"Mad" Mel

The we-know-best-and-you-don't left/liberals call her Mad Mel. They never have much to say after a terrorist hit or near-miss. She does. I knew a very noisy left/liberal years ago who said that all terrorism was caused by poverty - a cursory glance at the backgrounds of leading terrorists - especially the current crop of jihadist psychopaths - demonstrates that, like so much contemporary left/liberal dogma, that particular nostrum is fucking poppycock. But it shows you they'll believe anything.

Radicals flocked to the UK, attracted by Britain's toxic combination of criminally lax immigration controls, generous health, education and welfare benefits and the ability to perpetuate their views through the British veneration of the principle of free speech.
Despite 9/11, the 2005 London Tube and bus attacks and the dozens of other Islamist plots uncovered in Britain, the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are still allowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and 'human rights'.

As a result, Britain remains - to its eternal shame - the biggest hub of Islamic radicalisation outside the Arab and Muslim world.
Extremists are still slipping into the country. The courts are still refusing to deport terrorists in order to protect their 'human rights' abroad.
London boasts the shameful reputation of the world's premier money-laundry for terrorism, which shelters behind a label of 'charity' that the authorities choose not to challenge.
Not only is no action taken against extremist mosques and madrassas, but many British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres.

Rest here.

As Madness once sang, if this is madness then I'm filled with gladness.

Because totalitarian governments always label their opponents insane in the end. See soviet Russia.

Is it "Mad" Mel, or is it "Mad" Gordon, Ed, Harriet and Tony? The answer depends on whether you prefer your head in the sand or not.

Local effing government

After last night weather, I felt moved to ask a friend of mine to stick this the local paper round here:

Dear XXXX,

I will buy you a beer or two if you put this letter in your paper.

Dear Sir,

When I emerged from ****** station at around 12.30am on Dec 17, I found a blizzard blowing. In the space of two minutes I saw three people take heavy falls in the slush - there was, of course, no grit down. Walking through the snow I saw several other people take heavy falls. I called out to one man, who had fallen very heavily and appeared to have done serious damage to his arm, and said: "wonderful, isn't it, that we pay a fortune in tax and AND council tax to keep the council offices full of local government staff who are supposed to be 'managing' everything but they can't even grit the roads and pavements, even when there's 12 hours notice.."
Of course, the above sentence was shorter, sweeter and punctuated with bloodcurdling swearwords.
When I finally reached my road, after half a mile uphill of ungritted pavements and roads, I checked the box at the end of the road to see if there was any salt that residents could use for the road come the morning. Naturally, it was empty - we used it all in the February blizzards and, though the council can have a diversity and green policies of byzantine intricacy and bully everyone into having four different recycling boxes, it cannot refill the salt supply tub for the road.
I would write to my councillor about this but last time I wrote to him he never wrote back.
The moral of the story is what the point of local government? Five intelligent people - who actually live in the borough and understand its needs - could meet once a month in a room above a pub and make all the financial and planning decisions necessary to 'run' this borough. Local government is an expensive, useless racket and it should be abolished now.

William Gazy

Balls

Privately educated 'toff' Edward Balls has responded to Andrew Gilligan's Spectator piece about the Labour government giving money to a school where a former Hizb ut-Tahrir campaigner with extremist views is working(see past posts)with a letter to said organ saying that no hardline Islamic attitudes exist within the school because the school's Ofsted inspection didn't find any.
I'll say that again. In a slow, mockingly sarcastic voice. Because Ofsted didn't find any.

This is how socialism does its business. This is how it sleeps at night. The same thinking that results in Baby P and the doctor who couldn't see he had a broken spine and the social workers who filed reports while his father kicked him round the house. Why pensioners lie in their own excrement in hospitals. Why people end up in court for having opinions that the Oxbridge intelligentsia don't approve of. Why Victoria Climbie was tortured to death under the noses of Haringey Council. Why Fiona Pilkington was driven to suicide as the police did nothing. Why a hundred or more teenagers have been shot, stabbed or beaten to death in London in the last couple of years. Why the national debt is heading for £1.5 trillion.

Because Ofsted didn't find any.

Victoria, Midnight

Study for Victoria, Midnight; charcoal on brown packing paper
14x19in

It was Van Gogh who said that night was just as interesting to paint as day, if not more so. I think he was right.
If you ever come round the corner into Terminus Place, as the area outside Victoria Station is called, on a bus, you will notice how the recorded female voice announces it. She says it quite unlike the way she announces any of the other streets.
She says 'Victoria Station' in the voice of a woman who has just had a very good time in bed.
I like the front of Victoria Station at night. It has grime and grandeur; a monstrous wedding cake left out in sooty rain. I've been coming in and out of that station for thirty years and the front always has something new to show me, if only the way the light catches it.
The impression I want to give here is something vertigious, tottering almost, with immensities looming. Some lights still burning but many switched off.
I hope to work it up into something majestic and damned, like England is.

Post budget record, sing in a Scotch accent, if you please.
Here we are again. The money's all gone. Osborne is right when he says that at least in the past when they'd pissed it all away on their bureacratic utopias they had the balls to take the tough decisions. Not this bunch of devious cowards.

The Liddle Incident - Night Thoughts II

Anyone who takes notice of the news and spends significant amounts of time on streets and on public transport in London will know that Rod Liddle has a point - the culture of young black males has been pathological for a very long time now and liberals and the Left cannot face it and have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide/deny it.
If you've seen a fair bit of life from, as Kipling has it 'the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off', you will know that Liddle is being provocative but broadly correct.
(Sorry to bring Kipling in - that won't help anyone's case in the eyes of an urban liberal)
The usual suspects have all howled with rage - you won't see Bonnie Greer or Diana Abbott getting so exercised about Hizb ut-Tahrir - and let them howl. Abbott is one of the biggest and most ridiculous hypocrites in the parliamentary Labour Party - and that is a very crowded field.
She refused to give her son the socialist education her party insists children should have, for the very reason that she did not want her son to become involved with the pathological culture of young black males - which socialist comprehensive culture can do absolutely zilch about, except invent ever more fantastical explanantions and excuses for it.
So she packed him off to a private school, paid for with the money she makes from 'representing' the people whose sons she does not want her son mixing with.
And she calls Cameron and Osborne toffs...
Bonnie Greer was reported in yesterday's papers to have responded to Liddle's piece by saying:

'My response would be that the overwhelming majority of paedophiles, murderers, warmongers and football hooligans are white males and all we got in return was beans on toast and Top Gear.'

Now, doubtless this is sarcasm and I should not bother to refute her outburst on the grounds that I have never seen Miss Greer say anything that even appeared intelligent or wise, even when she had a golden opportunity to do so when she found herself sitting next to that repulsive and stupid man Nick Griffin on Question Time.
But still. They are very intemperate comments for someone who is Deputy Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, don't you think? As well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the Franco-British Council.
Guess who personally put Bonnie on the board of trustees for the British Museum? Gordon Brown, that's who.
The Left can't handle crime when it's done by anyone - but their especial supinity is with black crime. Which is why it has escalated over the Blair/Brown years.
In fact, the near-weekly fatal stabbing of young black men by other young black men which occurred during the late baroque wrongness of Ken Livingstone's mayoralty has only been reduced because that heartless communist and his tame copper Ian Blair were turfed out by someone on the Right who could face the truth and do something about it.

Three cheers for Andrew Gilligan - he's proved that the Labour government ARE funding what amounts to a Hizb ut-tahrir madrasah. Gilligan, no righty he, called Ed Balls a 'disgrace' to his face, which must be a wonderfully cathartic thing to be able to do.

The main evidence that Mr Balls has made a massive blunder is a chapter in a Hizb ut Tahrir pamphlet, ‘Education and Identity’, written by one Farah Ahmed. Mrs Ahmed is the head teacher of one of the two schools, and also a trustee of the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation (ISF), which runs them both. If I were a Muslim parent, I would not let my child within 20 miles of her.

Just when bien pensants were about to start playing their well-worn record entitled 'all an invention of the right wing press', old Gilly gets to the bottom of it. Well done son.

I approach Taki in the Spectator with caution. He can make you laugh or he can make you think he's an old Germanic word beginning with c. But he's very funny this week about Dubai threatening to go pop. I particularly enjoyed this bit:

Sam Goldwyn once said that if you want to send a message use Western Union. Hollywood didn’t listen and lots of crappy movies were made. Well, I liked old Sam, not that I ever met him, but we should follow his advice and send a message through Western Union to the Maktoum Brothers comedy act. It should read as follows: Palace intrigue old hat stop decision making lousy stop greed comma arrogance comma and all round hirsute facial ugliness too much stop no longer welcome to rainy comma full of towels already comma London stop. Not that it will ever happen. Because you can fool all the people all the time when you promise them riches. Because that’s all the Dubai debacle ever was. A desert mirage fueled by greed and sold to suckers by tawny types whose ancestors used to sell flying carpets to dumb Englishmen with sunburnt noses, knees, and elbows.

Of course, I'm more struck on the Maktoums than Taki is - I've backed a lot of their horses and won fat sums off them.

Night thoughts

It occurred to me as I gazed out of the train window going past Battersea Power Station at midnight the other week (I work nights) that the seed of Labour’s disastrous years in power was this: when you and your members/supporters are out of office for a generation you start to think you’re right simply because the government of the day is wrong - and so does everybody else. That’s exactly why I warn people from voting Cameron. The prime lesson to be learned from Blair’s tenure was just because it’s all gone wrong don’t think the incoming cabinet are going to be anything other than shit with bad ideas.
The English middle classes and the English working class Tories developed a kind of in-advance version of Stockholm Syndrome about the Labour Party back in the dog days of Major. The media onslaught against the Tories and the recession – remember how thick it was laid on compared to Labour’s recession? – pushed these sections into loving something they normally hated with a passion and they voted and voted for ‘Home Counties’ Tony, and by doing so they entrenched a gang of former and not-so-former Communists in power.
Well, as an old gangerman I knew when I worked in the building game used to say when someone had injured themselves through their own stupidity: ‘that’ll fucking learn yer.’



When are all the young urban liberals – and the comedians, pop singers and DJs who manufacture their attitudes and ideas – going to start shouting about President Barack ‘W’ Obama, as I am pleased to call him?
He announced his upping of the ante in the AfghaniNAM war this week in an assertive speech at West Point that would have made every young urban liberal I know absolutely venomous with righteous indignation – if, er, he didn’t happen to be black and a ‘liberal’.
But I see nothing much about it. If it had been Dubya himself, then it would have been a very different matter. It is this squalid hypocrisy among the young that I find so disgusting – they want to lead us in the fight for a rainbow world of equality, low carbon consumerism, middle-class bummer rock and quality coffee shops, and yet, when confronted with a Jack-and-Jill test of their moral reasoning, they fail at the first. Dear me. All that whining, all the marches and gigs, all those Marcus Brigstocke gags and then tumbleweeds when a Black Democrat does the warmonger boogie.
Do you remember when comedians, pop singers, the BBC and actors used to criticise British governments? It happened for a while during what I call the Luvvies’ Interregnum – the freezing winter of 2002-3 – when, after five happy years of Thatcho-Socialism (that’s where you can be a pig for money, power and privilege safe in the knowledge that your tax money is financing Cultural Marxism) Blair made his fateful, stupid decision to go to war and the Left split down the middle. (You may also remember that apart from the Iraq scrimmage, Labour’s pop culture vanguards never had anything to say about Blair’s other wars)
But apart from that, this appalling government – far worse than Margaret Thatcher’s government and I’ll award ten English pounds to the first person who can write below a convincing explanation of why that statement is wrong – has never had any serious opposition from popular culture and as regular readers of this blog know that makes me mad.
It’s all very well to say that centre-left governments are always the darlings of the arts, media and academe, but when things have become so pisspoor and people who could speak out don’t, then you have to question the intellects and morals of these people. And I do. And I find them wanting and so, therefore, I find the mainstream culture wanting.

One of my strongest dislikes these days are so called stand-up comedians. Among my extensive network of friends and acquaintances I find so many people’s beliefs about how the world works are shaped by men like Eddie Izzard. This amounts to a pathological sarcasm about western civilisation, or rather the defence mechanisms of civilisation – the nation state, empirical thinking, cultural conservatism. See Izzard’s routine about flags, on youtube. I long for the day that people such as Izzard and Stephen Fry get some of their own medicine from a younger generation.
Of course, scratch one of these ‘comic geniuses’ and what do you find? Neil Kinnock. By which I mean dreary, socialist EU fanatics. Izzard is a Labour party groupie and last time I heard an aspirant MEP.
The only contemporary stand up comedian who I find consistently funny is Harry Hill.

A few of useful things that have come out of the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos: It has clearly demonstrated to the British public that, as ever, a Labour government cannot behave in a responsible manner towards the armed services. We forget that at our peril.
Injudicious comments from ministers have revealed that a major reason Whitehall will not countenance pulling out is because they fear the legal and immigration ramifications a retreat would cause – extraordinary but check Hansard. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225177/British-troops-fighting-Afghanistan-stop-immigrants-coming-Britain-claims-Phil-Woolas.html
Finally, a lot of intellectual bigheads have had to shut their mouths about what a jolly good thing these wars are. You don’t hear so much of C Hitchens and his merry men these days now the whole thing’s gone tits up. I am not an intellectual bighead but I was pro Iraq and I am big enough to admit I changed my mind. As I was writing this I thought about some of the arguments I used to have with a blog called Drink-Soaked Trotskyist Popinjays for War, a group of Australian Hitch-ite left-wing ‘hawks’. They didn’t half like to give it the big one, as they say. I decided to look them up on the net and it looks like they’ve disappeared. I wonder why.
Finally, I like to say to people in regard to the mass media/culture’s attitude to the war in Afghanistan: Imagine what people would say if it was a TORY war…
Good night all.