doesn’t exactly conjure up visions of suicide vests. If an Anglican were really angry with you, he might serve you sweet sherry instead of dry.

But FOCA should wake up and smell the coffee. There are lots of problems they could be bending their not inconsiderable traditionalist talents towards the slowing of: for a start, not many people actually go to church any more. Then there’s all those people dying of hunger, lack of clean water and disease. Oh, and the odd war needing sorting out as well. Tell you what, FOCA, here’s the deal. Let’s get all that sorted out and when it’s done and dusted, and churches up and down the land are rammed to the rafters with throngs of happy worshipers, then we can have an international conference, somewhere warm and sunny if you like, to decide whether or not Leviticus says it’s OK for gays to dance on the head of a pin, or what the original Aramaic text of the Apocryphal Book of Spartacus has to say about women bishops and whether they can only move diagonally. Can’t say fairer than that, can we? Or, failing that, bugger off and let these other committed Anglicans sort things out without you sniping from the wings.

Death of a Thousand Cuts

2009-09-02T16:13:00.000-07:00

It is looking increasingly clear that the next election will be fought largely on the issue of public spending cuts. Both the major parties, currently, are maintaining a fundamentally dishonest position on this issue. Labour is pretending that everything is going to be OK, that the economy will pick up, and therefore no real “cuts” will be necessary. The Tories have built their entire platform on the necessity of cuts, but other than generalised statements about quangos, have been strangely reluctant to specify where, when and how the cuts should fall. My next sentence was going to be something like, “Quite how we can have an election when both the main parties are lying, escapes me.” But then I thought … hang on.

I don’t even know which one is the more dishonest, although I do know that the Tories have the edge on populist appeal. Labour’s Micawber-ish whistling past the graveyard attitude will not find favour with a cynical electorate who are even now seeing jobs and livelihoods vanishing before their very eyes. Whereas Cameron, with the instinct of the apparatchik to mount every passing bandwagon, has tapped into a rich seam of Daily Mail public sector-hating bigots who would have you believe that the ratepayers of England are regularly subsidising the Lesbian Muslim Hopscotch Agency, or similar.

At the same time as calling for the quangos to be hacked down, root and branch, Cameron has also added his voice to the many which have been clamouring for better equipment for our troops in Afghanistan, specifically more helicopters. So at least we can safely infer that he is broadly in favour of maintaining or increasing defence spending in an era where the government coffers have been used to bail out Lloyds and the Halifax. And even now we are unsure if we can afford Trident’s replacement and the two new huge aircraft carriers that will be the backbone of the Fleet for the next generation.

So assuming we’re going to find some extra money for extra helicopters (in response to the latest casualty statistics, I don’t recall Cameron being that concerned before we lost 15 soldiers in one week), plus the money for Trident II, plus the two aircraft carriers, what is he going to cut to pay for all this? So far, all we have heard is vague rumblings about Natural England (they never did care for the environment, preferring to leave it to rich farmers). Natural England will not pay for all this. Someone should ask Cameron outright, and keep on asking, no matter how often he blethers and obfuscates and tries to change the subject, how many schools and hospitals he will cut to pay for all this.

In fact, Broon should start asking that question now, and continue until the eve of polling, if he wants to avoid a landslide disaster for the Labour party, and the even greater disaster for the rest of us of a slash-and-burn Tory administration, protecting the rich and making sure the poor are the ones who pay for their mistakes.

Local Homes for Local People

2009-09-02T16:11:00.000-07:00

The government seems to be suffering from an outbreak of common sense. Sadly, it has taken from 2007 until now to incubate, and even now it is only at an early stage, and may yet perish before it becomes pandemic. Still, maybe Gordon Broon is finally listening, or maybe he’s got some new advisors, or both. Still, cancelling ID cards and shelving the part-privatisation of Royal Mail in the same week is at least a start, in the same way that seeing two feminists doing the washing up is a start.

There’s still the same acute lack of vision, of any sense of purpose though, still the same feeling of flying desperately by the seat of your pants, and what there has been in the way of positive announcements in Gordon’s master plan for the future of Britain is still unlikely to have crowds thronging the Mall or people doing the conga in Trafalgar Square, heatwave or no heatwave. Teachers will have to have a test every five years, and this on top of all the other crap they get dumped on them from on high, and, in a move not widely reported, the sneaky bastards are proposing a measure whereby farmers have to insure their livestock against the possibility of their being the source of an outbreak of foot and mouth or similar, which, considering that the most recent outbreak was sourced back to the government’s own laboratory at Pirbright, is rich indeed.

Both those proposals are inherently nasty, sneaky, and unlikely to benefit the people targeted – teachers and farmers – but the proposal which should perhaps give us most pause for thought in the new plan for Britain’s future is the one which has been characterised as “local houses for local people”.

For a long time, people, including me, have been trying to tell the Labour Party that they neglect the needs and concerns of white, working class voters at their peril. Nature abhors a vacuum and, into the vacuum which the New Labour project has created by ignoring huge areas of what used to be its most solid, bedrock supporters, has slipped the BNP. They start by empathising with the disenfranchised, disaffected people in deprived communities, many of whom are elderly and who have probably, in their eyes, had enough of a world of madness, deprivation and uncertainty, a world where the things they used to be able to take for granted, a job, a neighbourhood, the friendliness of neighbours, a reasonable standard of living and healthcare, the local pub and post office, bus services and housing, are all either gone or under threat. It is no wonder they hark back to a byegone era.

The BNP offers tea and sympathy, and agrees with them that their lives are shitty. The voters respond. At last, someone is listening to them. Then the BNP play their trump card – “And do you know who is to blame for all these problems? Immigrants!”

You can’t entirely blame the voters. It’s a very plausible argument, one that comes with its own ready-made solution. No one in the BNP’s target audience, or very few people at any rate, will respond by saying, “Well, actually, immigration isn’t really as simple as all that, you have to take into account the numbers of people who actually leave the country as well as those who enter it, and nobody, not even the government, knows how many illegal immigrants there really are, and the whole debate is skewed anyway by the issue of the EU, which says we have to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry, as long as he’s an EU citizen”.

Nobody points out that social housing is under particular pressure, never having really recovered from the onslaught of Thatcher’s selloff.

You can prove anything with statistics, particularly if you use them selectively, which is why the BNP concentrates on the influx and ignores the exits. It’s much easier to come up with the simple two-trick pony answer that the BNP peddles. Your life is shit right now. (That, for many white working class or elderly voters, particularly in Labour’s traditional heartlands, is often true). And it is all the fault of Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers. (False, of course, and even if it were true, these are three very different kettles of fish, but it suits the BNP’s rhetoric much better to pretend they are all the same).

The BNP’s whites-only admissions policy is also ridiculous, ignoring as it does the fact that the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity it demands is in itself a product of immigration, albeit a thousand years ago. Perhaps it takes a thousand years to establish a Reich, Hitler certainly thought so, and look what happened to him. But of course, once you have bought the BNP’s simplistic lie about immigration being the cause of all our ills, it follows quite naturally that you will believe this tosh. The BNP’s justification for it, as far as I can discover amongs the verbiage on their web site, is that there are other, similar rules which apply, unchallenged, apparently, to black-only or asian-only organisations.

Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. A detailed study of the consititution of the Black Police Officers’ Association has not been high on my agenda of late. If it is true, then it’s equally as odious as the BNP’s stance, and should be challenged, but in either case, two wrongs don’t make a right.

It is disappointing, but not altogether unexpected, that the Labour Party’s only answer to the duplicity of the BNP seems to be to try and ape its policies, but this is, of course, partly a reflection of the corner into which they feel they have painted themselves. All of the mainstream and Labour politicians bleating about the voters and the success of the BNP and UKIP in the May elections have only themselves to blame. They took their eye off the ball.

So what do we need now? We need a politician of the left, or of an independent caste of mind, who will be able to take apart the BNP’s policies forensically, and demonstrate the fallacious links in the thinking. To point out, for instance, that if you were to repatriate everyone who was even faintly brown, the NHS for one would grind to a halt overnight. To state boldly and simply that when it comes to immigration, it’s just not as simple as the BNP likes to make out. And to have the courage to stand up and say that all Britons should be treated equally, whatever the colour of their skin, and to formulate policies that demonstrate it, both ways. And if that also means an end to pointless “positive discrimination” so be it.

Ending “positive discrimination” of the mindless, box ticking kind kicks a plank out from under the BNP straight away. I’ve never been a strong advocate of “positive discrimination” of any sort, beyond the physical kind, of making streets, homes, workplaces and public buildings accessible to people with medical difficulties, but certainly in a situation where you have a group of unscrupulous opportunists using any perceived inequality as a stick with which to beat you, I think you should think very carefully before handing them that weapon.

Ending positive discrimination of the worst, the most damaging sort, does not mean, though, going too far the other way, into negative discrimination, which is where Labour are currently heading with local homes for local people. For a start, they should make clear, and continue to make it clear, that by “local people”, they don’t just mean local white people, if they persist down this road.

The BNP, for all its success in the elections, is still a small, minority party, for the moment. But it has certainly fired a warning shot across the bows of the Labour Party, and it is high time they responded by hoisting the red flag to the top of the mizzen-mast, and letting fly a few salvoes of their own, instead of sailing under the swastika and crossbones, and trying to out-Pugwash the pirates.

Gordon Broon's Blackout Book

2009-06-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written much blogstuff lately. Partly it’s because I’ve been busy, partly because, to be honest, the political scene has now become so surreal that it’s very difficult to parody or even make fun of. It has passed the “duck horizon”, that point in any news story where ducks are first mentioned, after which it just becomes progressively more and more surreal, to the stage where you literally could not make it up.

No sooner had we digested the debacle of the European elections, with the triumph of UKIP and the BNP, two parties who are not known for their pan-European aspirations, than we were plunged into the reshuffle. By the mid morning it was like one of those offensives in the First World War where if you managed to survive until lunchtime you were likely to find yourself in command of a battalion!

James Purnell resigned, Jacquie Smith resigned, Caroline Flint resigned, Hazel Blears stormed out of 10 Downing Street via Humphrey’s cat-flap, a few others resigned too, I may have missed them. One woman resigned before I even realised she was in the Cabinet. I still don’t really know who she was. Kitty something. She may actually just have been a market researcher who happened to knock on the door of Number 10 to ask them if they’d ever considered changing their electricity supplier and got sucked into the general maelstrom. For a while, people were resigning faster than Broon could actually appoint them, and you got to the stage where it really seemed that at 9am tomorrow it would just be Broon, running round answering all the phones, and some guy who originally called in to fix the photocopier, but ended up as Foreign Secretary.

And over it all bestrides Gordon, like a colossus, and about as deft and flexible. I have no idea who is in the Cabinet now, and I am not sure that Broon does. Except that we have got Alan Sugar, God help us. Because parodying yourself on reality TV is of course a perfect qualification for kick-starting a broken economy. What next, Clive Sinclair as minister of transport?

But still, at least, the Government was getting to grips with the idea of the need to reform expenses, and even the Telegraph was starting to run out of steam, having failed to find a match for Douglas Hogg’s moat. So all Gordon had to do was to basically institute some reforms which would mean that MPs were no longer robbing the taxpayer, and then turn the focus on to the opposition and start asking them some awkward questions about their plans to cut public spending.

But no. Instead he diverted us down some bewildering avenue of his own choosing about constitutional reform, this presenting Cameron with a few more free open goals. We don’t need constitutional reform. A thieving crook who has been elected by proportional representation is still a thieving crook. All we need is for the people who have been elected not to rob the people who put them there. All that was needed was sorrow, contrition, apology, and restricting people’s expenses to things like folders from Rymans, envelopes, and toner cartridges.

But no. Just when the whole thing was starting to die down and maybe even heading towards the first step on the path to getting sorted, the Government goes and publishes the same expenses that the Telegraph published, but with anything useful blacked out! What mastery of the public mood! What skill! If you could have done one thing to ignite the whole scandal again and simultaneously make it seem to voters that you were totally cynical and didn’t care; that you thought they were complete idiots who would swallow anything; or that you weren’t actually in control of the situation anyway, this was the way to do it.

So, the whole thing has re-ignited once more with a mighty ka-boom! The Telegraph has gained a new lease of life, pointing out that Lembit Opik claimed £19.99 for a comedy wig (and I always thought that was his hair) Ben Bradshaw, technology minister, claimed £20 for a service engineer to plug a cable into his TV, and some nameless Tory apparatchik claimed 1p for a mobile phone call. Once more, we’re in “you couldn’t make it up” land, Toto, and we’re a long way from Kansas. OK, so we are not quite yet in the same league as Iran, where thieves broke into Ayatollah Kharmonyhairspray’s palace and stole next year’s election results, but by God, we’re getting there.

And now Inspector Knacker of the Yard is taking an interest, it’s only a matter of time until one of them does the perp walk. Still, at least Cameron was forced to pay back some of his mortgage, so it’s not all bad news. But given the easy ride he’s been getting from the Gay Gordons of late, he’s still laughing all the way to the bank. Me, I am off down to William Hills to put £25.00 on Humphrey the Cat to be Chief Whip by Monday. True, he’s dead, and he’s a cat, but he’s still got 101 more uses than any current member of the Cabinet.

Duck and Cover

2009-05-22T14:21:00.001-07:00

There comes a point in every news story where it crosses over into the surreal. A point where no matter what you could dream up, reality becomes both funnier and more bizarre than any satire you could invent. Strangely enough, and I have never worked out why - it must be some immutable law of the universe known only unto Stephen Hawking - this apogee in the news trajectory usually involves ducks.

Why ducks? I must confess, I have absolutely no idea. I just know that, for every slam-dunk, knock em dead press release I have ever written over the last twenty years, there have only been two things we have feared, two things that would sink the little barque of our press release in the deep stormy news seas, lost with all hands: the death of a member of the Royal Family, and/or a skateboarding duck.

A skateboarding duck is such a slam-dunk for the "and finally" spot, that you can bet your sweet palookah that if you come up against one, your press release is bound for the cutting room floor. The death of a senior Royal speaks for itself. And of course, if by any chance the skateboarding duck actually contributes to the death of the senior Royal (eg by frightening the Queen's horse at the Trooping of the Colour) well, that's it, you might as well give up and open a whelk stall.

Similar thoughts must have been crossing the mind of the competitors to the Daily Telegraph this week when the MPs' expenses story finally crossed the duck event horizon, with the news that an MP paid £1645 for a "floating duck house".

Judging from the picture, I couldn't actually see £1645 worth of work in it, but in any case, as a duck-related story of public expenditure excess, it pales into insignificance alongside the news that Defra has spent nearly £300,000 on a study that shows that ducks prefer standing out in the rain to floating on ponds. If they'd asked me, I could have told them that for as little as , oooh, £150,000.

It's not been the only duck-related story in the news this week: a banker in Spokane, WA, USA, got up at the crack of dawn to stand underneath a ducklings' nest on some inacessible ledge (maybe he was planning to jump off it later) and catch the ducklings as, one by one, they fell out of it and headed to what would otherwise be a swift demise as duck and pavement met at terminal velocity. He caught and saved every one of them, then shepherded them across a busy road to a nearby lake. Shame there wasn't a shower handy, but at least it proves that not all bankers are bastards. There is one, in Spokane WA, who isn't.

Anyway, once it crosses the duck threshold, even more surreal things start to happen to the story: a Tory MP claims they are all on the verge of suicide (tough shit, you should have thought of that before bleeding the system white) and someone called Anthony Steen says that all this is motivated by envy of him and his big house!

Just for the record, Mr Steen, I don't covet your lifestyle, or your house. I thnk it would be a lot better for you and for us if you were forced to do a fortnight in a tower block in Walsall. I certainly don't want to be you - who would? I envy you the fact that you can use your position to screen you from the realities of life and to be honest I wish I was able to.

But I can't understand why you just don't admit that it's a fair cop.

Meanwhile, I hope that the ducks are OK

Motes and Beams

2009-05-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else, I guess, I have been gobsmacked by the way members of Parliament of all persuasions seem to have been taking the piss with their expenses, going back not weeks, not months, but years with their claims for faux-Tudor beams, foaming moat cleaner, spare tyres for their cat's butler's granny's Aston-Martin, etc etc contd p.94.

Yet, on reflection, I suppose, I have always known - we have always known - that the political class have a featherbedded lifestyle, cushioned from the harsh realities of life, so it shouldn't really come as a huge surprise that, coupled with extremely lax standards of accountability, a certain amount of abuse must have taken place.

But what is staggering is the scale of the problem. As I have said before, I generally deplore chequebook journalism, but you have to say here that, in this instance, the Barclay Brothers’ chequebook has, at least for once in its life, and no doubt to the surprise of any resident moths, been deployed in the public interest. The fact that the owners of the Daily Telegraph, and people such as Rupert Murdoch, probably avoid far larger amounts in tax than the MPs have jizzed out of the taxpayer, is sort of beside the point, for once. As is the assertion that journalists also fiddle their expenses. Yes, we know. But that argument descends quickly to the level of “whataboutery”. So what? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Anyway, as I was saying – the sheer scale of it. We all know about David Cameron’s mortgage and Jacquie Smith’s bath plugs, for instance, but this current scandal is like putting your hand through a small hole in a wall somewhere in the dark and feeling what you thought was a small tassel on the end of a leathery bell-pull, and then discovering to your horror that you are actually holding an elephant by the tail. You sort of think on the one hand it might be prudent to bow out now and let it go, but on the other hand the sheer impressive bulk of the pachyderm deserves a grudging respect.

Elephants, of course, have their uses. While alive, they can haul timber, or carry Nabobs and Mahouts around the Indian jungle, thus saving the rest of us the trouble. Translated to the elephants’ graveyard, they provide useful umbrella stands and excellent piano keys. I’m not sure if anyone is currently working on a publication called “101 Uses For A Dead MP” but if they are, it’s likely to be a slim volume, up there with the Taliban Joke Book and the Spanish Guide to Donkey Welfare.

Because they are going to get slaughtered. Not literally, of course, this isn’t France, where if a similar scandal came to light, their equivalent of Parliament Square would be crammed with burning lorries, rioting students and CS gas, in roughly equal proportions. No, this is England, where we shrug our shoulders and say “mustn’t grumble”! But slaughtered they will be, electorally speaking. This is the problem with repressed anger, of the sort that is seething below the surface of (it seems) the entire voting population right now. It sometimes manifests itself in strange, perverse, unexpected and frankly, sometimes unjust ways. So, all over the UK, come the local elections, hard –working councillors, who conscientiously go to meetings, actually try and help the people who elected them, juggle a workload that would stun an ox, and claim little or nothing in the way of expenses, will get voted down because of the loons at Westminster, because people want to vent their anger and protest, and that process will of course inevitably benefit the demagogues.

In fact, this is probably what makes me angriest about the whole thing. Instead of saying “sorry” about the money – or at least as well as – and coming out with their cockanamie lame excuses about mistakes, oversights and accountancy not being their strong suit, they should also be apologising for undermining the very fabric of democracy and handing victory to the fascists on a plate. Because undoubtedly the beneficiaries of this fiasco will be the BNP and UKIP. It is very easy for the likes of the BNP to do now, in the UK, what the Nazis did in 1930s Germany. Denounce the existing administration as incompetent and corrupt (check); promise to make things better (check) promise to put British workers first (check – they mean white British workers, of course); promise to make the trains run on time (check – well, the only opposition was Lord Adonis, so that was a slam-dunk); and blame scapegoats (in Hitler’s case it was the Jews, in the BNP’s, it’s the Muslims and immigrants). What fascists never tell you, of course, is that once they’ve made the trains run on time, the terminus is always the death camps.

So what are we going to do with these MPs, eh? Those public-spirited stalwarts, who all agree now, in the celebrated quip by Andy Hamilton, that the system was so rotten and so abhorrent they could scarcely bring themselves to milk it dry? Is it enough just to apologise and pay it back, even in those cases where amnesia seems to have shaded over into actual fraud? [On the subject of paying it back, by the way, I don’t really see the sense of this. The Government will only go and blow it on something frivolous like an extra Eurofighter or Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension. I’d rather they gave the equivalent of the overclaims on second homes back as a donation to Shelter].

Is it enough that, in the most widely telegraphed downfall since King Kong brandished a screaming Fay Wray at the passing Curtis Jennys from the top of the Empire State Building, a charmless and unpopular speaker of the House has been sacrificed in the hope that it will throw us off the scent? No. It isn’t.

In real life, of course, it’s no defence to say I’m sorry, I forgot. But we’ve already established that these people inhabit a different reality to the rest of us. If you forget to tell the DSS about a change in your benefit circumstances for instance, you are likely to find yourself being interviewed under caution, forced to pay it all back, and probably fined and or prosecuted to boot. But MPs live in a different world, and I am not holding my breath for any prosecutions. I am, however, and I remain, incandescent over the double standard. Not so much moats and beams, as motes and beams.

Much has been made of the argument that MPs were given tacit signals that it was OK to fill your boots on this tax-free gravy train of a system, because this in some way compensated for a supposed shortfall between an MP’s “basic” pay and that of the grades of equivalent public servants such as head teachers, civil servants, brain surgeons, etc. If that is the root of the problem, then maybe the solution is as simple as – give them a basic pay rise, but take away their expenses. Apart from legitimate business ones. I’ve no objection to them buying a folder from Rymans, but having your moat treated is taking the piss. Seriously.

In addition, I’d also take away their right to vote on their own pay increases, and give it to an outside body instead, perhaps composed of CIPFA, the Office of National Statistics, and maybe even citizen representatives from say a dozen randomly-typical constituencies throughout the land, on the proviso that these people are not members of any recognised political party.

Furthermore, if they do put in an expense which is disallowed, subsequently, then that should be retrospectively taxed as a benefit in kind. Their claims should also be published, in full, in the public domain, at least annually. Finally, to this I would add (to which I return yet again, like the dog that returneth to its vomit) a residence qualification. If you want to represent the good people of Lower Snodbury in Parliament then you should damn well buy or rent a house in Lower Snodbury and go and live there, and have lived there for a number of years before you are even allowed to stand.

The people who point out this disparity – supposed disparity, I should say – also often use this as a plank to support the argument that unless we pay MPs “what they are worth” you will only get rich people being able to afford to run for Parliament, and those of modest means will be excluded. Well, I would just like to say, here and now, that I think £64,000 is a massive sum of money. It’s three times what I earned last year before tax, and I would jump at the chance of being Ancient Geek, MP. There’s only one thing stopping me standing, which is the £1000 deposit. Get rid of that, or reduce it to a nominal amount, then you might get some people who actually want to make a difference standing for Parliament. People who aren’t just in it for the money. True, by-elections and indeed general elections would suddenly sprout whole lunatic fringes of monster raving loony candidates and people like Wing Commander Boakes, of recent memory, who used to campaign by sitting in a deck chair in the fast lane of the A40!

But to me, you see, that is all part of the rich tapestry of democracy. It keeps the big parties on their toes, and it gives the protest vote somewhere else to go, other than straight into the arms of the fascists!

And, it would send a very loud, very clear message to those present incumbents at Westminster, whose idiocy might even now just have let the Hitler Youth into the Reichstag by the back door, that there is more to the governance of this great little country of ours than just turning up every so often and signing for your expenses.

Absolutely Fabulous!

2009-05-10T04:22:00.000-07:00

Oh deary me, it looks like the Court of Public Opinion is in session once again, and this time it was invoked by the lawyer for the continuing campaign for the right of former members of the Royal Regiment of Gurkhas and their dependents to reside in the UK.

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of their case, and personally I have a great deal of sympathy for it (though this is rapidly being eroded by the increasingly manic and shrill ravings of Joanna Lumley) there is no doubt that once again, the Government has handled this appallingly badly and now has a PR disaster on its hands.

I’m not sure whether it’s the Prime Minister’s advisers being just not up to the job (spending too much time composing schoolboy emails about George Osborne and his wife?) or whether it’s Broon himself, the clunking fist, blundering on with his usual world-war-one style detrermination, on, into the valley of death. Or maybe it’s a heady mxture of both. But oh, deary, deary me.

The resistance of the Government is fundamentally cost-based at the end of the day. They are wary of opening up yet another door to let yet another class of people and writing a potentially open cheque to them and their dependents, for ever and ever, amen. They are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Our mistaken adherence to the one sided terms of the European Political Union project, which, in immigration as in so many other areas, hands the UK the shitty end of the stick, means that we are forced to take in every Eastern European Mafioso and Romanian rapist, while the Gurkhas, who – after all is said and done – have demonstrated a willingness to fight, if not actually die for the UK, have at best an indeterminate status and an uncertain future, notwithstanding Joanna Lumley’s efforts.

This situation presents people like Ms Lumley with an open goal. One which they have never tired of netting over and over again in recent days.

What I find surprising, is that no one from the Government has made any effort to respond by pointing out to people that this dilemma exists. The British people aren’t completely unreasonable or stupid. True, potentially rubbishing the EU three weeks before a Euro-election isn’t that good a move, but the Government is going to get decimated by UKIP anyway, even before all this blew up.

If the Government turned round and said “Look, we feel your pain, we share your frustration, we’d like to help the Gurkhas but we’re strapped for cash right now, and we can’t do anything about this Eastern Europe situation because – however much we might agree on principle – we are part of Europe and all that that implies, in terms of jobs, investment and trade” – Well, that at least would be a start.

The only person I have seen even groping towards this type of empathy has been the unfortunate Phil Woolas, who was being sandbagged by Joanna Lumley at the time. He’s not had a good week, what with the duffing up she gave him. I’m not surprised if it turns out to be true that, at least on the alleged evidence of the reporting of his expenses in The Daily Telegraph, he seeks consolation in nappies, tampons, and items of women’s clothing.

Which brings me neatly back to MP’s expenses. Generally, I am not an advocate of “chequebook journalism”, preferring to believe that the truth should emerge in the end simply because it is the truth. But in this case, the Government has been stonewalling over this for six months, spending yet more taxpayers’ money on a rearguard action through the courts to stop us knowing the details of how public money has been spent, and to be honest it serves them right that this has now blown up in their faces, for trying to delay publication until after July, when the house would have risen for the summer, and even if the media had picked up on it rather than the usual fare of Loch Ness Monster stories at that time of year, anyone who might have been held to account would have been on holiday in Tuscany.

Predictably, MPs have reacted to the revelations that we have paid – for instance – to have John Prescott’s loo seat fixed twice (one of the more understandable claims, in my view) with howls of anguish that their data has been infringed and their human rights traduced. Mixed with pious observations that “we did nothing wrong” and “the system is a bad system and must be changed” (to the latter of which statements I always feel the need to add the unspoken words “now that we have been found out”.)

Well, tough.

You are lucky even to have a second home, in a country where people are homeless, let alone one which is paid for and maintained by the taxpayer. If I had my way, I would give you a sleeping bag and a sheet of cardboard and tell you to doss in Parliament Square, until there was not one homeless person left in the UK.

Now stop whining and lining your own pockets, and get on with running the country, which is what we pay you handsomely for.