My administration will hit the ground running…

Day 1: If you vote for a political party because a dead soap opera character told you to, you will lose your vote. And your prefrontal cortex.

CAN EVERYBODY PLEASE STOP BEING UTTER BASTARDS FOR ONE SODDING MINUTE?

As Shell and BP both reported a sharp increase in first quarter earnings, industry experts said drivers who are currently sitting in a queue outside a petrol station in Scotland waiting to pay £1.25 a litre would soon work out the connection.

Read the rest

Following on from excellent work by Blairwatch, Unity has a fine piece up at Liberal Conspiracy about the links between the 7/7 ‘truth’ movement and self-confessed Holocaust deniers.

Go and read the whole thing.

So I’m listening to XFM. I’m not proud of it but there’s very little good on the radio of a Sunday lunchtime. Some spotty herbert sends in a text to the presenter:

What was that rubbish you played after the Ting Tings?

‘That rubbish’ was Young Americans by David Bowie.

A House of Lords committee has reported on the impact of rising numbers of right-wing thinktanks on people’s economic well-being. They found that the benefits of such bodies had been overestimated.

Inquiry chairman Lord Wakeham said: ‘Looking to the future, if you have got that increase in numbers and you haven’t got any economic benefit from it, you have got to ask yourself, is that a wise thing to do?’

Shadow home secretary David Davis said the peers had shown ‘unequivocally that the benefits of the current thinktank policy to ordinary UK citizens are largely non-existent’.

We all had a good laugh, me included, at all those riot coppers piling into Blackstock Road in north London the other day. The Daily Mail - The Daily bloody Mail - of all people called it ‘Operation Overkill‘.

Well, here’s the punchline.

Late last summer I had to slap away the marrauding hands that grabbed at my thighs and my bag whilst voices hissed at me that I was a XXXX-sucking XXXX English dirty whore who needed to be taught a XXXX-ing lesson.

…

My tolerance for bullies, criminals, racists and liars is at an all-time low these days. I want my neighbourhood back. This is a very good start.

Overkill? Nowhere near. I hope they were shitting themselves.

Well, slap my thigh and call me Roger, you’ve got to hand it to them. This is amazing. So amazing, I almost danced around the room in elation at being alive to see such a thing. Honestly and truthfully, this is one of the most stupendous, awe-inspiring things I have ever seen.

You thought the Blair years saw the pinnacle of high-handed contempt for human life masquerading as political economy? Of moral bankruptcy. Of the pathology that can turn away from human suffering. WELL GET THIS, BABY:

Money set aside to clear landmines and remove arms from conflict zones is to be raided to pay a private defence contractor to keep Tornado jets flying in Iraq, according to a confidential memo seen by the Guardian. The Ministry of Defence plans to pay BAE Systems from the multimillion-pound Conflict Prevention Fund - which covers projects such as destroying weapons in Bosnia and landmines in Mozambique - to subsidise the £5m-£10m cost of servicing each of the six planes.

See what I mean? Read it again:

Money set aside to clear landmines and remove arms from conflict zones is to be raided to pay a private defence contractor to keep Tornado jets flying in Iraq.

GODDAMN. You’ll tell your grandchildren about this one. Doesn’t it make the head spin? They’re going to take money used for conflict prevention to pay for conflict permission. They’re going to divert money allocated to saving lives into taking them instead.

Imagine the twisted, stunted, mutilated, suppurating morality of the people who came up with this. Picture that instead of going home, getting into a hot bath and opening a significant vein or two, they kissed their children, ate a good dinner and slept the sleep of the just.

I mean, what next? Making a woman who turned a blind eye to child abuse Children’s Minister? Oh, I forgot, they already did that.

But wait, this is a good bit:

Defensive news briefs are being developed to counter adverse media comment.

Translation: Yes, we know we’re massive bastards, but we need to persuade the media otherwise.

I don’t doubt they’ll succeed.

You know, I once said that I refused to believe that this government was truly evil. What a naive, ingenuous fool I was. If Gordon Brown were to go on live television tonight and pull off his mask to reveal himself Satan, I doubt many would turn a hair. The Daily Mirror would still say ‘at least he’s not a toff like that David Cameron’.

I could go on about this all day and there’s a very real possibility that I might.

From this angle, one suddenly wonders whether the Conflict Prevention Fund isn’t merely a job creation scheme:

The UK’s Global Conflict Prevention Fund has helped to destroy over one million weapons around the world in addition to providing advice on stockpile security and management.

Get rid of the old ones so the likes of BAE can make shiny new ones. War! Huh. Good God, y’all. What is it good for? Well, it’s quite good at fostering corruption in the name of the national interest. BAE shareholders, yes, it’s quite good for them. The deformed egos of small and otherwise mediocre and unremarkable men, it’s just what they need.

Say it again.

(Via Philip)

This is a capital idea:

Senior military commanders, MPs and families of service personnel killed in war have lent their support to calls for an Armed Forces Day to be created.

Just the ticket, I think, for boosting morale. Sure, we can’t send them to war properly equipped and we can’t look after them properly when they’re injured and maimed. We can’t run the inquests or look after their families properly when their sons are killed. But let’s have a day to cheer them all up.

Can I be the first to divert this bandwagon slightly and also ask for a Coal Miners Day as well. And a Steel Workers Day. Call centre workers have a shitty time of it so how about one for them.

Credit card users and mortgage payers and other brave consumers of usury services deserve recognition as well. Let’s face it, without them this country is well and truly knackered.

We should probably add buy-to-let landlords to the list. God know, apart from illegal wars and corruption, they’re about the only thing this country produces these days.

Our brave boys might be fighting for democracy in Johnny Arab Land but docilely propping up Gordon Brown’s rickety reputation for economic competence is the real battle of our generation.

I’m in a bad mood today and reading the papers really hasn’t helped. I mean, take a look at this:

SCHOOLCHILDREN are to be encouraged to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen and promise to obey the law in ceremonies similar to those for new immigrants.

I have to do enough deprogramming of my kids when they bring religion home (you try placating a three year-old who’s wondering why King Herod killed all those babies at Christmas) without their schools turning them into royalists as well.

Still, it’s an excellent way to entrench that festering sense of injustice and the ‘know your place’ ethos that will be New Labour’s true legacy. That it’s luck and privilege not hard work that get you where you want to be.

I thought we lived in a ‘meritocratic’ (spit) society, but no, we’re still persisting with this notion that people are worthy of respect because of who their parents were. The last time I looked at the calendar it was 2008, not 1008.

Now I’m going to have to explain to my children that the reason we’re not rich and universally adored is because their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather didn’t have the foresight to raise an army and slaughter thousands or blow Richard the Lionheart.

I’d just like to say that if you get drunk all the time because celebrities do it, or take drugs because celebrities do it, you’re a cock.

With this post, I think Flying Rodent achieves the perfect example of Hegelian dialectic:

I firmly believe that the world is the way it is because a large number of people like it that way. All this misery and paranoia makes no sense to me, but people keep telling me it’s perfectly reasonable, so there must be something in it.

Being British, of course I love animals far more than people. I’d be a fool to admit otherwise. Last winter somewhere around 25,000 pensioners died of cold but we can at least comfort ourselves in the knowledge that the vast majority of Britain’s pets were tucked up toasty warm.

But even I was shocked at the massive outpouring of emotion over the marine chucking the puppy over the cliff. If the dog was alive, and that’s by no means certain, at least its end was quick. Not like Manadel al-Jamadi’s, for instance.

Google his name, and you get 7,210 hits. ‘Puppy off cliff’ gives around 8,000 hits and the story only broke yesterday.

But anyway, US marines + puppies = bad, US marines + people = not so much. I haven’t spoken to my elderly grandmother for a few weeks but the gerbils are fed and watered.

(A thought: if those marines say de poor widdle puppy died while being water-boarded, they might get off.)

(Another thought: The way this story has shot up the Google search engine rankings with the number of people linking to it is amazing. If I were the Pentagon, I’d call the dog Abu Ghraib. That way whenever anybody Googled the prison, they’d get the sad, sad story of the poor puppy and not the photos of sexual humiliation and torture. Instant air-brushing of history.)

Update: How about this for a comment about the video:

Wow. I hope he got shot in the face later that day.

I think it’s past somebody’s bed time.

I don’t know about you but watching this video of a man carving the figure of a baby has really made me see the error of my ways on abortion. What a monster I was.

And then there’s this one, likening abortion to workplace bullying:

Because having an abortion is just like being bullied at work, isn’t it? At least it probably is if you fall into the clutches of this stripe of hectoring anti-abortionists. Their message is so simple, so effective. Sorry, I meant simplistic effluent.

Watching the current crop of prominent conservative bloggers discuss abortion is so deeply dispiriting. MP Nadine Dorries will be along shortly and the discussion will degenerate to the level of a chimp’s tea party. The term ‘abortion industry’ is less a tawdry euphemism and more a metaphor for the grinding, futile circularity of this debate when it’s in the hands of these people.

Where are the likes of Andrew of Non-Trivial Solutions and Blimpish, both of whom are long gone? They were civil, coherent, willing to defend their positions with honesty (both intellectual and moral), engaging and - very importantly - likeable. I like to think they slipped off to a parallel universe where they now find themselves British political blogging’s leading conservative commentators.

(Via Westmonster)

A problem that, up until now, had no solution:

British people perceive themselves to be much slimmer around the waist than they really are, research shows.

Experts fear that by failing to recognise their increasing girth some people may be missing a key warning sign of developing type 2 diabetes.

With tight trousers clearly providing no clue, help is at hand. I’m about to patent a device that will end the misery of Mis-perceived Girth Syndrome. It’s cheap, portable, easy to use and easily produced. I call it the Gauging Strip.

What’s that? We already have them? Then sodding use one.

I see fearless champion of freedom of speech Guido Fawkes* is defending Wikileaks. The website is a repository for documents that might otherwise be suppressed.

This is where Guido uploads important documents (like that Northern Rock memo) and others they don’t want you to see…

I’ve got some important documents that ‘they’** don’t want you to see. Would Wikileaks be the best place to put them for safe keeping, do you think?

(Guido will also be speaking at the Manifesto Club - that bolt-hole for the some of the Living Marxism atrocity deniers - on Tuesday. ‘Guido will be putting the case for the freedom to offend everyone except the truth’. Would anybody like to go? I imagine we could make the Q&A session afterwards an interesting one.)

* Number of legal proceedings initiated against other bloggers: 2
** ‘They’ in this instance being Guido Fawkes.

BRITISH Gas has said its 500% increase in profits is the result of charging people much more money to buy gas.

Unveiling its annual results, the company insisted the £480 million profit jump vindicated its strategy of making it a lot more expensive to cook food and keep warm.

Read the rest

(See also Philip)

The Daily Mash:

IF Britain wants to pay more than £15 for a DVD player then it may as well just go ahead and boycott the Beijing Olympics, the prime minister said last night.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the people opposed to the proposed change were honest, and said, “I feel very strongly that this is a counter-productive measure because I want to keep all my money, even though I’ve got more than I could ever spend because I want it and I don’t care about your health service because I own my own intensive care unit so that money’s mine.”

Which is why non-domicile tax status is one of those modern phrases, like the names given to various disorders ascribed to unruly kids, that makes you think “Oh that’s what they call it now is it? Why can’t they stick with its simple old-fashioned name, of being a selfish, greedy bastard?”

read the rest

Via James and courtesy of the New Statesman (what were they thinking?), you now have the opportunity via an online questionnaire to tell BAE Systems what you think of them.

There’s a box at the end of the questionnaire for you to add detailed comments and a lucky responder drawn from the hat will have £1000 donated to a charity of their choice by BAE. I went for No More Landmines.

(I would have nominated Campaign Against Arms Trade but because being unhappy about people being bombed and shot is against the rules, the organisation is not allowed to have charitable status.)

Oh, what a heady whirl it is to be European Commissioner for Trade for Peter Mandelson! Bono, Bill, Gordon and Miliband major. Mwah, mwah. Peter could have danced all night. And still have begged for more. His favourite restaurant? L’Idiot du Village.

If he was honest, I bet Peter wishes he’d been born into the court of Louis XIV. The intrigue, the romance, the unbelievable balls. Then he could have worn a real powdered wig, a dab of rouge and one of those little beauty spots on his cheek. Instead of the metaphorical versions.

As I explore the strange and unfamiliar landscape of global finance, I find myself feeling like the newborn Bambi. I beg information of the more worldly creatures around me but they just laugh at my questions.

How about the unfortunate Jerome Kerviel. The lowly trader wipes out £3.7 billion belonging to France’s second largest bank and is now under investigation by the police and on bail.

What a dick. He made the classic mistake of being a lone rogue trader instead of running with the flock. Jittery traders wiped £77 billion off FTSE share prices last week. But in this instance, they were all allowed to go home to their wives and Porsches. It was the rest of us who were told we’re in trouble.

And how about public sector workers? They’ve been told not to expect inflation-busting pay increases and warned that their demands threaten the economy. They haven’t been called ‘the enemy within’ just yet but give it time. A Sun headline screeching ‘TRAITORS!’ can only be days away.

Conversely, the gas and electric companies have announced inflation-buggering price rises. And yet their profits are astronomical. Quite right too: passing those profits on to the consumer would be madness and very probably communist. Being good capitalists, there’s no question of the privatised power companies threatening the country’s well-being. Gordon Brown isn’t saying they’re threatening financial stability so obviously they can’t be. Customer disconnections are up mind, but it’s probably only poor people who are suffering and they no doubt deserve it.

Thanks God for privatisation. It’s been a boon. A few pensioners might freeze to death as well with a bit of luck, freeing up NHS beds and (if they’re in the nick) much-needed prison places. The fish doesn’t rot from the head down in this country, attrition starts at the bottom. We all know it, we should just have the guts to be honest about it.

And how about Shell’s newly announced annual profits, eh? Wowee! A new record for a British firm apparently. I don’t know about you but I’m swelling with patriotic price this morning. It now costs £40,000 to drive a mile. Or something like that. Looks like war in Iraq was worth every penny, no? If you’re an oil executive, I mean.

Now don’t get me wrong, we have to price people off the roads for the good of the planet and poor people seem the best demographic to start on. Attrition*. They don’t vote, they smell, they squabble amongst themselves and don’t threaten the rest of us unless we’re foolish enough to stray into their enclaves.

No wonder they drink, they’re so poor. Sorry, reverse that. No wonder they’re poor, they’re so drunk. This blog’s compassion valve is leaking again, sorry. No, just think of all the Vauxhall Novas and Ford Fiestas we’re taking off the roads, freeing the highways and byways for school-running** 4×4s.

I don’t know why we don’t simply ban poor people from buying petrol outright and make them dump their money in a huge bucket marked ‘Big Oil’. The effect would be much the same and the rest of us would get to feel a little more superior about our own shitty little lives.

This is all very hectoring I know and I don’t wish to come across as the little boy pointing and laughing at the naked emperor. If for no other reason than the emperor isn’t in the all-together. He’s kitted out with the finest ankle-length mink coat, Savile Row suit and diamond-top cane. You want to see the size of his cigar. And his grin.

* Bless you.
** A new insult. Scowl at your neighbour as she loads her foul offspring into her tractor to drive them half a mile to school. She’s an enemy of the state. Not a drug-runner or a gun-runner, but a school-runner.

There was a spectacular display of false consciousness on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. It happened between Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling and his interviewer Edward Stourton:

Stourton: Could you not at the very least try and introduce some kind of structure which would encourage bankers to think in longer terms? In other words try and ensure the way they make their money stretches over a longer period so you don’t have this phenomenon of people thinking well, you know, ‘by next Christmas, with my bonus, I’ll be in the Maldives for the rest of my life and I don’t really care what happens afterwards’.

Darling: I’m not sure, if you look across the banking industry, it is packed with people who have that sort of attitude. But I do agree with you, whether you’re the board of directors of a bank or you’re a govenrment or anybody else, you want people to look to the longer term and indeed, right across the world, you want governments that are prepared to look to the long term, which is what we’ve been trying to do for the last ten years and will continue to do.

Where to start with these statements so at odds human nature, history, experience and perception? Let’s move swiftly over Darling’s whacko assertion that the banking industry isn’t ‘packed with people who have that sort of attitude’. If it wasn’t, you wonder why so many people want to work in it. At least, unless I’ve missed the announcement proclaiming the banking industry is now a paragon of altruism and profligate selflessness. Just because they’re civil to you over drinks, Alistair, doesn’t make these city types Mother bloody Theresa.

It’s all very well Darling waxing lyrical about the ‘long term’ but he’s been at the heart of a government for the last ten years that’s barely looked beyond tomorrow’s headlines and certainly very rarely any further ahead than the next general election.

One of the reasons that this government is so comprehensively in the toilet right now is that it’s spent all the money. It hasn’t saved for a rainy day. Or even a sunny one. Not one brass razoo. At least not for anyone other than incompetent bankers.

The government wants the rest of us to save for later life but itself has been spending for the last ten years like Viv Nicholson. Don’t get me wrong, I love public investment - we’re not allowed to call it ’spending’ any more in case it upsets people. I just wish we’d invested less in the lavish lifestyles of management consultants.

But really, it’s an expression of staggering naivety to expect people to think of the long term. None of us do really. In the long term we’re all dead. That Stourton would even voice such a water-headed concept marks him more fitting for a job presenting the Cbeebies channel than the BBC’s flagship radio news programme.

No, each and every one of us lives in the short term at the expense of someone else. Resisting instant gratification is extremely dangerous for the economy and thus equivalent to treason. It’s called capitalism and it must have its many losers or else conservatives and libertarians would have nobody to sneer at. Poor people can’t hit back, at least they can’t if you hide behind your desk.

The banker this morning moved some money from here to there and took a step closer to buying his yacht. Long term be damned. That his decision puts someone out of job is neither here nor there. He makes no apology. There must be a loser. There must be a sucker born every minute. Our way of life kills people everyday, we’ve just reached an accommodation with that fact. I’m not happy about but it to suggest even small changes in the systems by which we live is to invite people to shout at you. I’m not an idiot.

The banker is no different from the rest of us. I, this morning, was on my hands and knees looking under the sofa to see if there were any coppers so I could buy a pie for my breakfast. There was. Long term be damned. By moving money from here to there I took a step closer to my pie. Well, I was tuppence short, but the man in the shop was very understanding. That I’ve inconvenienced my future self today instead of waiting until I was really hungry is neither here nor there. I make no apology. There must be a loser. There must be a sucker born every minute. Up yours, future hungry me, I’ve reached an accommodation.

You see? We’re all the same. Banker, wanker, Member of Parliament, thief. Except that it’s only the lowly that should have consciences. The dole scrounger earning a bit of cash on the side must be hounded, a punished and a penitent man. Such earthly considerations are not for the banker and the politician, however. I wonder if they have some kind of lobotomy before entering their professions. Prozac patches? It’s a noble sacrifice, whatever their methods of emotional disconnection. They do, after all, have high, weighty concepts such as ‘finance’ and ‘democracy’ to worry about. You know, the real stuff.

You can’t expect these titans to give a shit about how you put food on the table or whether you’re going to die of cold during the winter of 2030. I mean, what are you, some kind of mental defective? I bet you work for the human rights ‘industry’.

So, Suharto got the funeral ‘they’ thought he deserved. Personally, I thought it would have been more fitting if his corpse had been fed to a pack of wild dogs and the footage put on YouTube, but that’s just me.

Sure, like everybody else, I’ve tried to see the sunny uplands of the cuddlier aspects of the old butcher’s personality, but the view was obscured by piles of bodies.

Still, it goes to show again that if your personal standing is flagging, all you need to do is die to give it a real boost. Or get a serious disease. I’m quite looking forward to getting cancer. Sure, there’ll be terror and screaming and having bits of me lopped off, but I’ll never be more popular.

Say whatever else you like about cancer and death, they have the beneficial side-effect of curing all manner of personality deficiencies. Reputations have a near 100% survival rate.

Update: ‘[T]here may be some controversy over his legacy,’ said Cameron Hume, the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta. Feel that understatement. If only they would bottle it. Just imagine what you could get away with just a few swigs of Bush Administration Patented Rhetorical Restraint.

So, another one cheats us all. At least Suharto, when he reaches the same Circle of Hell where Augusto Pinochet is having a pitchfork repeatedly inserted by some minor demon, can comfort himself with that.

‘We ask that if he had any faults, please forgive them,’ said his daughter. That’s an ‘if’ as big as the Ritz. He had somewhere in the region of 200,000 faults. A third of the population of East Timor.

Like many I imagine, I cut my political teeth reading about what successive American governments got up to in Central and South America in the second half of the 20th century in the name of democracy. You can’t read those histories without also reading about what went down in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran (we helped with that one)…

And, yes, in Indonesia. We help with that one as well: ‘…a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change,’ said Sir Andrew Gilchrist of the FCO at the time of the coup that led to Suharto coming to power.

In Western Democratic terms, Suharto was ‘our boy’. Let us mark his passing.