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So I’m going through all the election leaflets we got this year, all the vapid, patronising and platitudinous crap that’s supposed to convince us to lend our support to this party or that.

And you know what? There’s not a single ‘please’ in this asking (‘VOTE BLAH’ is more of a command, really). Not a single ‘thank you’. Not from red, blue, yellow, green, purple or swastika. Not even in the ‘personal’ one I got from Gordon Brown. There’s your relationship between politics and people.

Ignorant pricks.

The Government has been urged to tackle pensioners’ drinking problems after new figures revealed the number of over-65s admitted to hospital because of alcohol has risen by more than 100,000 in four years.

Anyone surprised? When you look at how we treat old people in this country is it any wonder they want to get hammered?

The BBC has defended a decision not to air a TV fund-raising appeal for Gaza, saying it wanted to avoid compromising public confidence in its impartiality.

Gutless.

Vote for the worst corporation of the year.

Last year, French nuclear supervillain Areva entered the Hall of Pain because in Niger ‘the company-owned hospitals prefer to diagnose the cancers of its [uranium] mineworkers as cases of the deadly HIV virus’ to avoid compensation costs. As they say, no sentiment in business…

Pity poor Digby Jones, former head honcho at the CBI and now former junior government minister. He whined when he took the job, he whined when he had the job and he’s whining now he’s out of the job:

The former Trade Minister Lord Jones told the Commons Public Administration Committee that the job of junior minister was “one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences a human being can have”.

Some us, when hearing his ugly pronouncement on things like the minimum wage, wondered if he was human in the first place. Still, poor Digby. Fancy having a job even more dehumanising and depersonalising than in an Asian sweat shop or a UK call centre or whatever drone tasks him and his corpulent chums want to herd us into. Yes, pity poor Digby.

I’m not sure I understand all the fuss about Prince Harry and his use of racial epithets like ‘paki’ and ‘raghead’. It is, after all, merely an explicit expression of the essential dehumanisation of our enemies (that is, in this instance, brown people) that allows our armed forces to do their jobs without going totally insane and that allows us to skip over the news of Middle Eastern atrocities without doing the same. Harry’s crime, it seems to me, is to openly express the taboo to which we’re all signed up. It’s a psychological defence mechanism appropriate to who we’re fighting at any given moment. It’s a casual, easy contempt that makes it easier to take – to accept the taking of – another’s life when told to by the ruling classes. In earlier days it was ‘gook’ and ‘kraut’ and ‘nip’ and ‘eyetie’. The fuel needed to propel the war machine changes and the inexorable turning of its wheels means that – right now – it’s ‘pakis’ and ‘ragheads’ that we’re using to stoke the boiler.

So I see the Norwich Union is changing its name to Aviva on the back of an advertising campaign which must have cost a fortune. Because nothing is more redolent of the new age of financial responsibility we find ourselves in than throwing cash at multimillionaires like Bruce Willis, Ringo Starr, and Elle Macpherson, don’t you find?

But what does it actually mean, Aviva? It’s like when Arthur Andersen became Accenture and when the Post Office was briefly Consignia before becoming Royal Mail. It’s nice shiny PR bullshit chosen precisely because it’s devoid of meaning. ‘One Aviva, twice the value‘ goes the new slogan, like a rhetorical rice cracker: you can chew on it all you like but you’re not going to get anything out of it.

Aviva. Sounds like Iranu or Uvavu to me. Or, more worryingly, Areva, the French energy conglomerate currently botching nuclear construction projects across the planet and helping to keep Niger at the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index.

Still, you can’t blame Aviva for wanting something more glamorous in this modern, thrusting, misanthropic age. I mean Norwich, it’s so parochial, don’t you find? Not at all global. And Union. If there was ever a time when a company needed to shed connotations of being an organisation that might even think about helping the poor and vulnerable, it’s now.

Imagine the looks on the faces of the hedge funders and investors as Norwich Union representatives begged for their patronage at swanky cocktail parties. I bet some of them were even physically sick.

Update: I stand corrected. Guess what? Aviva does mean something.

The company name, Aviva, is a Hebrew name meaning Spring or Renewal (as in Tel Aviv). It is pronounced Ah-Vee-Vah.

No, I’m still none the wiser either. How that imagery fits with the ethos of a sodding bank is anybody’s guess.

Update updated: Ah. It’s not a bank is it? It’s an insurance company. Not that that’s any kind of step up, morally.

…please. You miserable, idle, misanthropic, dirty, dirty bastards. What is it with people when they can’t take 30 seconds to wash their own shit off their fingers? What are the pressing matters that can’t wait that long? Really, I’d genuinely like to know.

“In case you hadn’t already worked it out – the entire global financial system is predicated on the assumption that you’re an idiot.”

So, I see the undeserving poor are getting more hard-working taxpayers’ money . If that’s what you want to call them and it. I think we can take it that these people at the top with their hands out haven’t been and won’t be treated with the same level of high-handed contempt as those much further down the ladder also needing help.

Of course, the way the small time benefits scrounger is treated – the patronising, the vilification, the incompetence and the depressing – has the dual function of giving petty bureaucrats a frisson of sadistic power and, also, to teach said scrounger not to do anything as stupid and as careless as hit hard times through no fault of their own ever again.

So, here’s another idea for helping solve the global economic crisis. Let’s treat the leading banks just like unwashed dole scroungers. Don’t invite them to Downing Street for high-level talks. Make them walk a mile in the rain to a grubby office where they will be met by the distressingly surly indifference of a claims officer (if that claims officer isn’t off ’sick’). Make the bankers do this at the same time every two weeks. Don’t offer them any advice when they’re there or, if you do, make it ambiguous or just plain incorrect.

Hand the banks’ finances over to undertrained and demotivated staff in a government call centre. Make sure the system is as half-arsed as possible. Delay the payments to the banks for a day or two. When they phone up panicky and asking what’s happened to their much needed money treat them off-handedly. Make sure they know their place. If they can be reduced to tears so much the better. Stoke the crushing uncertainty of it all. Promise to phone back when you have more information but don’t. Send them a payment but make it smaller than promised. Make two payments just to unsettle them further. Insist they can keep the money and then write to them a week later demanding it back. Do it just before Christmas.

If after 18 months this situation isn’t sorted the banks should be handed over to a private sector agency charged with getting the banks working again by all means necessary. They will be paid by results and will receive their money when the banks are working again – whether the agency had a direct hand in helping or not. Again, make sure the staff are undertrained, bored and lacking in any empathy whatsoever. Leave it hanging over the bankers that they could lose their money at any minute.

Start a widespread campaign to plant in the public consciousness that banks and bankers are scum. Find out if any of them are foreign. Shame, shame and shame again. Sodding bankers sitting around leeching off the tax-payer. Add to their already towering misery as much as possible. Apply pressure from which they can’t escape. Make things ten times harder, more long-winded and as frustrating than they need to be. Break these scroungers, in other words. Compensate them by allowing them to get their anti-depressants for free.

The bastards won’t do it again.

Is anyone else noticing an upsurge in spam email purporting to be from your high street bank and asking you to verify your account details and PIN number? I suspect that these emails aren’t from third-party chancers at all but actually from the banks themselves hoping to trap the gullible into ponying up some much needed liquidity.

I see a delegation has been to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer overnight to ask for more cash. I seem to remember that the last large delegation to visit him asking him for a raise – representing teachers, nurses, and other key workers and public sector workers – were told to sod off in no uncertain terms.

Would the banks strike, do you think, if Alistair Darling fails to give in to their demands? Can we look forward to a Winter of Content as smug and patronising banking workers huddle around their braziers on picket lines outside your local branch?

(more…)

I’m not having the best of weeks. Can anyone supply me with whatever it its helps Cherie Blair see the world like this…

She added she liked to think of herself as someone who might be “a role model for people who want to become lawyers”.

Mrs Blair said history would judge her husband, former PM Tony, “very well”.

“He’ll be up there with Churchill,” she argued.

Imagine living in a state of that kind of blissful pig-headedness. Or has she perfected dimension jump technology and this interview was phoned in from a parallel universe? I’ll have some of that if these delusions aren’t drug-induced.

Bloody hell. That’s British manufacturing really finished isn’t it? Apart from illegal wars, call centre workers, minor celebrities and hospital superbugs, about the only thing we’ve produced worth a damn in the last few years has been buy-to-let landlords. We’ve been like a tropical island economy that has only coconuts to barter with. Now it turns out the products are faulty and actually dangerous. They make lead-painted Chinese toys look like lollipops.

And so, the nation owns Bradford & Bingley’s buy-to-let landlords and looks like it will do for some time. Seeing as nobody else wants them and they don’t seem to have much other uses, couldn’t we put them to proper work for the good of the country? You know, community service or something.

They could wear high visibility jackets so the public could see justice at work. We could send them rented door to rented door to explain to nurses, teachers and other key workers why there isn’t enough affordable housing to go around. Send the landlords to rural ghost towns to explain why the local economy is knackered and why the original residents’ children can’t afford to live in their home villages.

Such people are puzzled as to why their prospects are in the shitter and who better to explain it to them than those who helped bring it about?

We are, after all, living in a ’something for something, nothing for nothing Britain’. Gordon says so.

Barclays bank, who announced £7 billion profits this year, have been fined a whopping £50,000 for making creepy phonecalls. That’ll learn ‘em.

‘As a result, we offer a full apology for any inconvenience and distress to our customers that these calls caused,’ said a Barclays drone. Not, you’ll notice however, for the ‘inconvenience and distress to our call centre workers’ whose being treated like shit in automated call centres led to the problem of ’silent calls’ in the first place.

Still, 50 grand, eh?

So Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI, said the bonuses are “a very effective way of motivating employees”. In which case it’s a good job the rest of the country’s workforce manages to get motivated without a £12.6m bonus or hospitals would be full of frail old patients squealing: “Can you change my sheets dear, I’ve had an accident,” and the nurse replying: “Four million quid or you can do them yourself.”

Read the rest

This is fantastic.

Paulie, I salute you.

Everybody enjoying the ultimate triumph of capitalism? Amazing, huh? Who knew that letting a bunch of greedy, immoral bastards run the place would be so successful?

I haven’t witnessed such a stunning ‘victory’ since Gerard Butler was shot with a million arrows at the end of 300.

I suppose its indicative of the times in which we live, and how our language is changing, that words like ‘triumph’ and ‘victory’ can pretty much mean whatever you want them to. Exciting times – capitalism really can do anything.

Anyway, must go and put on another jumper. Go neo-Thatcherite consensus!

Why is it that those who preach the supremacy of the white race are always the worst adverts for it? Fat Nick Griffin with his wonky eye and neckless troglodyte hangers-on, for example. This tit. You can see why they’d feel superior, can’t you?

I mean, take a look at the dicks who ‘tried’ to have a crack at Barack Obama.

The Master Race? Ooh, you look it, lads. That’s Gollum on the right, isn’t it?

The fat, like the poor, will always be with us. They’re not going away any time soon – we and they have reached an accommodation with their existence.

Take the adverts for the anti-chafing cream currently gracing our television screens at the moment. Is it aimed at athletes for who chafing can be a hindrance to optimum performance?

No, it’s aimed at wobbling sad sacks who seemingly can’t waddle to the fridge without crying out in agony because their corpulent thighs and buttocks are creating enough friction to light a camp fire for Ray Mears. Hey fatty, now your parts can glide together like two greased pigs (you and your mother).

Don’t people realised that when they can’t move because their thighs and mudflaps look like burger meat it might, just might, be time for a lifestyle change? You have to hand it to the cream’s manufacturers. They’ve clearly identified that section of the obese population who’ve decided that, in the screaming crimson glow of their red-raw inner thighs and bum cakes, amelioration rather than cure is the answer. Why eat a salad when you can just slake yourself with goo?

Goo you say? Twelve economy-size pork pies and a case of Abrade-B-Gone please, Mr Costermonger.

(Philip has another breakthrough to help us stay on our well-lubricated arses)

D’you wanna be in my gang? One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble. Here’s a Bangkok reporter on the Artist Currently Known As Nonce:

South east Asia is full of child abuse – my travel buddy from Nicaragua was in Cambodia until recently on secondment from the Met police to track them down. But the legislature is so weak and when they are caught and sentenced it is on such weak penalties exposing the permissiveness of sex abuse over here.

I asked my boss why they don’t clamp down harder on these sorts of crimes – the awful truth is, he said, it’s not entirely frowned upon. There’s an argument – held frightenly widely – “what else will these poor families do for money?”. I asked my Thai colleague – “it’s never really discussed” she said.

So that huge Interpol manhunt for “swirl face” teacher Christopher Paul Neil got him 3 years in prison. I’m not saying I know what the right sentence is, but it did seem light given that it included no rehabilitation programme, no monitoring mechanism on release… just recycled out on to the darkest streets of south east Asia where a blind eye is turned to routine abuse.

Reaching out to the universe with crisps…

Attempting to announce our presence to any intelligence that can get in front of the signal by sending them something made by a company that sells crunchy shit in bags is not the way to the maturity of the species.

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The eldest just brought home the school’s latest newsletter. In it the headmaster is asking the parents to stop fighting in the playground. Straight up.

A truly awesome piece of lateral thinking from ‘moderate’ New Labour mouthpiece, Luke Akehurst:

Maybe instead of Labour fielding a candidate in Haltemprice & Howden we should find a Martin Bell type candidate – preferably a recently retired senior police officer, or a survivor or relative of a victim of a terrorist attack, to run under the following 5 word candidate description: “Independent – for detaining terrorism suspects”.

Really, it’s really just an extension of New Labour philosophy – we all have a role to play. We all have our rights and responsibilities. Terror victims, now is your moment. Ask not what the government can do for your pain, ask what your pain can do for the government.

Maybe New Labour could find a nicely disfigured one to front up. Not too disfigured mind, a photogenically disfigured one. One that Gordon Brown can put his arm around without looking too disturbed.

Or how about one still shaking with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? Preferably a woman, who can be guaranteed to break down in tears at a debate. You know, to catch that easily manipulated vote. That’d show those cowardly Tories, I’d wager.

Keep an eye on Akehurst. With a easy way with suffering and misanthropy like that, and a child-like view of the terror debate, he’s got the makings of a future New Labour prime minister.

(Link via BlairWatch)

Update: Akehurst responds to being handed his arse by Rachel North:

I think Rachel’s position just goes to show that experiencing something first hand doesn’t necessarily lead you to come to the right conclusions about how to deal with it.

Those pesky terror victims and their first hand experience not necessarily leading them to the right conclusions, eh? If only we could refine terrorism as a brain-washing technique then no-one would be protesting against 42 days internment.

You see, Rachel is the wrong kind of victim, that is one who refuses to be used and, indeed, one who refuses to be a ‘victim’ full stop. In Akehurst’s universe we have to file her away with the wrong kind of snow and bad AIDS and find the ‘right’ kind of ‘victim’.

Still, the ability Akehurst shows in being able to hold two contradictory positions at once shows further Prime Ministerial credentials.

Update updated: More credentials. Akehurst is a …

Public Affairs consultant (specialising in advising defence and aerospace companies).

Jesus, was he grown in a New Labour laboratory or something? ‘Gentlemen, we have created the perfect candidate…’.

The next person to make a non-ironic and in-all-seriousness comparison between the Nazis and anybody else in the comments on this blog is banned for all eternity from making any other contribution.

It’s not clever. It’s not satirical. It’s rhetorically empty and it makes you look like a tit. That is all.