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.

Oh, boo hoo…

The government has abandoned plans to impose a pre-9pm ban on junk food TV advertising when it unveils its new anti-obesity strategy tomorrow, safeguarding more than £200m a year in TV advertising revenue.

No doubt there will be those who are upset, though I’m not sure why. Anyone who thinks they can appeal to an advertising executive’s sense of morality clearly needs to see a doctor.

You’d have more joy asking it to levitate above Birmingham than expecting the advertising industry to set aside the entrenched hatred of humanity that allows it to be so successful. And as for expecting this government to raise our kids, well, it’s doing such a good job with everything else, isn’t it?

So, what’s the solution? I’m afraid most people aren’t going to like it. Don’t want your children watching adverts trying to sell them an early death? Then don’t let them watch the channels showing those ads.

This might come as a surprise to some but there are television channels out there that don’t show adverts. Apart from that one that shows the Fantastic Four cartoon and Captain Scarlet, the commercial channels aren’t really worth watching anyway, are they?

Take some personal responsibility (remember that?). The kids nagging for a mechanically recovered burger or a bucket of antibiotic-and-abscess chicken? Say no. Go on, try it. Advertising execs aren’t forcing you to watch the adverts or buy the slop. They’re just laughing themselves sick in swanky bars while you and your porcine brood are blaming everybody but yourselves.

I see Guido is using once again more tittle tattle of a sexual nature as a battering ram against the gates of the ‘mainstream media elite’.

All fair enough, I suppose, if you get a rise out of that kind of thing. You know, dragging a kid into your self-promotion.

Except. There are gatekeepers of the new media elite who are also reluctant to open up. People with long memories will remember, a while back, a group of bloggers attempting to ‘dish the dirt on their own’ thinking ‘it would be of huge interest to the public’.

Across blogs, in London and Brighton pubs, it has been common knowledge for years. This blogger is at the heart of the politico-media nexus that constitutes the new disintermediated class.

The blogger who’s skeleton from his past the group attempted to ventilate ran for his lawyer and threatened them with legal action. When attending an interview to talk about the matter, the blogger took along his daddy[1] for moral support (the blogger is 40).

Can anyone remember that blogger’s name?

[1] Update: Or was it granddaddy?. Maybe Guido could clarify for us.

Also, this is from Guido’s ‘about me‘ blurb:

Any kind of reference to Guido’s family [...] is deleted without hesitation.

Couldn’t you just slap him?

The complaining about Gordon Brown proposing an opt-out organ donation system is great. Selfish, pig-headed and self-contradictory whining is always a joy.

Needless to say most of the umbrage is coming from the Right. They might as well be saying ‘Gordon Brown can pry my liver from my cold dead hand’ for all the sense they’re making. They bang on about the ‘murder’ of foetuses by the ‘abortion industry’ but are seemingly willing to stand by and let walking, talking people die because their politics have been offended.

What it boils down to is putting your principles before the lives of dying people. And what’s more, you’ll be dead anyway and won’t even get to enjoy the smug satisfaction of putting one over on Gordon Brown with your clever principles. Because you’ll dead (did I mention that?).

Unless you believe in heaven, obviously, in which case I suppose you could look down and blow raspberries in Gordon’s direction. If they let, smug, selfish, gloating pricks into heaven, that is. And unless you’re expecting an Assumption, you can’t take your guts to heaven either.

It seems that these people would rather take their organs with them to the grave or the crematorium out of some kind of spite. Even more amusingly, others are signed up to voluntarily donate their organs and they’re still complaining. They’re giving their organs when they die but they’re still all ‘Wah! The state wants to own my body! Wah!’

You could sort of see these people’s points of view if there was an alternative use to which you could put a human corpse. I suppose some of the egos we’re talking about would quite fancy being stuffed and put in a museum but they have to take your guts out to do that anyway.

Anybody planning to have their sweetbreads turned into pate to sell for the benefit of their dependents? No, you’re going to have them burned or buried with you unless Gordon Brown extends a bloody claw and tears them from your still warm corpse.

I think this stems from two attitudes. The first one is that mature strand of reasoning that non-ironically equates the state with fascism. You see it a lot on the less fun blogs. Sure, it might be a good idea and think of the lives that will be saved, they seem to be saying, but it’s Gordon bloody Brown’s idea so it must be shit, the one-eyed mental nazi.

‘It strikes at our relationship with the state,’ they say. Well get this: You can’t have a relationship with the state when you’re dead. You can’t assert ownership over your own corpse. Why? Because. You. Are. Dead. What other freedoms would you like to exercise after you’ve shuffled off? I take it you’ll be putting your favourite songs on your iPod to take with you as well? It’ll be as much use to you as your liver.

Do you really not have anything else to worry about? I’m more worried about the horrifying, demeaning death I’m likely to suffer at the hands of the NHS than what they might do to my corpse once I’ve screamed my last.

The second attitude is the weird way we regard dead bodies in this country; that they are sacred relics to be cherished rather than the empty shells of people who have gone. It’s an idea you seen romanticised in films where the hero screams ‘Noooooooo!’ over the (beautiful) corpse of his deceased love.

Respect for the dead has always struck me as a strange idea particularly when you see how little respect we have for the living. The dead should have dignity we say, as if there’s any dignity in lying around stinking and farting (just ask Chris Moyles.)

Both attitudes are perverse in the extreme and reflective of the implicit (rapidly becoming explicit) immaturity that’s taking this country back to the Middle Ages at a dizzying speed. Maybe these people just haven’t been shown enough footage of cute ickle children dying for lack of available organs. With a Snow Patrol song played over the top. That should sway them, surely?

Update: I like this. What’s he going to do, come back as a zombie to stop them stealing his precious guts? Hunt the recipients down one at a time? How else to enforce this blogging bravado?

Update updated: Now cross posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

Dear Mr Woolworth

IT. IS. JANUARY. THE. BLOODY. SEVENTH.

Lots of love

Justin x

I love technology, I really do. I’ve got my iPod, digital camera, DVD player, bittorrent, mobile phone, tiny remote-control helicopters, blah, blah, blah. We really do live in the future. I first listened to the Beatles’ White Album on my parents’ radiogram some time in the early 1970s. Now, I carry those songs around in my pocket.

And now I’ve got my PVR - Personal Video Recorder. It’s basically a Freeview tuner bolted to a hard disc drive. You set the timer for a programme using the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and the box records that programme onto the hard drive for later viewing.

Except, what’s the point of an EPG that says a programme starts at X o’clock and ends at Y o’clock when the programme doesn’t start at X o’clock and end at Y o’clock? Or rather, what’s the point of a broadcaster who can’t begin and end a programme at the advertised time? It’s just as well bomb disposal experts aren’t so cavalier about time keeping. Imagine Olympic sprinting if everybody could start when they bloody well liked.

Video Cassette Recorders were clunky and the playback quality was naff but at least it would have recorded the end of ‘Three Men In Another Boat’ the other night and not cut out just before Griff Rhys Jones finds out how much his boat is worth. (I’m not proud I recorded TMIAB but I quite like Dara O Briain and it was the visual equivalent of Horlicks that brought my heartbeat back down to a safe level after having been to see I Am Legend.)

If I have to endure another session of tears from the kids because the PVR has clipped the end of Doctor Who or Robin bastard Hood, I’m going to find the home phone number of the Director General of the BB-shitting-C and phone him every time it happens so he can endure the lamentations of my children as well.

Like a government that was never going to be able to clean up the street of Basra when it couldn’t even scrape the dogshit off the streets of Brighton, surely we’re unlikely to see the cure for cancer (and, more importantly, jetpacks and flying cars) until we can get a television programme to begin and end on time?

I despair:

After six years of childless marriage, John and Cynthia Burke of Newark decided to adopt a baby boy through a state agency. Since the Burkes were young, scandal-free and solvent, they had no trouble with the New Jersey Bureau of Children’s Services—until investigators came to the line on the application that asked for the couple’s religious affiliation.

…

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes’ right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being.

It’s the Christian thing to do, apparently.

(Via Graham Linehan)

Ahem: I would have despaired if I had been born when Judge Camarata made his judgement. In 1970. Always read the small print.

(Ta to Joe in the comments.)

All of us should be heartened by the news that Tom Kelly, Tony Blair’s former official spokesman, has been awarded the Order of the Bath.

It was Kelly’s job to read aloud to journalists from pieces of paper handed to him by government spin doctors and to occasionally slip the metaphorical stiletto between the ribs of potential political threats. It was Kelly who memorably described Dr David Kelly as ‘a Walter Mitty‘ type. Kelly (Tom) found it in his heart to apologise for the remark after Kelly (David, Dr) was dead.

That such modest talents should be enough to earn a medal for chivalry (the temptation to use quotation marks around that last word was almost too much to resist) is a rallying call to the rest of us toiling away in obscurity.

The enobling of Kelly (Tom) demonstrates that fame and fortune are within the grasp of anyone with the reading skills of a seven year-old and the ability to administer a put down to people whose abilities dwarf your own. Tom Kelly was, in a final analysis, a blogger attaining greatness.

Fly my pretties, 2008 is ours for the taking.

Jesus wept:

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn’t understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some. Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

The immediate response is to laugh when the true response is to ask: how can this be right? How is this allowed? Of late I’m trying to be nice, I’m trying not to be negative, I’m trying to make suggestions. But, I’m sorry, two generations of education ministers should be dragged out this very night and horsewhipped.

It’s the 21st century. We’ve got huge brains and opposable thumbs. We’ve barely begun to explore our potential as a race. We should be on Pluto by now. But no: we’re stuck on this rock, the gears jammed in reverse. I’ll say it again: we’re on the cusp of a new Dark Age.

(Heads up from Eugenides)

Update: A fair point from Jamie:

[U]nless you think it’s the job of education to train stupid people to know just enough to make stupid bets, then the fault isn’t really with the education system. The scandal here is that the state promotes the exploitation of stupidity by licensing a lottery system in the first place.

As we all know, the Little Britain pound is big money. Buy British. British Jobs for British Workers. No element of our lives is immune to an attempted appeal to knee-jerk nationalism. You’ll never go broker appealing to Billy Britain.

Take the Southern Electric representative who just knocked on our door trying to get us to switch our power supply to his company. To say he wasn’t going to take no for an answer was an understatement. When he finally saw he wasn’t getting anywhere, he asked which supplier we were with. Upon being told we were with Scottish Power he replied:

You know they’re Spanish owned now, don’t you?

(Because light bulbs glow that little bit brighter with good old British electricity, don’t you know. Because you don’t want your money lining the pockets of avaricious Spanish businessmen when it could be lining the pockets of avaricious British ones.)

And with his appeal to our patriotism also falling on stony ground, he was gone. I wonder if appealing to British nationalism is in the training manual.

Last night, as I cracked open my eighth can of lager and shoved the final piece of pizza into my gaping maw, I turned to my partner and said, ‘you know, I think I might be sleep-walking into an obesity crisis‘. Sleep-walking. We sleep-walk into all kinds of things these days - a surveillance society, environmental catastrophe, financial meltdown. It’s terrifying the things we get up to when we’re asleep. Pass me a Red Bull.

In this instance, it’s not my fault I’m a fat drunk; it’s my genetics. It’s not my fault I’m tired and apathetic; it’s society’s for giving me a cushy job and big pies. It’s not my fault I’m a lazy schlub unwilling to get off the couch; my body’s designed for harder times - it’s the latent caveman in me.

I like crisps. Walker’s salt and vinegar to be precise. Very nice in an egg mayonnaise sarnie. Not too often, mind, just the odd bag now and again. Or rather I did, because now they’re shit. Because parents couldn’t stop themselves pushing bag after bag after bag of those cholestrol time-bombs into their swelling offspring, Walkers had to change their crisps by reducing the saturated fat content by 70 per cent. And now they’re shit. Because a swathe of British parents couldn’t stop themselves from abusing their children, my crisps taste like shit.

You know, I quite like my nanny state. Who doesn’t like free cash and having stuff done for them? Why modify your own stupidity when you can carry on before with an easy conscience that someone else is looking after your children’s welfare? As if the stupid, bovine, corpulent parasites that seem to constitute the majority of middle England these days didn’t have enough excuses to continue their mewling, rapacious, whipped cream flecked self-destruction disguised as you’ve never had so good stack it high sell it cheap all you can eat good times.

Telling fat and lazy Britons that they’re fat and lazy because they’re no longer chasing gazelles out on the savannah has to one of the most stupid things I ever heard. It’s as facile as the bit about blokes loving a barbecue because deep down they miss being hunter-gatherers and sitting around a fire in a cave. Can everybody please grow up?

I’m fat and lazy because I eat and drink too much and exercise too little. A child could grasp it - between gobfuls of cake, obviously. It’s a simple case of inputs and outputs. You put in more energy than you burn off and you get fat. Try tweaking the levels of one or the other to get them to match. Bringing our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncles Ig and Ug into it just syphons off a bit more personal responsibility from a population that could do with a big heavy spoonful of the stuff. And then being hit round the head with the big heavy spoon.

Unless, with all this talk of our ancestors’ genetics, the plan to get us all fit and healthy is to release the inhabitants of Chester Zoo and give us each a spear. You can sign me up for that.

Exciting times for Star Trek fans. The prequel, showing the first adventures of a fresh from Starfleet Academy Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty and the rest, has been cast. Our very own Simon Pegg gets to be Scotty.

It’s sure to be a tense, roller-coaster of a movie with plenty of jeopardy and an ending that I’m sure nobody will be able to guess. Anyone care to bet which of them won’t survive the battle against the villain, Nero?

Well, it pays to think ahead in the current climate:

The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales have attended the dedication of the new national Armed Forces Memorial.

…

There is room for 15,000 more names to be carved on the Portland stone walls of the memorial, at the National Memorial Arboretum.

(Via Ed Rooksby.)

Dear Sky News

Thank you for your press release hawking your hilarious political Top Trumps. It has been filed away in the usual place. I was gratified that you obviously took the time to look around my blog before including me in your mass unsolicited mail-out.

You missed this however. Oh, and the political ethos of this blog that would suggest, even to a particularly slow child, that I would rather place my generative organ in a bacon slicer than help shift product for Rupert Murdoch.

On the up side, however, I must praise you for elevating British politics to the level of a card game and boiling down the defining characteristics of our leaders to their looks and charisma. Democracy is safe in your hands.

Love

Justin

Former New York mayor and US Republican presidential ‘hopeful’ Rudy Giuliani’s been in town and dissing the NHS.

Speaking at an event at a London hotel, he said: “Healthcare right now in America - and I think it has been true of your experience of socialised medicine in England - is not only very expensive, it’s increasingly less effective.

“I had prostate cancer seven years. My chance of survival in the US is 82%; my chance of survival if I was here in England is below 50%.

I think he probably ‘misspoke‘. What he, of course, meant was:

A prominent politician’s chance of survival in the US is 82%…

I’d be interested to see, to pluck an example at random, the survival rates of black men from New Orleans having no medical insurance. It’s a question of who you are, I would say.

A bit like having a dodgy ticker over here. One imagines that if Gordon Brown were to wake up this morning with a prostate gland the size of a grapefruit, his chance of survival would be considerably greater than 50%.

Garry Bushell, 21st Century Boy:

‘I think there are a lot of things to put right in this country before you go around preaching the gospel of perversion,’ he said.

Yes, like tying up bottom-feeding old never-weres in a sack and dropping them in the Thames, for starters.

Homophobia, as we all know, is largely based on a misplaced narcissistic rape anxiety. But what’s Bushell’s excuse? Surely even he can see that no self-respecting gay man would look at him twice? Is it the nagging horror that he might enjoy it, perhaps?

(via Larry)

One of the advantages of living in a modern society, as opposed to say, Athens in 500 BC, is our flexible approach to refuse collection.

Brighton City Council, for instance, have taken to the not unreasonable policy that, should your wheelie-bin be full, any excess refuse bags placed beside the wheelie-bin will be ignored by the refuse collector and left to rot. (And yes, I do sort through my garbage like a starving racoon to separate out the glass, plastic and paper).

That is why, at 3.15 AM this morning, I was woken by the sound of not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE urban foxes having a violent and protracted Mexican stand-off over the (double-bagged) chicken carcass I put out yesterday. A truly unique sight, I hope you’d agree.

Now, I love foxes. There are loads of them round here (clearly). Amazing animals. I spent a very pleasant hour watching the five little pranksters foxy-boxing, howling at the tops of their little lungs and generally trying to tear each other to bits.

But when you knock on the window and all five brazenly stare up and don’t move, their minds clearly fixed on the prize, you have to wonder how far we - and specifically the abject Brighton City Council - have progressed since the Cretans invented the landfill site in 3000 BC.

And that’s why I’m knackered and feel like I want to thrash a council representative this morning.

(See also Seagulls. This year’s incessantly squawking and rutting contingent seem to have finally buggered off from the roof. Looks like we’re going to have to give the seven-year old the ‘where do babies come from’ chat before they come back as I suspect my ‘oh, she’s just giving him a piggy back’ excuse is wearing thin.)

Rhys Jones was in ‘the wrong place at the wrong time’ say Merseyside police.

Now forgive this crusty old liberal, I’m not an expert on police procedure after all, but surely it was the twat with the gun who was differentially positioned and temporally challenged?

Good to see David Cameron’s now customary fat-headed response to the issues of the day (in this case the Learco Chindamo affair) getting both barrels.

It’s just a shame that New Labour, still never knowlingly outflanked on the Right by anyone, weighed in with their own fatuous response. Jack Straw leapt aboard the bandwagon so nimbly you wonder if he missed his calling as an Olympic hurdler.

The thing is, with re-offending rates amongst Britain’s ex-prisoners astronomical, a more humane and thoughtful government (of whatever political stripe) would have taken the opposite tack.

By any measurement, Learco Chindamo is one of the success stories of the modern prison system. A violent murderer who entered prison 12 years ago ‘unable to read or spell his address when he started his sentence’, he has expressed remorse for his crime, gained GCSEs in maths, English and art and is described by the deputy governor of Ford prison as ‘a changed person who would prove himself worthy of trust’. Chindamo should be held up as an exemplar of what can happen when prison works as it should.

But no, the retributive flavour of the mix isn’t strong enough. We need a dash more. A ravening, spittle-flecked media, interested in nothing more than shifting product, yank on the politicians’ chains to get them to do the heavy lifting. Which they duly do for fear of slipping a few votes in the super-marginal constituencies. Why don’t we just do away with Parliament and have all decisions of importance made by a board consisting solely of newspaper proprietors? By which I mean, they make those decisions already but let’s have some transparency and stop insulting everyone’s intelligence, shall we?

The Home Office’s case against Chindamo seems to be that, ‘while it was unlikely that Chindamo would reoffend’, his very existence as a free man poses a risk to public safety as a third party might be tempted to have a pop at him. Using that logic, why aren’t all of Britain’s nonces under lock and key to protect them from fire bombs and poorly spelled placards? Why aren’t Chris Moyles, Alastair Campbell and Rebekah Wade in the pen?

It’s Chindamo’s ‘notoriety’ that marks him. But who stoked that notoriety, Chindamo himself? He seems to want to keep his head down, atone and reform. How about the likes of the hacks who chased him earlier this year when he was on day release? Or headline-starved MPs and their echo-chamber hangers-on?

In the middle sits Mrs Lawrence, yet another victim of the drive for newspaper sales and political populism. Neither of the parties pulling her this way and that give two shits about her grief or her dead husband. She’s not so much attempting to ride the raddled tiger as trying to fight off two at once while they attempt to have their filthy way with her. And they won’t phone in the morning.

Update: This is very good.