I’m alive but have much stuff going on in the real world right now which makes one realise just how much of a grotesquely irrelevant pantomime – with almost zero effect on day to day living – British politics really is. There’s nothing quite like it to engender violent teeth grinding disgust, when you’re under pressure in real life, than to watch the Brown-Cameron-Mandelson-Osborne daisy-chain in full cry.

Plus, the fair Victoria finally married me a couple of Saturdays back. And it only took fifteen years of pleading, begging and threatening suicide on my part to get to her to do it. Learn from the master, lads, learn from the master.

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

• David Cameron in trouble for fake German accent Video – Yahoo! News UK – What a cock.
• BBC NEWS | Wales | Tories to end free prescriptions – Doesn't sound like a vote-winner to me.
• Alastair Campbell: not in my name! « Harpymarx – 'Again, when it comes to mental health, not in my my name Alastair Campbell!'
• ‘I feel sick with myself when he touches me’ – Guardian Weekly – Who needs the BNP? part 35,353…
• Spielberg "Cracks Story" For Indiana Jones 5 – Den of Geek – Haven't we had enough bad news this week?
• Questions for the BNP: part four | Pickled Politics – Social and legal impact of a BNP government (cont…)
• The Curmudgeon: The English Progressive Tradition – 'We mustn't change the voting – FPTP is such fun, And causes such hilarity concerning how we're run…'
• Carol Ann Duffy leaps into expenses row with first official poem as laureate – Finally a poet I could get into. I haven't enjoyed a poem since 'Why Patriots Are a Bit Nuts In the Head'.
• How 10p-a-minute government helplines cripple those most in need – New Labour: helping the most vulnerable once again. Did I tell you the Kinnocks have six state pensions between them?

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So a Times journalist works out the identity of Orwell award winning blogger, Nightjack. Nightjack, a police officer and wanting to maintain his anonymity, takes it to the courts, loses, and is outed by The Times who duly crow…

Mr Justice Eady… , who is known for establishing case law with his judgments on privacy, has struck a blow in favour of openness, ruling that blogging is “essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

Bloggers, ‘can no longer be sure that their identity can be kept secret’, it seems. I was wondering if there were any other enterprises which were ‘essentially a public rather than a private activity’. And then it hit me – of course there are – politics and journalism.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, in an attempt to restore the smashed trust in our political system and our politicians, to give us the ‘different type of politics, a more open and honest dialogue‘ he promised upon becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown has said the inquiry into the Iraq war will be held in private and will not report back until Summer 2010 (that is, after the general election).

In parliament today he was unable to say whether the inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses to appear before it or whether they will have to give evidence under oath. Brown did his best to blame the Tories for the way the inquiry will be conducted. ‘The opposition wanted a Franks style inquiry [the inquiry into the Falklands war] and that’s what we’re having,’ he said making it sound like a generous concession to Tory lobbying. You’re all in this one together, lads.

One of the members of the inquiry’s committee is Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. Writing in the Independent in 2003 at the outbreak of the war, he had this to say…

Even if it takes time to dislodge Saddam’s regime, the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East.

Let’s hope Sir Lawrence is better at recording history than he is at predicting it.

Update: Jamie: ‘Let the assistant gravedigger bury the dead‘. There aren’t any words, really. Not longer than one syllable at any rate.

Update updated: A good point from Bob:

But at the end of the day I suspect few will change their opinions because of the inquiry, in public or private. And I’m one of those. To me, Blair either lied on WMD or was conned by the US. Fool or Knave, it makes no difference, both were things for which he should have been made to resign, and if he had some evidence which would persuade me otherwise I’m damn sure he would have put it in the public domain by now.

Updated update updated: Here’s inquiry committee member Martin Gilbert comparing Bush and Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill.

This week is Refugee Week. Like all highly politicised and emotive issues, the use of language used when we talk about refugees is extremely important and worthy of study.

In this case, I defer to Steven Poole in his indispensable book, Unspeak.

Also a threat to the fictionally homogeneous ‘community in Britain were ‘asylum seekers’, those seeking to stay in the country on the grounds that they were persecuted in their place of origin. The term ‘asylum seeker’ had gradually replaced ‘refugee’, shifting the emphasis from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in. It was safe to call people ‘refugees’ as long as they remained elsewhere in the world (as, for example, those displaced by the 2004 Asian tsunami); but as soon as they arrived on British shores they became ‘asylum seekers’.

It’s a process of dehumanisation. You strip any element of compassion by painting refugees as scroungers which has the double effect of obscuring any possible mention of what benefits – cultural and economic – that refugees can bring to Britain. It’s simple, elegant and horribly effective.

Over at Pickled Politics, Jai is compiling a list of 85 questions that the British National Party need to answer…

- Part 1: Role models, affiliations, and policies of senior members of the BNP
- Part 2: The medical, economic and military impact of a BNP government
- Part 3: The social and legal impact of a BNP government

(With more to come)

Yesterday, on BBC1’s Big Questions programme, Jonathan Bartley of the thinktank Ekklesia asked the first one…

No, the Tories are just desperate to rob Labour of its little publicity coup because Sir Alan Sugar comes across on TV as exactly the sort of cock who Tory voters like. His brand of “no-nonsense” nonsense and second-hand rhetoric, and his public affirmation that wealth makes what you say more important, are perfectly judged to appeal to the sort of idiot who thinks David Cameron talks a lot of sense, even though all he does is repeatedly bleat “change” like a tramp in a doorway, and his only stated policy is “to become prime minister”.

[...]

The real problem with Sugar’s new appointment is that it’s such an obvious and grim attempt at populism. Gordon Brown is either so short of ideas or so despises the electorate that he thinks the best way to demonstrate that the government is coping with the biggest business crisis in a century is to make it the responsibility of a man whose day job is telling self-regarding mediocrities that they should take off their Mexican hats before trying to put on their jumpers. A man who has made himself rich, but whose career as a tycoon has gone sufficiently quiet that he’s got time to do TV.

Read the rest…

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

• Primeval dropped by ITV – At last, some good news.
• Stephen Grey on how the MoD is restricting access to conflict zones such as Afghanistan – "We have been lied to and we have been censored."
• Blogoir: Britblog Roundup 226: UK and Europe Edition – Chunky bloggy goodness…
• I’m a Labour sycophantic cock sucker – Don't take my word for it…
• Profile: Nick Griffin – All you need to know about Nick Griffin: he owns two rottweilers named Anne and Frank.
• Beau Bo D’Or » Hazel Blears pleads to keep seat – 'Back to images for a while. And back with a Manchester cliché too…'
• Between the Hammer and the Anvil: You’ll just have to trust me on this… – Farewell to the Encyclopedia Of Decency whose job is done. I think there should be a print version for posterity.
• UK Indymedia – Radioactive Tritium with your Tea? Yes, More Please say Sellafield Ltd – The radioactive Lake District as Alfred Wainwright might have seen it…
• D-squared Digest: Political campaign endorsement – DD names his favourite for Speaker of the House of Commons
• BNP Deputy Simon Darby suspended from City Hall | Tory Troll – What the BNP get up to when given a sniff of power…

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If you would like to send a message of condolence and/or share your memories of poons with his family and friends, please send them to Tim Ireland who is collecting them to forward them on.

If you enter the question ‘is the BNP racist‘ into the Google search engine, and click the ‘I feel lucky’ button…

Right here:

So here we have the edifying spectacle of Hazel Blears with an onion in her hankie and her hand on her heart of stone. After a week of reflection she’s admitted to being ’stupid’. Glad we’re now all on the same page about that, Hazel, if nothing else.

The thing is, one has to wonder if Hazel’s resignation had led to Gordon Brown getting the heave-ho, whether she’d now be turning on the waterworks in public, expressing regret about poncing around the place wearing that look-at-me-aren’t-I-the-clever-one badge, and telling us she’d been ‘thoughtless and quite cruel‘ towards the former Prime Minister.

As things stand, we’re left to wonder just what it was that prompted this crisis of confidence in the usually bullish and never-wrong Ms Blears…

Hazel Blears will face a motion of no confidence next week at a meeting of her constituency Labour Party.

Yes. That would do it.

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

• Liberal Conspiracy » It’s not the immigrants’ fault that BNP voters are badly educated – 'Which schools in the UK do worst? No, it’s not the ones in areas crammed with ethnic minority kids.'
• Blears: My regrets – Manchester Evening News – Watch Hazel Blears beg. It's ace.
• The Stunning Work of Chris McVeigh – Amazing pictures
• Petition to: stop leading tributes to pointless celebrities and to spend more time running the country – We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop leading tributes to pointless celebrities and to spend more time running the country.
• BBC NEWS | Politics | Brown pays tribute to Ronaldo – Sod a bloody dog. SHUT UP AND GET ON WITH YOUR JOB YOU UTTERLY SHAMELESS OLD FRAUD…
• BBC NEWS | Politics | Harman pay gap data ‘misleading’ – Well done Harriet Harman. The issue of pay equality is now obscured by the fact that you're a bloody idiot…
• The water through which we swim (The Quiet Road) – 'Griffin should not be arrested for stating his views. But each time he does so in public, he should be challenged. And each public utterance of racism should be drowned out by a thousand voices in opposition.'
• Matt Wardman: Is the BNP Racist? – What do you reckon?
• Dying of cancer – but Home Office expels her parents – Big hearted New Labour strike again. Who needs the BNP?
• Hazel Blears – Communities and Local Government – 'It may be that it has moved location or has expired and been removed.' Sounds about right.
• Take CCTV out of the classroom – 'On a recent visit to a secondary school in Greater Manchester, I was informed that I would have to have my fingerprints taken if I wanted to buy a sandwich in the school canteen.'

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They Work For You now have every parliamentary speech going back to 1979. Here’s a promising young man giving his maiden speech in July 1983…

I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.

Tony, if you’ll forgive me asking, what the fuck happened?

This is a bloody brilliant piece of work by Beau Bo D’Or:

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

• Liberal Conspiracy » Trying to blame the left for racism – Go read.
• LENIN’S TOMB: Nick Griffin’s near ‘Kilroy’ moment – Look at his stupid fat Nazi face.
• Mark Steel: So this is New Labour’s legacy… – 'What a pathetic "rebellion". The Labour Party is in its worst state for a century and all it took for their leader to save himself was a sentence about finding a vision, and a promise he would "learn to listen". So after 10 years as Chancellor and two asPM he's going to start seeing and hearing. Next time he's challenged he'll promise to learn to crawl and eat solids.'
• Welcome To The North » A whole lot of nothing – Doncaster mayoral protest vote backfires spectacularly…
• Liberal Conspiracy » Cheers Tim, but we already know what Fascists are – 'This entire BNP/Far-Left meme is intended to serve two very distinct propaganda purposes, both of which we should be mindful of and oppose.'
• BNP poll win brings cash and staff – and legal challenges over racism – We should start a legal fund for 'non-indigenous' applicants…
• Simon Hoggart’s sketch: standing space only in room 14 – 'In the chamber, a solitary Labour backbencher was attending the debate on the health bill…'
• BBC NEWS: Brown prepares for crunch meeting – 'The only voices we hear are those laughing sycophantically at the leader's jokes.'
• LabourList.org: Labour must lead the new ‘coalition of the willing’ and take on the BNP – Because that's what New Labour needs right now – Iraq war metaphors
• The Curmudgeon: The Hand of History – 'It is no small achievement to have deported children and cancer patients, to have broken down doors at three in the morning, to have regarded ludicrous contortions about "Britishness" as a matter for national policy, and still to be so ineffectual, crooked and cowardly as to make the BNP seem the better option.'

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When brutality and terror and abuse are government tools, used against people whose only crime is to want to come to this country for a better life, it’s a vital time to fight for the rights of refugees.

It’s Refugee Week from June 15 – 21. There’s loads happening. Perhaps a simple act is in order.

Pass it on.

This isn’t repellent because it’s a supposedly left wing PM that’s the target – fuck Gordon Brown. His crime in my eyes is getting involved with this shower of deceitful turds in the first place, and he’s been up to his nuts in every scam and scandal of the New Labour years. He wanted the premiership so badly he was prepared to do anything to get it, and now he is getting it, good and hard.

But let’s not dance around what we’ve seen with last week’s press circle jerk and shows like tonight’s Dispatches. It’s a naked attempt by a massive chunk of the nation’s ruling class to pin all the faults of the country they created – the fucked financial system, the sleaze-ridden politics, the empty PR machine that is New Labour – on Brown, leaving the rest of them to get on with business as usual.

Read the rest

Dave ‘poons‘ Halligan was an occasional commenter here and a thoroughly decent bloke. A couple of years ago he let me put an honest and hopeful piece from his blog in the Blog Digest book. Sadly, two Saturdays ago, he lost his long fight against alcohol and depression. Rest easy, Dave.

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

• Stumbling and Mumbling: Burnham misses the point – 'If Burnham really wants to “understand” voters, he’d be better off trying to understand why six times as many people abstained as voted Labour. But this is to ask too much.'
• OH FOR CHRIST’S SAKE JUST DO IT, BRITAIN TELLS LABOUR – The Daily Mash – 'LABOUR was today told to just get on with it so we can all have a peaceful weekend without having to watch Nick Robinson jumping up and down like a child that's bursting for a piss.'
• The Curmudgeon: Nice New Chums – 'Daveybloke has just spent a cosy weekend in Warsaw with denizens of the Law and Justice Party, whose Polish initials form the gratifying acronym PiS.'
• ??????????? ???????? – Now wash your hands, Mr President. Vigorously.
• David Turner’s Procrastination Station: One For the Drunks Amongst You – Genius.
• RATS DESERT SHIT GOVERNMENT – The Daily Mash – On what was arguably one of Gordon Brown's better days as prime minister…
• U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally – NYTimes.com – They should have mailed it to the Marx Brothers…

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Yet more people are talking about Alan Johnson’s perfect upbringing. This time, The Scotsman:

Johnson’s back story is as good as it gets. His father, a painter and part-time pub pianist walked out of the family home when he was eight. His mother died when he was 12, and he was then brought up by his teenage older sister in a council house in Battersea.

As good as it gets. The lucky, lucky bastard.

Meanwhile, back in 1968…

Within two weeks, Enoch Powell was to make his notorious “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham. But by then the Labour government had already done more to catalyse racial prejudice than Powell’s rhetoric ever could. In fact, as Callaghan’s biographer, Kenneth Morgan, points out: “From Callaghan’s point of view, Powell’s antics were a valuable distraction. They enabled the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced…”

And it was ever thus. While we’re watching two BNP thugs getting elected to the European Parliament (they enable the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced), the not-at-all-fascist New Labour are quietly getting on with stuff.

Remember Fatou Felicite Gaye and her son Arou, who has ‘post-traumatic stress disorder caused by previous interaction with the Border Agency’, who were picked up by the Home Office in dawn raid, and who were sent to the Dungavel detention centre? They were deported but refused entry to the Ivory Coast because ‘Ms Gaye has no paperwork to prove her identity, and Arouna was born in the UK’. They are now stateless, back in the UK and in the Yarl’s ‘without adequate health services‘ Wood detention centre.

British National Party? Watch and learn, lads. Watch and learn.

The British National Party’s Nick Griffin has just been on Radio 4’s Today programme. How did he choose to launch his first day as an elected member of the European Parliament? By railing against the fact that Friar Tuck in the BBC’s Robin Hood television show is played by a black man. No, he really did.

Griffin was elected last night with less votes than he got five years ago. This isn’t about a surge in support for fascists, it’s about a collapse in support for New Labour. The tide went out and exposed the stinking crap beneath the polluted waves.

Not in my name.

To describe New Labour policies as ‘back of a fag packet’ has, up until now, been a metaphor for their seemingly dashed-off-in-minutes nature, their paucity of ideas and passion. (Plus they make you feel dizzy and nauseous. And give you cancer)

Who knew that when it came to the party’s European and local election campaign strategy, it could actually, literally be written on the back of a fag packet. Here’s John Prescott whining about New Labour’s pisspoor campaigning…

I kept asking the party what was the strategy, what was our message, what was the campaign? I became so concerned I actually wrote to Harriet [Harman]. Her reply was less than satisfactory. These apparently were the ‘messages.’

For the many v for the few
Grow your way out v cut your way out
On your side v on your own
Substantial leadership v insubstantial salesmanship

And that was it.

And that was it. To think they had the guts to use the word ’substantial’.