sympathy voting

So, Hateful Smears has finally fucked off. She is, as this article quite succinctly describes, a cynical, careerist bitch. I can’t pretend I have any time for her. If she really cared about her integrity as a politician, then she would have resigned when it was revealed that she was a tax-dodging fraudster. All her bullshit and bluster mean fuck all when set against her record. She’s a deceitful, self-obsessed shyster and I dearly hope that when the next general election is called that the people of Salford see through her backstabbing cuntery and kick her to the curb.

I’m just enjoying Prime Minister’s Question Time. I was wondering what colour tie that Gordon would choose for his last PMQ before an election. Surprisingly both he and Dave ‘Just Call Me Dave’ Camewrong are both sporting the same fetching shade of light blue. I thought that the PM might rock in an old school, old Labour, red number. Perhaps a way to reach out to the bedrock of the party and remind them that he used to be a socialist.

However I think that perhaps the Labour party are orchestrating some kind of attempt at a sympathy vote. Why not? It’s about all they’ve got going for them. Aw, just look at Gordy-wordy in his Tory outfit and sad jowls. How can you not vote for him? All of his friends are leaving, he’s all alone. Awww…diddums.

Of course it’s hard to sympathise with a Tory government that wants to ally itself with ‘homophobes, anti-Muslims, climate change deniers and Nazi sympathisers‘ in Europe. A move that has been described by senior Tories as a ‘rigid commitment to impotence’. I don’t have kneejerk anti-Tory muscle that twitches whenever I hear one them talk. However I do not trust David Cameron in the slightest, and my dislike is not exactly a secret. He’s got great hair though, which almost enough to mask his complete lack of substance and his inability to form a coherent policy that isn’t based on an opinion poll.

Anyway, one day till the election. I’ve already heard one commentator say that Labour may find themselves ‘going down into the teens’. Now there’s the kind of political scandal we’ve all really been waiting for.

electioneering

My favourite ever election pamphlet (what’s yours? what do you mean you don’t have one?) arrived during the last general election from the Christian Conservatives. I recognised their candidate as the person who had stood for the Conservatives at the previous local elections. However something had changed in the interim, and he had moved away from the cold bosom of the Tories and ended up in the embrace of their more right wing fire, brimstone and damnation brethren. This was explained by the opening line of the pamphlet which told us all about the chap. He was ‘recently divorced’, and so I had some sympathy for him. However the story of his divorce was unwittingly told as he spelled out his manifesto. This culminated in a call for a return of the death penalty for “the two most heinous crimes: murder and adultery.” Ah, I see…

I nearly voted for him anyway, just because I wanted a spiteful, reactionary MP. In the end that’s exactly what I ended up with.

quit living in the past

“Truly, we are living in historic times.” I think that should perhaps be said in Brian Blessed’s voice. Or Rod Hull’s. One of the two. Instead it seems like the BBC’s Political Editor, Penfold’s Dad, seems to be saying it at the end of every single bloody piece to camera he does, but in his own stupid bloody sanctimonious bloody prick of voice. In fact if he did his reports in the style of Penfold it would be far more amusing “Oh crumbs PM…” and so on and so forth.

But yes, we are indeed living in historic times. Except we’re not yet. But on reflection we will be. Eventually. Honestly. And not just because historians will look back on the first few months of this year and marvel at the fact that Biffa Bacon’s Mutha is the most talented person in the Britain. I would write about Britain’s Got Talent, but a) I’ve not watched it and b) Chris TT has done a far better job than I ever could over here. But yes, historic times. Yadda. But they are, if you step back away from the hyperbole and try to gain a bit of distance and perspective.

I remember studying the 1867 Reform Act and it’s effects when I was in school, so it’s not unbelievable to think that at least some of the current shenanigans will of course be debated in depth by bored students sometime in the future. Of course by then there will be far more primary sources at hand, and a historian will merely need to take the disk marked ‘Entire Internet 2009′ and inject it into his eye to find out everything that happened this year, after sifting through 17 brain’s worth of porn. This will of course feature some facts, but mainly three different articles about any given subject. These are ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘I agree with the man who said No!’ Not that anyone will pay attention, they’ll just doodle pictures of the history teacher being fellated by goats or whatever it is that students of the future will do. Possibly lessons will involve actual holographic goat interaction to keep people interested.

The thing is though it’s probably not going to make an iota of difference. At the moment the party leaders are just spuffing their first thought onto the biscuit of electoral reform. It’s quite unseemly really. All of a sudden we’re in a constitutional crisis, but no-one knows why. A cynic might suggest that all of this is being put into the public domain just prior to an election in order to perhaps push a different agenda. Maybe because the main parties are pretty much pro-Europe and it’s the (generally) anti-Europe fringe groups of vegetarians and racists that are likely to pick up some votes. Hmmm. That’ll learn you for not having a referendum to ratify a treaty that is so dull that even the contentious bullet points are the literary equivalent of 17 pints of morphine. And of course the Daily Torygraph hate Europe with the passion of the Christ.

Also, if we get some kind of electoral re-districting it will not be of benefit to the Labour party. Things have gone pretty well for them in terms of electoral boundaries over the years so a move away from First Past The Post or a reduction in the number of MP’s may isolate them for years. Somehow an agenda that is entirely unrelated to the issue at hand has been pushed to the fore, deflecting further allegations about the Tories and enabling Julie Kirkbride to be pushed from her seat with far less fanfare than the resignation of an MP should merit. It’s almost reminiscent of the way that, when faced with a Vietnam Veteran as an opponent in the 2004 election in the middle of a war, the Republicans chose to attack John Kerry for being a ‘nam vet. Ignore the facts, but bluster on as if it’s other people doing exactly what you are trying to hide from actually doing yourself.

All in all, it’s been the ruling party that have been hit worst by all of this, and it’s generally been their own fault too. This would not have happened on Alistair Campbell’s watch. Next month’s Euro elections will be sort of thing that you will need to mention in your essay if you want to get full marks in History in the year 2358.

One possible upshot of all of this is that Scotland and Wales will leave the UK governance and head for Europe. This will of course scupper any chance of this country being anything other than a centre-right elective dictatorship for all time (which is kind of is now, but that’s the fault of the Herr Blair Bunch) But I’m waffling on. I don’t know enough about history to make cogent comparisons to the past, I care little for nationalist politics of any hue and I lost the will to write this somewhere in the middle of the last week. Still, an election next week. I fucking love a good election, I do. I just can’t wait to see the swing-o-meter.*

*Yes, I know that they generally don’t gauge the swing European elections, but they will transpose the results as if it were a general election onto a swing-o-meter. And I will enjoy that bit. From a graphical perspective. I’ll shut up now.

hazel blears: idiot or thief?

Bored now. Really bored. It’s boring. Stop boring me. The whole tedium of MP’s expenses has got to me. At the start it was funny, then it got interesting when Hazel Blears was revealed as tax-dodging fraudster. Then when Andrew McKay was forced to resign it reached a peak for me. I’ve had a long running personal feud with Andrew McKay. By feud I mean that I’ve hurled abuse at his perma-tanned face from the sofa for over a decade. Or once to his face when he was door-stopping at an election, except that wasn’t actually abuse, more just swearing under my breath as I slammed the door. But that’s about it. As feud’s go it’s barely equates to having an argument with your own reflection in a darkened room you’re not even in. However, I’ve won the feud, as I’ve still got a job. Ya boo, sucks to you Mackay. I’ll always remember you in your starring role as a failed Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, anyway.

Since then it’s all gotten a bit meh, really. I was watching the news last night and they were getting all excited about the next revelations. Turns out it was just some bloke claiming thousands for a TV and a massage chair and some preferential housing agreement. Is that it? Pathetic. I was hoping for a sex dungeon, with nipple clamps funded by the tax payer. There’s been nothing of any excitement claimed for so far.No double-ended dildos. Not even a tube of lube. No second home to house the ho train. No mansion in space, circling near the oort cloud. At the very least I would expect someone to have an army of emotionally dysfunctional killer robots. The most ridiculous it seems is Douglas Hogg claiming for a moat, but fuck it. He’s a Tory grandee. If anyone’s going to claim for defences to keep out the great unwashed, then it should be some wizened Tory. At least the proles will be clean, should they breach his barriers. And his lack of contrition has been ever more gratifying. Good on yer, Dougie.

The reaction of the other MP’s though has been worse than the crimes themselves (except for the ones which are actual crimes) Listening to the faux apologies and pseudo groveling got my bile duct twitching like a 6am erection. Watching Hateful Blears waving a cheque around and saying she was going to pay back her debts because it’s what constituents wanted was more ball dredgingly tortuous than sitting through Revolutionary Road. Although, unlike Revolutionary Road, Blears’ unconvincing grovel-a-thon was enhanced by the lack of gratuitous nudity. The fact they’ve all got enough spare cash lying around to pay it back straight away is even more galling. ‘What’s that you say? 16 grand? Oh, I’ll pull it out of my arse for you shall I? I’ll even wipe the shitty notes all over your ungrateful face.’

This whole idea that MP’s are reacting to public opinion is an absolute falsehood though. If any of them actually two tugs of a diseased rat’s cock about public opinion then they wouldn’t have voted for an illegal war. Or they wouldn’t have rigged a public nuclear consultation to support pre-determined results. Perhaps they also wouldn’t have committed to spending £70bn we don’t have on replacing the Trident nuclear subs in the face of overwhelming public opinion. Unless of course they’ve discovered that Sealab has the bomb. Perhaps if they cared about public opinion that much then they would be scrapping the ID card scheme. No, politicians don’t actually care what the public want, unless it might threaten their jobs.

Of course all this ire has been stoked by a fevered press. The Daily Telegraph has long been little more than a Hitler Youth comic book for grown-ups, but now it finds itself seeing it’s circulation increase at a time when print newspapers are going down the toilet, with The Independent not long for this world. They have, as is their wont, been concentrating on The Labour Party to the effect that Labour have been hammered in the polls and the Tories are barely suffering. This has partly been because, as the ruling government, they deserve the most focus. Secondly, as a bunch of supposed socialists they are supposed to be above this. Thirdly, a corrupt Tory is barely news. Two of them have been banged up in the last decade. Finding out they’re on the take is less shocking than the innards of a faraday cage.

Thankfully the government aren’t sneaking out other news under the radar. Like Jack Straw announcing today that, though he had shelved plans for secret inquests in the 2009 justice act, he had also decided that the existing 2005 inquiries act actually covered off most of what he wanted anyway. Not quite the glamour of doing away with juries when it suits the government, but close enough. Nice work Jack. With cameras on every corner, proposals to spy on the internet, logging of mobile calls, removal of the right to protest…well, hopefully we never end up with a despot in charge, as the legislation exists to make their job an absolute doddle.

So, what can be done about it? Well, not a lot at the minute really. Neither of the big two support their grass roots anymore. Their behaviour of late has shown they have nothing but contempt for the entire population – which puts them below the BNP who at least only hate racial minorities. Perhaps it’s time for a new political party. I might stand in the next election, with a manifesto comprised solely of images of Snow Patrol being savaged by rabid porn wolves. It’s not much, but at least it’s something positive to take forward into the new decade.

piggy in the muddle

The other day I made my monthly trip to the post office. There was a really pretty girl behind the counter, and as the mail robot of destiny said ‘Cashier number 5′, I strolled over, and our eyes met, and lit up, as I approached. It could have been the start of something beautiful. Then I pulled out the payment cards I have for a couple of debts and asked her to put a few quid on each of them. I might as well have handed over a list detailing the deviant acts I’d like to perform on her mother. There’s no way you can reveal exactly how rubbish you are with money and expect any kind of sexual frisson from a conversation. As such I had some sympathy for Alistair Darling when he stood up last week and revealed the state of the nation’s finances. Let’s face it, if you stand up and announce you’ve got to borrow £200bn to get out of the mess you’re in, you’re not getting laid for a long time.

But that was last week. Now he might find himself getting a bit of Pandemic Panic Sex. “Hurry Darling, I may have a slight temperature for a few days.” If they close the schools down then all the kids will be at it, as apparently all they do in their spare time these days. I can understand the fear though. At the time of going to press there’s been 20 confirmed deaths from Swine Flu. Or, if you’re reading the papers, there’s been 152 deaths from flu-like symptoms, which is a much better headline. Not that I’m belittling those deaths any more that I would the 36,000 who die of flu in the US every year. Just looking for a little perspective,

If you made the mistake of logging on to any news website at the moment though (the Daily Heil is frikkin’ hilarious – “An armoury of drugs. A global network tracking every new outbreak. Instant diagnosis by phone. We’ve never been better prepared to tackle a flu pandemic… OR HAVE WE?“ a story which continues “If the Mexican swine flu virus turns out to be the Armageddon strain – and for the moment that is still a big if…” Armageddon flu? Really?) you’d be convinced that we’re all gonna die. Even on Channel 4 news a minute ago you’d have been hard pushed to find some actual science or medical opinion. No, just shots of empty airports and news that a stage of emergency has been declared in California. The World Health Organisation simply don’t know what’s going on. However it’s much easier to fill airtime with panic. It’s not that we’re a world full of idiots. I’m not some science dude, but I would like to at least hear from a doctor about this, not just talking head wittering on about contingency this and loss to the economy that. Nah, arses, let’s just sling a little doom and gloom and worst case scenarios and ignore that less than 1% of the cases have been fatal and none of those have been outside of Mexico at the epicentre of the outbreak which may or may not have other genetic influences. Or influenzas.

That said of course, it does all feel a bit like the start of a Zombie flick. Except that no-one’s editing out the dull bits from my life between Natasha Kaplinski’s bletherings and the background of spinning sensationalist headlines. The main worry in that scenario is that I’d be the hero in that film. Perhaps the fact that I’ve eaten so many pigs over the years has mutated my DNA and if I come into contact with Swine Flu, I’ll become Pig Man and I’ll save the world by…erm…hunting for truffles. Seriously, if it is a Zombie thriller, and I’m the star then the world is truly fucked. I’d be rubbish. I wouldn’t even get the girl, let alone kill the baddies and save the entire planet. Unless I save the world by eating all pigs, nose to tail. Could call it “Sean of the Sweetbreads” or something.

Still, we shall wait and see. It may well turn out to be an absolute global catastrophe. Who knows? Well, WHO know maybe. At least we can stop worrying about the fact that the money’s run out for a while and instead look at images of people in Ayrshire with sniffles. I’m not saying that things aren’t going to get more serious – I obviously have no idea. With my luck with medical things I’ll end up with it anyway. I’d just like to be told what’s going on in a simple, straightforward manner, not just be told to stock up on tinned goods.

accounting the costs

As has been shown with their recent laughable attempts to start a blog, the Labour Party have shown that they’re not exactly early adopters when it comes to new technology. Compared to the Facebook savvy Blackberry tweeting St. Obama of Cool it looks like they have just about stumbled across this new ‘wheel’ invention. This week Chancellor Darling and Dear Gordon both took to youtube (don’t they know it’s all about Vimeo now?) to show they hip they were when talking to ‘da peeps’. Now most people were laughing at Gordon trying to do a simultaneous impression of every actor that’s ever played The Joker that they forgot to pay attention to what he said, and the opposition reaction to it.

But before we get to that, here’s some little factoids from They Work For You…

In the current Parliament:

Gordon Brown has voted 15% of the time.

David Cameron has voted 27% of the time.

Nick Clegg has voted 45% of the time.

In case you’re interested Gordon Brown has used three-word alliterative phrases 1203 times in debates — well above average amongst MPs.

Back to the point. Instead of recoiling in horror at the sight of Gordon Brown turning that frown upside down, it should instead have been noted that he was trying to sort out the shameful mess that is MP’s expenses. Last year MP’s voted against tighter regulations on their expenses (one of the people how made sure the allowances stayed as they were was Home Secretary Jacqui Smith) and unsurprisingly this decision has blown right back up their arses.

The PM’s suggestion is to essentially do away with the expense accounts and just introduce a flat-rate daily allowance. Not, in essence, a bad idea really. If you’re going to get expenses you might as well actually turn up and do your do your job. It seems pretty fair to me. Unless you can think of another idea…how about it, Dave? “I do worry about this idea of paying MPs a per day amount to turn up and do their jobs.” But you would say that, wouldn’t you Mr 27%? Thankfully Nick Clegg thoughtfully brought a bit of sanity to the debate with a pointless noiseburst of nothingness “This is what they do in the European Parliament and I don’t think bringing the Brussels gravy train to Westminster is the answer to our problems.”Of course that wouldn’t help Nick, especially not after spending all that money moving the gravy train terminus to St. Pancras.

With 6.5% of the population unemployed and countless others part-time or working on temporary contracts (I say countless, but I couldn’t download the spreadsheet as this laptop doesn’t have Excel – saw some figure of 6.2% of the population on temporary contracts somewhere though) I don’t think now is really the time to quibble about expenses, unless of course you’re Jacqui Smith and you think that a gentleman’s exercise video is suitable for the tax-payer to shell out for. No, perhaps they should instead be doing all they can do to ensure that they don’t join the 6.5% after the next general election by perhaps acting with a bit of fucking decorum.

But I think the PM doesn’t actually go far enough. Why not make being an MP an hourly rate all together? You have to either be in parliament, a committee or your constituency to get paid – or doing official government business such as saving the world if you’re Gordon. I can just imagine all these MP’s queuing up on a Friday afternoon waiting for the speaker to sign their time-sheets before they fax them off to the treasury. They could then know what it’s like to be phoning a call centre in Cardiff on a Tuesday to find out an administrative blunder means they haven’t been paid, while knowing their rent (on either of their houses) goes out the next day.

I was initially thinking, we could ensure that they only get paid when they vote, but then you’d end up with MP’s who are behind on their child support turning up to vote on issues they were ill-briefed on, like Land Rights for Gay Whales or something. I don’t actually think that forcing MP’s to vote on every issue is a worthwhile idea. However there should be a statutory minimum to the number of debates they attend before they can claim a stipend. Even if they abstain at the end of it, at least they showed up. I believe that would perhaps be seen as engaging in the democratic process or something.

Obviously this would be the place for a sanctimonious rant about ‘is it any wonder that people have lost faith in politicians’ but I can’t be arsed. However ensuring that some kind of pay-to-play option was introduced may actually show the electorate that the reason they got into politics was to make a difference, not a profit.

By the way, the stats at the top about voting records, while accurate, are a bit misleading. They don’t show abstentions, or votes taken while MP’s are in committee or engaged in other activities. What it would be useful to see would actually be how many times they actually turned up for work.

The links, if you’re interested, do lead to stats on how MP’s vote on particular issues: Gordon Brown has never voted on a transparent Parliament.

kelvin mackenzie

On Saturday I was at Hillsborough, standing opposite the Lepping’s Lane end, almost exactly 20 years to the day that 96 people were people were allowed by the police to die for the simple crime of going to watch a football match. I, like many, remember exactly where I was when the events unfolded, but standing in the minute silence at the ground it amplified the emotional impact of the anniversary. Finally over the weekend it was announced that files relating to the disaster may be released early and maybe the families can finally put an end to their search for the truth of what happened that day. Now I’m not here to indulge in the kind of grief porn that’s been prevalent in the media over the last week, nor to rake over all the errors that were made by the police that day, nor the cover-up that was perpetrated after the events. I’m not going to praise the press for ensuring that this year, more so that any other, they quoted the Taylor Report that the main cause was a failure of police crowd control. No, what I’m concerned with is Kelvin MacKenzie.

For those of you too young to remember Kelvin MacKenzie as anything other than a talking ignorance bollock (seriously – look at his face – he looks like a marginally malformed testicle), he used to also be the editor of The Sun, and he is the reason why that newspaper, 20 years after the events of Hillsborough, is still not stocked by many newsagents in Liverpool. The Sun, under the headline ‘The Truth’ described how drunken fans urinated on the dead, picked their pockets, tried to assault the police and so on and so forth. Or the choice piece of bullshit, ‘Sheffield MP Irvine Patnick revealed that in one shameful episode a gang of Liverpool fans noticed that the blouse of a girl trampled to death had risen above her breasts. As a policeman struggled in vain to revive her, the mob jeered: ‘Throw her up here and we will **** her’. A few years ago The Sun publicly apologised for this, but despite this it still sells relatively few copies in the city and it’s estimated that their coverage has led to around £55m in lost revenue in the last 20 years.

You may think, meh, get over it. I can see your point. But the thing is Kelvin Mackenzie has retracted the brief apology he personally made at the time for heaping libel upon slander of dead people and the ever apologetic Sun has re-employed him as a columnist. Now this may not seem like the largest crime ever committed, and it’s not. In the grand scheme of crime this wouldn’t even amount to shoplifting a Mock Turtles cassingle from Woolworths. However as he is one of the BBC’s pet Tory opiner, wheeled out on to Question Time every so often to unleash his willful stupidity onto the masses at the cost of license fee, it at least counts as maybe half-inching a Wham bar before shamefacedly putting it back on the shelf before you leave the shop. And at the risk of sounding like Daily Mail campaign, that’s just one of the things that offends me about the man. I have my pocket picked for him to continue spouting his shit.

There’s plenty of people that get wheeled out on Question Time who will leave me breathlessly shouting abuse at the television, but they speak from the courage of their convictions. Kelvin however hides his prejudices beneath a veneer of populist respectability. I would usually argue that no-one’s opinions are wrong. How can an opinion be wrong? His opinions however are based on lies and misrepresentation of facts and he is unprepared to alter them in the face of reality.

He is like a creationist scientist – if they find evidence that man didn’t live in perfect harmony with dinosaurs, side-by-side on the piano, they choose to ignore the evidence as it contradicts their view that the Earth is 10,000 years old. Kelvin MacKenzie chooses to ignore anything that the contradicts the gospel according to Kelvin, which means any evidence the contradicts the first thought that flickered across his hate-filled brain. He’s a man who has changed football clubs twice to date (Millwall to Charlton) and is now considering abandoning Charlton for QPR, as Charlton have gone down. How you can trust a man who would not only abandon one football clube for another and then consider choosing yet another is beyond me. If he at least had the good grace to glory hunt then I would at least hate him less for this, even if it was Chelsea he now supported. Millwall for Charlton for QPR though? He just flitting around like a footballing fly around various bowls of shit.

And this essentially sums the man up though. He’ll abandon a principle like a child in a handbag at Victoria station. He wrote gushing praise for the Thatcher government, but now that The Sun is, at least nominally, no longer a Tory paper he will criticise the party he helped to build and sustain, just because he’s paid to. Or when he’s prepared to stand in a by-election against David David on a point of principle, he’ll back out in case it offends Rupert’s next general election horse. But when he’s caught in a lie he’ll stand resolute in the face of mounting evidence, just to prove a point. That point being that he’s an unspeakable little poison spitting turd. His opinion of the lost libel cases during his tenure at The Sun is ‘When I published those stories, they were not lies. But I don’t really think of it all in the way you suggest. They were great stories that later turned out to be untrue — and that is different.‘ He’s a caricature of the kind of person he believes he wants to be and the person he believes he represents. In reality he’s just a knowing, callous shit spinner with a genuine disregard for ‘The Truth’ – an ignoble feature in any journalist, let alone any man.

debunk the police

I remember watching the TV as the twin towers fell. I remember the BBC reporting, only hours after the they went down, that they had indentified one of the terrorists as they had found his passport in the rubble. I remember thinking that if passports had dental records they still wouldn’t be able to identify ten years from now. I remember the news then reporting that, based on this passport, they’d found the hijacker’s car and there was a copy of the Koran on the dashboard. Which struck me, at the time, as a pile of utter shite. It’s peculiar what is immediately reported in the aftermath of a shocking event. It’s as if everyone watching is so full of stoopid that they will swallow whatever is shoved down their throat quicker than a thrupenny whore in a desert.

I therefore took the initial reaction from the Police to the death of Ian Tomlinson as being totally true. I mean if even before they were being accused of being involved they’d already denied it, then it must be true. You’d need to be, oh I dunno, a babysitter, to have not heard that kind of excuse before. Thankfully no-one who works in the press has done any form of childminding before, nor have they had to lie to their parents or a lover about something they’d done. Instead, as I might have already mentioned, all the news hunter/gatherers had already written their copy the day before about some jobless unshaven types smashing a bank window (no money was harmed) and our brave boys in blue fighting off the forces of anarchy and saving us all for a better, brighter, future.

Glad we cleared that up. It would have been really embarrassing for all those assorted journalists if, in the most CCTV heavy area of the country, with TV cameras from all over the world, everyone just happened to be looking the other way when the police pushed an innocent bystander over and may have caused his death. Or in the case of Channel 4 news actually filming it and broadcasting it, but not realising you had it on tape as you were too busy looping the bit where the protestor jostled the camera in the foreground just beforehand.

Not that I’m saying the press are complicit in what happened. They have no reason to think that the police would lie. OK, the police may have said that Jean Charles De Menezes had wires hanging from his jacket, hurdled the barriers at Stockwell, been high on cocaine and was fleeing from the cops before he was lawfully shot and that was printed verbatim in the papers, but that was just one mistake. And there was the whole lying about the miner’s strike beatings which was carried in the news. And there was Hillsborough and The Sun (one of the best articles I’ve read about that day is here and clearly illustrates that there still needs to be an investigation into why it happened) And there was…OK. There’s a lot. If you or no-one you don’t have any kind of personal gripe about the police then you need to get out more. And if your complaint was in the paper, your face would be photoshopped onto Peter Sutcliffe’s body. Or his face on yours. Or they’d just not bother mentioning it, because it’s not really news, as it’s only about you.

There’s been rumblings about the police actions that day, but most of those have been ignored. The Guardian have been pursuing the circumstances of Mr. Tomlinson’s death for the last week. However they are a bunch of yoghurt weaving Trotskyist do-gooding do-nothing vegetards. Their readership probably hate the police as much as they hate themselves. Which explains why they’ve been ignored. Even as the footage emerged yesterday it was all but ignored by the news. If you read the morning papers you’d have found a couple of paragraphs on page 6 about it, saying the police may have appeared to push him. Since then it’s all kicked off, and it’s even the front page of the Evening Standard. Wow. It must be news. Even Boris Johnson has refused to comment on an on-going investigation. Which makes a change.

But of course the coverage is now as over-the-top as it was non-existent. Let’s face it, as police beatings go, it’s hardly Rodney King. I’m not excusing it and it looks like it could well lead to criminal charges, but come on people, let’s have some perspective. What needs to be investigated is not just what happened and how much the police contributed to it, but also why they lied, who told them to and who else knew about it. There’s dozens of people watching, in uniform, as it happens. And no-one does a thing. Except perhaps stroke their erection or whatever it is the police do when they’re in riot gear.

Of course we wouldn’t have a Rodney King type incident in this country as the police are not racist and the Macpherson report that described the Met as institutionally racist was wrong. Obviously what Sir Ian Blair is saying in that story is that the officers investigating the death of Stephen Lawrence, if not racist, were therefore incompetent?

As I write the policeman involved has just come forward. Which is very brave of him. Well done. You only waited until video footage of you striking an unarmed man who died shortly afterwards emerged. That’s the kind of bravery you expect from our boys in blue. I will sleep safely tonight. But that’s because we’ve got double glazing and bars on the windows.

This post was not officially sponsored by The Guardian. They deserve some plaudits for their efforts this week in not letting this one lie though. The dirty commies.

anarchy for the uk

One of my favourite things is the daily GetyerEvenin’Stannah’ere poster that pops up outside newsagents and street vendors. More often than not it’s a quite baffling mixture of poor grammar or sensationalism that conjours up mental images that are perhaps not what is intended. For instance “Student Victim of Cruel Rape” made me wonder if it would have been less newsworthy if it was one of those nice, pleasant rapes that you never read about (because they don’t exist, obviously) On Monday we had “Porn Scandal Minister Faces Axe”. This pricked my attention as it made me aware that not only do we have a Minister for Porn Scandals, but the position might soon be vacant. I’m not sure exactly what the role would entail. I imagine it’s reacting to Sunday Sport headlines such as ‘Hattie Jacques Naked – Fury at Fake Pics’. Perhaps you have to announce to the media ‘Furious? I nearly dropped my cock.’ Or something. It would be great though. I would definitely have some kind of Bat Phone in my office, but it would of course be a big plastic willy resting on a pair of flashing norks. Everytime there’s a Porn Scandal anywhere in the world the bell-end would start ringing and I’d be off in my PornScandalMobile, ready to fight Porn wherever it raised it’s scandalously frothing head.

Today I was quite surprised to see that ‘Police Fight Anarchy in the City’ was today’s mildly gibbering lead. Having just returned from ‘the city’ in question I had obviously this missed this ‘anarchy’ that should, by rights, have been spilling in through the windows and wiping it’s arse on my computer screen. From checking the news tonight it seems instead that the ‘anarchy’ is actually a slack handful of people who haven’t bothered finding out what the word means, beyond the 30 yr old jingle of a butter pusher. Bizarrely it took Boris Johnson on the local news to actually speak some form of truth about the day. Normally BFJ isn’t at his most coherent when he has to speak, but I was taken aback by him cutting through the bullshit. I’ll have to paraphrase as I can’t remember it um for ah, but he essentially said to the woman from the BBC that the media had got what they wanted from the day – a few images of bloodied faces, but they were ignoring the fact that the day essentially went off without any real bother. All in all it was quite civil disobedience, but no-one really cares about that. Mild looting plays so much better on the news wires.

The run up to it though has been like the week leading up to WrestleMania. The Anarchists saying they were going to smash shit up, the police offering out anyone who would smash shit up. OK, there’s not been as many waxed and oiled nipples on show, but you get the gist. The hype has been unrelenting. The Rumble in the Concrete Jungle, The Thriller In the Manila Envelope. The Shanking of the Banking. Sky Sports should really have knocked out some graphics and some swhooshing sounds. The breaking of Fed Goodwin’s windows just added to the tension. All that was needed was a copper smashing a steel chair over a bandana-ed head at an anarchist press conference. Maybe tomorrow we’ll have a steel cage match and The Undertaker will rock up and tombstone the Met Chief from the top of canary wharf.

The government even went as far as to ratchet up the tension in the pre-match face-off by saying that protestors would be subject to anti-terror legislation. Realising they’d forgotten to remind us about terrorism for a while, the government decided they should let us know all about their new anti-terror strategy Contest 2. Firstly I think that calling it ‘Contest’ is just encouraging terrorists. ‘What? It’s a competition? Really? Well, it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part…rucksacks on boys, let’s go meet some virgins’. Of course not all terrorists are virgin-seeking Muslims, as the 176 page shitbone awful document points out. Just before the final draft hit the printers, Now That’s What I Call The IRA, or whatever nonsense they are called, re-ignited ‘the troubles’. The Contest 2 document helpfully reminds us that some terrorists are (ssh!) white people and not even by following a trail of frosted lucky charms can you tell them from normal God-fearing honkys. I’m guessing what was previously in the place of this hopefully hastily inserted paragraph was a pie-chart featuring different hues of brown. This cut-out-and-keep guide would enable you to gauge whether the skin tone of the suspicious ethnic chap over the road actually made him a terrorist, or just a rapist, murderer or drug-dealer. As it is, there’s not a single chart or diagram in the thing. Not even a process map, detailing your cellular deterioration in the event of the inevitable dirty bomb. All it is is page after page of the government, in their benevolence, telling you how they will allow you to live (because they can’t afford for you to die) Your life, for all that the debt it is worth, is in their grubby little hands. They could have got rid of all the words, and just turned it into a flickbook featuring a caricature of the Justice Secretary with an ever-engorging semtex phallus, that ejaculates a massive mushroom cloud at the end. ‘Jack Straw’s Doom Cock Goes Boom Book’ isn’t as snappy as ‘Contest 2′ though, so I’m not surprised they didn’t bother.

But I, as per usual, digress from whatever prompted me to gibber pointlessly at the ether. Ah yes. The threat of terror is not an excuse for the police batonning people’s heads until they resemble a rhubarb crumble. But then again I’m not going to applaud someone for smashing up a bank that they, as a tax payer, own. Way to add to the public debt there, fucko. I am, quite strangely for me, totally apathetic about the G20 protests. I support many of the aims of the various umbrella groups. I just don’t see what point is actually being made. If they’d waited until May and organised a mass-protest on the bank holiday then it might have a bit of higher attendance. You can still head off down the East End and throw stuff at the politicians in the meantime. However instead of ’speaking for majority of people’ like some of these protestors seem to think they are, why not just organise something for when the majority of people can turn up? Make a day of it.

I’d still probably give it a miss though. Protesting is, essentially, a physical gag. I’m all about the lazy sarcasm. Not because I don’t care. It’s just easier to pretend not to.

mainstream media

The new hero of the current economic crisis is suddenly Daniel Hannan after his speech to the European parliament was put on Youtube and went viral quicker than, well, an erm…virus. His speech, which despite being full of holes from an argumentative point of view, is well worth a watch. When I first heard about a Eurosceptic Tory MEP ranting at Gordon Brown I imagined it would be about as coherent as a drunk old man throwing his slippers at the moon. However I was wrong. It’s a well delivered speech, made all the better for the subject of his ire having to sit there and listen to it. Even Gordon’s wife must have had to stifle a chuckle during parts of it.

Of course this story didn’t get picked up by the press over here, and this is now being held up as an example of mainstream media bias. The BBC coverage of the PM’s appearance was limited to brief story about his speech going down well. Even that wasn’t headline news. But because of mainstream media bias the non-news story of Gordon making a a speech that was applauded wasn’t followed with the non-news that Tory MEP stood up and took the piss out of him. In fact the media are so biased that the Daily Telegraph only covered the story about the speech going viral, not the speech itself. As Hannan is one of their columnists it just goes to shows that so biased are the mainstream media that people’s own editors are against them. Or perhaps even right wing Tory press decided that is was actually non-story. I can’t imagine they were being briefed against him by Number 10.

So how did this story become such a sensation? The answer of course lies with that scourge of the mainstream media Fox News who picked up the speech. The fairly unbalanced rantings of Fox News are now seemingly dictating the news agenda in this country. This is of course the point where everything goes a bit weird. The fact that you have the walking hypocrisy that is a Eurosceptic MEP – someone who works on a continent he isn’t sure exists? – being championed by a news channel that has poured nothing but scorn on Europe is, well, a bit fucking odd. But then again, when you’re scraping the barrel of the internet to fill 24hrs of rolling news, you never know what will stick. Let’s face it, if it hadn’t been Hannan it would been an hour of fucking lolcats.

And this is where it all falls down down as some mainstream media conspiracy. Fox News spend most of the recent American election campaign railing against the insidious influence of mainstream media. Which makes as much sense as King Herod complaining about his local abortion clinic. It was them, and the right-wing American blogs that popularised the use of ‘mainstream media’ as an insult, to the extent that ‘MSM’ became shorthand for everything was liber-ill in the world – or at least everything that suggested that their guy was going to lose. The acronym ‘MSM’ is now creeping into use on British news sites, and I really do hate it. Something about those three letters instantly makes me think that the person using it rapes canoeists at the weekend. But that’s of course partly because I hate abbreviations in general. ‘MSM’ in this country though is used by those at both ends of political rainbow, as those are the ones that shout the loudest about the fact that no-one’s listening. ‘MSM’ is essentially textspeak for ‘everyone else is wrong’. It’s an inherent arrogance that says that the general public are being deluded because I’m not pushing the news agenda according to my political or religious beliefs.

Of course this is partly true. At least the bit about the public being deluded, but it’s not clear by whom. This article details the dumbing down of the news at the expense of crime reporting. Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe last night rammed home the point that the news has descended into nothing more than farce, partly because it’s aimed at idiots. In America it’s taken a comedy show to highlight the absurdity of the standard of reporting on the economic crisis. The media both at home and abroad have allowed us to sleepwalk into the current financial gloom, as indeed they allow to us drift somnambulantly through our everyday life. Vince Cable was decried as one of the few lone voices, barking mutely into the gale of excess. He’s now the voice of sanity. It’s not like there wasn’t anyone giving the warnings, it’s just that no-one wanted to hear it. And this is the fault of the media to some extent. It’s not like bad news doesn’t sell. It’s just that they think it only sells when there’s a pair of jiggling tits or a bullet-shattered skull attached to it. And that’s our fault. We spent the time asking for more boobies. When it comes to economics I need to have it as idiotised. I’m just not interested enough to get it. The stock market is just like Ladbrokes, but they gamble with the pension I don’t have. Short selling is pimping midgets. It’s just unfathomable numbers and euphamisms for underpants like cax and dax. However if someone had just been regularly publishing an article ‘Listen – it’s all going to go to fucking shit’ and included some pie charts, then that would have been great. I like graphical displays of gloom. Not as much as bouncing funbags, but enough to be distracted for a while.

That’s the problem when people complain about mainstream media. They complain that it’s dumbed down without asking why it has done so. That it doesn’t represent their views. That it’s just a conspiracy. The fact that those on the right complain it’s pro-left and those on the left bemoan its capitalist bias shows that both of them are wrong. It’s hideously flawed for sure. Sometimes I wonder who I have to kill, just to get something of interest on BBC1 at 6 o’clock. But that’s not the point. The media in this country, whether you like it or not, represents the views of the mainstream. The public reflect the news as much as the news reflects them. We have dumbed down, and the news is partly to blame. But it’s also because no-one wanted the bad news in the good times and now they’re looking for someone to blame. It’s easy to shoot the messenger, especially when you can see yourself in him.

That said, the other reason why Daniel Hannan’s video is such a success is because at the moment everyone wants to shout at the Prime Minister. He finally let Gordon Brown see the rage and frustration that is apparent in this country. I personally think it’s better that thing kind of thing is a viral hit, as it shows that people care. If it was on the news it would have been prefaced by government spin and a list of examples to point out the flaws in Hannan’s speech. This way it gets to people intact, and they can look on it as they please, free from bias, and interpret it their own way. Unless they need to read about it in whichever media tome will frame it in a more digestible way, because what they really need is someone to tell them how they should think about it.