KOLLEY KIBBER'S ADVENTURE CARD

2011-12-11T18:35:00.000-08:00

Study for Engine Sheds at Victoria

2011-11-30T15:25:00.000-08:00

Study for Round the Back of East Croydon Station With Mik & Ange (On the Way to the Pub)

2011-11-19T03:55:00.000-08:00

From the Bus Top: Memory of Kensington Mist

2011-11-03T18:07:00.001-07:00

Study for Railway Lines, Flats and the Thames

Friday Night On the Train Home, or, Firework in the Rain

2011-11-02T05:35:00.001-07:00

Cabbage, Onions & A Carrot

2011-10-24T13:21:00.001-07:00

Watercolour on paper.

Study for Rain at Brighton

2011-10-09T17:47:00.001-07:00

Watercolour. 10/10/11

Demolished House at Night, N6 (version 2)

2011-09-21T18:18:00.000-07:00

Watercolour and ink

The Lovers & the Moon in an Imaginary Landscape

2011-09-08T13:15:00.001-07:00

Watercolour and ink on paper 12x8in

Fender Telecaster & Denby Teapot

2011-08-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

Pencil, biro and watercolour

Scotch Bonnets, Tomatoes, Onion and Horse Form

2011-08-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

Watercolour

Symphony of Dirt, Picture #1

2011-08-16T14:23:00.001-07:00

Watercolour

The BBC and Left-liberal response to the riots in London

2011-08-08T03:18:00.001-07:00

(Sung to the tune of Camptown Races) Everything's the Tories' fault, doo-dah doo-dah! It's back to 1981 again, doo-dah, doo-dah! There were no social problems before Tuesday the 11th May 2010, doo-dah doo-dah DEH!

Study for Allotment After Dark

2011-07-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Indian ink, watercolour and gum arabic on paper

Postcard to Nick Reeves

2011-07-19T04:43:00.001-07:00

Two Cheers for Libraries

2011-06-27T03:40:00.001-07:00

IMAGINE a BBC drama where an idealistic young journo/councillor/social worker finds himself in a town in with public and private financial problems and ends up concluding that while the private sector is simply interested in the cold-hearted pursuit of financial advantage so too, when it comes down to it, is the public.
No, it wouldn't happen. The narrative will never be messed with: public good, private bad. That's socialism, right? The ruling ethos of the BBC.
If ever there was a time to have some real drama, art that makes us consider and think about current predicaments instead of headlocking us and dragging us to the conclusions North London Observer-readers always come to, it is now.
I thought this as I stared out of an upstairs window in Croydon Library. I was looking at something which had rather knocked me back, but more of that later.
Having moved from Highgate and currently of no-fixed-abode (furniture and possessions in storage; sleeping in parents' spare room) I am back in my old stamping ground and taking a look round.

There is controversy about the borough's cultural life at the moment because the Conservative Council decided to prune £1.5million off the arts budget and having done so they got the taste for it and are now looking at libraries.
I supported the first round of cuts. They mainly affected live events at the Clocktower, the cultural centre based in the Town Hall and library complex. Almost every event staged there was laughably politically correct, box-ticked to the last Labour governent's rigid requirements of Cultural Marxism (and the predictable tastes of the Guardianistas who ran it all). I am trying to think of some good examples off the top of my head.

The African storytelling which only allowed black children in was a good one. I sold the story to a national newspaper but it was never used (though I got paid). When push came to shove the relevant spokespeople - who were independent of the arts centre itself - denied the anti-white apartheid, but I had already made a careful study of how the event was advertised and those promoting it only approached black people with flyers. When I asked about this one of the promoters made some remark about 'cultural specifics'.
There were many other events, most of which were coded propaganda for Multiculturalism and other satellite creeds.

So, the axing of all that could only be a good thing. Then they chopped the two free music jamborees, the Croydon Festival and the Mela. All my liberal friends got upset about this. I observed the outrage via Facebook. In all the ranting no-one connected the largesse of the previous Labour council and government with the current situation. The shit-or-bust public spending based first on tax creamed off a boom created by consumer debt and City cowboys* and then, when that failed, based on good old borrowing.
As a regular festival-goer at Croydon I could honestly report that it had been going downhill for years. The nadir reached when Martha Reeves and the Vandellas sang to dodgy backing tracks in a hideous porridge of sound. My suggestion to a promoter friend of mine who got very exercised by the axe falling was: promote it yourself. If people love it as much as they say they do they'll pay a fiver on the gate.
Funnily enough my friend didn't fancy the gamble.

So the festivals went and I don't think anybody's too bothered now that the dust has settled. The Mela often ended in violence as various Asian gangs fought out obscure tribal ructions, though this went largely unreported because the local newspapers were slavish adherents to the NUJ's race reporting guidelines: if it reflects well on the particular community big it up; if badly, try and swerve it if you can. We'll have no black marks against the Multicultural project, thank you (no pun intended).
So now libraries. There is a great deal of controversy over proposed library closures nationwide, as well there might. According to Public Libraries News there are three hundred and ninety five (316 buildings and 75 mobiles) libraries under threat in one way or another. My maths says this adds up to 391 but I won't argue with librarians, they never take it well. It appears the Government doesn't quite know what it is going to do about libraries, so the figures are unclear.

Alan Bennett, who to the Obs reading-crowd is a sort of cross between Gandhi and the Archbishop of Canterbury, has called the cuts child abuse. The sane man receives this pearl with a sigh: if the old Holy Fool were that worried about child abuse why didn't he pipe up about the endless literal child abuse his beloved socially democratic public services allow because to intervene would be to judge and judging is for the petty conservative moralisers of suburbia, the ones Bennett's been taking the piss out of for fifty years. That's the way, Alan, EM Forster's the answer to Baby P's murderers. Has Bennett had anything to say about the shocking levels of illiteracy in London? Does he feel that his generation's battle against elitism has missed its target and destroyed standards instead?

The Evening Standard battled for months to jemmy those shocking figures out of the authorities. Tony 'Education, Education, Education' Blair donated the princely sum of £5,000 from his vast personal fortune towards that paper's crusade for literacy. I don't think it was some kind of heartless joke on his part but you never know. It certainly made me laugh albeit sardonically.
Child abuse is, among other things, the dumbing down of education, something that, whether he likes it or not, his 'side', the clever bien pensant side, have taken to with a vengeance as a sort of final solution for class equality. When there is a Prime Minister from a comprehensive school and if he is not a dunce, then I will say the project has finally worked. At the moment it doesn't look too clever, with the posh kids getting from education all they need to succeed and those in the lower social spectrum getting what the NUT lefties think they need to succeed. Guess who loses in the long run?

The council has allegedly been in talks with a ghastly-looking U.S. company that specialises in turning libraries into commercial propositions. The Institute of Directors, arm of Thatcherism in all its forms, recently said that libraries can go hang because the public are now buying cheap books off Amazon as well as Kindles etc. The Socialist Party squeals for the end of cuts.
So I decided to go in Croydon Library (first time in a while) and see what was going on. First floor: book aisles virtually empty (two people browsing, four seated); seven people at the computer terminals checking emails or Facebook. Fifteen children doing their homework, ie talking, in normal voices. This went unremarked and uncorrected.
Floor two: Books aisles entirely empty: seven seated reading, mostly newspapers; twenty-five people on the internet checking emails and browsing Facebook. Most tables filled with children doing homework, ie talking in normal voices. As downstairs, this went unremarked and uncorrected.
The unofficial homework club thing has been going on for years and it certainly has turned me away on several occasions because every table is taken up and the place has the atmosphere of a classroom. Those doing homework rarely trouble the bookshelves so the necessity of their presence is questionable. As in so many areas the public services' non-judgement ethos of the Labour years has indulged socially incontinent behaviour and as a consequence the idea of the library as a place of solace and quiet study has been eroded. It is now, with the blessing of our cultural commissars, more community centre than place of learning. (Perhaps they, and Alan Bennett, imagine that hoodies are having a quick break from skunk dealing to knock off a couple of chapters of The Princess Casamassima.)
A similar picture was to be seen on floor three.
I walked the aisles and thought about it all.

It is fair to say that a good deal of my education came from the shelves in front of me. I didn't have to walk far to come across books I've borrowed. In work and out of work, the nine books and six CDs you were allowed to borrow kept you instructed, stimulated, diverted and contented; and all the time education (a word I naturally now mostly associate with cant) of one sort or another flowed in. Conrad, Dickens, Joyce, Melville, Waugh, Greene, Patrick Hamilton, De Mauppassant, Flaubert, Anthony Burgess, Zola and countless others.
In the art section I realised I'd borrowed at least half of the books perhaps more. Some on many occasions. Many were like old friends that I'd forgotten. Books I borrowed when I was a callow art student, beginning the journey. From these shelves the boulevards of the Impressionists' Paris opened up for me, Rennaissance Italy, Carravaggio, the Cubists, Van Gogh, the School of London, Turner, Ruskin, Constable, Picasso, war artists, photographers you name it.
Libraries: The best that has been written, painted, sung and drawn. All free.
And here it is, seemingly largely ignored while the Facebook terminals multiply.
It hit me then that the problem neither the cost-cutting right or the stop-the-cuts left can see is that money is not really the issue here, it is culture.
Our culture drifts year by year ever further in a vacuous, stupid, vicious and inane direction. High culture survives but it does so in an increasingly marginalised and hidden state. The war against elites became a de facto battle against standards, in effect a crusade for mediocrity but fought under banners that cried excellence. With imagination-destroying television and computer gadgets at the centre of culture, education and the family are the first and last bastions of culture and civilisation. Both are now undermined in many ways, and the state and fate of libraries are to my mind proof of this.

The book as cultural artefact is at the centre of Western Civilisation. When we are done with books we will be on a very dangerous road indeed. When and if public libraries vanish it will be a very dark day in British cultural history. But we can't save our libraries until we save our culture, and I don't see anyone in power doing much about that.

Which brings me back to what I was staring at through the second floor window of Croydon Library: a huge hole in the ground over which three vast high-as-cathedral cranes loomed. The site of, drum roll, Croydon Council's new Public Services Delivery Hub. 240,000 sq ft of public sector doings, consolidated from other council precincts. This despite 30 per cent of the town's office space lying empty. The council has so far refused to say how much the building will cost. It claims construction overheads will be offset by 'development' of the assets (there is 20,000 sq ft of retail space as well), therefore theoretically costing the taxpayer nothing. What that means is: if another boom comes along everything will be OK.
I don't beleive a word of it.

*Those Labour Party defenders who blame the whole debacle on the, yes, disgusting behaviour of banks and hedge funds would do well to remember the whole sorry epoch had the public blessing of Chancellor Gordon Brown and his crooked little fingertip Edward Balls, for tax-and-cash-swill reasons on his own. He even made it easy for them through his much-vaunted light touch regulation (which of course had an unpleasant and unspoken corollary: heavy touch stealth taxes on the workers further down the economic food chain: hedge funders boasted of paying less tax than their cleaning ladies: wouldn't you like to see that in a BBC drama: you might, but it won't happen under a Pink Government...)

Memo From Turner

2011-06-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

Marr and the Bloggers

2011-06-06T17:55:00.000-07:00

THIS BLOG, such as it is at the moment, warmly welcomes back Mark Brentano's blog to the internet. If there is a more entertaining commentator or better writer of English currently being published on paper in England, or indeed western civilisation, I do not know about them. I missed it during its interregnum.

Mark has opened up batting with a good whack at Andrew Marr, in response to the broadcaster's dismissive comments about bloggers, made here.

I agree with practically all Mark has to say on the matter, but there are a few thoughts I'd like to toss in.

The real reason Marr has taken against blogs is because the ones that have caused ripples and crossed the divide into the mainstream media have generally been those that have criticised the pinkish political, media, legal and administrative class which runs the country and which Marr belongs to and thinks a very good thing indeed. These blogs are what the Guardian would call 'rightwing'. Sure there must be left wing blogs by the thousand and by the end of Cameron's period in office I would imagine we'll have a left-wing version of the right wing tattle site Guido Fawkes. Indeed, new Labour stooge Derek Draper tried to start one a couple of years ago when he realised the game was up for that government.

If blogging were dominated by a mentality that a champagne cultural Marxist like Marr could get on with then he'd refer to the activity as the People's Journalism or some other predictable bit of Mandlesonese and would pat them on the head in print, saying how wonderful puff-pieces on diversity and graffiti art in inner cities are. It's the lack of control which horrifies Marr and all the many others of his ilk. The unmediated thought that is baldly said. His generation have been extraordinarily effective in creating an alternative reality in a very short time simply by playing with words.
Despite his preoccupation with pop festivals*, a libertarian is the last thing Marr is. There is no cast-iron way, as yet, that the internet commentariat can be politically corrected and superinjuncted. The political, media, legal and administrative class (lets mint a bit of Newspeak and call them the polmedigad) do not like this and will, if we are not careful, in due course take steps to see that it is.

But there is another side to this. The real problem with blogs is that they are, as Mark Brentano says, for the most part journals and therefore the product of journal-keeping, which is halfway between diary-writing and op-ed. It is punditry not reportage. A pundit, from the sanskrit pandit for learned man. A source of opinion but not necessarily a news gatherer. The feeling I get from blog-browsing is that reportage, which what real citizens' journalism would be, is far too much like hard work. The blogosphere is rather like the Observer used to be about 20 years ago, ten per cent news and ninety per cent opinion columns. Opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one. That's the trouble with blogs. In the blogosphere, I don't particularly like that word but we're stuck with it for the time being, hard news is hen's-teeth-rare. Bloggers don't appear to go in for the cold-calling, interviewing, document trawling, FoI-ing** and on-the-spot reporting that constitute active journalism.

Of course, many paid journalists are now mere churnalists, recycling press releases. Then there are the platoons of journalists handed stories from the PR men and women in politics, showbiz and sport. However, even within the editorial preoccupations of any given newspaper/TV channel there will be real news stories broken along with those copped from other organs or the wires. Bloggers don't generally do this.

They wait for the stories to be supplied, then comment on them or speculate on new angles and motivations within them. There is nothing wrong with this at all. It allows the publication of sometimes gloriously spot-on reaction that would never be allowed in the mainstream media. However, it does mean that blogs are something that can be taken or left, like op-ed in a newspaper. They are not essential and that is their flaw, if you are putting them up as an alternative to mainstream media. Internet media briefly became essential recently when it did something that the mainstream couldn't do: name public figures whose sex lives had been kept secret by law. It started to break stories the press and tv could not break. I wonder if bloggers learned from this important moment the sheer value of new information as opposed to opinion given about new information or opinion which says new information is not true information.

If blogs are to go on and become something to rival the mainstream media, as opposed to their current situation, which is closer to myspace or facebook, they will have to join the hunt for new information and then comment on it as well. When that day comes, Andrew Marr and his class will come to fear and respect them.

*In his TV history of Britain he looked down on the Glastonbury pop festival from a helicopter and spoke an encomium to the event, calling it 'microcosmic society', which are exactly the same words as Mick Jagger used in the film Gimme Shelter to describe the Altamont rock festival in 1969, and we all know how that ended up. In a way of course Marr was right: hundreds of thousands of people all pissed, talking platitudes while listening to rather rubbishy music high on drugs IS a miniature version of the country, or parts of it.

**Submitting Freedom of Information Act requests.

Ed and the Shammers

2011-05-23T18:38:00.001-07:00

WHILE eating a late breakfast of boiled eggs I looked up at the television and saw Edward Miliband goggling and grinning.
I turned the sound on, reluctantly. Dermot Murnaghan of Sky news was asking the Labour Party leader about youth unemployment.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Miliband said in that nutter-on-the-bus voice of his. He started on about a lost generation and the need for ‘more investment’ and all that political class rhetoric that you know so well you could do ten minutes of it yourself on TV.
Murnaghan prodded Miliband a bit, saying if it was a lost generation then generations take some time to get going, therefore surely the last Labour government had some hand in the present situation.
Of course, Miliband wasn’t having that. And so it went on, as it does. I looked down at my eggs and they goggled up at me just like Ed.
Murnaghan could have discomfited Miliband quite easily it seemed to me, or at least have wiped the goggliness off his face.
He could have asked the leader of the Labour Party why the last government engineered a population rise of about five million though immigration, many of whom do the sort of jobs that Miliband’s lost generation could be doing while they await work as management consultants, abortion co-ordinators and equality data officers to become available.
Edward Miliband will know something of this because his brother David more or less wrote the manifestos of the new Labour era. And of course, instead of gaining experience of how the country actually works Edward spent those years as a ‘special adviser’ to Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown, in other words a civil servant well paid by us to advise those two how to burn our money, sorry I meant implement social justice.
When standing in the long queues to buy, say, overpriced coffee from eastern European baristas, I often hear political class rhetoric about unemployment in Britain ringing in my ears.
To use a clichéd bit of that rhetoric, it is the elephant in the room. Various simple solutions to this seem blindingly obvious but you will never hear them entertained by the powers that be or their shadows. Nor will the media so much as suggest it.
This is because nobody in Westminster wants to solve the problem. Perish the thought. All interested parties are gaining something from the status quo: Big business, liberals, the Left. Besides, questioning mass immigration plays badly with the yummy mummy vote, or so the political marketing men say.
This led me to another massive pachyderm pacing round in front of the telly: the difference between the rise in accommodation costs and wages.
From my own research (recollecting my hourly rate and my monthly rent) I have established that wages for non-skilled jobs have risen about 33 per cent in the past 15 years while rent has risen between 200 and 250 per cent.
This again is directly linked to a huge influx of foreign workers and students: excess manpower and a lack of living space.
But I have never heard a politician say this on television. I have never heard a thrusting, truth-seeking BBC journalist say this on Panorama. It is the great unsaid thing.
Meanwhile, generations get lost.
Murnaghan finished his interview with Miliband. Two highly paid men going about their business, which happens to be largely a sham.
I finished my goggling eggs and went to work.

Email to a pal concerning Osama, Obama, The Beatles, Liverpool, Chester and the Ras Prince

2011-05-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

From: William GAZY
To: Pal
Subject: Jelly Roll and the Ras Prince
Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 14:24:09 +0100

HALLO DERE!

Many thanks for the CD. I literally hurried to put it on. What was my disappointment to find 'CD not finalized' come up on the display! Not dissing your work old boy but I really fancied a listen.

The landlady has had the builders in at Highgate doing the windows and other bits and bobs. This has taken six weeks. I have been camping out at Croydon and getting no work done, by which I mean the work of using one's imagination to create things of aesthetic or literary interest. I have been busy lately, continually diverted by the two largest claims on any Londoner's time: work and Drink. There has been precious little time for art, low or high. I did have a dalliance with one Tina Perch but what with her one-year-old child, her part time lesbianism and belief in UFOs etc I felt that a long-term relationship was not in either of our interests.
I did have a fair run of luck on the Turf. One afternoon placing six horses in six races either first, second or third which, had they all won in a £1 accumulator, and they were all capable of winning, would have netted me one million and fifty three thousand pounds. Of course, I would have had to forego the £53,000 because bookmakers' payout limit is just the round one mill. Unfortunately I had them in different trixies. Ah well - but still a good pick-up.

I was pleased to see the Americans shot Bin Laden because among other things it would in a matter of hours reveal the hypocrisy of many of my liberal acquaintances, liberals in the sense of that seam of inchoate right-on opinion that dominates broadcasting, academia and etc.
Where was the outrage at this act of western imperialist freebooting? Where were the luvvies bussed in to BBC news studios every hour to be prompted into anti-American rhetoric? Where was the outrage on Facebook? There was none to be seen among my many liberal friends, none of the hand-me-down sarcasm from the world of stand up comedy. I dare say Noam Chomsky had his say somewhere but I didn't hear about it. Of course, one expects the the head of the Church of England to side with Al Qa'eda now and one receives the news with equanimity; the gobsmacker would have been the tiniest vindication of the action delivered with impeccable Anglican tact. Why have we spent a thousand years listening to old poofs in funny hats? (Good album title)
But really, it was a muted reaction from the Righteous.

And then of course it dawned on my slow brain: Barack Obama, the President of the U.S., is a black liberal. Or is perceived to be so. Had a white man named Bush, or indeed anyone from the Republican Party been in charge then etc.
In those crazy days nine years ago you regularly heard a kind of coded praise for Bin Laden, remember? At that time his war on the U.S. appeared to some of the more addled members of the Islington Tendency as a sort of underdog football match between Crewe Alexander and Manchester United. It was years before they grasped that Bin Laden and his friends were not the sort of edgy young shavers who would dig The Clash, Mark Thomas and dub reggae. I knew a stoner bus driver a few years ago who openly admired Bin Laden, pronouncing his name fussily each time as ozammabin ladenne.
As I used to say too much: it is impossible to keep up with the cuntishness of modern opinions.
But it does make you wonder who'll the Righteous Left will blame everything on while they wait for the next Republican government to come along. I did wonder at one point if the BBC would go against all instinct and make the French out to be the wrong 'uns of the world. They had Sarko AND the Burka ban, maan, to go on.

A pal from work suggested a trip to Chester races prefaced with a jaunt round his home town of Liverpool. I had never been up the North before. Day one was L/pool. The beer was better than beer served in London, there was no doubt about that. Another northern friend had said to me: I don't like southern beer, it's warm and flat; I like northern beer, it's cold and creameh. He was bloody well right. I liked the city, what I saw of it, with its faded but grand architecture and old pubs. My Liverpudlian pal took me in the best example of an ornate Victorian pub I have ever seen: The Philharmonic Dining Rooms.
We went down Mathew St and in the fake Cavern and past the electrical sub-station which stands on the grave of the real one. There is a Beatles shop at the top which had a large poster of the bad lord Jagger in the window marked: 'was £4 now £2'.
My interest in the Beatles' music faded a long time ago and I found the area slightly sad, but we went in a couple of good pubs, one called the White Star (filled with dramatic sea pictures and four brass plaques on seats where the Beatles are supposed to have caroused, marked with their names). In another pub there was a photograph of the 'the boys' next to the corner where it had been taken. 'THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN HERE'. There they were aged 17 and the spot did not seem to have changed. We contemplated this for a moment and then Agadoo by Black Lace came on very loudly. The area seemed to have potential for ironists.
Later we went to an old RC church that had been converted into a bar. I forget its name but seek it out if you go up there, it is well worth seeing inside.

Chester was a nice city and the racecourse very good in its appointments but every knobhead for miles around had come. I should have realised this when agreeing to the trip, in fact I think I did but I agreed to it a year ago and clearly forgot.
We had press tickets which kept us in the good bit while the races were on. The women were very hot but there was a lot of footballers wives-a-like mutton accompanied by coked-up wrong uns in the mix. Fair enough, that's racing anywhere. But in a pub beforehand my accent had been clocked by three laddos at the bar and there'd been some mild screwing out. From that moment I realised I was a) 180 miles off the manor and b) Londoners are by and large disliked up there. I briefly considered adopting a northern accent but found I had too much pride and self-respect. I had a forecast up and had a nice pick-up on the last. As we left the racecourse it occurred to me that it was rather like being a POW on the run in Germany during the war: every time I opened my mouth it was clocked and not admiringly.
I had to get a train to Crewe, which turned out to be full of drunken chavs going back to Sheffield and similar. As the train pulled in to Crewe one of them, very drunk and half-abetted and half-restrained by his mate, tried to start a fight with me outside the toilet, which was out of order (the toilet). He grabbed hold of my hair, which was slightly bouffant, and started calling me a fucking gay cunt. I was holding him off trying to delay the full fight because I knew there was more of them in the carriage behind. Then he clocked my accent and he the abuse increased. They don't half hate Londoners! I was very calm during this, which always surprises me when I'm in real danger. Both him and his pal had had chunks out of their faces in the past so one could guess their hobbies. However they were both slight compared to me and I made up my mind to do my worst if it came to it.
I am by no means a keen fighter but I am as strong as lion, plus I'd had a few pints of Okells myself. Just then an Asian woman came along the corridor and this claimed the main antagonist's attention: he began racially abusing her in a manner to make a BNP-er blush before being dragged away by his pal. The train came to a halt and off I got. I headed for the station bar and ordered a drink at the precise moment five drunken scousers came in and clocked me and the accent. One of them did a strange silent 'square up' to me which he immediately backed off from to play pool.
By this time I felt like Sedgwick the Manufacturer in the Great Escape.

I drank my drink and thought: these young idiots are monkeys and they know they're monkeys: that's why they hate us cos we remind them of it. Caliban shrieks. Eventually I got on the train to London. I travelled virgin first class because I’d got a deal on it - £35. As I sunk into my seat, thinking ‘fucking close call’ and the fields sped by at 125mph, a stewardess comes along and asked me if I wanted a drink.
‘Got a gin and tonic?’
‘Yes,’ she said brightly. ‘You might as well have two, mightn’t you?’
That’s a good idea, I said. I asked her how much.
‘Oh there’s nothing to pay, it’s free drinks in first class.’
Thereafter it was a happy journey back to London - 90 odd mins. Pope-like, I considered kissing the platform upon arrival at Euston. I went in the Doric Arch and ordered a large VAT: seven quid! Definitely back in London. I paid up cheerily.

Rgds

WG

Cleese takes to Bath or RACIST PIE-THONN

2011-04-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

From: William Gazy
To: Pal

Absolutely, I didn't think it needed saying. Lib Demmite he is as well! He has actively funded the pinkish political class and now moans at the world they've brought about.
The poor luvvy's down to his last £3.5million. DIDDUMS.
It will be interesting to see how the BBC handles its former star in the light of this. His remarks will be pored over at the Ministry of Truth. Poisoned umbrella tips at the ready. I suspect The Alimony Tour will now be a Channel Four broadcast.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:21:59 +0100
From: Pal
Subject: Re: Further to our conversation on the bus yesterday
To: William Gazy
Well said by Cleese but slightly ironic since arguably he and his chums helped along the death of respect started by Beyond the Fringe etc. A case of 'be careful what you wish for'?

--- On Fri, 22/4/11, William Gazy wrote:

From: William Gazy
Subject: Further to our conversation on the bus yesterday
To: Pal
Date: Friday, 22 April, 2011, 11:25

'Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a "middle-class culture" and the emergence of a "yob culture".
He said: "There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it's a yob culture. The values are so strange."
He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt "English".
"London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath," he said. "That's how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8455538/Lord-Cleese-of-Fawlty-Towers-Why-John-Cleese-declined-a-peerage.html

As P Hitchens said: 'Only the rich will be able to escape the consequences.'

Postcard to Nick Reeves

2011-04-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

Email to a pal re England: An Elegy by Roger Scruton

2011-03-16T04:30:00.000-07:00

I wasn't being facetious when I said sub's disease. I think it is an occupational hazard. It's hard to say whether I really disagree with you because I read the book more than five years ago, though I have looked at bits since. Parts of it are a hard read but as I say my guess is that he wanted to lay out concrete arguments alongside metaphysical ones if you know what I mean. He knew he would be slagged because you simply cannot write a book like that with upsetting the usual suspects. I found the Guardian's review of it online. It was, naturally, an exercise in juvenile carping. Its central charge was the book contained nothing about, yes, black or brown people's 'experience of England'. The reviewer had quite forgotten Scruton's stated aim, which was not a work of s*ciol*gy but an elegy, with all the faults and strengths of an elegy.
To turn the book into a magazine feature would risk losing some detail in the concision and would simply shorten it, something I reckon Scruton is constitutionally against because he is an academic and they adore length. But more importantly it would turn the book into mere journalism, which is ephemeral. A book is a lasting statement, or so you would like to think.
I had a small correspondence with him after I read the book but when he discovered I was a journalist that was the end. He hates journalists. He says a lot of questionable things in the book and if I remember rightly tries to mount a defence of social snobbery among other silly right-wing windmill tilts. But where I agree with him and evidently some on the nominal left/liberal side - Lord £Bragg£ for one - do is that the character of the country is changing into something inane, vicious and tasteless and that socialism (his father was a socialist of the respectable 1945 variety) has as much of a hand in the change as the hated Thatcher, someone who Scruton describes as 'an awful woman'. He also eats liver and bacon, likes horses, drinks a lot and (I was pleased to discover) has similar aesthetic tastes to me, excepting Wagner on my side and rock and roll on his. He unapologetically decries modern design, modern architecture, animal rights fanatics, political correctness, Islamism, dumbing down and television and does so with arguments that stand up. This makes him an admirable figure in my view.

2011-03-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

Demolished House at Night in N6 5/3/11, chalk on jet black canford paper

Study for The Crucifixion of St Peter

2011-01-17T14:09:00.000-08:00

From an email to a pal:

'This is the rough i did of the crucifixion of st peter the other night. I've been thinking of doing this picture for a couple of years. It's not a Christian thing - though no one will believe that - but more an image of the calculated domestic nastiness in our own age of conflicting idelogies colliding above the chavs. I'm thinking the background should be an ordinary English tatty suburban park - green railings, maybe even a game of football in the distance...'

OK, St Peter did ask to be crucified upside down, according to the Apocrypha, but still.

'Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss'*

2011-01-11T09:59:00.000-08:00

A FEW years ago I got a lot of stick off friends and enemies for saying the right-wing 'Fundamentalist Anglican' Peter Hitchens had hit the bullseye a few times when attacking new Labour in particular and the political class in general and the fashionable nonsense that had seeped into their policies.
He is far from right about everything - in fact plain wrong on many things - but when I first read his dissections of leftish middle class's doctrinal preoccupations I knew he was on to something. His jibes against New Labour and its armies of supporters, or should I say in the media, arts and local government were delicious to me: truth well-aimed - and he never gets tired of slinging it at the nicely-thank-you inverted snobs, con-men and hypocrites with which our political and civil administration is filled.
Almost everyone who gave me stick subscribed to a widespread political view which persists despite years of evidence which proves it is full of holes and cant; indeed, to use a phrase beloved of my old man, it sticks like shit to a blanket.

It is of course: Tories are scum and Labour is on the side of the angels. Oh yes, don't you worry about that.
After a long, long period where holders of that viewpoint had to keep very quiet for obvious reasons, the good times are coming back. Ed Miliband was in the Times last week denying that Labour's 13-year spending splurge on bureaucracy and civil servants had anything whatsoever to do with the vast structural deficit it faces. This was a lie. Good for Ed; he's shown himself to be cheeky, and you need to be cheeky in the political class. You need brassneck cheek.
Cameron is handing the Labour Angels another gift by bottling it on bankers' bonuses. This shows a lack of pragmatism and balls. When you add that to the Coalition's backing out on so many key areas: EU, immigration, crime, welfare reform, then stir in VAT and tax rises and you start to wonder who the hell this government is representing. Only another four years of it to go. Or is there...?
Which brings me back round to P Hitchens, who had this to say a couple of weeks ago about Dave Cameron and the yellow peril welshing us all on the immigration issue which has turned parts of country into ongoing tinder-boxes and will provide many angry British adults in the future called Osama:

'...the modernised Tory Party, just like its New Labour twin, actively favours large-scale migration. Rich young careerists in pleasant parts of London – who form the core of all our establishment parties – couldn’t function without the cheap servants and cheap restaurants that immigration brings.
Not for them the other side of immigration – the transformation of familiar neighbourhoods into foreign territory. Not for them the schools where many pupils cannot speak English, and the overloaded public services. Not for them the mosque and the madrassa where the church and the pub used to be. Not that they mind that so much. These people have no special loyalty to this country, nor much love for it. They are not significantly different from the Blairite apparatchik Andrew Neather, who last year unwisely said openly what such people have long thought privately.
Let me remind you that he spoke of ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. And that he recalled coming away from high-level discussions ‘with a clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main -purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
Well, doesn’t Mr Cameron also like to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date? I think he does. And of course anyone who complained could be (and always will be) smeared as a ‘bigot’. In fact, the issue long ago ceased having anything to do with skin colour. We have many black and brown Britons who have, over time, become as British as I am – though alas this is less and less the case because the curse of multiculturalism has prevented proper integration, as has the huge size of the recent influx.'

Well said.

Of course, the cry of right-wing press will be heard. I prefer to take my cues from reality. Such as my father, age 74 (still at work in a manual trade, started work 1951), attending a hospital last week for a blood test which he had been told would take an hour but which took about eight hours because there was a queue of 180 people in front of him. Yes, you read that correctly.

He made a little study of the queue, a proper socialist study of nationalities and ethnicities you might call it, and to the best of his knowledge he could only discern four English people in it. Yes, yes, Harriet Harman, I bet there was loads of British passport-holders in the queue. I know which lawyers to consult to buy one as well, should I ever have need.

But well done Labour! You lived the dream. Well, you didn't live it you just inflicted it on your sainted ordinary people who you hate and call bigoted it on the rare occasions you meet them - see Gordon Brown during the election.

One day someone will write a proper history of how a bunch of smartass exam-passing machines who did PPE at Oxbridge and thought everything they read in the Economist about globalisation and Multiculturalism was true and big and clever, and how it might lead them to sing the Red Flag *and* have a platinum mastercard ('the working class? Oh they're around somewhere I'm sure...'), led them, out of sheer arrogance and greed, to create a Nowhere out of a Somewhere. And still end up in £1.6million ex-National Trust property in Dartmouth Park, North London.

Yes Mili Minor, I'm talking about you.

In trying to make Ed Miliband look a good bet for the public in four years Labour's Alistair Campbell-elect, Tom Baldwin, will have his work cut out for him. Don't get me wrong, the strategy part will be easy: gallons of the sweet wine of socialist rhetorical carping: 'there's plenty of money available for you and it's all hidden in a golden chest under David Cameron's bed along with his Eton collar'.
It is selling Ed himself to the public that will prove difficult.
However, I did not return to blogging to write about the opposition. I didn't do it when Labour were in power and now we have another bunch of overprivileged, venal, incompetent cowards in charge I intend to criticise them. I merely draw your attention to Baldwin because he appears to be one of the larger media sycophants of the Blair years and his profile is classic political class, right down to the extreme wealth, Oxford PPE qualification and the 'fanatical loathing' of Tories.
Oxbridge is good at producing such people. If only they could give them such a thorough grounding in ordinary life as they do in Keynesian economics and Marxian critical modes.
Someone called Tanya Gold, who seemed very pleased with herself, wrote the cover feature for the Sunday Times Magazine this week called Marx and Spenders - How the Left took over North London Again. Again? I think she meant that they all sulked because of the war in Iraq, but now they are all voting Labour once again, apparently. 'We're happier in opposition, aren't we?' says some organic knitwear yummy mummy Gold vox-popped in Hampstead. You know it, girl! Carping is the natural state for such people - I can handle that as long as they aren't running anything. Trouble is they *are* running everything, every civil institution bar the Cabinet. But that is another story.

Sufficey to say that Ms Gold's piece about Darmouth Park, Hampstead and Highgate (where I reside) missed the most obvious and grandest irony about it being a colony of champagne socialists. These places are nice to live in because they have resisted everything that the cultural and political Left has imposed everywhere else.

*From Won't Get Fooled Again, words and music P. Townshend 1971

Email to Mark Brentano

2011-01-01T05:54:00.000-08:00

You dear old boy,

I hope you have recovered yourself. I was on a skin-shedder from Boxing Day (which didn't stop me taking £75 quid off the relatives at roulette. Joe Pesci accent: you better do Nicky cos if you don't he'll play the alley bets till he beats you on the margins. Suggestion: Line for a rock and roll song: Play the Alley Bets). The 'Flu still hasn't entirely removed itself from my body but I feel a human being once again. I couldn't get my arms over my head on Wednesday. Didn't stop me taking a turn down to the Royal Standard though, where I consumed three pints of E.S.B. to get my bowels working again and throw something heavy at the contagion. It warmed me slightly and opened up the Limpopo but it was mere palliative care.

I have spent the week reading K Richards' memoirs and they are fun that's for sure. It's all about the turn of phrase. There are not many books which contain astute observations on heroin, Gram Parsons and Bexleyheath Tennis Club. There is a larf or a smile on almost every page.

All in all it puts me in the right frame of mind to play a bit of guitar in your proposed combo. Last time I was on stage was playing the ukulele at an open mic 5 years ago so what I may bring is debatable but maybe me and the serb can weave it up.

Richards says the Altamont fracas was largely caused by the vast amounts of two brands of cheap fortified wine the audience was consuming. One was good old Thunderbird the other Ripple. Thunderbird and Ripple - quite a good name for something.

He also remembers the Stones' piano player and road manager turning to him at Altamont and saying: 'Getting a bit hairy, Keith.' To which the great man responded: 'We've just got to brass it out.'

Like so many areas of life, eh?

See you in the bar and happy new year,

N

2010-12-19T09:44:00.000-08:00

This is what gets on my wick about the assumptions of Guardian music writers (I have known one or two):

Par from Beefheart's obit:

'Captain Beefheart was also a visionary in one other, often overlooked, way: he hymned the natural world in his own inimitably odd way on songs such as My Human Gets Me Blues and Wild Life. He was an ecological warrior long before it was fashionable. His death, after a long period of self-enforced seclusion, comes at a time when it is difficult to imagine anyone as eccentric – and as eccentrically gifted – finding a place in contemporary pop culture. In the era of The X Factor the old-fashioned showbusiness values that the 1960s rock revolution was meant to have swept away have returned with a vengeance. There is no place now in pop for the madcap and the beautifully demented, but there is always Trout Mask Replica. Approach with caution.'

In the era of The X Factor the old-fashioned showbusiness values that the 1960s rock revolution was meant to have swept away have returned with a vengeance.

No, they haven't returned. Old fashioned showbiz values meant the performers you see on X Factor would have been booed off. Simple as that.
'The 60s rock revolution' was balanced on the despised 'old fashioned showbiz values' in the sense that you had to have a talent honed through discipline, you had to be 'good'. You don't anymore and that is more a result of 60s cultural relativism, digging a pony as Lennon had it, than Cowell's shit-peddling.
I was sad to hear of Beefheart's death. I've long been a fan, even though I think he was a bit of a charlatan.

2010-12-15T07:42:00.000-08:00

Colour Study for That's Life, That's What All the People Say. Chalk.

Email to a pal re Melanie Phillips

2010-12-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

THEY all slag her off but I read her book Londonistan and everything she says in it is borne out by current events - London and environs is the biggest breeding ground for Islamic terrorism outside the Orient* and the British public are paying for it with their taxes through benefits, grants and paying for the EU to build a legal system that gives protection to the radicals. No surprise the exploding dimwit in Sweden was radicalised here. She made the point that when the mullahs came here in the 80s, the Govt and MI5 made the basic error of thinking they would only cause trouble abroad so let 'em get on with it. For this reason I wrote to her and suggested she should use a George Orwell quote from his essay England, Your England, as an epigraph for the paperback edition: 'The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.'
I thought of that line on the 7th July 2005.
Of course, Orwell's next line was: 'But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good.'
He goes on to say, rather wonderfully:

'The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of the country.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.'

Still a recognisable picture, mutatis mutandis and accepting that they now have power, eh?

The essay can be read here.

*A word I have started to use again as it apparently offends both Islamic and Marxist mullahs. As a kid it was a word I enjoyed (Biggles in the Orient, for example and the whole mysterious Chinaman trend in adventure fiction). I even considered supporting Leyton Orient because of my liking for it.

Study for Hastings Pier After the Fire

2010-12-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

Charcoal and chalk on brown packing paper, 4/12/10.

The Philosophy of Losing

2010-12-03T17:59:00.000-08:00

‘HABIT is stronger than reason.’ So said the philosopher George Santayana. The aphorism could well do with being posted in prominent positions everywhere bets are taken on horses.
I did not wish to burden you with a disquisition on horse-playing this early in my return to the online fold, but feel what I have to say will benefit me (by the action of writing it down) and you if you ever decide to gamble on racing yourself.
I had planned a little canter round the subject of what happens to revered American film directors once they’ve got their Oscar and have entered their seventh decade, but that can wait.
I don’t know if Santayana was a racing fan. It’s possible, I suppose. He knocked about Europe a fair bit and lived in Italy for years. He might possibly have had a few lire on the Palio. However, his little Christmas cracker motto nicely illustrates the primary error of the average punting mind.
Every punter has a bad habit. Indeed most punters simply have bad punting habits full stop. Mine is doing each-way trixies (A multiple bet consisting of three selections covered by three doubles and a treble – four bets. Each way makes eight bets. We’ll come back to trixies another time, for they are rivalled only by women as vehicles for inflicting joy and misery).
The first, foremost and worst punting habit is the one that ensures there is a profitable betting shop situated roughly between every pub and bank in England – the indiscriminate backing of favourites.
Happily it is not bad punting habit of mine. Though I have plenty.
If favourites won all the time there would be no racing and no betting. You cannot ‘buy money’ by lumping on short-priced favourites. OK, it can be done sometimes and is done, but as a strategy it is foolhardy and will send you to the poorhouse in short order. Yet the same people go back day after day to shove their hard-earned or not so hard-earned money at the cashiers for the ‘good thing’, the the jolly old favourite. Habit proving very much stronger than reason.
You are more likely to find me having unprotected sex with an African prostitute than putting a packet on a nag at evens or odds-on.
The following anecdote should prove nicely instructive about the folly of backing favourites.
I was walking to work in central London a couple of weeks ago when I remembered there was quite an interesting-looking race on the Newbury card that afternoon. That particular jumps meeting always has some class action and is usually worth getting involved in. I entered a betting shop in Camden Town a few minutes before the start of a novices' Chase.
The first thing I noticed was a young man gabbling into his mobile phone with a betting slip in front of him which had ‘Spirit River, £200 win’ written on it in an unsteady hand. Oh dear, I thought.
The place was full of Chinese and Poles plus the usual pensioners and builders. They were all lumping money on the favourite, a handsome, powerful-looking French beast, the aforementioned Spirit River, trained by the very clever Nicky Henderson (who trains the Queen's National Hunt prospects). With one eye I watched Spirit River cantering down to the start on the main tv set and with the other, so to speak, I had a glance at the form.
I’m not the greatest judge of equine physique but there was no doubt Spirit River was the best horse in the race and would win if he put in a clear round over fences. He looked as if he would have a high cruising speed and plenty in the tank.
It was a novice chase, so they were all hurdlers looking to score over fences for the first time. Hurdles are much different from fences. Fences are bigger and more of a challenge. If a horse is used to lifting his legs to a certain height he may find he has a surprise when going over fences in a race scenario. However, it was clear everyone in the shop and at the racecourse had elected to believe that a good hurdler will be a good chaser first time out despite plenty of historical evidence to the contrary.
Paul Nicholls’ well-regarded Celestial Halo was also making his chase debut but I didn’t fancy him over fences just yet. A tricky horse, he is.
My eye was taken by Cois Farraig, the only horse in the race with point-to-point experience. Point-to-points being amateur steeplechases.
At 10/1 and with some fence experience he looked like he might be worth a bet. I didn’t expect him to beat Spirit River in terms of racing, but in terms of jumping. If he could jump better than Spirit River – if the favourite fell, to be precise – then he was in with a serious chance I reckoned.
Meanwhile, money continued to pile on the favourite, Spirit River, which was 10/11. The young man approached the counter and pushed £200 under the window. Oh dear, I thought.
Off they went. Cois Farraig led until the fourth fence when Spirit River headed him. I felt a tad gloomy because Spirit River was doing OK. In fact I was on the verge of throwing my betting slip away. The Sporting Life’s report tells what happened to the favourite next with greater concision than I can hope to rival:
‘Led 4th, blundered and fell 11th. Opened 11/10 touched 11/10. £1000-£800 (x3) £500-£400 (x4) £1200-£1000 £1100-£1000 (x2) £550-£500 £473-£400 £1000-£1000 £500-£550’
The figures that follow the description are a record of some of the larger punts made with bookies in the betting ring at Newbury.
When poor old Spirit River fell a great oriental lamentation spread across the room, punctuated with Polish oaths. I simultaneously yelled, with a bit of mockery in my voice: ‘There’s no easy money in this game, fellas!’
The Poles regarded me sulkily for that. The Chinese said nothing. They simply shouted at each other and the screen. But I was busy watching my horse, which had looked as if its jockey, Dominic Elsworth, was easing it down for place money in the wake of the favourite. Now Spirit River was out of it every other jockey in the race suddenly realised they might be set fair for some of the £25,000 prize money. Cois Farraig picked up sharply, was ‘slightly hampered 11th, led 12th, driven after 2 out, stayed on well’
to win.
I did a little dance in front of screens as I sometimes do under those circumstances.
The race announcer, who’d said he’d backed Spirit River, sounded a bit gutted when talking the race over. No one but me was at the pay-out window. ‘Well done,’ the commentator said, ‘if you picked that one out.’
‘I did!’ I announced to the shop before toddling past them all – including the now dazed-looking youth who put £200 quid on Spirit River – back on to Camden High Street to continue my journey to work. A profitable little diversion.
But the nub is that the following day, the following race even, 90 per cent of the punters in the shop would be back on the favourite, lumping on short price certainty. Habit being stronger than reason.
Spirit River is once to keep an eye on. He’ll win a chase soon enough.
As I walked along chuckling a bit, another Santayana quote suggested itself as a betting shop legend, perhaps embossed on brass plaques above the main screen: ‘If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.’

The Return

2010-11-30T15:33:00.000-08:00

DEAR readers, I do apologise for cutting off like that back in May but I trust you won’t hold it against me. You did not have to be a psychologist to realise that the last government had started to annoy me a bit too much. I needed a rest quite frankly.
However, you have to keep your hand in where writing is concerned and so, I reasoned, what better way to discipline one’s thoughts than reviving the old blog? Andrew Marr doesn’t like them, so that’s a point in their favour straight away.

In the intervening six months some things have changed and some have not, as things in life tend to. I have moved to Highgate, North London, from Croydon, South London. I did not set out to live ‘up there with all them pop stars and celebrities’ as a cab driver recently put it, but by chance I did and I find it rather agreeable, far more so than Croydon, a town where the worst mistakes of capitalism and socialism meet and hold on tight to each other like comic drunks on ice.
I still work for a national tabloid and I still like to mouth off about politics and culture. But you will have noticed that this blog is no longer called Better Than a Dead Lion.
My circumstances and my approach have changed and I feel this demands a different title. Kolley Kibber is of course the nom de plume, so to speak, of Fred Hale, the Daily Messenger journalist who is murdered by Pinkie Brown at the beginning of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock for exposing a slot machine racket. The above picture shows Alan Wheatley playing Hale in the film version, a favourite of mine.
Hale is also a keen follower of the Turf, tipping Ida Arnold the winning Black Boy at 10/1. I myself have a interest in racing and I will write here occasionally on my punting adventures and reflections on form study. Racing, and gambling on racing, often has a way of illuminating, or rather complimenting, what the great writers and philosophers have had to say about existence.

Greene explains Kolley Kibber as a preface to the novel:
During the summer season in England certain
popular newspapers organize treasure hunts at
the seaside. They publish the photograph of a re-
porter and print his itinerary at the particular
town he is visiting. Anyone who, while carrying
a copy of the paper, addresses him, usually under
some fantastic name, in a set form of words, re-
ceives a money prize; he also distributes along his
route cards which can be exchanged for smaller
prizes. Next day in the paper the reporter de-
scribes the chase. Of course, the character of Hale
is not drawn from that of any actual newspaper-
man.
This blog is a sort of Kolley Kibber route card left on the internet, if that is not too fanciful; reports from wherever my mind or body wanders. In the film of Brighton Rock, when Hale leaves a card on the magazine trolley at WHSmith's at Brighton Station, you can just spot 'Kolley Kibber Adventure Card' printed on it, so that gives me my title.
I think the blog will be more descriptive of a life led than just the old soapbox but you know me. This government is starting to look like it could end up as bigger disaster as Project Blair, and the boy Ed – whose £1.6million ex-National Trust house is not far away from where I live and Marx lies – shows no sign of bring sense to the Labour Party.
And to finish, the opening page of Brighton Rock, one of the great openings I reckon:

HALE knew they meant to murder him before
he had been in Brighton three hours. With his
inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner
cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't be-
long belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whit-
sun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in
by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down
Queen's Road standing on the tops of the little local
trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh
and glittering air : the new silver paint sparkled on the
piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a
pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature mo-
tors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below
the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the
health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.
It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost in
Brighton. Fifty thousand people besides himself were
down for the day, and for quite a while he gave him-
self up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics wher-
ever his programme allowed. For he had to stick closely
to a programme : from ten till eleven Queen's Road and
Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium
and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the
Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one
and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle
Square, and after that he had to make his way all down
the parade to West Pier and then to the station by the
Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and
widely advertised sentry go.
Advertised on every Messenger poster : "Kolley Kib-
ber in Brighton today."In his pocket he had a packet
of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route :
those who found them would receive ten shillings from
the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for who-
ever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and
with a copy of the Messenger in his hand : "You are
Mr. Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize."
I hope you few, you happy few, are still there to read this blog.

1997-2010

2010-05-11T17:55:00.000-07:00

'As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade...

Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.'

WH Auden, September 1, 1939

Brown Trousers Time

2010-05-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

I said all along that Brown wouldn't go quietly. When he made his speech this afternoon outside No.10 I was in the newsroom of a national newspaper. Gasps and incredulous laughter swept across the room. Of course, this was mostly journalistic lipsmacking at the feast of nonsense to come and all the good copy to be derived from it. But there was also a genuine sense of disbelief.
Someone turned to me, a Labour supporter as it happens, and said: 'That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.'
But it was no surprise to me. What, did they really think an arch-control freak like Brown would just say ta-ta? The defining characteristic of the modern Labour Party is a total lack of respect for constitutional normality: the whole mechanism of civil governance is there to be raped as expedience demands.
Only the other week I'd had a conversation in the pub with the same colleague during which I'd advanced my theory that Brown is mentally ill and unstable, as well as being a Communist.
'In what way,' said someone drinking with us, who regards himself, with some good reason, as a political specialist, 'is Brown a Communist.'
'Emotionally,' I replied.
But they were not up for that.
It seems obvious to me that Clegg will side with Labour - a window of opportunity lies in that direction: a voting system that will keep the Tories permanently out of office. Clegg must know that the Tories will never give him anything much on voting reform; turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
In the background, Mandelson politicks - the ol intrigant engineering the last great rolls of the dice to build a thousand-year Blairite reich with Cleggy boy and finally dance on England's grave.

The Rat Parliament ii

2010-05-10T04:09:00.000-07:00

I haven't written anything on here for a month or more because I was sick of politicians and related subjects. In fact I had resolved to close this blog down and put my efforts to more rewarding activities.
But the hung parliament is worth a few lines.
Cameron lost the election because he listened to Steve Hilton and Andy Coulson, the marketing men who called the shots on his campaign. They insisted he mouth liberal platitudes to capture the wavering Blairite vote. If Coulson and Hilton ever got their noses out of Notting Hill and saw how real people on average salaries are talking they would have known two things: one, the political attitudes of the young are created largely by 'Uni'. That is to say a decaff Marxoid reading of recent social history in which Margaret Thatcher is regarded as the antichrist. They will not vote Tory because of this and because of being spoonfed the same attitudes via BBC drama and others bits of pop culture. They cannot be wooed by boasting about gay marriages and black candidates.
Secondly, what Cameron lost by 'alienating' the youth and female vote in south by talking straight he could have won back with handsome interest in the North. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say he could have rampaged round the North on the issues that Gillian Duffy raised with Gordon Brown on that fateful afternoon. But these are politicians who only like to gamble with your money not their chance of power.
Cameron will now be firmly in the sights of the Tory Right-Wing.

The result of this election is that the Tories will never govern with a majority again. At least, not until the Union is broken up. Whatever farcical arrangments are announced today, the government will be weak, divided and vulnerable and will be disposed of in due course. Any concessions on voting reform will only bring about the Tories' end more swiftly. I am not overly troubled by the Tories going another step on their way to oblivion; but the fact is that if they now shrivel and make a Faustian pact with any sort of proportional representation then Mandelson's idea of perpetuating Project Blair/Brown through a 'progressive alliance' of LibDems and Blairites becomes a reality and that is not a government I wish to live under. The quickest way to see this country go the way of Greece, Spain and Portugal would be to have a Lib-Lab coalition. The IMF will be a frequent visitor to these shores.

As for Labour, well. I was quite shocked by my friends' sentimentality about them. There can be no doubt they are one of the worst British governments of the modern era, whose cv of folly, corruption, warmongering, incompetence, arrogance and criminality is breathtaking. And yet people, intelligent people, were blithely prepared to vote for them once again. Apart from self-interest - some of them work in the Public Sector - I am at a loss to understand the motivation. Concern for the poor? The working man has been shafted by 13 years of Labour quite as much as they were under 18 years of Toryism. So why this devotion? Because 'they mean well'?
This is the ultimate sentimentality, isn't it? Judging a government on its *intentions* and ignoring the results.
Unlike the Tories, Labour will win again. We live in an era of infantilised minds easily gratified and hostile to complicated ideas or arguments. Someone else will always pay; cake can be had and eaten always; nasty decisions need never be taken. This is the view that Blair triumphed on and Gordon Brown presents to his client base of civil servants and welfare claimants under the 'invesment' rhetoric. Anyone who publishes anything to the contrary is a stooge of the right-wing press.

Clegg. The less said the better, really. Blair redux. They say Cameron will offer him the job of Home Secretary. There's a thought to make you shudder. See my analysis of the LibDems' manifesto from last year for a taste of how well they'll fit into a Tory cabinet.

Let's hope things will be OK. Or, see you in the riots.

The Rat Parliament 2005-10

2010-04-27T17:39:00.000-07:00

Picture: Dead Rat in Croydon on a Midsummer Morn (c) William Gazy 2008

Cheltenham

2010-03-20T04:11:00.000-07:00

In racing, the adage about the king is dead, long live the king is very acute. Kauto Star was expected to win the top prize in jump racing yesterday but I knew that his jumping could be dodgy. I’d tipped Imperial Commander for the Cheltenham Gold Cup to anyone who was asking and so was well pleased to see him win.
The only problem was that, apart from an ante-post yankee which had fallen apart in the course of the festival, I wasn’t on Imperial Commander; I was on Denman, though the old tank wasn’t carrying much of my money.
Myself, Ange and Mick were in one of those ale and pie pubs that are absurdly expensive and make their money out of corporate entertaining. We were there because they were showing Cheltenham on the telly. As I walked in a posh man was at the bar with his son; they were dressed like Princes Phillip and Charles visiting Gordonstoun in 1963, and sounded like it too.
There was a time when I would have sneered at them. But I have little class war left in my soul. The past 13 years of “social democracy” has made me realise we have a great deal more to lose than our aitches, to paraphrase my hero, George Orwell. Or as my mate Butch says: ‘I thought I hated Thatcher till I saw Ed Balls.’
Anyway. One useful thing about the wealthy is that they’re usually tight with money. This puts them in a sort of canary in a coalmine role in the marketplace. Thus, as I approached the bar I heard the older man say, with well-modulated incredulity, ‘I beg your pardon? Six pounds ten for a glass of wine?’
I felt like elbowing him in the ribs and saying in my best Alfred Doolittle, ‘aye, cap’n, a man can’t get himself drunk without laying out a fortune. Tax, captain, tax and brewery greed. It’s how socialism fucks you up the arse twice. Tax.’
The difference between conservatism and socialism, really. Once up the arse or twice.
I watched him shell out the money. It amused me. Perhaps I have got more class war left in my soul than I thought.
We settled down and watched Berties Dream hold off Najaf and win at 50/1 in the County Hurdle. Ange, who is a coincidence bettor, had it in a 25p trixie with Thousand Stars, which had won the previous race at 20/1. So she was £300 to the good already. If her third selection, Balthazar King, pulled it off in the conditional jockeys’ hurdle at 4.40 she would be in for over £7,000.
Both my bets in the previous two, Tito Bustillo, Fionnegas, had gone west. But I didn’t mind because my third top bet of the festival, Soldatino, had won the Triumph Hurdle at 6/1 with £50 quid of mine on its back.
If you’re into racing I think there is three different types of bet: a racing man’s bet, a punter’s bet and a mug’s bet. I mainly do the last two, but occasionally I’ll pull off the first type and it gives me a kick. I saw Soldatino win at Kempton a few weeks back – backed him as a well – and I thought: here’s class. French class as it happens.
The race was for me the best of the festival. Barizan had front run and was at one point 20-odd lengths ahead of the rest of the field. Soldatino was lost in mid-division. Then he came wide and started to slowly reel Barizan in, all the way up the hill, and won. I nearly put the whole lot on Tito Bustillo in the following race. But it was good that I didn’t, because he was beat halfway.
I’d had a racing man’s bet on Sizing Europe the first day and that had also won at 6s. During the week I’d had punter bets on Big Zeb, which won at 10s, Albertas Run at 14s. I couldn’t complain. I’d had a few losers and all my multiples had gone west but I’d made a profit, which I then dissipated with fermented liquor and its ancillary expenses.
As we sat in the pub – me drinking ESB, which is a hell of an ale – I suddenly looked at the screen and saw Denman had drifted to 5/1. I thought: McCoy, champion jump jockey and remorseless winning machine on *Denman*, the barrel-chested tank? At fives? So, even though I tipped Imperial Commander to everyone, including in my role as the tipster Flash Harry in a friend’s publication, I decided to back Denman. I was right in two ways. Kauto Star’s jumping let him down, Denman would be better value than Kauto and Imperial Commander would win it. Paddy Brennan is my favourite jumps jockey, so it was very cheering to see him chin Denman on the way up the hill.
We strolled up to the Ladbrokes to watch Ange’s race. Balthazar King looked good and was having some mighty money punted on him. He opened at 20s and was soon down to 10s. I had a small each way. Ange was nervous. ‘I just want to get this over with,’ she said.
Balthazar King had a talented three pound claimer on him but fell after about four fences. Ange picked her 300 up and we went to the nearby Wetherspoons for a bottle of competitively-priced veuve cliquot.
On our way out of the betting shop we saw Fat Boy and a rather sly Asian youth who is sometimes referred to as ‘p**i on the moon’, for reasons I will explain below.
They are a sort of double act. Fat Boy aged about forty-five, white, with the choleric face and massive waistline of a veteran form lager addict. Sanjif, to give him his proper name, is thin, about 30 and, if the rumours are true, slowly conning his crippled uncle out of his savings. They both only back favourites, to ‘buy money’, which is the most pathetic form of horse playing, in my opinion. They always look miserable when the big meetings come round because they lose their money as short-price favourites get turned over again and again.
They don’t like us, I feel, because we *gamble*, we have sport from it. They could never do this, the pain would be too great for them. They’d rather lose on a ‘certainty’ than win on a proper tilt. They feel more comfortable that way. They both employ ‘prison queue’ tactics in the betting shop towards people they don’t like – “accidental” shoving, barging in front at the betting window.
On my way out I smirked at them – they knew we’d had a win, but they didn’t know how much, so we acted like we’d picked a few grand up, just to annoy them.
The reason for the Asian man’s unpleasant nickname among the pub/bookie’s denizens is that he once borrowed ten pounds off Charlie, the fence and gambler and failed to pay the money back. Charlie said to him in a loud voice in the middle of the Corals: ‘If I don’t get that tenner by Friday, Sanjif, you’ll be the first p**i on the moon.’
Please don’t shoot the messenger; this is reportage.
I’d seen a mug bet that morning. Pigeon Island, in the Grand Annual at a massive price. I’ve always had a soft spot for that horse because it appears to have been named after the popular but unofficial name of that little area outside Tooting Broadway Tube where the statue of Edward VII is and which is home to hundreds of
Anyway, in all the to-ing and fro-ing I forgot to back it. Yes. It did.

Last Chance to Smash the Pigsty!

2010-03-10T03:11:00.001-08:00

If you, like me, hate both parties and believe that the deadlock created by the current intellectually and morally bankrupt political class needs to be broken, then vote Labour.
A hung parliament will likely mean that the LibDems will shore up a Mandelson-dominated Labour Party. This would be bad as it could lead to a new centre left party with all the terrible assumptions and sense of entitlement the Political Class but hardened into a broader power base.
The coming general election could prove tumultuous. At present the Labour government is borrowing £500million a day to maintain the illusion of a functioning economy. If the Tories win they will stop it, allowing Gordon Brown and the Labour Party to blame the consequent hardship and misery on the Tories, even though he would have had to have stop the borrowing if he won. It would also allow Labour and its supporters to blame the consequences of the economy they wrecked on the Tories - a game they play every time they are voted out.
No, only an outright Labour victory will do. A Labour victory would destroy the party because its owners, the union Unite, would then expect preferential treatment in return for bankrolling the party. However, the money is all gone, the budget deficit as a wide as the jaws of hell and we're a year or so away from the I.M.F bailing us out so Labour won't be able to satisfy its client base and will consequently collapse into internecine warfare.
A Labour victory would also destroy the Conservative Party, because if they can't win against Gordon Brown in the current situation they'll never win again. This is also good.
Potentially, the deadlock created by the two utterly useless ruling parties taking turns to mess up Britain could BE BROKEN ONCE AND FOR ALL! So, Vote Labour and smash both of them to pieces! You know that removal of power or or the possibility of power is the best way to punish these people.

Save the Beeb

2010-03-02T17:52:00.000-08:00

It’s interesting that the BBC has chosen to start throwing ballast - or what it thinks is ballast - out of the balloon. Reality must have penetrated Portland Place at long last. By reality I mean that the piss-taking of the upper echelons has now made the BBC the target of all parties and it is now a case of jump before you are pushed. It didn't need to be this way, but it was always going to happen after John Birt had control. He set the course for the micro-management membrane that has taken over the whole corporation.
Before its recent run of bad publicity I was fully in favour of abolishing the BBC on the grounds that it had moved from being the boldest experiment in public education in history to the boldest experiment in propaganda.
Ten years ago, when I started complaining about the BBC’s left/liberal bias, my intelligent friends – bar Butch – all thought I was mad. It struck them as a lunatic proposition, like accusing a maiden aunt of being an axe murderer. (Notice how nobody calls it Auntie anymore?)
These days, the same people get more exercised about the BBC than I do. The main complaint being that ‘it’s out of control’ and there are whole areas of news and culture it cannot approach objectively – you know, climate change, the Middle East, immigration etc.
I now annoy my friends by saying that in some small respects the BBC has improved. Which is why I don’t think it should be abolished. Its most intolerable phase, what I like to call the Africa Lives on the BBC*/Jonathan Ross years, may have passed.
I think it could be reformed and for once I agree with Jeremy Dear, the Chavez-loving Bennite dreamer who leads the union I used to be an official for, when he says that if executives at the very top had not arranged themselves vast salaries and perks then workers further down the pipe would not be facing redundancy. It’s one thing you see again and again with the liberal media class in its middle years – having spent all their youth acting as if concern with money was infra dig and morally shabby, they are now completely obsessed with getting vast amounts of it for themselves and sod the consequences. See Yentob, Mandelson, and many others.
But yes, the BBC needs to be saved and reformed. Which is why cutting the Asian network and the website is the wrong thing to do.
Cut all the frivolous crap like antiques and property shows and so on. BBC drama needs to be reformed and desperately needs fresh and radical approaches. By radical I mean telling stories about life in Britain from a non-Guardian feature viewpoint. Just think; the realities, tensions and consequences, good and bad – as opposed to the odd heavily deodorised, happy-clappy doc or drama – of the Labour government’s vast social engineering project 2000-10 has never really been accurately reflected on the BBC. That’s a bit like the BBC going from 1960 to 1970 without mentioning the Pill or the Beatles. Not really public service broadcasting after all.

My favourite bit of the BBC is Radio 3. Yesterday I listened to composer of the week – Chopin – as I did some yoga before going to work. There was some winter sunshine outside, a tiny herald of spring; and intelligent talk between the nocturnes and mazurkas. Chopin, like all great music, takes you beyond words and coherent thought. I lay in the corpse pose at the end, watching the dust spin in the sunbeams above me, thinking without words. You don’t get that from the One Show with Adrian Chiles.
I shaved as Lunchtime Concert came on and, as I occasionally do, I thought: this is it for the beeb – it’s not about Jonathan Ross and rap stations, it’s about civilisation; the best that has been thought and said; it’s about high art and, when it is middlebrow, it should be the best middlebrow. Keep following that disastrous mix of dumb-arse populism and media studies-level leftism and it’s a dead duck in the long scheme because anyone can do that.
Of course, the TV execs in Charlotte Street restaurants wouldn’t agree, but so what? If they knew anything television wouldn’t be as awful as it is.

*The actual catchphrase of a series of programmes that gave a smiley, decaffeinated Marxist, all-the-fault-of-white-men overview of the continent.

Extract from an email to a pal

2010-03-01T18:57:00.000-08:00

'Yes the Tory slump is wonderful. I hate Cameron and Osborne, because they’re our generation and we know what they think and what they’ve done why they’re full of shit. As you say, they’ve spent the last eight years preparing for power on the mistaken idea that Blair © was the new reality. What people want is Billy Bigballs, not trendy vicar.
I want Labour to win because that will bankrupt the country fully and irrevocably. Some of the shit and vomit will get splashed on Obs readers finally and they won’t be able to be righteous when an axe wielded by a socialist humanitarian falls on public services. The Tories will be destroyed: good.
With the money all gone and the IMF knocking on the door all those little consumers who are living in la-la/ryanair land now will suddenly wake to find themselves in a sort of post war country with a lot of draughty shopping malls getting boarded up; Europe will end up having the bits of control it hasn’t already got; immigration would go on as it is now, causing further rent rises and pay slumps; queuing and overcrowding would get even worse; unemployment would soar; the country’s credit rating would be downgraded, there’d be no growth, massive budget deficit, tax hikes, super tax, race riots, a General Strike, militant Mohammadanism running amok (on taxpayers’ money, given to ‘promote non-radicalisation’), the extreme right boneheads fighting the Muslims and everyone else, barbed wire enclaves in Burnley, the handing back, by Miliband, of the Falklands to the Argies with a little smirk; mutinies in the armed services when Labour try and merge them with the French forces*, and possibly even a coup d’etat if we’re very lucky. And in the middle of it all that lying, autistic fucking dunce Brown. Someone will shoot him.
It would be such *fun* to watch, so much better than four years of Cameron and Osborne and with the added piquancy of seeing a proper bit of history: the swan dive to EU banana republic.

Exile: I doubt the doc will be done well, because Jagger will have control of it and he’s never had any idea about that sort of thing and doesn’t understand the appeal of the band or what makes it great and never has had. The Stones were just lucky that they could hire the hippest filmmakers in any given period – Godard, Robert Frank, Scorsese. As Keith Richards said when Watts asked him what he thought of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil: ‘crap – but we look good in it.’
Jagger said when the record was released: ‘There’s a lot of rock and roll on it. Too much. I like to experiment, I don’t like to go over the same thing again and again.’
Trouble with that is that the reason the Stones were great, particularly on Exile, is because Richards DID like going over the same thing again and again. If he hadn’t liked jamming the same four chords around for hours on end with Taylor and co All Down the Line etc would never have got written. And the world would be worse off.
Experimentation, on the other hand, took the Stones to Their Satanic Majesties and Undercover of the Night.
I rest my case.

Punk will become the property, if it hasn’t already, of academia, which will distort it even further into a Marxist reading of 70s social history.

Reading wise: I read Roger Lewis’s Seasonal Suicide Notes. Funny stuff, if a little too in debt at times to Waugh’s later diaries. He can be very funny though. Do you remember that letter I got from him after I wrote how much I laughed at his Burgess book? Scruton’s new wine book is a very fine read, but I hardly ever drink wine these days.
I had another bash at Crime and Punishment recently but it’s such a monumental bore and the lack of style makes it ‘hard shoulder’. Bits of Conrad’s memoirs. I’ve been reading some Simon Raven. Ever tried him? Funny, half-queer, snobby, public school, cricket, cad, army, gambling, writing; sort of Captain Grimes with a bit of Stringham. Very clear stylist and fun on the train. He disgraced his regiment through his gambling on horses and was warned off. But at one point he had a yankee up for about five grand in the early fifties. Can you imagine? He bought a Bentley with some of the winnings.

*See left wing think tank’s proposals for the armed services. Reported on by the BBC’s website as A think tank. Have you noticed it doesn’t prefix left wing think tanks with ‘left wing’ but always does ‘right wing’ for right wing think tanks?'

Dreamer in a Landscape

2010-02-24T16:59:00.001-08:00

John Craxton. Dreamer in a Landscape, 1942. Ink with pen and chalk

Andrew Lambirth's Spectator tribute to the painter John Craxton, who died recently, is a lovely read:

An artist with a particular interest in the inhabited landscape, Craxton could summon up the spirit of place with a wit and ingenuity that left most painters of his generation standing. Aware from youth that there is no art without other art, he sought out essence rather than originality, but achieved an original vision by the depth of his understanding and interpretation. John detested labels and pigeonholes, principally because they encouraged unjustified assumptions and lazy thinking, and he is frequently quoted as disliking the term ‘neo-romantic’, which was attached to his own work of the 1940s. It was the ‘neo’ he objected to particularly, being proud to admit his indebtedness to the Romantic vision of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, just as he would be the first to claim the inspiring influence of Byzantine art.

I had nearly forgotten about Craxton. When I studied painting nearly 20 years ago I found his work intriguing. I was in those days a devotee of Caravaggio, Degas, Van Gogh, Freud, Bacon, Whistler, the impressionists, the fauves, Stanley Spencer and the Camden Town painters. I still am. But it was a few years before I discovered my taste for English Romanticism. I had a good working knowledge of Turner, Constable and Samuel Palmer, however it was some time - after much solipsism and many nights spend wandering under harvest moons that I fell truly under their spell and was properly awed by their achievements.
Constable is out of fashion now, but I always think of him when I walk in a betting shop during the Flat season and see evening racing from Salisbury: not having the BBC's budget, the SIS only has cameras for long shots and this is a boon; you get a complete picture: the gaily coloured jockeys galloping through a blue and gold dusk, lush green turf dappled by evening sunlight, trees and the cathedral behind them in the distance. I must paint that view one day.

Walking through a warren of dark wet streets the other night I turned a corner I don't normally turn and there stood a pub, a proper pub with a proper name, lit up from one end to another with coloured bulbs and glowing with friendly light. It's a good pub that myself and my friends have fallen out of the habit of using. It was like encountering a lit-up pleasure boat on a dark and wintry river. Just the sight of it was a pep without even buying a drink.
I hope we don't lose too many places like that as England disintegrates - they make winters in these bleak cities a bit more bearable - but of course we already have.

Some scattered opinions

2010-02-20T09:08:00.000-08:00

A quick apology for saying in my last post that single parents and the welfare/social arrangments of the underclass produce the Doncaster Junior psychopaths. I was careless in my use of language. Obviously I ommitted 'can' from the sentence.
While we're on the subject, I haven't got carried away with the flock that says that the whole thing was a sort of freak thing that could have happened anywhere and at any time. In this country it is only in relatively recent years that small children could have been subjected to such prolonged exposure to violence, drug ingestion, hardcore pornography, horror films and alcoholism. Yes, yes, the medieval period and the workhouses and so on, yes I understand. But monkey see monkey do.
A friend of mine who is a hairdresser said a friend of hers came into work a few weeks ago and told her that she'd found her two sons, both under ten, naked and 'spitting on each other's anuses'.
Evidently she was more bemused than worried by her discovery. But when my friend told this story in the pub all those present - some of whom were parents themselves -immediately came to the same conclusion: her children had been watching and acting out hardcore pornography.

So, James Purnell, Blairite golden boy and model member of the Political Class leaves the circus to find a proper job. At first I was surprised and was almost tempted to say well done, son: these sort of people never like letting go of power, but then I thought again. An intrigant like Purnell, who did his indentures in power-gathering under Tony and Mandy, will always have a good analysis of his own chances: he obviously sees defeat and a lurch to the Left for Labour leaving him on paltry money - by political class standards anyway - and well out of power for years to come.
Merely doing his job as a backbench MP won't excite Purnell, which, when you contrast it with his cant about serving the public as a 'community organiser' rings the bullshit bell for me.
He is well mourned in the Murdoch press today as well he might be: my contacts at Wapping have seen him down there often, currying favour back when the going looked good. He is 'bright', he is 'brilliant', was a 'rising star' etc.
If only the journalists who reeled this stuff off had practical experience of being within the jurisdiction of Mr Purnell's power.
In the middle of last year I found myself in dispute with the Department of Work and Pensions, Purnell's responsibility at the time. The incompetence was breathtaking. I spent many weeks without being paid what was due me. The call centre staff at Stratford Benefit Delivery Centre always directed me back to the Job Centre and the Job Centre always directed me back to SBDC; its staff were mainly foreigners who had no colloquial English, which made explanations time consuming and next to impossible. Two months passed and still no payment.
I contacted my MP and wrote to Purnell. I never heard back from Purnell but I got a very swift reply from my MP, a Tory who had just been exposed as exploiting the additional costs allowance to get himself a second home even though his actual home was only half an hour from Westminster.
In a roundabout way I heard that my MP planned to raise the matter of maladministration at the DoWP and its satellites in Parliament because of the sheer number of complaints he was getting from his constituents.
Meanwhile a reporter friend of mine from Wapping made a study of the DoWP - when ringing it up she always asked - could never find - anyone who knew who James Purnell was.
I sent in a few FoIs asking the things one always asks in FoIs to government and civil service: how many staff are off long term with anxiety and depression, how many are in rehab on the taxpayers' nickel, how much have you spent on prayer rooms, religious toilets, interpreters and halal menus, and, important in this case, how many complaints and disputes about Benefit Delivery Centres are under way. You usually get evasive verbiage or a request to reframe the question. In the case of complaints I seem to remember it would cost them more than the justifiable allowance to find out.
But let me make it clear, I've been in and out of the benefit system over the years and I have never known such incompetence and faceless bureacracy. I couldn't help but think: modern socialism: be shit and be untouchable for being shit.
All under the benign aegis of the great white hope of centre-left politics, James Purnell. Anyone who now says that Ministers cannot be responsible for their departments - a common view now among political class apologists - is essentially playing into the hands of the hard-core libertarians, such as Dr Sean Gabb whose hilarious book on how the libertarian Right might capture England, proposes simply abolishing departments such as the DoWP and the Foreign Office at a stroke.
Incidentally, Gabb's book is a splendid read as long as you don't take it too seriously. I read it in 2007, on trams and buses while commuting through chaotic south London, which was going through the high watermark of the teenage cult of stabbing, skunk and violent disorder caused by Mayor Livingtone's and New Labour's interference in police work.
Can anyone disagree with the basic premise of Gabb's book?

We face a new ruling class made up of the student radicals of the 1960s and 70s. Now in power, they are creating in their own behaviour all the corruption and bigotry and hypocrisy that they falsely alleged against the liberal democratic rulers they have replaced.

Dr Gabb's solutions are far more debatable; and I took issue with him dismissing the BNP as a vehicle for change only because they were 'tainted', and not because they are modelled on the Nazi Party of 1933.
You can download a free pdf on that link.
As for Purnell, he'll be back in about five years with 'street cred' to fight a floundering Tory Party.

I saw a bit of Tarantino's Kill Bill Part 2 on the TV the other night. The last film I saw at the cinema was Kill Bill 1 nearly seven years ago. When I left the cinema with my then girlfriend - who was equally bored by it - I thought, in an obscure way, 'that's the last time they do that to me'. By 'them' I mean the American film industry in general.
Among self-styled hipsters you are not really allowed to dislike Tarantino. Or rather you are allowed to not like his films but you will be branded narrow-minded and provincial if you do. A friend at the time took this tack but I said that you could hardly call a man narrow-minded and provincial who has seen and found merit films such as, for example, Last Tango in Paris, Roma, Pasolini's Salo and The Devils.
I watched about an hour of Kill Bill 2 and I suddenly I remembered very clearly why I dislike his films so much: it isn't that they are comic strip silly, I don't mind that. What I don't like is that within the framework of silliness and comic strip plot is pretension, pomposity and self-indulgence. The dialogue scenes that go on and on - like the absurd death scene of Bill - and demonstrate to me that even though Tarantino boasts of his multi-million dollar masturbatory plagiarism, he wants to be taken very seriously as an artist. His sensibilities are really that of the, horror of horrors, graphic novel. I think he thinks he's a sort of new Sam Peckinpah. But the difference is that while Peckinpah was self-indulgent he had a soul and was an adult and you can see this in his work. No so Quentin.
The exploitation films he adores were rightly regarded as down-the-bill rubbish - sometimes enjoyable rubbish but rubbish nonetheless - but Quentin the video store nerd doesn't like that. He doesn't think they are getting 'nuff respeck. He wants to bring back the old rubbish, pump it full of 'clever' dialogue and adolescent cruelty, and place it at the centre of the culture and have the critical establishment genuflect and the kidults go bandy.
And he's done it, more's the pity.

The Bonfire of the Economist's Vanity

2010-02-11T18:08:00.000-08:00

Sorry for radio silence. I had a month off from blogging. As James Brown sang: I’m back!

A friend of this blog asked me to comment about this editorial from last week’s Economist. Its angle is that Cameron’s ‘Broken Britain’ doesn’t exist.

Stepping back from the glare of the latest appalling tale, it is clear that by most measures things have been getting better for a good decade and a half…The broken Britain of legend is one where danger stalks the streets as never before. In the real Britain, the police have just recorded the lowest number of murders for 19 years. In mythical broken Britain, children are especially at risk. Back in real life, child homicides have fallen by more than two-thirds since the 1970s. Britain used to be the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world; it is now the 17th. And more mundane crimes have fallen too: burglaries and car theft are about half as common now as they were 15 years ago. Even the onset of recession has not reversed that downward trend so far.
Comatose teenagers line every gutter in the boozy Britain of popular imagination. Yet after a long period of increase, there are tentative signs that Britons are drinking less alcohol. The overall consumption of drugs is dropping (though some narcotics, including cocaine, are becoming more popular) and rates of smoking are now among the lowest in Europe.
As for family breakdown, some commentators seem to think that sex really was invented in 1963. British grannies know differently. Teenage pregnancy is still too common, but it has been declining, with the odd hiccup, for ages. A girl aged between 15 and 19 today is about half as likely to have a baby in her teens as her grandmother was. Her partner will probably not marry her and he is less likely to stick with her than were men in previous generations, but he is also a lot less likely to beat her. In homing in on the cosier parts of the Britain of yesteryear, it is easy to ignore the horrors that have gone. Straight white men are especially vulnerable to this sort of amnesia.

As an aside, and as a betting man, I would bet that the person who wrote this article is under thirty, either female, Asian or gay (or all three), from a middle to upper middle class background; they are some sort of senior intern following up an Oxford degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics with a stint at the Ec while pondering which career to pursue in the Political Class. They pitched the editorial and got the gig. That’s why the piece is so redolent of the flippant intellects, shrivelled moral imaginations and brazen incuriosity of the graduate class of today.
Anyway, enough of the rhetoric.
To take it point by point:

Regarding the ‘crime is going down’ mantra. Yes, certain types of crime are going down. Mainly the crimes that are motivated by Mr Marx’s commodity fetishism – burglary and car theft. This is indubitably a good thing. But why has it happened? In my view because consumer goods have never been cheaper, welfare provision is generous and credit was plentiful. If DVD recorders, computers and the like were well out of the financial range of the criminal class they would come into your home and take them off you, as they did back in the days when video recorders were the ne plus ultra of consumer fetishism.
When the truth about this country’s financial situation is laid bare after the coming election and the borrowed money tap is turned off for the first time in years as well as a new austerity applied to welfare culture, the behaviour of criminals is likely to change. It’s always worth remembering that when people can get something easily they don’t bother with the hard way – until they decide they have to.
The crimes that have escalated over the past 15 years are crimes such as violence and the use of knives among the young. That has rocketed. Any comparison of teen-on-teen knife murder in the past five years and 20 years ago will show that violence has exploded in recent years. But Left/liberal commentators shamelessly hide this in the general statistics.
I have argued about this many times with a well-known Labour-supporting journalist and he airily refuses to engage with it. Many crimes, particularly petty violence and shoplifting simply go unreported. The police make it abundantly clear they are not interested in ‘minor’ crime. This is the result of a highly privileged, socially liberal judiciary and public administration thinking it social justice to not enforce the law on these crimes. They forget that honest people in poor areas are the people who have to pay for their big-hearted actions. It’s hard to see Hackney, Croydon and Lambeth and their drugs, knives and welfare problems from Hampstead Heath.

The middle par is a splendid example of Political Class doublethink. Yes, every provincial town is a mess of violence and vomit several nights a week – my town centre most definitely is – but ‘there are tentative signs that Britons are drinking less alcohol.’ What signs are these?
Drink isn’t the problem anyway. It’s the entire social and cultural orientation of people that’s becoming a problem. Drink just unleashes it. Drink is just a detonator for the morons our society creates.

More doublethink:

The overall consumption of drugs is dropping (though some narcotics, including cocaine, are becoming more popular).

Nothing to do there but titter.

The third par is also doublethink. Or, perhaps, no-think. Like many a flimsy argument blithely put, it contains the seeds of its own destruction:

As for family breakdown, some commentators seem to think that sex really was invented in 1963. British grannies know differently. Teenage pregnancy is still too common, but it has been declining, with the odd hiccup, for ages.’

A girl aged between 15 and 19 today is about half as likely to have a baby in her teens as her grandmother was. Her partner will probably not marry her and he is less likely to stick with her than were men in previous generations.

How quick that last sentence is rattled off and how much nuance it contains!
And why won’t the man stick around? Because often he will have had no father himself from which to learn moral responsibility and civilised behaviour from; because the stigma of fatherless children was abolished by ‘progressives’ and because he no longer has to because everyone else – via the state – is paying for his children. This ‘empowers’ women, according to the Labour Party. An extreme example of the sort people these arrangments produce is the recent case of two junior psychopaths in Doncaster.
But,

…he is also a lot less likely to beat her.

Yes, well, you can’t beat someone if you’re no longer with them.

I will admit that I don’t like Cameron’s phrase ‘Broken Britain’. It’s as phoney as a newspaper campaign. Of course, most of the people currently objecting to the phrase were the very people who were forever screaming about ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ and blaming every last ill on her government. For example, within the past few years the late Richard Stott in the Daily Mirror was still blaming every violent crime that occurred in Britain on Mrs Thatcher, 15 and more years after she left office. Labour must be careful over this.
Having interviewed Cameron I know that he has the single-mother welfare industry created by Labour firmly in his sights. Personally I think he’ll bottle it when the time comes but we shall see.
The Economist has long been a magazine extolling the selfishness and hypocrisy of liberals in love with consumer capitalism: Blair’s old speechwriter, Neether, in his role as comment editor of the Standard, seemed always to be getting senior editorial staff from the magazine to pen the spurious from-business-class defences of Labour’s insane immigration levels. Defences that have subsequently been proved by the House of Lords report on the matter to be completely wrong. Still, cheap labour’s cheap labour – it’s not called The Economist for nothing.
The more people I meet who are involved in the Political Class at even lowly levels, the more I encounter this idea that somehow a mixture of the preeminence of pop culture, feminism, gay rights and ‘multiculturalism’ means that Progress Has Happened and It Is Not To Be Gainsaid in Any Way. Anyone who asks awkward questions is held to be opposed to gay rights, feminism etc and is liable to be called a ‘fascist’ or ‘rightwing’.
I am in favour of gay rights and feminism, but I stop short at surrendering to the ideological fantasy that the family is not THE building block of a civilised society but A block and that everyone can do exactly what they like and it's all for the best in the best possible world. I've seen enough of it going wrong to know that is the moonshine of the socially leftish middle class.

Then there’s this pearl:

The waning of the manufacturing jobs that used to be the mainstay of the working class has created a generation of young males, in particular, who don’t know what to do with themselves.

Could have been written Marie Antoinette, couldn’t it? What has created the generation of young males ‘who don’t know what to do with themselves’ is the impact of trendy and ‘progressive’ social developments in homes and schools. Where nobody can or is allowed to stand up to these children before the road to the underclass is taken. Meanwhile the middle classes get the glittering prizes. And they call this social justice. As I once said to an Oxbridge graduate journo who was extolling the virtues of decriminalising skunk: ‘It’s all right for you. You can get away with it. Thousands of kids round here won’t be so lucky.’

The editorialist mentions how Britons are sentimentally looking back on – vile expression – ‘yesteryear’.
I don’t. I like to think I have a level head about what we have lost and what we have gained. And we have gained much. But some things, some worthwhile things, have been or are being lost. To point this out is not to be a sentimentalist. In my opinion, children who grow up on nothing but telly, the net, computer games and porn on their phone will be less pleasant, less lovable, less use and enjoyment to themselves and to others than children who grew up using their imaginations through playing with each other and reading and drawing so on. I may be wrong but what I see so far makes me feel I am not that wide of the mark. The innocence and space of childhood is being stripped away, sexualised and, somehow, nationalised. It fills me with dread. To note this is not to be nostalgist, surely?

To conclude. If The Economist want to see the sharp end of the pluralism they are in love with, they should get out of Shoreditch and spend some time hanging round the sinks, where the crack and kicking-heads-like-footballs culture is. Broken Britain may be a cliché, but you could hardly say it was in full working order, what with nearly 10 million people economically inactive and/or in the welfare system and a government which still insists we need foreign labour. After 13 years of an enormous socialist spending spree, the current situation leaves Blairite capitalists with some very thorny questions to answer.

Amjem's March...

2010-01-05T05:09:00.000-08:00

...is being discussed in a waffly way at Harry's Place. The usual High Left response that it's all an illusion cooked up by the Press and if only we could have censorship nobody would ever need to consider religious extremism in Britain again.
I replied:

Islam4uk is just the tip of a massive iceberg. By which I mean there are a huge amount of young Muslims in Britain that think that killing in the name of religion is justified*, that a caliphate is good news and that this, their home country, is at war with their religion. Their demonstration, if it had gone ahead, would have caused the first major battle of a second English civil war which now looks unavoidable in any case. How decisive Brown and Johnson are on this for once, how unequivocal! That’s because they too know it would become the first battle – and also be nicely illustrative the logical end of doctrinal multiculturalism, something both men have backed for years. A street battle between bearded fanatics and respectable middle-Englanders in a country town like WB would demonstrate vividly the mess that modern socialism and its siren suicide note of moral relativism and cultural Marxism has got silly old England into. No, you bet your arse they don’t want that.

*Last year, a poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion** found that almost one in every three Muslim students in the UK said that killing in the name of religion was justified, with one third also in favour of a worldwide Islamic caliphate, or empire, based on Islamic sharia law.

** Started with money from Civitas, which probably means that the High Left will airily ignore its survey results as 'right-wing propaganda'.

Cheer yourself up with Butch

2010-01-02T03:38:00.000-08:00

From Keep Thinking Butch,

'Gordon Brown, our Prime Minister, and his six-year-old chum David Miliband have said rude words on China for executing a drug smuggler according to their legal code. That’s right. A man who aimed to bring misery to thousands in order to enrich himself has been whacked by the world’s next superpower, and our [non] elected representatives have a problem with that. I wish I could live another hundred years, if only to see Guardian readers’ faces when China takes over the role of Great Satan from their hated America. Human Rights Act? Toilet paper to the Chinese, my liberal friends. Also, I love the fact that every Brit in chokey abroad these days has got a ‘psychological condition’. Yeah, they have. It’s called being British. From a court case in the near future:

DEFENCE LAWYER: M’lud, although it is indisputably true that my client was found in the same room as seven dismembered corpses, with a bloody axe in his hand and repeating the phrase “I am death”, we would move for a plea of mitigation due to a psychological condition suffered by my client.

JUDGE: And what is the medical term for this condition?

DEFENCE LAWYER: Britishness, m’lud.

JUDGE: Case dismissed!

In other news, we can’t stop telling Iran how to run their internal affairs, either. It has absolutely nothing to do with us if a bunch of theocratic spastics want to club opposition supporters, be they women or children, half to death for the unislamic activity of having an opinion. So why are we getting so wobbly lipped about it? These people have yet to enter the eighth century; why do we think they will suddenly respond to adult suggestions, even those made by Childe Miliband? The only concern we have with Iran is keeping nuclear weapons off the menu and, if we lack the courage to do that, Israel will do it for us and I, for one, will have a street party on the day the first mushroom cloud is spotted over Tehran.'

And if you didn't laugh at that, well, as Rod Stewart says on the Faces' live version of Maybe I'm Amazed, 'I dunno where yer bin.'

"Mad" Mel

2009-12-28T18:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-18T03:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T17:20:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-08T19:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-03T19:37:00.000-08:00

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.

A song Georgey boy would have enjoyed.

2009-11-29T03:44:00.000-08:00

Some months ago I noted with some considerable sadness that Chas and Dave had split up. Dave Peacock could no longer continue touring after the death of his wife.
Anyone who has been to a Chas and Dave gig will know they were the greatest rock and roll band in modern Britain. I do not say that 'ironically' nor facetiously but in the sense that they could play the music known as rock and roll better than any other band at work in the contemporary scene. Get them on the right night and when they played old rock and roll numbers in that propulsive Little Richard/Jerry Lee Lewis style and it was simply magnificent. They were great lyricists as well.
Anyway, I wanted to post a small tribute to them and I forgot to. So now I am. Where does the greatest English journalist come into it, you ask?
Well, click here and you'll hear a song that I think the author of Politics and the English Language would have enjoyed.
They've turned the language upside down
And aimed it out the door.

Quantitative Easing, or, The Coach

2009-11-25T16:48:00.000-08:00

Study for Quantitative Easing, or, The Coach. 60x45cm, charcoal on brown packing paper.

Continuing with my drawing project (see this post for more details). A while ago I sat at the bar in the Coach and Horses, Soho, and idly made some small very rough sketches of the room and how the light falls in it - light readings, really - and took some phone pics to back it up. Then I promptly forgot all about them until this evening when I was looking for something else. I used them as the basis for this drawing, which seems to continue the theme.
I slightly warped the perspective here and there, partly to make the viewer feel he is in the bar feeling a bit drunk or emotional; and partly as a salute to Keith Waterhouse's play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, which featured the Coach and Horses all at crazy angles, as if CRW Nevinson had got juiced up and designed the set.

When the Nomenklatura turned into the Political Class

2009-11-18T18:49:00.000-08:00

'...Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.

In 1985 the secret police moved against me and I was arrested in Brno; visits to Czechoslovakia came to an end and I was followed in Poland and Hungary. But our team kept going until 1989 when, to our surprise, the catacombs were opened and our friends came pale, staggering and bewildered into the sunlight, to be hailed by the people as the natural trustees of their restituted country. This was a wonderful moment and, for a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State.

It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and realpolitik — without which it is impossible to stay in government...'

Roger Scruton remembers his dealings with the anti-communist/socialist underground in Eastern Europe 25 years ago; and how the tentacles of Moscow have been replaced by the chicanery of Brussels. (No, he's not saying the EU is as bad as soviet totalitarianism, but, and there is a but...) The rest here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6906694.ece

Boom Times

2009-11-10T07:36:00.000-08:00

Many thanks for all the good feedback on my drawing.
When I said I undertook it to take my mind off the political situation I didn’t express myself very clearly. What I meant to say was that in the past few weeks I have formulated and even begun to write quite a few posts, but all of them have been abandoned, partly because I’ve seen the same things said better elsewhere and partly because, well, savage indignation and the great morass of cant, lies and bullshit known as contemporary political discourse are draining materials to work with.
I find it interesting that now the political class and Labour government’s mistakes are piling up thick and fast it seems to have a deadening effect on all our moral imaginations, by which I mean we are being worn down by living in the logjam; what would once have shocked me now provokes nothing more than a disgusted sigh: responding freshly to a situation of permanent chicanery, incompetence, arrogance, hypocrisy and moral nullity is hard work for the human brain. As Orwell said, sometimes the hardest things to see are right under your nose.
However, these are a few unpolished thoughts provoked by the past month’s events.

The present government, political class and contemporary culture represent the full flowering of the baby-boomer generation. It is the received opinion of forty years of liberal thought made civil and constitutional reality. In many important areas it has been an utter failure, disguising rather than solving many of the old social problems, while creating many new pathologies and problems, which it often refuses to admit exist and always refuses to take the blame for.
Although socially speaking there has been a welcome easing up of the old class boundaries and social snobberies, these boundaries still exist in education and many of the boomers’ remedies have simply turned out to be wishful thinking: levelling gestures that have punished talent emerging from the lower social spectrum, while leaving the moneyed middle classes to carry on as they were.
To write the above is to generally invite a chorus of sneering retorts along the lines of ‘what, would you rather live in the 50s?’ To which the answer is most certainly not. I simply turn the boomers’ triumphal view of history around a little bit: we know the bad things that have disappeared, but let’s consider what was worthwhile. Sometimes it is worth considering the baby and not the bathwater.
When you consider the burning social injustices that drove most boomers to righteous decaffeinated Marxism – having to wear short trousers until the age of 14; having old men tell them to stand when they played the national anthem; being told to get their haircuts and take their feet of the seats on trains – you have to laugh when you compare them to the injustices these grammar/public school boys eventually thrust on the subsequent generations: the rights of passage now are knives, drug delirium, absent fathers, a landscape of strong and casual violence, gang rapes, feral behaviour, legitimized ignorance, unpunished violence, unexplored potential, low paid work or a life of welfare.
Even the boomer complaint that in their youth difference was severely frowned on – John Osborne’s comment about not being able to walk through a provincial town wearing a yellow cardigan comes to mind – has to be digested in the knowledge that anyone these days who doesn’t conform to manufactured reality of television (the boomers’ superhighway of liberal babel) is liable to be singled out for belittlement: pre-cultural revolution, people were not jeered to self-immolation for having long hair or wearing yellow cardigans. If they were attacked repeatedly the law would do something about it. Now, thanks to boomer government, the police will only act if it is a ‘hate crime’. Anyone who decides this is an exaggeration had better study the recent Fiona Pilkington case in detail.
I wondered what had made the boomers the way they are. I can understand a lot of it: I was a wayward youth and adult, embraced rebellion, sex, drugs and rock and roll plus left wing politics. I still believe that two of the most repellent sights in British politics are young conservatives and old socialists.
But you grow up, you notice the hypocrisies of the new boss, same, as The Who sang, as the old boss – but in the case of the boomers often a deal worse (put Blair next to, say, Macmillan).
That is not to say you suddenly believe that Britain should be run by Mark Thatcher types and that greed and the corporations are good, far from it; but you come to realise that the same problems keep coming up, and that there are, perhaps, reasons for certain attitudes. That standards are there for a reason and that without authority there can be no justice.
But a social democrat boomer would tell you that there has never been more justice – a ministry of justice here, supra-national ministries of justice on the continent; a mantra of social justice running through the media and academe like letters through a stick of rock. But this brave new world keeps producing more and more inversions of justice. While the EU creates a legal framework which protects Islamic terrorists, it simultaneously bans Italian schoolchildren from wearing crucifixes to school.
While we are on the subject of Islam it is always worth repeating that the rise of radical Islam in Britain, while in part was allowed to flourish by the security services, was largely a result of the boomer class's vanity: they considered themselves so non-judgemental (of non-white groups anyway) that even when an organised far-Right death cult began to gain influence all the boomer class did was make excuses for it and give it money (recent example: Hizb ut tahrir - the far Right Islamic group that Tony Blair boasted he would ban - has just received a large grant to run its own schools) This is institutional folly on a grand scale.
The boomer left claims to hate elites and yet it has given its weight to creating and sustaining an anti-democratic elite in Brussels.
Multiculturalism, mass-immigration, the curtailing of freedom of speech – all things that were decided in a wholly undemocratic way by noisy social democratic boomers. The effect? A flagging civil infrastructure, overburdened schools and services and a growing urban tension. A demoralized, low-paid workforce struggling with crippling accommodation bills – the privileged boomers, however, got the cheap au pairs and Polish plumbers. Now fascism is on the rise. Before 13 years of boomer government the BNP was a tiny, fringe organisation with less than 2,000 members. Now it has 20 per cent of the population considering whether to vote for it, two MEPs in Brussels and a regular spot on Question Time to look forward to.
And still Jack Straw (a textbook boomer) would not connect his government and its policies with this alarming rise of support for a fascist party.
The principal of free speech replaced by political license: in the bad old days homosexuality was illegal. This was wrong. It achieved legal toleration. This was right. Now it has become virtually illegal to disagree with it. You are no longer allowed to disagree with the state orthodoxies. Is this the liberty that boomers shouted about? I don’t recognize it as liberty.
Sure, there is more liberty than there was in some respects and what is worthwhile I enjoy. But the boomers’ relativism and hatred of their parents’ manners has dovetailed perfectly with consumer capitalism to create the blank-eyed, ignorant, utterly selfish, burger-stuffing iPodista we sit next to every day on the train. For such people, independent thought means what crap am I going to buy next. Does saying this really make me a soulless fogey? I don't feel like one. I feel young, actually, with a soul. (I'm listening to Otis Redding as I write this - but I do listen to the more melodically pleasing Elgar now and again...)
But why did the boomers become as they were? I’ve come to the conclusion that it was an inferiority complex about the Second World War. They had to grow up in the shadow of it and the achievements and resilience of the people who lived through it and this pushed many of them into a kind of permanent adolescence, rejecting on principal – not reason – anything that reminded them of their parents’ and grandparents’ attitudes (I am not saying that all their attitudes were right and proper).
But it is a good irony that what the boomers’ destroy they eventually need again: hence after years of decrying the suburban archetype of ‘the nosy neighbour’, the government is now planning to have local snoopers, paid by the state. They do exactly the same in the failed Communist state of Cuba, where each block of flats has a party snooper on the look out for any seditious comment or behaviour. Our local snoopers will soon find their list of trangressions to look out for widened to take in the political manias of the boomers.
There is one silver lining, I suppose: the boomers will all retire soon, most of them on fat pensions – they had the good times and queered the pitch for many of those that followed.

Study For A Painting

2009-11-03T15:08:00.000-08:00

Study for Our Revels Now Are Ended, or, English Smuts. Charcoal on brown packing paper, 48inches x 19inches

Before the West Pier in Brighton was finally destroyed by arsonists* I used to go and look at it now and then because I love piers and because not only was it the finest pier in Britain it was the finest piece of Victorian seaside architecture bar none.
It also looked magnificent even when it was falling to pieces.
It was designed by Eugenius Birch in 1866 and was finally closed in 1975. I own a plank of decking from the pier: an old girlfriend had a pal who rescued it from a pile washed up on the beach after one of its collapses.
The West Pier has been drawn and painted many times but I have never seen one I much liked. Plus I have always wanted to draw it, even though it has now gone from decomposition to skeleton, as it were.
I hope the following doesn't land me in Pseuds' Corner. I fancied creating some drawings and paintings as a way of taking my mind off the current political situation and to somehow produce a work that says something that writing can’t.
This charcoal study was my first attempt at the West Pier. It felt like a gamble, an adventure in drawing (I haven’t enjoyed drawing something so much in years) and it also felt like taking a reading of the subject.
I dug out some photographs I got a friend to take years ago (I generally hate working from photographs) and felt my way in. I wanted something that had an atmosphere to it; somehow that particular Brighton atmosphere of sunny frivolity and concealed evil; and, in a larger implicit way, the atmosphere of inevitable general decay, of people and all their works.
I want to work towards a painting, perhaps on a larger scale with some figures in the foreground maybe. In a way though, smutty charcoal on cheap packing paper seems to be the way of it, or at least a way into it. My working title is from The Tempest: Our Revels Now Are Ended. But I also like English Smuts, though that is obscure – smuts does play an end of the pier chord, I suppose.
Wonderful set of photographs taken on the decaying pier in 2000, here.

* In Brighton, it is an open secret who was behind the arson attack. I once knew a journalist down there who had the whole story, but he feared for his legs/life. It was all, now I come to think about it, reminiscent of Hale in Brighton Rock.

How Lucky We Are to Be Governed by Educated Moral Socialists

2009-11-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

How educated, moral and intellectual socialists run things. A recipe. First, get five to seven million (and rising) extra people into the country for your own political agenda (drive down wages, drive up rents - clever, that). Second, close 2,500 sub-post offices in one year. Then everyone will have to queue, nice and collectively, in the main post office. Clever, isn't it? This queue, very average, consisted of 75 people. Gordon Brown, very clever, moral socialist. Heart of gold. Brilliant.

Sammerthwaite and the Art of State

2009-10-15T03:10:00.000-07:00

Sammerthwaite & the Art of State

Sammerthwaite, the ancient poet, whose sole verse collection, Batting Average, might just be found by the determined bibliophile in the more murky corners of Charing Cross Road or Cecil Court, was alive. That fact alone would have surprised most literary scholars – at any rate the rare ones who could recollect his name. They would have expressed further mild surprise to discover this relic of minor literary interest was submerged in Purley, that mock-Tudor arterial two-road town, twenty minutes due south of Victoria on a fast train, where he lived in reduced circumstances, still wrote, and cogitated on selling his letter from TS Eliot.
One thing that would not have surprised those literary students who remembered him, was that Sammerthwaite was poor.
But, though the days when he rampaged through London literary parties were decades behind him, he was alive, and, as old people are obliged to, was drinking bad coffee in a church hall. He sat next to an old man, who was nearly asleep. As ever, he composed idly:

In old age, why do we lurch
To the United Reformed Church?
En masse we make a target for God’s broom
To sweep us from this anteroom

The black rag sniper picks us off
As we prepare our chicken broth
Or starts the canker in our belly
As we browse the daytime telly

A female “organiser” approached Sammerthwaite and handed him a flyer.
‘You may find this interesting,’ she observed. ‘It’s an arts debate.’
‘That means there’ll be wine,’ said Sammerthwaite, who, the organiser noted, smelled mildly of drink.
‘It’s to do with the Prime Minister’s visit, I think,’ she said.
‘That abominable Scotchman,’ said Sammerthwaite in a serious voice. He had no love for Scotland.
He could get by reasonably well for an old man with no savings, but when he was spendthrift with his pension money he often dropped in on various church coffee mornings for the free food. He was thin and had little appetite, which was helpful in the long run.
The flyer interested him for reasons other than just free wine. He had long noted newspaper stories and gossip about the Arts Council and its lavishness with money. For some time Sammerthwaite had resolved to pry money from that organisation, by hook or by crook. He noted the name on the back of the flyer: Jo Grippe, Arts Coordinator.
He left the church hall, invested in a brandy miniature and headed for the council’s offices, in nearby Croydon.

Since falling out of the literary scene in 60s London (his last grand party had ended violently when he attempted to teach an important publisher’s wife how to play ‘Nelson’s Eye’) Sammerthwaite had had many dealings with the council. He knew its landscape, physically, bureaucratically and politically. So it was with ease that he avoided the front desk and was soon knocking on Jo Grippe’s door in the Culture and Leisure department. Ms Grippe proved to be a large, ruddy-faced woman aged about 27.
‘Who are you? How did you get in here?’ she demanded.
‘We spoke a few weeks ago.’
‘Did we? I don’t remember.’
‘Yes, we did, at the library cinema. You gave a talk before that film about the lesbian chickpea and millet collectives in sub-Saharan Africa. I found it most moving.’
She softened. ‘My talk or the film?’
‘Both, actually.’
Sammerthwaite had in fact spent the night in question drinking pints of Ganges bitter and playing pontoon in his local, the Fighting Temeraire. Luckily he’d spotted a poster for the event near Jo Grippe’s door.
‘I’m sorry but I don’t remember speaking to you, but it was a great night. What was it you wanted to talk about?’
Sammerthwaite explained about the flyer.
‘You’re a poet? Cool. Basically, the Prime Minister wants to build bridges in this area with his visit. We want to basically show off the diverse range of artistic activity here: like hip-hop, filmmaking, rap, parkour, street dancing, graffiti art etc. Did you have any ideas for a contribution?’
‘I thought I might recite some Tennyson.’
‘Eh?’
Jo Grippe’s phone rang. ‘Fucking ’ell,’ she said looking at the number, ‘it’s the mural woman again. She never leaves me alone.’
She picked up the receiver. ‘Jo Grippe.’
There was a long pause.
‘Look, Annunziata, basically we agreed on the content and design weeks ago: giraffes, elephants, children holding hands, map of Africa, fish and the fight climate change and racism logo. Also ‘vibrant’ and ‘diverse’ spelled out (I know you can’t do letters but I’m getting someone for that). You can’t just put Gandhi in it because you saw something on TV about him last night…actually, yeah you can. It’s quite a sweet idea. Steve Biko as well? Who’s Steve Biko? All right, OK, do that.’
She put the phone down. ‘Well, Mr Sam – Mr, I don’t think I’ve got anything for you really.’
‘I don’t mind what I do,’ said the poet; ‘I could do some of my own if you want. I’m writing a huge poem about 20th century history.’
‘I really don’t think there’ll be time. Give me your number and if anything comes up I’ll ring you.’
Jo Grippe had risen and was gently propelling Sammerthwaite out of her office.
‘I’m living in poverty,’ said Sammerthwaite as piteously as he dared.
That word seemed to have great impact on Jo Grippe. As they stood in the doorway she fixed him with her eyes. ‘Basically, I will help, if I can.’
'Poverty,' tittered Sammerthwaite as he rode the lift down to the ground floor. 'Moral poverty more like,' he growled in a fruity colonel's voice.

As Sammerthwaite walked home he found himself near the pedestrian underpass, a series of gloomy concrete trenches illuminated by sallow electric light 24 hours a day. This, he remembered, was the location of the mural. He walked down the ramp. Many schoolchildren ran about screaming while a young woman wearing a mauve pashmina drew Gandhi on the wall. Sammerthwaite stopped by her ladder.
‘That’s a good likeness.’
‘Thank you,’ said Annunziata. ‘What a man.’
‘Indeed. You know what Nehru said about Gandhi?’
‘No.’
‘He said, “it cost a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”’
Annunziata laughed shortly and uneasily. Sammerthwaite doffed his cap and walked on.
‘Who’s Nehru, anyway?’ said Annunziata to herself.

Sammerthwaite poured himself a reviver.

Nothing from the art of state
Another glancing smart from fate!

The phone rang. It was Jo Grippe.
‘Hi, hi; like, basically, I have got something for you, Mr Sammerthwaite.’
‘Ah, excellent. What is it?’
Jo Grippe told him.
He gulped.
‘Will I be paid?’
‘A hundred quid, basically.’
One hundred pounds!

On the day of the Prime Minister’s visit it was observed that an old man, dressed as a Highland Scot from the time of Culloden, was in and out of the pubs in the town centre, drinking a lot of gin. It was also observed that the man in question was not Scottish.

After the Prime Minister’s party had been shown round the Town Hall, the Library and a bit of the local shopping centre (where an egg missed him by inches) and had sampled some rap, some parkour, some street dancing and some graffiti, Jo Grippe stood up in the Mayor’s Parlour and announced that, in honour of the Prime Minister’s home country, there would now be a short history of Scotsmen in Croydon accompanied by traditional music.
In came Sammerthwaite, his tam o’ shanter set at a rakish angle and with a very perceptible stagger. He was followed by another man dressed in Scottish national costume and carrying bagpipes. Jo Grippe was alarmed to see Sammerthwaite had no notes. There followed a long moment of silence as Sammerthwaite’s rheumy eyes ranged across the audience. He belched quietly. Someone tittered.
Then the bagpipes began.
Instead of advancing to the microphone to recite the history of Scotsmen in Croydon, the poet began to dance an unsteady highland fling.
After a while, the bagpiper was prevailed upon by Jo Grippe to stop playing. Sammerthwaite stopped dancing, drew a toy sword and spoke in to the microphone: ‘“Wee, sleekit, cowrin, timrous beastie!”’
The Prime Minister smiled uneasily and, with prompting from an aide, got to his feet. Political minders moved towards Sammerthwaite, who yelled, in bloodcurdling stage Scottish ‘“O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!”’
The microphone was suddenly switched off. The Prime Minister moved away.
‘Tha need na start awae sae hasty!’ shouted the poet in a drunken boom. ‘Hey, you,’ he continued, ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race!’ Sammerthwaite darted forward as he said this and poked the Prime Minister’s belly with the sword. He was quickly surrounded and dragged away. ‘“Wi bickerin’ brattle!”’

And the Press, as they say, had a field day.
Jo Grippe giggled in her office. ‘Basically, it’s bang out of order, BUT, you put us on the map! I’ve seen myself on the news on all channels. Everyone seems to think that publicity of this sort is good. So no harm done, basically. By the way, here’s a council leaflet on alcohol abuse: you can’t be too careful at your age.’
‘So I’ll still get paid?’ asked Sammerthwaite nervously.
‘You would have done anyway. Rules are rules.’

Sammerthwaite stopped at the pedestrian underpass on his way to the pub. Gandhi was gone. Annunziata was painting over him.
‘What’s happened to old Gandhi?’ asked the poet.
‘Not relevant enough, apparently. They want Barack Obama instead.’

The smoking ban has been good in one way: it has illustrated the purblind, cloistered foolishness of modern British socialism.

2009-10-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

What a disaster the smoking ban has been. We are told it has saved 40,000 lives, but so what? Even if the figures are true, that is a high price to pay for the loss of so many public houses and, most importantly, the loss of a coherent social experience.
Even since England “went smokefree” on July 1, 2007, the English pub, already spoiled in too many ways to count here, has gone into precipitous decline.
The first thing that disappeared, obviously, was the aroma of a public house: the mixture of beer and tobacco. I knew immediately this was a great loss, a black-ringed watermark in English history. I first sniffed this intoxicating, deeply adult redolence when I was about eight and was taken in the bar of a pub near where I lived by the publican’s daughter, a friend from school. It still had its Victorian appointments, a splendid circular bar, photographs of famous boxers all over the walls (a previous owner had been a famous fighter) and a space invaders machine that looked like a glass coffee table. That essence of stale beer, fags, cigars and pipes represented, much like onyx table lighters, sports cars and drinks cabinets later, all the heady promise and “glamour” of the adult world.
Incidentally, I walked past that pub a few weeks ago for the first time in many years. The builders were in. I walked up to the door and looked inside: there was nothing: it was an empty space; back to the brickwork on the walls and a new concrete floor, still wet. I can imagine all too well what that interior will be like when it reopens…
So, the smell went. What was left: the astringent aroma of detergent plus B.O and farts. The old internal stratospheres of smoke hid so much.
But this has been well said before. As I say above, the greatest loss is the loss of coherent socializing. Most of my friends are smokers; some light, some heavy. A light smoker, like my colleague Mark Brentano, will toddle out for one perhaps every half an hour. That interrupts the party no more than urination. But most of my other friends smoke far more heavily and, since the ban, have taken to spending the entire evening in beer gardens, regardless of weather conditions, or, when things get truly bad, going out about every ten minutes; but the weather has to be truly appalling for that.
I have to say at this point that I gave up smoking cigarettes in May, 08, because it aggravated chronic esophagitis. I miss them sometimes when I’m tipsy, but not much. But what I really miss is being indoors talking over drink and tobacco. I still like a good cigar, but cigars are an indoor pleasure, and therefore ruled out in pubs.
This will be the third winter I am expected to spend shivering in beer gardens under the sickly glow of the heaters and I have decided I am not going to do it. This means I will see less of quite few people I like, but as Steve Marriott used to say, say lar vee. I don’t enjoy drinking in those conditions.
Now, at this time of year, I find myself thinking nostalgically about something that we used to take for granted: closing the door to the beer garden in October and not stepping foot in it again until the following spring; being inside a warm pub on a cold evening (one with an open fire, preferably), in a mild fug of smoking and conversation.
But I hear a clamour of Cromwellian, socialist repudiation: what about health? What about bar staff?
Health: good and efficient extractor fans and air-conditioning had made pubs far less fuggy than in days of old. Plus there were no smoking areas. Quite often, with some artful arrangement, you could straddle the two areas quite easily, to the satisfaction of all bar the busybodies.
They say it has prevented many heart attacks. Well, certain chain smokers are likely to have delayed their coronaries for a few years, but their bad habits were a matter for them to deal with as individuals.
Bar staff? If you don’t want to work in smoky areas, don’t do it. Do something else. I stopped working behind the bar more than ten years ago because I was sick of serving rude drunks. What is socialism’s non-negotiable legislation for that “social problem”?
In the real world, the world beyond the torturously manufactured arguments that socialists employ to extend their power over us all, people avoid work that does not agree with them. I’m not talking about benefit chicanery here but simply getting another job.
Ah well, our rulers have very little knowledge of being workers.
The smoking ban has been good in one way: it has illustrated the purblind, cloistered foolishness of modern British socialism. In my area, every day, I watch as people – and many children – go about their business, driving, working, walking along the street, openly smoking skunk, an illegal, potentially highly dangerous mind-altering substance, all too aware that the chances of interference from the police are minimal, to say the least. But if I were to walk into a pub and light up a cigarette, the full weight of the law would be soon upon me.
How quickly those fluent and apparently perspicacious politicians of 1997 delivered us into moral insanity. The heavy interference of the state in such matters as smoking, and their apparent “success”, sets a grave precedent to future politicians. They already have their sights on controlling our alcohol intake: note the various powers being handed to councils about how and where drink is consumed; in the north they are starting to limit the sizes of rounds and sometimes having policemen present in the bar. This is all reported by the BBC and other pro-state, pro-political class media outlets quite uncritically and even admiringly. You have been warned.

Patrick Hamilton

2009-10-06T03:47:00.000-07:00

2009 is the 105th anniversary of the birth of novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton. He is a bit forgotten and unfashionable now, but he’ll come round again in a small way, he usually does. Though his chief subject matter of emotional dysfunction, money and alcohol couldn’t be more ‘relevant’, his stage, the old style pub with separated bars and a murky saloon, has largely been dismantled.
His master was Dickens and, though Hamilton has big flaws as a novelist, I think the big fella would have approved, not least because of Hamilton’s talent for characterization and tart humour.
One of the good things about television back in the day was that it still paid higher art forms the compliment of adapting them for its own ends (apart from obvious exceptions, TV largely lives off itself now, so to speak, with predictably banal results). You could discover literary gems through the box. So it was with Hamilton and me. More than twenty years ago ITV adapted his trilogy of novels about a serial killer called Ernest Ralph Gorse. Although I didn’t know to call it that, I was developing an interest in social history, particularly for the period bookended by the two world wars. The Charmer, as the programme was called, therefore caught my attention.
I sought out the novels but found them hard to come by, though I eventually got the Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, and The West Pier, which Graham Greene judged to be the best novel ever written about Brighton. This was followed by reading Hangover Square and other novels by Hamilton.
Hamilton's novels conjured that gloomy interwar world of intense snobbery and social pretension all mixed up with drink and neurotic behaviour.
Doris Lessing observed that what made Hamilton’s novels ever-relevant was that ‘you can go into any pub and see it happening in front of you’. This is true. As teens, my mates and I spent a huge amount of time in pubs of all types. Then, as now, I liked to observe people and behaviour and, after I’d read a couple of his books, I saw Hamilton as one of those kindred spirit writers you encounter from time to time in life, that seem to be speaking directly to you. You walked into a pub and there, as Lessing said, it all was. Just read his description of a pub’s atmosphere from opening time to closing time in The Plains of Cement.
Although they were changing rapidly and had been pillaged by design fads in the 60s and 70s, some pubs twenty-odd years ago were far closer to the pubs of Hamilton’s era than they are now. The décor, the attitudes, the behavioural codes, the demographics, the drinks all had a closer connection with Hamilton’s saloon bars than they do now. Depending on which set of friends you were hanging out with, you might find yourself in some small side-street pub that hadn’t changed significantly in decades (the sort of pub that is now usually closed or denuded of its decoration and atmosphere in a vain attempt to make it appeal to the tastes of youth). And there, on some dark winter evening (and it's usually a dark winter evening in his books), you’d see a vignette at the bar that had walked straight out of one of Hamilton’s novels. An aged, pedantic bore with his crossword, a youngish alcoholic chasing the pub coquette, who’d come with a party from the office and stayed all evening getting drunk on “whisky and American”, or rum and coke; the overpowering smell of beer and different tobaccos; the illicit affairs and blazing rows.
And it all still goes on, obviously, and with a vengeance in fact, but the point is that it looked and smelled a little more like Hamilton’s world than it does now, and I found that fascinating.
Although they captivated me, his books were not altogether a pleasant read. Although they were amusing and I loved the literary style, the biliousness, depression and dark atmosphere that sustained drinking can cause sweated off the pages, sometimes causing you to feel hungover even if you were not. But you had to go on with them.
As he aged and guzzled two or three bottles of scotch a day (in this era, where every other television personality claims to have ‘battled the bottle’, Hamilton’s intake reminds us what real and hopeless alcohol addiction is), his authorial voice became ever more hostile and negative, but that, in a way, suited his milieu perfectly. He gave in to the temptation of explaining to the reader in a sour and insistent tone motivations that the reader could already see; consequently, he became at times in print the sort of bore he feared in pubs.
However, his best work is powerful and memorable. Take the first paragraph of The Slaves of Solitude, which comes into my head now and again:

'London, the crouching monster, like any other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, exhaled violently through the same channels.'

As may be deduced from that paragraph, he was at one time a convinced Marxist (like many on the Left he thought the fascist conflagration of the second world war was a ‘crisis of capitalism’) but apparently later became disillusioned. He must have been savvy enough to know that the paragraph quoted above would be perfectly descriptive of city life in any of the workers’ paradises round the world that have followed Marxist revolution, with, of course, the added element of an all-powerful secret police and no freedom of speech or expression.
I don’t have it to hand but the final paragraph of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, a vision of the countryside smothered in mechanical beetles (cars) is prophetic of today’s teeming traffic domination.
After my early 20s I never read Hamilton again, but I occasionally had a dip, just to see if that comic, queasy and slightly depressing world was, as it were, all still there. And it was, and is. If you come across an old pub that's somehow avoided the wrecking ball of the accountants, nip in and drink a toast to Patrick Hamilton.

A Legend: The first horse to win the Arc, the 2,000 Guineas and the Epsom Derby.

2009-10-05T01:51:00.000-07:00

Watch this amazing performance here. I never thought he'd get through and judging by the comments afterwards I wasn't alone. Note Clare Balding saying: 'no way, no horse can do this.' Note the commentator: 'Perfection in equine form!'
For once, all the superlatives are appropriate: glorious, unique, we'll never see the like again etc. He saw off the best racehorses in the world. I won not a penny on him - too short to be backed, though the BBC's tame bookie reported someone lumping 50,000 euros on him at the last minute. That punter's heart must have been going when Sea The Stars was well back, caught in traffic and boxed in more than halfway round...

LONGCHAMP, France — The Associated Press Last updated on Sunday, Oct. 04, 2009 02:02PM EDT

Sea the Stars made history Sunday by winning the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, becoming the first horse to win three of Europe’s top races.

The 3-year-old colt, ridden by 50-year-old jockey Mick Kinane, started slowly before powering home to win his sixth consecutive race — two lengths ahead of Youmzain, ridden by Kieren Fallon and trained by former England soccer star Mick Channon.

Youmzain was the runner-up for a third straight year, while Cavalryman, trained by seven-time Arc winner Andre Fabre, finished third under jockey Frankie Dettori.

Sea the Stars is the first horse to win the Arc, the 2,000 Guineas and the Epsom Derby.

“I ended up in a position I maybe didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to risk firing him up,” Kinane said of the start. “They were going a nice pace and I knew I would need a bit of luck in the straight, no matter what happened, but I knew I had the pace to go anywhere I wanted. He is a phenomenal horse.”

Kinane, who claimed his first Arc victory 20 years ago on Carrol House, put an Irish flag around his shoulders after the race and waved to the nearly 50,000 fans that gathered at Longchamp, including American movie star Bo Derek and French actor Alain Delon.

Sea the Stars, son of former Arc winner Urban Sea, has lost only once in his career, in his first race last year in Ireland.

“It’s a big relief. Obviously it was the best horse in the race but you never know,” trainer John Oxx said. “It’s the end of the year and it’s easy to get beaten in the Arc.”

Regarded as one of the best horses in the world, Sea the Stars took advantage of perfect race conditions following a week of dry weather in Paris. Oxx had concerns that rain could have softened the ground and hindered the 4-6 favorite’s chances.

The trainer admitted he was a bit worried when he saw Sea the Stars trailing before his stunning burst of speed.

“There was an anxious moment whether he would go out or go in, but once he started to go you knew he would get through,” Oxx said. “No horse in any race has more speed than he has and Mick wasn’t worried when he was a little bit back.”

Oxx added that it was unlikely his horse would race next year, drawing comparison to last year’s Arc winner, unbeaten filly Zarkava, which was retired eight days after winning the prestigious race for her seventh consecutive victory.

“He has achieved so much. I think it’s highly unlikely he’ll run again next year,” Oxx said. “But we’ll have to discuss that. During the week we’ll have a discussion and see where we go from there.”

Monumental errors

2009-10-02T13:17:00.000-07:00

Re the conference: Well, that's Brown and co finished. It's not even funny anymore, is it. A bunch of bullying and conniving clever dicks telling lies as the ship sinks.

Brown! It's really beyond belief. When I wrote in 2005 that when he reached number ten he'd be the strongest box office poison since the dog days of Maggie even I didn't think he'd be this bad, this stupid, self-serving, arrogant and ridiculous. I had only an inkling of what an unpleasant piece of work he is. The story below is representative of the Britain this bullying fool of a prig has helped create. I have seen so many variations on it I've lost count. I don't say he or his colleagues did it on purpose but wiser and more worldly people would have seen it all coming a mile off, before dismantling school discipline, legislating against the family, emasculating the police force, diluting penalties, lobotomizing the education system, enabling drug abuse among schoolchildren, creating a moral wasteland where nothing is ever anybody's fault until it is too late. If I hear that 'son of the manse' nonsense from Brown one more time... In regard to Brown and his government I quote Wren's epitaph: si monumentum requiris circumspice - if you seek his monument, look aboutcha!

The family of a man beaten with a hammer by youths after confronting them about their anti-social behaviour has called for society to "make a stand" so people can live without fear.
Ricky Anderson, 17, was given a life term with a minimum sentence of nine years and two months by Northampton Crown Court after admitting the murder of 65-year-old Peter Bryan.

You see, with morons like these you have to go to war with them and break them before they break something precious. Nobody ever stood up to these people - not in school, not at home; not the law, not the courts. Peter Bryan stood up to them and got his head smashed in for it.

Notes on the Liberal Democrats

2009-09-22T03:55:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has announced his intention of voting Liberal Democrat at the next election. As I respect his take on politics it prompted me to consider how I feel about that party (I haven’t given it any serious thought for years), so I scuttled off to find the Lib Dems’ policies and see what I thought.

The William Gazy Overview of the Liberal Democrat Pocket Manifesto, 2009.

Contents
1 – The Bits I Like
2 – The Bad News, the Cant and the Doublethink
3 – Conclusion

1. The Bits I Like.

Though the party is totally committed to the EU, it says it will give British people a referendum on the matter of staying in or leaving. I think this is showboating because it knows by the time it comes to power, if at all, the EU will have bullied everyone into the Lisbon Treaty, Blair will be President of Europe and a referendum will be largely academic.

They plan to cut taxes on low and middle-income families. This is a good idea. The Labour policy of taxing these people to lavish cash on the bureaucratic membrane of the public sector was one of the central – and most disastrous – ideas in Brown’s plans.

They intend to ‘cut red tape from the small businessman’. This, within reason, is also a good idea. They say they will reverse the Thatcho-Blair attack on post offices and the Royal Mail by the Labour Party and reinvigorate it with a huge investment (two billion pounds. Shome mishtake, shurely?). This is a good idea, but, like a lot of the Lib Dems’ proposals, you wonder where this money is going to come from (more on that later).

They promise a no-holds-barred Iraq inquiry. Good, if they can manage it.
They intend to re-link increases in the pension system to increases in people’s earnings, which I think is a good way avoiding what we are heading for at present: millions of future pensioners living in poverty.

They intend to provide more support for people with disabilities. I think this is an excellent and humane idea.

They propose building and sustaining a national railway system. Good, but see section number two.
They intend to help independent pubs with tax relief to fight unfair brewery practices. Good. Ditto affordable housing in rural areas and affordable housing generally (see below).

Council Tax replaced with something closer to the old rates system = big house, pay more. Good.

They intend to stop the shockingly poor management of the armed services’ budgets and provisions that has flourished under Labour.

They have also interesting plans for local democracy: elected boards deciding how money is spent on a range of local issues including policing and health. There is a huge flaw in these plans, see below.

They intend to scrap targets in the NHS. I think this is good. Targets were a prime piece of modern socialist thinking – really flash on the surface, corrupt as a corpse underneath. It is difficult to know where to start on the NHS, because such a noble thing has become a behemoth of corruption, waste and abuse by so many different elements.

2. The Bad News, the Cant and the Doublethink.

The Lib Dems’ propose to ‘give power back to the people’ by having a new constitution. Under the subtitle ‘For the People, By the People’, they go on to say:

We will involve the British people in producing a
written constitution. This would reform and reinvigorate the democratic process,
putting individuals back in control. We will simplify the system for petitioning
Parliament and ensure petitions are considered and acted upon. We will lower the
voting age to 16, establish a fair, proportional voting system or elections to
Westminster and local government, and decentralise decision making. We will
reform the House of Lords, replacing it with an elected second chamber.

This written constitution could only be written within the parameters of EU law, or rather deal with matters outside of the EU’s reach – and there isn’t much that the EU doesn’t touch, so this is doublethink, stupidity, or a lie. Just imagine what Brussels would make of a petition for, say, the reintroduction of the death penality or corporal punishment.
The talk of involving the British people in producing the constitution is interesting and harks back to other similar bones thrown at the public during times of national despair. John Major’s People’s Charter and a many later Blairite charades come to mind.
They claim they wish to ‘decentralise decision making’ while simultaneously planning to create an entire new chamber of elected representatives to sit where the abolished lords once sat doing the same job as MPs (correct me if I am wrong but this will add hundreds of new members to the ranks of the political class, something Mr Cable is appears publicly opposed to). Although they say they will tame the expenses and corruption culture (and with all those new upper house MPs they will have their work cut out), in practice I think this will mean that MPs of both houses will demand and get larger salaries in return for not fiddling their additional cost allowances, or whatever that has been renamed as.
Reducing the voting age to 16 is an empty, eye-catching gesture – they won’t vote and the ones that do will likely vote for stupid and dangerous politicians.
The party also says it will:

Support reform of party political funding with caps
on individual donations and procedures to ensure transparency in party spending.

Unfortunately, this was written just a month before the Lib Dems’ own funding troubles with a dodgy donor emerged in August. However, transparency is good, but the rest of the sentence suggests to me that the party will propose further public funding of political parties to some degree (opposition parties already get money to balance the ruling party’s access to the instruments of government). This would be worse than the current unsatisfactory system, not least because in the near future it will inevitably mean statutory payments for the political activities of the totalitarian organisations of all political and religious persuasions that are emerging.

Talking of which, there are five lines about the policy that has caused and continues to cause huge problems and controversy in British society: mass immigration, or ‘migration’ as the political class has taken to calling it. They are tucked away at the bottom of the page on government and civil liberties:

Firm but fair on immigration and refugees – We will create an integrated border
police force bringing back entry and exit controls to monitor movement in and out
of Britain. By running immigration and asylum services fairly and efficiently, we
will ensure that all migrants pay their way through taxes and we will cut the
number who work illegally.

Firm but fair rather reminds me of the infamous ‘Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime’, from 1997. Note the ‘integrated’ that prefixes the border police. Integrated with what? Europe, of course; the very same EU that will control immigration to Britain from Europe and eventually dictate terms; the very same EU that the Lib Dems want to grow closer to. As there is no mention of any commitment to a reduction of immigrants or a coordinated deportation policy for the huge amount of illegal immigrants (the Europhilia of the party would mitigate against this in any case on account of Mr and Mrs Blair’s Human Rights Act*), the final sentence of the paragraph strongly suggests to me that a migrant amnesty will be unveiled early in any Lib Dem government ‘we will cut the number who work illegally’ suggests they will change the law as opposed to applying it. Like Boris Johnson with his proposed illegal immigrant amnesty, the eye is on the main chance of revenue possibilities and no other considerations, such as social cohesion, impact on the poor, overstretched public services.

One would like to believe the party about transport. They claim they can build an efficient national railway network, with new lines and new stations. This should be a flagship policy. Having kept a close eye on transport stories in the media over the past few years I have to ask, where is the money coming from? The other main parties cannot make this commitment because they know there simply isn’t the money for it in their projections – in the case of Labour it has been diverted and wasted on other things; and the Tories destroyed a huge chance to build up the railways when it sent the Thatcherite asset-strippers in and sold it all off to speculators who effectively embezzled a national asset. The Conservatives will continue that policy when elected.

On the subject of crime the Lib Dems say they intend to put 10,000 policemen on the streets, using the budget of the scrapped ID cards scheme. I’m inclined to think that we don’t need more police we just need them to start doing what they used to do before Labour began their wholesale Marxoid interference in law and order. There is nothing in the Lib Dem manifesto that suggests this will be the case.
On prisons, they talk about a greater emphasis on rehabilitation and ‘drug, alcohol and mental health treatment’. I’m curious to know where the money will come from for this in a country where even this spendthrift government is admitting, albeit largely in code, that the money’s all gone and the cupboards are bare. I also predict that this approach to crime will come to be seen by criminals as one more ‘get out of jail free’ card – ‘yur, I kicked his head till his eye popped out but, well, you know, I need treatment for my alcholism, don’t I, your honour?’ Expect a thousand variations on that, with the taxpayer coughing up for it.
On terrorism, this was interesting:

Tackle terrorism – We will reform our courts to prosecute terror suspects more
effectively. Restrictions imposed on people without trial risks increasing support
or extremists. Our reforms - intercept evidence in court, and questioning a terror
charge – will be effective and fair. We will improve co-operation between UK anti-terror bodies and reach out to young men in Muslim communities.

I don’t see how this reform will be able to take place to any great degree if the Lib Dems also desire deeper EU integration. I’m curious to know what they mean by ‘reaching out to young men in Muslim communities’. It sounds like the high cant of the Blair years. What form would this take? More diversity officers, presumably.

In their Culture and Media section they show strong support towards maintaining the BBC as it is now, without actually naming it. No mention is made of reform.
It pledges to boost the Arts Council budget. This will mean a great deal more of the sort of public art we have seen under Labour: dire, lib/left-wing brit art/social engineering ‘urban art projects’, box-ticking, political correctness, coded misandry etc. The project of Cultural Marxism throughout the British art and cultural scene will be safe in the hands of a Lib Dem government.

On green issues, they reject nuclear power and want wave, tidal and wind power. I have yet to read anything about these forms of power that say that they can provide anything but a fraction of what is needed. Of course, like so many idealistic policies in British history, it will only be after a huge amount of money, time and land is wasted and ruined that common sense will prevail. As matters stand, a Lib Dem vote is a vote for an English landscape smothered with wind propellers and a vast new membrane of green public sector jobs. More domestic green bullying – there is no indication of any rethink on recycling, slop buckets, wheelie bins, rubbish limits etc.

On Defence they have this to say:

Play a leading role in European Defence Cooperation – If Britain is to continue to
have the capability to be a force or good in the world that will require far greater
cooperation and collaboration with NATO and EU partners. Through joint
procurement, sharing of equipment and better competition in defence markets,
Britain can still be a force for good and get better value or the tax payer.

This is the thin end of the wedge for a European Army. This is a bad and dangerous idea as it will destroy the character and nature of the British Army as a highly effective defence institution. This will happen through EU diktats and general interference. Ditto the RAF and the Navy. The Liberal Democrats don’t seem to have grasped that you cannot have free and autonomous institutions within a framework of a heavily intrusive socialist supersate. It sounds good but it won’t actually work.
The sentence about ‘being a force for good in the world’ could be read as coded support for Blair’s vanity wars.
While we are on that subject, the Lib Dems appear to have no policy, at least not in the pocket guide, to the war in Afghanistan; a fact I find extraordinary.

On Education they are going big for the youth vote: free tuition at universities. If we had an excellent education system this would be a noble policy; since we have a huge university system in which intellectual and moral standards are in rapid and precipitous decline I think it will be a huge waste of money and further cultivate and licence the culture of mass ignorance in contemporary society and rubber stamp the death warrant for any chance of retaining a real intellectual elite.

3 – Conclusion.

Since the credit crunch, the Lib Dems have managed to raise their profile as a sort of ‘common sense party’ on economic affairs. Vince Cable even got himself a gig writing about economics for the Daily Mail, quite a coup for a small s socialist. However, notwithstanding Cable’s Phd in Economics, it doesn’t take an economic or moral mastermind to observe that the City was out of control and that the Labour government encouraged them to be out of control because the revenue from City excesses well suited Labour’s spending plans for public sector bureaucracy: raw economics financing fake economics. Everyone in politics should now recognise that credit booms are not the way forward for healthy societies.
City reform is dwarfed by the two biggest obsessions of this party: green politics and further integration into the EU, in other words more New Labour than New Labour, Miliband with knobs on. They say they want to ‘reinvigorate the democratic process’, but this is in total contradiction to their commitment to Europe: they have completely misunderstood the European superstate project if they think it will allow any genuinely independent decision-making power by ordinary, non-political class people. In any important aspects this will always be overridden by EU law (it will drive a coach and horses through their ideas of local people deciding policing policy, for example); I guess the party thinks it can bypass the situation of ideologically unsuitable people being elected by operating the big trick of proportional representation: closed list systems – in other words you control the outcome by controlling the entries – a bit like the handicap rating system of the British Horseracing Authority: supposedly very fair but often wide open to artful tacticians.
Climate change and green initiatives recur heavily in the Lib Dems’ policies. Apart from the green lobbyists in the party and the usual across-party PR strategy that climate change is the surest way to colonise media time, it’s obvious why they are so heavily in favour of these green measures: it will be an open sesame to EU subsidies for non-jobs and environmental schemes, which are a central plank in the Lib Dem vision of how the British economy might function in the lean years ahead. In other words, a further expansion of the public sector ponzi scheme thinking of New Labour.
This, then, is the real objection. The Lib Dems remain pretty much what they have always been, a sort of maiden aunt compromise on Tory greed and the sweaty socialism of the Labour Party:’ seventy-five per cent of the same thinking, with a few modifications based on Labour’s glaring mistakes and incompetence and without the union and public sector blackmail. The proposed abandonment of top-down Islington government is eye-catching, but a futile gesture by a party totally committed to the EU, an organisation whose laws grow from the totalitarian Napoleonic law and not the English common law; an organisation not just committed to big government but monster sized multi big government with all its attendent bullying, arrogance and money burning élan.
There is a tendency among young urban liberals to view those who object to the EU as being 'fogies who can't stand change' or are 'clinging to an England that never was' etc. That may apply to some old colonels and cab drivers but the real point is this: you either believe in self-governance or you don't. Even Tony Benn thinks it undemocratic, and when a man who loves Mao says something is undemocratic, well... The Blairite moonshine that you can have it both ways on Europe has been exposed for what it is in the past ten years. Evidently the Lib Dems still believe it.
I dare say the party's leaders have finally got their economic story straight after years of embarrassment when Charles Kennedy simply had no idea of how the figures added up; but the answer to the hard question of where the money will come from seems to be: the EU. In other words, New Labour in funky new threads.

22/09/09

*There is no mention of any plans to overturn this most destructive law, which has aided Islamic extremists to remain in this country.

2009-09-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

From the Sporting Life website. A poem, don't you think?

Newbury 2.50

Pos 1. Almiqdaad 8-12 R Hills, M A Jarvis, 14/1 held up in mid-division, steady headway from 4f out to lead 2f out, ridden over 1f out, in command final furlong, stayed on well opened 16/1 £5000-£300 (x3)

Well, it made me happy anyway.

The Fiona Pilkington Case

2009-09-18T14:29:00.001-07:00

Another example of the Clockwork Orange society that 13 years of a social democratic approach to policing in Britain has led to, and clearer than ever proof that our current model of community policing was dreamed up and run by fools who are old enough to know much better. Getting harder by the day for people like David Aaronovitch and other Labour groupies to say this sort of behaviour is rare and those who draw attention to it are exaggerating it to suit their - yawn - right-wing agenda. If this case happened under Thatcher you know what all the worthies on the Left would be saying.

Some Labour Party slogans to keep in mind:

'Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime' = give other people's hard-earned money to violent chavs and let them get away with destroying the community.

'Building a Safe, Just and Tolerant Society' = Police can't help you with yobs making life hell for your family - but look at that big housing estate we just built for all the foreigners who conned their way in and jumped the housing queue! Your mate and his young family might have a 14-year wait* but we're helping people from lands the British Empire exploited and, er, countries the empire never touched as well! Aren't we Fabians bloody lovely! And don't moan because your area is full of burkhas and Albanian gangsters or we'll have the law on you for a Hate Crime. New Britain! Hurray!

Question for your Labour MP, if you have one: Why would the working class ever vote Labour again?

*Actual case of an acquaintance.

Betting Shop Dispatches: Sea The Stars

2009-09-18T04:21:00.000-07:00

When I walked in the Londonbet shop there was an argument in full swing about Sea The Stars and whether he will win the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.
Del, short, bins, smartly dressed, cockney, fifties, ruddy with drink and blood pressure, cab-driver outlook and immensely genial, is seated at the one table in the small shop. Next to him is Jack, his equally smartly dressed and cockney sidekick. They are in there frequently, Del holding forth on all subjects and Jack occasionally knocking out hooky designer wear and other bits and bobs.
Del backs horses in the shop and lays them over his mobile. The pair of them know their onions, or appear to, and take racing seriously. Jack isn’t always around, but Del is there every day. Effectively it’s his office.
Behind them sat two other men, scruffy and dirty, one tall with wild eyes; one short, with no teeth. They all knew each other.
The tall one with wild eyes was losing his rag: “I’m telling you, Sea The Stars was on drugs at Leopardstown. Simple as that.”
“Fuck off, Johnny,” said Jack.
“He was drugged and they’ll drug him at the Arc and he’ll win. That’s why I’ve lumped on. I’ve got 15/8 and I’ve lumped on.”
“Different race, the Arc,” observed Del gravely. “French. It ain’t like here.”
“’S a fucking horse race, Del.”
Del’s sanguine cheeks flushed deeper and suddenly he became very animated; he tore off his reading glasses and put on his normal glasses and said: “When they run a Group One here or in Ireland they move the fucking fence, so the horses race on virgin ground, right Jack?”
Jack nodded.
Del, vindicated by what he clearly regarded as supreme knowledge made a serene yet I-told-you-so face, highly reminiscent of Jesus in Guercino's The Incredulity of St Thomas.
“…so they race on the best turf. Turf what ain’t been fucked by previous racing. They don’t do that in Paris. That’s ’cos the French don’t, ’cos they’re fucking awkward cunts like that. Chances of him getting stuck in the ground or in traffic is big. It’s a long season, remember, and he’s at the end of it. I wouldn’t bet till the day. I don’t even think he’ll go to the Arc. I think they’ll fucking back out. You got to have luck as well. Look at Zarkava last year. You got to make it through the traffic there, boy.”
“Sea The Stars will have the Arc,” said Johnny, “don’t you worry about that. They’ll drug him, like at Leopardstown.”
Jack looked round in disgust. We’d been alone in the shop that afternoon when Sea The Stars had displayed superstar quality at Leopardstown. When he got up to win we’d both looked at each other with that head-shaking, awed respect you only see men give to phenomenal, once-in-a-lifetime performers in any medium.
“Drug him?' said Jack. "Woss the Arc, a fucking Seller at Brighton? He don’t need drugs. He’s a natural athlete. He’s the best horse we’ve seen for forty years. Be sensible.”
“Whatever; he’ll win. Any ground. He’s an any-ground horse now.”
Del’s voice rose and became imploring. “Any ground that ain’t fucked, you mean. You got to think about the ground, Johnny boy, the state of the fucking turf. Wait till the day comes and see then.”
Del focused on the street outside. A hot blonde walked past. “Fuck me, look at her. Look at that. I’d like a bit o’ that. She could do what she liked, she could. She could p*ss all over me.”
There was laughter. Then the man with the wild eyes spoke again: “Sea The Stars will do it, Del, don’t worry. I’ve lumped on.”
“So have I,” said the short man.
“Oh, Kenny,” said Del almost tenderly. “I hope it wins for you.”
Silence descended. A dog race occurred. Del pulled a five-pound note out of his pocket and regarded it. “I’ll get some beers with this for tonight. A fiver’s worth of kip, that’s what that is.”
Then he kissed the ragged note with his eyes shut.

Betting Shop Dispatches

2009-09-16T04:37:00.000-07:00

I know several betting shop managers for the big bookmakers and they all say that middle management in their firms is obsessive about creating a friendly rapport between the cashiers and the mugs, sorry, punters.
So it amused me yesterday to find myself in a betting shop, owned by one of the big three and managed by a man who pushes rudeness, incivility and contempt for customers to the limit.
I was familiar with shop, but if I am in that area of south-west London I usually use a nearby shop, owned by the same company but much smaller, where the manager is friendly and obliging. The friendly manager said to me a few months back: “Dunno what he’s doing round there, but all his custom comes round here now.”
I knew what he was doing, that was why I’d stopped going in there.
Yesterday, caught in the rain, I decided to go in the other shop. It was huge and empty, bar two Albanians playing the roulette machine. Dog racing and the early prices at Yarmouth and Lingfield were up on the screens. The notorious manager sat behind the glass at the far end, feet up on the counter, watching daytime TV. Behind him in the back room I could just see his young female assistant sitting at a table eating something with a spoon. The view almost – almost, I say – had the epic banality and numinous profundity of an Edward Hopper painting. The smell of her lunch had wafted through the shop: a gross admixture of oxtail soup and pot noodle.
I’ve made a little study of the manager before and it struck me that he is the epitome of a certain type that infests betting shops and racecourses. He’s about 50, thin, with the face and eyes of a man who has been smoking, bullshitting, crust-swiping and shit-stirring since he was a small child, in other words a sort of hairless monkey (as opposed to naked ape). His hair is cut like a teenager’s, and is dyed the colour of brown Kiwi boot polish.
There’s nothing he doesn’t know about racing and about ‘having it off’ on the horses. This is, presumably, why he is managing a betting shop for a poor salary at the age of 50. He has total contempt for his customers, excepting the coterie of degenerate gamblers, violent small-time builders and football-obsessed morons that constitute his social circle.
What he really admires isn’t winners – he pays out with a furrowed brow and his attitude suggests that your winnings are coming out of his pocket (I dare say his employers operate some arcane bonus system). I won a 200 quid in there one Sunday afternoon on a mad 16/1 shot and he looked furious. No, it’s big losers he admires. Men like him and his friends reduce absolutely everything in life to a sort of virility test. Betting is no exception. He therefore admires the sort of men who walk in, pissed, after a week’s toil on a building site, and, after staring at the screens for three minutes and breathing heavily through their mouths, stick fifty pounds on a dog or a horse, lose it, swear uncontrollably, and then do it all over again and again until they stagger off home to the wife with a score to last them until next payday, muttering about how ‘that dog had shit in its eyes’.
He admires the sort of jack the lad who lumps two hundred quid on an evens favourite to win. Conservative betting is what he despises. I have come to be a largely conservative bettor, on the grounds of personal experience, current financial woe, and by having American writer and horse racing fanatic Damon Runyon’s famous aphorism never too far from my mind: ‘All horse-players die broke’.
I wrote out a 2.50 double and took it to the counter. Slowly, he took his legs off the counter and dragged his eyes round to meet mine. I pushed the slip under; he picked it up. The manager studied it briefly. He regarded it in the way he would if he discovered he had inadvertently got some faecal material smeared on the palm of his hand.
“Can I have the prices on those, please?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said disagreeably, and knuckled down to the intense hard labour of looking up two prices and writing them on a betting slip. “Not much of a pick-up if they win,” he observed.
“Fifty quid’s fifty quid.”
“Put a cockle on, then you’ve got a proper bet,” he advised with a sort of avuncular contempt. I replied quick as a flash and in an unpleasant tone: “Why would I want to give ten quid to you on a stupid bet like this?”
He seemed to realise that it was time to let the customer be right. He pushed the processed slip back under the glass and said nothing. I looked at him. He grunted by way of thanks.
I walked away, and said, ‘stroll on,’ in the manner of Michael Caine in Get Carter. I looked at the screens for a bit while whistling ‘Hey, Big Spender’, then left the premises.
Both horses in the double came fifth.

Mick Taylor and the Whirligig of Time

2009-09-13T03:54:00.000-07:00

It’s a shame about Mick Taylor. The former Rolling Stones guitarist has surfaced in the middle pages of the Mail on Sunday, now aged 61, skint as a tramp, fat as a pork butcher and living in a tiny hovel in rural Suffolk with thirty-five years of smack and coke abuse on his doctor’s notes. An ignominious life for an ex-member of the ‘greatest rock and roll band in the world’.
The Stones have made a billion and a half quid out of their records and tours – and that’s without the tons of cash and publishing rights to their most famous songs that Allen Klein swindled them out of – but they stopped paying Taylor his royalties in 1982, when they changed record companies and a lawyer told them to drop him from the payroll.
Taylor was a great blues guitarist and his joining the Rolling Stones was musically providential for him and them: they were musically limited but possessed of classic chops, attitude, preternatural rhythmic ability and steeped in black American popular music of the last seventy-five years; Taylor was a 20-year-old blues guitar virtuoso whose fluent playing put him in the top league of British guitarists back then. He gave them ‘guitar hero’ credibility and ability in the age of Hendrix and Clapton; they stopped him disappearing up his own arse musically. The results of this alliance can be heard across more than half a dozen LPs from 1969 to 1974, which for me constitute the high water mark of the band’s achievement. Everything before was a brilliant rehearsal of that period; everything after was a soggy cliché. As my friend and fellow blogger Mark Brentano has heard me say too many times in public houses: the Stones finished the day Mick Taylor left them.
It is a well known fact among we amateur Stonesologists that Taylor contributed to the songwriting of this period and that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards kept all the publishing for themselves, probably because they’d been so comprehensively rolled by Klein.
It’s seems clear from Taylor’s comments that he was the archetypal aloof musical protégé who thought that great musical talent was an unanswerable Monopoly card that could be used as a proxy for common sense. I’ve got a pal like that, whom I love dearly, and who is currently drinking himself to death in one of southern England’s more deprived seaside towns.
However, the Stones should cough up some cash for Mick Taylor, it’s as simple as that. The band’s leaders are, as has been noted many times, hard characters that take great exception to resignations. ‘A cross between an English gentlemen’s club and the mafia’, was how an insider described the band’s internal workings back in the day. But 35 years have passed and Taylor’s virtually an old aged pensioner. The band members could all give him half a mill and never know it was gone. Taylor says he’s finally going to the lawyers. It will be interesting for Stones-watchers to see if they settle out of court or go for the gamble.
Mick Taylor's fate is ironic, when you think about it: When he joined the band he was a teetotal, non-smoking vegan, five years younger than the rest of them. He became a long-distance drug addict and now looks ten years older than the rest of them (barring the kippered macacque that is Richards). Looking at Taylor’s picture in the paper I was reminded of Feste at the end of Twelfth Night: ‘And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’

Sherlock Holmes Doesn't Smoke Anymore

2009-09-12T04:56:00.000-07:00

Email to a pal:

You're quite right about Holmes 'piss-takes' being a graveyard. I had an argument with a friend of mine about this. She's the audience the BBC loves: mid-thirties; an eternal student where taste is concerned; Xfm all day long; stand-up comedians are the legislators of her moral and political world; a 'pacifist' and 'socialist' who loves money and power and refuses to argue her political stance, because that's 'boring';thinks the Foo Fighters are 'rock and roll' (as opposed to being thrashy, tinny white 'rock', like the odious John Cougar Mellencamp played on a higher speed); thinks Dr Who, far from being a children's programme of highly variable quality, is actually the greatest entertainment known to man and Russell T Davies and the actor who plays the Doctor are Shakespeare and Garrick respectively; regards the whole day-glo, noisy, specious, flippant, vainglorious, boring, hypocritical, upspeaking, trashy, 'postmodern' vista of television as her Arcadia and her theological handbook of instruction; her divine trinity is Bill Hicks, Kurt Cobain and Jonathan Ross - with a little bit of Robbie Williams on the side, for those weepy, chocolate scoffing moments.
So we're sitting there half-cut and I mention the stuff about the new BBC Holmes and she says, 'well, that's a good way of updating him. I just think that him having smoking patches is a good way of updating him.'
I said, 'he's been cleaned up for the Blairite age, where tobacco is banned but other street drugs are negotiable and marijuana a naughty treat for kids. He is, in fact, the Labour Party's Sherlock Holmes by dint of his having been worked over by television people and television people are all Luxury Socialists ie the Labour Party of today. Look at that pompous northern cunt who played him before the present one, his press conference was all 'my Dr Who is about meeting aliens and not thinking they're terrible just because they're aliens.' (get the - mid-Atlantic academic's accent - subtext there, John?)
But, when people having been weaned on telly and its values, anything outside of that thinking is shocking to them, like in the Isaac Asimov novel where the planet is a roofed-in, airbrushed ut(dyst)opia where kids have never seen the sky and when they are taken up and shown it they go insane. Never turn the telly off, kids, reality will send you insane.
Funny thing about it is that people such as her were ALWAYS pointing out 'ruling class' propaganda 20 years ago but now their ruling class is doing the Goebbels they fail to see it. I've even heard it said that the BBC was and is 'right-wing', though any consideration of its drama output of the last 45 years will show a marked Loachian aspect.

Ah well, the left will rediscover moral indignation when Cameron takes over the Blairite project next year. Have you heard about this Jack Straw quote, 'the English as a race are not worth saving'? I want to use it but cannot find the source.

Poppy Cock

2009-09-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

These days, when things go very bad, very publicly, for any sort of government enterprise you can rely on what I call the sunshine balancer to appear very quickly. The sunshine balancer is positive spin and, after the last week's news about the mortal fiasco surrounding the elections in Afghanistan, I was waiting for the combined spin doctor talent of the British and American governments to produce something. Lo and behold the UN pipe up with some 'good' news about a marginal reduction in the Afghan poppy crop.

Makes you think, doesn't it? It took six years for the allied armed services to beat the combined forces of the Axis powers and eight years for the allied armed services to reduce the poppy crop of Afghanistan by 10 per cent*. At one stage, the war was all about halting the poppy trade, then that all sort of faded out. Now, as the democratizing/throttling the Taleban plan has been shown to be a bloody failure it seems as if we're back on the poppy war again. Hey ho.

*I don't mean to cast aspersions on the armies involved: they are fighting the war according to the tactical and material limitations imposed on them by politicians.

Well, Tony Blair, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, George Bush, Mark Steyn, Euston Manifestoistas, where are ya? Counting money?

2009-09-02T04:03:00.000-07:00

Times:

'Widespread and systematic fraud during the Afghan presidential elections has tarnished the legitimacy of any future government and undermined the Nato campaign there, Western and Afghan officials have admitted.

Two more British soldiers were killed yesterday and the commander of the Nato forces in Afghanistan warned President Obama that the eight-year war was in a “serious” state and that big changes were needed if victory was to be achieved.'

Telegraph:

'The metaphor chosen by General Stanley McChrystal to describe America's plight in Afghanistan is both graphic and depressing. The commander of US and Nato troops likened his force to a bull charging a matador (the Taliban) and being weakened with every sword thrust. He also warned that the Allied strategy was not working, because areas cleared of insurgents were not then held; meanwhile, the Afghan people were undergoing a "crisis of confidence" because their lives were not being made better after eight years of...'

Email to a pal: Hitch Minor, Sherlock Holmes, Anthony Powell, and The Germans.

2009-09-01T14:13:00.000-07:00

'I read Hitch Minor's latest book recently, The Broken Compass. The flak he's got since his last book has made him sharpen and refine his arguments considerably. The showboating and the baiting of the audience has subsided. If the Labour Party still had its socially conservative/patriotic side then he'd fit right in. The chapters on education and feminism have some knock-out punches for the Blair/Gove/Cameron/Mandelson mindset. I disagree with a load of what he says, but some things are just so spot on you want to clap. He was completely right about Blair from the word go.

I was perhaps rash about the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. I take your point. I'm going back through The Case Book of, and that has its moments. The Sussex Vampire, an old fave when I was a kid, has just about all the Holmes appurtenances - mist, mystery, old house etc - but the plot hangs on the wife refusing to tell the husband that his son is poisoning their baby cos it would break the man's heart. LUDICROUS, even in pulp fiction. Also been buying the Rathbone/Bruce B-Movies. You can get the UCLA-restored ones for three quid at HMV. They are very enjoyable: good 40s Hollywood lines, great 'cheap' art direction that is, with this material, much better than realism. Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, The Scarlet Claw and The Pearl of Death (featuring The Hoxton Creeper) are total rockers. Picked up some new information in one of them: 'Moriarty was a virtuoso on the bassoon'.

Been re-reading Powell. The Military Philosophers and Books Do Furnish a Room. I loved that bit at the end of TMP when he bumps into Jean Duport down a side street off the Embankment and remembers her opening the door to him years before, naked. I sort of waited the whole book for one line and when it arrived I found that I'd underlined it: 'Like so many things that have actually taken place, the incident was now wholly unbelievable.'

Regarding the anniversary of the war. I was in a pub the other night with two pals, Angela and Mick. There were three stools at the high table were drinking at. They went out to have a fag. Meanwhile, eight or ten middle-aged, middle class Germans, all dressed in cheap-looking leather jackets, walked in. It was half-eight at night in the big Wetherspoons in George Street, so seating was scarce. They looked around a bit. Spotted Mick and Ange's chairs and here's what they did. Two of the wives sidled over and stood near Angela's stool. They looked round at it. Then one of the husbands came over and put his pint of lager on our table, at the edge, near Ange's stool. They could see both chairs were in use, by the half-empty pints. A moment or two passed. Then one of the women grabbed the back of the stool and started to turn it round her way, while another of the men grabbed Mick's stool. "OI, OI, OI, IN USE," I said and, feigning surprise, they gave the stools back with crinkly mouths and the man took his beer away. But they hung near. Mick and Ange came back and one of the women leant on the back of the stool. "What happened?' asked Mick. I replied loudly: "I've just seen the political and military history of Europe, 1914-1945, played out in this pub, that's what."
Even Mick, a hippy and socialist, laughed. The Germans scowled and left. When I got home there was something on the telly about the Germans torpedoing the SS City of Benares in 1940 and killing all those children. You've really got to watch those bastards.
And there, as Kipling concludes in the Man Who Would Be King, the matter rests.'

Peston v Murdoch Jnr; plus Murdoch Snr's delusion.

2009-09-01T03:37:00.000-07:00

Robert Peston, who during the financial crisis somehow managed to make a legend out of himself by acting like a mad aunt dosed on Ritalin, has been arguing and swearing with James Murdoch in Edinburgh. They’re rowing about the BBC’s expansion and stranglehold on the provision of British news and media. Murdoch wants to deregulate the market and, obviously, the BBC don't like it. Peston, Jana Bennett and other BBC bigwigs are convinced the public trusts only them. If they got out from Primrose Hill and started talking to ordinary people I think they’d get a bit of a surprise. Years ago, when I started pointing out to people the BBC’s bias towards the attitudes and beliefs of young urban liberals* I was met with dismissal. Now, ten years later, the same people point it out to me.
Peston will believe the BBC is a white knight of truth in a world of dingy right-wing American cable TV news values. And he’d be almost right if the beeb hadn’t lost its objectivity and begun, long ago, to rig its media presentation to suit the political and social agendas of its management and its political allies. When the BBC finally meets its political nemesis (who that may be is unclear. It is unlikely to be Cameron) and its obituary is written, this collapse in standards and rigour plus the rise in Birt-ian management-itis will be identified as the corporation’s fatal illness.
Peston and co would argue that even if you think the news is biased the BBC must be valued as a buttress against the crassness of commercial television. That would be a good argument if BBC television hadn’t become so crassly commercial itself. Murdoch's product will be brash and crass, but I'll take that over brash and crass plus pay-us-or-we-prosecute political and social bias. Ultimately, I find all this talk of television as some sort of vital component of civilisation rather ridiculous. I look forward to the day that television is regarded as a bona fide health hazard to society and the individual, like heroin and cocaine.
Another aspect of the argument to consider is Murdoch senior’s beliefs. He is now displaying signs of full-blown senility, by which I mean he believes he can start charging the public for is papers’ online news content. This will never work for two simple reasons that have, as per, completely eluded monster-salaried corporate geniuses: one, the majority will simply not pay for online news under any circumstances, because, and this is point two, new, free sites will emerge to scrape by on advertising and news gathered from the wire services and by pirating paid-for content (newspapers are filled like this now, so what would be different?). These sites will trump any paid-for service. Someone on Facebook will link to some site called freenews.com or something, all her friends will bookmark it and use it and that will be that. What the marketing men call 'viral'. Wailing about high-quality journalism will fall on deaf ears, unfortunately. That’s what happens when you dumb everything down: valuable things are not always recognized.

* Not exactly hard-core socialism but that utterly selfish consumerism mixed with empty platitudes, ‘don’t-know-if-I-really-believe-it-all-but-it-makes-me-look-good’ Guardian comment page views and vague internationalist posturing that constitutes the ‘leftism’ of today’s ‘educated’ youth.

'The Old People's Town'

2009-08-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

'So it’s the consequence of your urban planning, or your colonialism, or your wealth, or just plain you. We’ll blame anything rather than confront the central truth—that when an old, relatively unicultural society admits in a short space of time a large, young, fecund population from somewhere else, you are setting in motion a process of transformation. Caldwell asks the obvious question—“Can you have the same Europe with different people?” and gives the obvious answer: no. “Europe is not welcoming its newest residents but making way for them.”

In the end, that coy French euphemism for the, um, rioters of no particular socio-religious persuasion—“youths”—gets to the heart of the matter: youths are youthful, and ethnic Europeans aren’t. In the heavily North African Paris suburb of Montfermeil, the Muslim children from the housing projects pass on their way to school each morning a neighbourhood of detached houses still occupied by French natives: they call it “la ville des vieux”—the old people’s town.'

Mark Steyn reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

What Happens When Hippies Think They've Turned Right

2009-08-21T01:56:00.000-07:00

2 Rifles has suffered more casualties over the 4½ months of its tour than any British unit serving in Helmand. Twenty soldiers have been killed from the mixed unit of riflemen and fusiliers, including six in the past week. The number of wounded, a figure that cannot be disclosed for security reasons, ranks alongside that suffered by British infantry units during fighting in Europe in the Second World War.

When I read this I wondered, not for the first time, how much longer the British Government can keep 'managing' the 'outcomes' of this war. Can mutiny be far away?

Meanwhile, glad to see that other masterstroke of neo-con foreign policy, Iraq, is toddling along nicely towards stable, liberal democracy. They'll have MTV, no-wage burger franchises, a moronic film industry and valet parking in no time.

The Great Dumb Down and A Bright Future

2009-08-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

The dumb-Down proceeds apace!

But grade inflation brings devaluation, so... and blimey, even the Guardian's noticing.

Of course, the dumb-down and course-work plodding style of A-levels was brought in to make it easier for girls and penalise boys, to facilitate the gender revolution.

Don't be surprised if the 'intellectual elite' of tomorrow, in politics, the civil service and the media are a bunch of cocky, narcissistic ignoramuses who talk in up-speak. You'll be working in giant Tescos till you're ninety to pay their fat pensions. While we're on the subject, I noted Gus O'Donnell's letter tucked away in the back of the Mail last week, which I can't find online, boasting about how the civil service will be a gynarchy by 2020. What manner of civil servant O'Donnell is can be seen here.

Like the advert says, the future's bright.

I Was Waiting For This

2009-08-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

Two months ago, possibly on this blog but definitely in conversation, I predicted that MPs would be on upwards of 100,000 pounds per annum within five years, in return for showing great forbearance in the matter of having their large scale expenditure frauds removed. So, this came as no surprise.

Harriet

2009-08-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

See my post below. Who could do the same thing for the Tories?

Why I'm Voting for Harriet/Afghanistan Elections

2009-08-18T01:03:00.000-07:00

And lo, it suddenly hit me. Last Friday. I was going to vote Labour at the next general election and that was that. Now, this may come as a shock to readers of this blog. As you know, I am merely a poor wretch, lately jettisoned from the world of journalism, and now adrift in post-boom Britain, where jobs are scarce (see picture) and are usually aimed at foreigners who savour the small wages here because they are ten times what they get back in Poland/Czech
Republic/Albania/Wherever (Mandelson doesn’t mention wages when he tells the British unemployed to go abroad to work). I liked that advert because it showed that wages for that sort of job have risen about 75 pence in 14 years. I know, because I used to do jobs like that and by the looks of things will soon be doing them again. Thanks, Tony, Gordon and Peter. I love the country you've created. Wages for the poor haven't gone up much but by golly their rents have! Well done, Islington, mass immigration was such a brilliant idea. Excuse the sarcasm and note the truth.
I don’t need to reiterate my criticism of Labour, do I? So why am I going to be voting for them? Because Harriet Harman will, hopefully, be in charge by then.
I was browsing in WH Smith’s last week. I saw The Spectator (a magazine I rarely buy these days, on the grounds that most of the writers are wankers and the whole thing is inching its way further towards being little more than a sort of American Express members’ magazine: adverts for watches and ‘Luxury supplements’ every five minutes. Plus they keep making people I hate ‘associate editors’) and noted that Rod Liddle had had the same thought I’d had a while ago: Labour will be very badly damaged very quickly if Harman becomes leader. Yes, believe it or not Labour can fall a lot further than they have already.
But that’s not the only reason for voting Labour. Another four years of hardline Harmanism would slowly drag the rich into this spitbowl and, quite frankly, seeing as they’ve remained untouched and grown wealthier through whole Thatcher/Major/Blair narrative it’s high time they, like the rest of us, have their lives touched by the compassion and fairness of new Labour, don’t you think? Add to that a growing sense that Westminster is steadily regrouping after the expenses scandal and needs to be taught a real lesson: as Alan Duncan’s remarks last week demonstrated, they have learned nothing from being exposed as swindlers.
A Harman government would compound the errors of the Brown/Blair years while bringing fresh stupidity to the table: She could fully bankrupt the country very quickly and bring Labour’s many hatreds and neuroses to the boil in a trice. There would be a vast new drives to go much further in implementing the policies that have made everyone hate Labour; the public sector would become a sort of Marxoid gynarchy; ‘misogyny’would be ‘stamped out’; billions of borrowed money ploughed into ‘equality’; the current underhand Labour policy of underfunding the armed services and diluting them into a ‘European Army’ would be stepped up, despite the country being at war; Labour’s policy of EU and non-EU mass immigration would be fiercely encouraged; the lobotomy of schools and education would gather greater pace; the monarchy would be closer to abolition than at any time for centuries; the police emasculation will continue apace; violent disorder and organised drug addiction will grow. As now, there will be no money but borrowed money. Taxes will soar. The journey to third world status and third world services, begun under Blair and Brown will be properly under way and steaming ahead all engines firing. The sins of the empire will be atoned for – the wet dream of every Labour ideologue – and England will be smothered. Except for the wealthy, civilised life will be a dim memory. Like now but more so, sirens, hip-hop and the Muslim call to prayer will be the soundtrack to urban living. Recycling will be encouraged at all spare moments, rather like the way that under Mao’s cultural revolution every person with a few minutes spare time had to work at digging a hole in their back yard.
For the sane man the only response will be alcohol abuse or revolt. One can almost believe that civil war would occur, and that, plus revolution, is just what this old country needs. Then we’ll all know where we really are, instead of the micro-managed media mirage of today. At the very least it will make a nice change, as my old granny used to say.
Of course, we won’t get a Harman government we’ll get a Cameron one; and the minute that expenses-fiddling individual sets foot on the Downing Street doormat all the forces of the liberal left, so long quiet about this country’s problems and economic woes, will start shouting and carrying on as if there hadn’t been a Labour government for 13 years. The Specials will probably re-release Ghost Town, even though high streets were boarded up and fascism grew fast under Labour rule. By three months in it will all be the Etonians’ fault and, though I dislike the Tory party, I don’t see why they should get the blame for what Blair and Brown have caused. Also, a Conservative victory will allow the Political Class ideal cover to repair and entrench itself after the disaster of the expenses scandal. This would be very bad for all of us.
So, I’m voting Labour at the next election and I urge you to do so as well. It is, as a politician would say, the only way to make real change happen.

It was sad to see the BBC reporter holding up the fake election papers he’d been sold in Kabul. It makes me angry to think that British soldiers’ lives are being thrown away to ensure a crooked election in a terminally corrupt and medieval country, and all on account of the vanity and stupidity of neo-cons and Anthony Charles Lynton “Tony” Blair.
The war in Afghanistan is lost; we are already defeated in the long run. It only remains for years of government spin to attempt to paper over the cracks, and for inquiries to come to some anodyne conclusions. It and Iraq are the biggest foreign policy mistakes for fifty years and there’s no way round it.
David Miliband, Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, writing about the elections in the Daily Telegraph this morning, asserts that Ninety per cent of the Afghan population is ‘reasonably confident that they will be fair’.
The BBC reporter I saw this morning was offered two hundred voting ID cards for a few pounds. The ‘allies’ can stay up there for fifty years and they won’t eradicate corruption or religious extremism.
They certainly won’t stop terrorism, which is the stated aim. It is a peculiarity of this government’s intellectual incoherence that they don’t mind starting wars in distant countries and throwing soldiers’ lives away but the idea of proper border controls, by which I mean burkas off at the airport door and an awful lot of searching and rigorous enquiry, appalls them. Yes, that is because it would disproportionately affect one of the Left’s most favoured minorities. Better to have an endless war in Afghanistan than annoy the Muslim Council of Britain and slow down airlines’ profits.
That’s a little specious, I know, but not so much that it doesn’t provoke the smile of recognition, in this author at least. After all, this government and its predecessors have allowed an extraordinary amount of jihadists to move freely in this country. Over the past eight years, while the Army has been ‘fighting terrorism’ abroad, the Cultural Marxism of this government has ensured that Islamist clerics have operated with near impunity in Britain.
The West must get out of Afghanistan. Those who wish to leave that country ahead of the Taleban rule can be re-located in the country that started the war: America. If the Taleban then wish to allow Afghanistan to become a fort for international Islamic terrorism against the West, the West must respond to any acts of war and aggression by carpet-bombing the country flat. The Taleban cannot win a conflict on those terms.
Otherwise, we should leave the mullahs to their goats and start to sort out the mess in our own countries.

New fiction: Double Raspberries

2009-08-11T03:01:00.000-07:00

I've grown so weary of writing and thinking about the war in Afghanistan and the British government's attitudes to it that I decided to subject it to the artistic process and see what came out. The idea for this story first occurred to me a year or so ago, and then it was to be a radio play called The Self-Serving Bias, about middle-management civil servants and a funding scandal. I abandoned the play on the grounds that Radio 4 (the only producers and broadcasters of radio plays in Britain) would never accept any work that was critical/satirical of or about the kind of decaff-socialist, self-regarding, politically correct, self-serving, deceitful, bureacracy-and-jargon-heavy micro-managerialism that runs Britain today, on the grounds that the modern BBC is run exactly like that and by the type of people who appear in this story. Still, the idea percolated, and, as the late trombonist George Chisholm used to say, it comes out here.

Double Raspberries
By William Gazy

Jamie Sping, junior policy development officer (feeder grade 2, civilian; lower quartile), media unit, Ministry of Defence, was playing a computer game in the office of his immediate superior, Dylan Banner (upper quartile, civilian; pension grade 3), a senior policy advisor liaising between Number 10 and the Ministry of Defence. Banner stood behind him eating a small triangle-shaped egg and cress sandwich – a leftover from the lunchtime meeting on fresh media approaches to the war in Afghanistan.
“Has this got the motionplus feature?”
“Nah,” said Sping. “I did order it but this came instead. It’s crap.”
“Grab the sea-trike: you get points.”
“No, extra life.”
“Well, pick it up.”
“Shit, missed.”
“You’re crap.”
Banner wandered over to the window, chewing. Through the net curtains he could see the back of a statue. Traffic passed along Whitehall.
“I felt like shite in there today,” said Banner. “The Prime Minister was on one.”
“Heavy weekend?”
“Went to Platitude.”
“Who was on?”
“Kung-Fu Jesus headlined – you know, Jody Crunj’s band, he was the drummer in Cyst.”
“Wicked.”
“Like, I grew up on Cyst. Soundtrack to my teens. Wild night. Got very messy. Done some pills that were like pink callies in the 90s. ’Course, I was mashed all the way back from Oxfordshire – couldn’t even dismantle the tent, left it there – and then everyone ended up round ours and we drank everything I had in the flat. Absolutely battered. Regretted it this morning. Tube was all fucked. Held vom till Waterloo. A mountain of shit waiting for me here.”
Sping laughed. “Bollocks: missed the sea-trike again. Have you got through the zombie swimming pool bit? If you blow their arms off before their heads you get double raspberries.”
The door to Banner’s office opened and Stubb, Ministry-to-Army media policy liaison officer (feeder grade four, civilian; median), walked in. He looked harassed.
“Sebastian’s going apeshit downstairs. His boyfriend’s lost his dog.”
Sebastian was their nickname for a prominent member of the government.
“What’s he still doing here anyway?’ asked Sping. “The meeting finished three hours ago.”
“Because he’s an interfering cunt. Been in an office downstairs with the PM. Kicked up a stink about combing the room for bugs. The dog must have come this way, because there’s a turd out there, so watch out.”
“Who’d be interested in listening to those two?” asked Banner. “I suppose the Taleban might like to get advanced warning on which bands will be playing Kabul?”
“Eh?”
“That was one of the things that came out of the lunchtime meeting,” said Banner. “Sebastian reckoned a rock concert in Kabul would be a ‘publicity coup for the West’. ‘Bring people together’, ‘show the West’s good side.’”
“You jest?” asked Sping, turning round.
“Nope. Sebastian’s full of radical ideas at the moment. Maybe he’s in love. He said: ‘it’ll be like the old days.’”
“What does he mean by that?”
“Fuck knows. When this government was popular, perhaps?”
“Have you seen either his boyfriend or the dog?” asked Stubb irritably, “because I’ve been roped in to looking for them.”
“You might get a knighthood if you find them,” said Banner.
A thick-necked sergeant-major, in his 40s, passed down the corridor behind Stubbs, whistling for Sebastian’s dog. “Kisses,’ he called softly, in a heavy Glaswegian accent. “Kisses, where are you?”

Two days later Banner had a breakfast meeting with his boss, Communications Liasion Director (Senior Civil Servant, 99th Percentile Grade) David Hirudine, and Stubb. Hirudine, neat, forties, grey temples and gym slim, was sniffing at an avocado.
Hirudine said, without looking up from the fruit: “Keep getting abusive emails and phone calls from the British Legion asking us why the PM or the Foreign Secretary or someone isn’t meeting the bodies when they arrive back from Afghanistan. What can we do about this?”
“Persuade the PM to do it?” said Banner. “Just the once? Make the gesture, keep ‘em quiet?”
“No, I don’t mean that,” said Hirudine irritably, “what can be done about stopping the bloody British Legion getting through to my voicemail and email? Why have a web team, an internal comms team and whatnot and then end up doing the front of house yourself?”
He turned to Stubb. “The sausages are good, aren’t they? This avocado is good. I had a little moan about catering and it seems to have hit home. Same with the booze: I’m preparing a preliminary beverage report, no pun intended, which you might like to contribute something to. I floated the idea of a wine committee, like they have in the Commons.”
Hirudine turned to Banner.
“Look, it’s not a bad idea to suggest the PM goes down to meet the dead, but you know perfectly well he won’t do it. He’ll say his predecessor didn’t and if he didn’t, then why should, etcetera. I don’t know why Shining One didn’t; he could have got away with it, made himself look good: cried and so on.”
Shining One was the their nickname for the Prime Minister’s predecessor.
“But it might do the PM some good, in a way,” said Stubb. “In the polls, I mean.”
Hirudine changed the subject.
“This rock concert Sebastian was going on about on Monday,” he said. “It’s starting to take off as an idea. Had the BBC on the phone at 5.45am wanting to do a phone interview about it with anyone from here.”
“How did they get hold of it?” asked Stubb.
“Sebastian, obviously,” said Banner.
“Of course,” said Hirudine. “He’s briefed them behind our backs. Complete lunacy, of course. But it’s taking off now and we’ll have to roll with it. Sebastian’s office is already doing a feasibility study vis a vis insurance and agents and talent fees and all that. I had a email from him a minute ago and he wants an office, essentially a media hub, set up in Kabul as soon as possible.”
Banner looked at the front of that morning’s Times. Heavy fighting in Afghanistan, and heavy casualties. Three deaths.
“So this concert, you don’t think it will blow over?”
“No, I don’t,” said Hirudine. “Sebastian says that he has extensive contacts in what he called ‘the rock world’. Says he met Jody Crunj at a backstage party a couple of years ago and, unlike most pop musicians, he wasn’t ranting that Iraq and Afghanistan are evil imperialist adventures.”
“He’s very much in the minority on that one, I’d say,” said Banner.
“Quite possibly,” said Hirudine. “But it’s in motion now and we’ll have to run with it. Sebastian will open the coffers up for it and the funding. In regard to us, it boils down to this: someone’s going to have to go and set the hub up in Kabul and that’s that.
Silence followed this.
“It’ll have to be one of us,” said Hirudine. “Or, rather, one of you two.”
“How can I go?’ said Stubb. “I was downhanded the re-incentivising of our media affiliates, plus the hits-and-clicks web delivery focus group to sort out.”
Hirudine turned to Banner. “Dylan?”
“My workload isn’t exactly light,” he said in a voice more hollow than usual. “I have people in my management line that might be appropriate.”
“That doesn’t strike me as being the best solution. You’d have to make a sound recommendation, which would have to be approved. I’d far prefer it if you went, Dylan.”
“OK, I’ll go,” said Banner.
“Now,” said Hirudine, changing the subject again. “I was briefed by the PM that we, as the Min of Def media, should be briefing everyone that the equipment in Afghanistan is good and getting better all the time. There is an adequate amount of helicopters in Afghanistan and, where there isn’t, there soon will be, which for you means there already is and, furthermore will be more very shortly. Armoured cars and so on are being developed that are invulnerable, etcetera. Everything’s on an upward curve of efficiency and strength; I know this is basic stuff but; never give an inch on this, ever. Never get put on the back foot by reporters over this. Ever. It’s the PM’s new golden rule.”
“Oh yeah?”
“According to Sebastian, some lawyer got arsehole drunk at Chequers the other weekend and said he wouldn’t be surprised if, quote, ‘the fucking lot of you didn’t all end up in court over the two wars’. Rattled the PM, who made the mistake of getting lippy and asking the man ‘what he meant by that’. ’Course, the bloke rattled off a prima facie case that should have been obvious from the start and that ‘they’d all be lying through their teeth till the day they died, just to stay out of a courtroom’.”
“What happened?”
“PM went into a sulk. Then someone said they’d heard that Shining One was now running around in Washington suggesting that ‘the allies’ should invade Zimbabwe.”
“What did PM say?”
“A very rude word. Then he stormed out.”
Banner’s blackberry buzzed. He read the message.
“Two killed last night in North Afghanistan. Corporal and sergeant. No names as yet.”
“Family bereavement media briefing pack four,” said Stubb, apparently as an aide memoir. He wrote something down. “Four B if they’re Scottish,” reminded Banner. “And three C if they’re Welsh.”

The working day was winding down. Jamie Sping was playing the computer game in Banner’s office.
“Get the fucking sea-trike!” yelled Banner, leaning over the screen.
“Got it,” said Sping. “Extra life.”
Banner consulted the time. “Fancy a quick pint?”
They went to the Red Lion, down Whitehall. Banner outlined the situation.
“So, basically,” said Ping, who always used the word basically in any work-related business whether it was needed or not, “someone’s got to go to Afghanistan to set the hub up?”
“Yeah,’ said Banner. “To be honest, like all the crazier policy drives from Sebastian it’ll fizzle out when the initial allocation budget dries up and nobody will sign off more money for it. Then the project will be renamed and only the hardiest FOI-sender will be able to find out where the money went. For you, on the other hand, it represents a chance to do yourself a bit of good. You can shine here. Go to ‘theatre’ and you’ll get points. Double raspberries. You’ll probably go up a grade far quicker than you would have and women will think you’re hot.”
“I am hot,’ said Sping.
“And all you’ll be doing is sitting in an office on fucking facebook all day. Like here in other words, except you’ll be in Kabul.”

The Times, always warm towards Sebastian, went big on the rock concert the next day.
“Fuck me,” said Stubb slowly, as he read the story in Banner’s office. “I like this bit: ‘A source at the Ministry of Defence confirmed that Bob Dylan has been approached for the concert in Kabul’. Genius. Your idea?”
“Yeah,” said Banner. “We-ell, you might as well go to town with it. We did approach him as well – he was playing golf at his Scottish castle – and he got his office to tell us to fuck off.”

To avoid a confrontation with Hirudine and the paperwork involved in sending Sping to Afghanistan, Banner presented at his doctor’s surgery complaining of anxiety and depression and got himself signed off work for a month. He did some housework, web-browsing and bought tickets to Glastonbury for himself and his wife. One afternoon his mobile rang and it was Hirudine.
“I realise you didn’t want to go, but is Sping up to it?”
Banner was prepared.
“Technically, yes. Emotionally, yes. True, he’s lower quartile, but a riser. He’s clearly got potential, otherwise why did we take him from feeder grade? You said yourself at that corpcom meeting that if bigger projects are not downhanded then our technological terrain and crossbriefing interstices will remain at Management Model II.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”
“In your power point presentation you said ManMod III requires nano-dynamism and vision-compliance from the lower quartile. ManMod III will remain non-impactful unless the lower quartile expedite synergistically. Other words, the guy’s a newbie, but I thought Sping was an ideal candidate for this project. If you don’t get the guy a challenge, he’s heading for long grass and bandwidth supervision, which, to be fair, seems a waste.”
“Thanks, Dylan,’ said Hirudine brightly, “I Hope you get better soon.”
Banner clicked off his phone. He switched on the television. The rolling news on cable showed more flag-draped coffins being unloaded at an RAF base.

Banner had been back at work for a month and several more soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan when Stubb came into his office at speed.
“Heard the news?”
“Go on.”
“Sebastian’s downstairs going apeshit.”
“Why?”
“Someone trod on his boyfriend’s dog – and Jody Crunj’s has walked out of the rock concert project.”
“That’s fucked that then. He was their only chance. No one will touch it now”
“Sebastian’s in with Hirudine now. Ranting and raving. Hirudine wants a meeting this afternoon on briefing angles.”
“I won’t be there, thank God – ManMod III aggregation delivery strategy.”

A few months passed. The war carried on with no discernible progress. Retired Generals wrote imploring letters to the The Times and the Daily Telegraph about the government’s duty to provide adequate equipment to the armed services. The media team were kept busy issuing briefings that showed that the Army’s equipment was more than adequate. More soldiers were killed. Fresh Family Media Bereavement Packs Four, Four B and Three C were printed. Meanwhile, the concert project disappeared from the media.
“Sebastian won’t have it mentioned,” said Stubb, who had been in Sebastian’s offices at the Commons that afternoon and was regaling Banner with gossip over lager in the Red Lion.
“I’m not surprised,” said Banner. “Don’t suppose he’s got much to worry about, though. The news coming out of Afghanistan is so bad the papers don’t need to start digging around that particular fiasco. I’ve never looked at the money spent on it but I wouldn’t mind betting it could have bought something useful for the war. If we’re lucky, if the story ever does come out it’ll just be a few pars in the back of Private Eye.”
Both men’s blackberries buzzed simultaneously. They consulted them and said together, “Sping’s been kidnapped.”
Stubb looked at Banner. Banner said, “for fuck’s sake.”
Both men drained their pints and headed back to the Ministry.

It all came out in the media. The rock concert, the money: the bill and expenses for event planning was called ‘eye-watering’. There were front page pictures of Sping; Sping in happier days on holiday and a video capture of him, blurry and crying in a cage – “bit like a Francis Bacon painting,” observed Hirudine, who was doing an evening course in Modern Art at the Tate. There were pictures of Jody Crunj and Kung Fu Jesus playing on stage; pictures of the office in Kabul from which Sping and two bodyguards were kidnapped; pictures of Sping’s parents and girlfriend. A meteor shower of Freedom of Information Requests hit the ministry. More financial details emerged to general outrage. The atmosphere became siege-like. The Secretary of State for Defence, a lowly figure in the cabinet and subordinate to Sebastian, took most of the flak.
“I see Sebastian remains untouched,” said Hirudine at a morning meeting with Stubb and Banner. “The old tricks are the best. He’s relentlessly briefed against and smeared the Minister, who now wants to resign – ”
“Does he?” asked Stubb.
“Of course, he’s had enough shit lately to last a lifetime. This is the final straw. Of course, neither the PM nor Sebastian will let him. Not until they think the moment is right.”
“Have you agreed strategic continuity on the kidnapping?” asked Banner.
“Sebastian, cleverly, has instructed me to request a press blackout in the interests of Sping and the bodyguards’ safety, while the Foreign Office attempts to negotiate.”
“That works in Sebastian’s favour, too,” noted Banner.
“Of course,” said Hirudine. He turned to Stubb. “If you can get that suggested wines idea of yours knocked into a pdf before lunch I can take it into Food and Beverage with me this afternoon. I don’t hold out a lot of hope, but as I said to the Minister, it’s no good serving pub wine in the Historic Rooms. It just makes us look crap.”

The war continued. Video footage of British soldiers fighting in the pink badlands of Afghanistan played daily on the television. The media blackout ensured Sping’s story disappeared. A year later Banner switched on the computer in his office, checked Reuters and learned that the decapitated bodies of Sping and his two bodyguards had been discovered in a cave, one hundred miles north of Kabul. He stared at the screen for a bit and slowly plugged his iPod ear plugs in.
Later, when Stubb arrived, Banner said, “I’m just glad I got that job at Health. Get out of this fucking nightmare.”
“Oh, you got it?”
“Yeah. Upper quartile, same pension grade. Health can be bumpy, but not like this. Fuck this.”
“For a game of soldiers,” said Stubb.

It was down Whitehall at Health, one afternoon some months later, that Banner, while walking down a corridor, noticed some dog shit on the floor. Soon after this Banner was accosted by his immediate superior (SCS, 99th Percentile Grade), who said, conspiratorially, “Sebastian’s in.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, spending a worrying amount of time poking his nose in down here these days.”
On their way downstairs they walked past another dog turd outside Briefing Room six.
“Careful not to tread in the shit,” said Banner.
“That’s what everyone’s saying these days, isn’t it?”

ENDS 2,957

Burke, berks & the BBC

2009-08-10T00:19:00.000-07:00

When you switch the BBC on in the morning, be it the TV breakfast show or James Naughtie's socialist briefing on Radio 4, you get the news which corresponds most to the BBC's obsessions, which are the hobby-horses of the grown-rich-on-taxpayers'-money liberal chattering classes: "equality", "diversity", climate change, prison-doesn't-"work", more-immigration-please, I-Love-the-EU, English-culture-embarrassing (except football and anything from the North - except the huge rise of the BNP there)/foreign culture good (and don't mention the honour killings, homophobia and Jew-hating). To this list of the usual suspects can be added a new, bubbling-under category: 'Now smoking has been banished from pubs how can we get drinking out of them?'
Watch this item from BBC Breakfast this morning.
The first thing to be said about the piece is that it fails to ask even one member of the public for their opinion (wot, no "social democracy"?). This is either lazy journalism or the manifestation of editorial approval. The Beeb being the way it is these days it's probably both. The second thing is that when strong-arm anti-liberty measures are proposed which involve police interference, say stop-and-search in areas of high ethnic density, the BBC rigs its coverage to demonstrate why they think the new measures are a bad idea. All manner of people, usually Shami Chakrabarti, are wheeled on to decry the new measures. Not the case with alcohol in Oldham. The ending of street violence becomes a non-negotiable necessity. Very laudable, I must say. But if this story was about a clampdown on violence and drug-dealing/taking in East London or Birmingham, 'community leaders' would be placed upfront in the item, laying out their objections and saying such measures would 'alienate the community'. The white working class in Oldham are not afforded that privilege.
Further thoughts: I'm not defending the loutish behaviour - I wouldn't go in one of those bars if you paid me - but I smiled at the irony when I watched the piece, because the problem of extreme drunken violence and bad public behaviour has been mainly caused by things the modern liberal-left strongly approve of: deeply equivocal and pluralist attitudes to family, education, morality and public behaviour. In other words, letting it all hang out, baby, is all fun until someone loses an eye. Don't expect The Guardian or the BBC to spot this obvious fact. The final thing to say is that if I'd been the reporter instead of that pliant dolt Richard Bilton, I would have finished my piece with these words from Edmund Burke: "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be from without."

Social Democracy All at Sea

2009-08-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

A fishing hut, Hastings, 7th August, 2009.

Another success for Sofgov*

*Newspeak for Sofa Government of Islington.

Oligarchal Collectivism - the Final Year Begins

2009-08-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

This new move to introduce state brainwashing of children is only the beginning. Only a few months ago traditional subjects were deemed a waste of time by Sir Jim Rose in his education proposals. So, out goes history and in comes the Guardian Women's page (except it doesn't have a Women's Page anymore, because every page is. Can a 'Man's Corner' be far away in the Guardian, I ask myself). Notice how it is only crime against females and one-way gender bullying that is being tackled. The fact that men top the lists in, for instance, suicide, alcholism and depression and get a worse deal from the NHS (not that you'd notice from the MSM) will go unremarked and entirely left out of this new slab of socialist interference in education. Note this:

Work on the strategy was first launched by Jacqui Smith when she was home secretary but is also understood to be being driven forward by Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the Labour Party and Equalities Minister.

As I said in previous posts, it's no-going-back, scorched earth policy railroading for the final year. This isn't good news for them either. Not that negative outcomes from their policies ever stop them for a second, but it's interesting that they can't even fiddle the figures properly anymore. Expect 'drives' and 'crackdowns' that are forgotten about in a week.

Letter to a friend concerning Madness, the 80s, the Thompson Twins, sex and Olivia Newton-John

2009-08-03T02:52:00.000-07:00

July 27 2009, evening

Hi, Nick-o-Pip,

Just a few lines to say fanks for your present. I last bought a Madness record twenty-four years ago and so I was curious, to say the least, to hear what the old nutties were up to these days. The Liberty of Norton Folgate proved to be a richly rewarding listen.
They have retained that very English mix of melancholy and joy (remember the underrated masterpiece of The Sun and the Rain?) and while their ambitions have grown, they haven’t become pretentious. Suggs, it would appear, has been inhaling a mix of Peter Ackroyd and Tom Waits and it’s done the fella a power of good. The amazing, wonderful and horrible bazaar of London past and present is well celebrated and elegied, if you know what I mean. The whole effect rather wonderful, with each band member doing the musical thing one remembers them fondly for. It was a lovely fruit-cake of a record.
Of course, what album is flawless? A couple of numbers serve to keep Guardian readers happy: a lyrically lazy, meaningless song about Africa, called, wooh, Africa (Suggs, you mess with the tacky God Toto: desist, desist! Don’t play da juju man with that particular middla the roadkill. Bes’ forgottun, realleh!) and another appearing to blame rude boys’ pathologies on ‘gherkin men’. Unless Gherkin Men be some extra-esoteric West Indies slang for players of the pink oboe, I do believe we are seeing some of that old red wedge 1985 malarkey from those old enough to know nuance better. Oh, would that it were 1985 again! (Nick R. appears stage-left wearing a bowler hat and brown carpenter’s apron. Whistling, he unfolds a temporary road sign: NO NOSTALGIA, PLEASE, AS SCOFFING TENDS TO OFFEND) Taggy browsers and shirty hurts (I was a natty dresser, at times). All was simple in the forest, even though it wasn’t! I was in love that year and my two years old copy of Long Hot Summer by the S*y*e C*u*cil was played to oblivion. As was various Madness – including The Prince. BRING BACK THE….WE WANT THE…PRRRRRRRRRIIINCE. What a mixture we lived on in those days: Brighton Rock one minute (I had a recording of them doing it on New Year’s Eve 1975 taken off a radio repeat – in scratchy long wave, my dears! May’s rhythm playing at the start made me put down the wooden Dunlop racket with the purple handle ((worn back-to-wood at the point I liked to strum the solo from the Shadows’ version of Ghost Riders in the Sky some six years previous – I had graduated from strumming the Ward Lock Junior Encylopaedia. Maybe I should get a guitar made to look like the Ward Lock Junior Encyclopaedia. Ron Wood had a toilet seat guitar, after all)) and retrieve my battered classical from the loft – later to be smashed to pieces in Townshendian salute. I couldn’t tape that guitar back together as Daltrey advises in Guitar and Pen.) and the Thompson Twins the next! Pip-voice: THE THOMPSON TWINS! THE THOMPSON TWINS! They had only one record I liked, the name of which escapes me. It was about being in a prison camp, if memory serves, which, I suppose, tied into that adolescent male dreamlife of being a hero of some description – even if one’s greatest struggle was the daily styling of the fringe in or out of the equation. I can see myself now: Shaving mirror door on bathroom cupboard; leaf-pattern frosted glass window; soap-caked radio on windowsill; sound of the Victoria train nearby slowing into Penge East; King in a Catholic Style by…ten points, Nick, ten points*…coming on, and this greasy fringe to contend with.
I’ve just looked up Long Hot Summer on youtube. As you would say: oh, dear! Talbot, the keys player, seems an honest-enough fellow, along for the ride, but one look at Weller…he’s like a devious Neapolitan deckchair attendant. Oh well. Children don’t always spot a mountebank as quick as they are sometimes given credit for. I’d got Frenchified and poncy, thanks to the S. Council’s Our Favourite Shop, which I adored. I took up French fags and loafed around listening to Down in the Seine, Weller’s idea of a Jacques Brel number. I thought it very cool.
I was also fond of a Communist band called the Redskins, I remember. Bring It Down (This Insane Thing). And of course the night Simply Red appeared for the first time on the Old Grey Whistle Test. I was ensconced alone in front of the box with a gin and tonic (the dark mysterious tabernacle of the drinks cupboard having been fully appraised and reconnoitred some moons earlier to vouchsafe a King Edward Imperial to smoke on bonfire night) and the then-unsigned Hucknall’s voice tore at my wounded heart (where my knee would be buried). WINE AND SONG, SIR. WINE AND SONG! A poisoned chalice, sir. ‘The pestle with the vessel, the brew that isn’t true.
But that’s nothing to a musical memory from the 70s: bloke next door in my front room doing an extended Elvis dance in his moccasins to Mud on the telly. TWIGLETS AND BABYCHAM, CHIPBOARD AND PAMPAS GRASS (possibly a new ITV detective series) VESTA CHINESE MEALS and wallpaper RD Laing could get his teeth into. As Roy Batty says in Blade Runner: the things I’ve seen with these eyes.

And, back in the 80s, Madness kept you going. You never took ‘em seriously, but my, how they entertained and, now one comes to consider it, how they have colonised one’s memory of that decade. Along with MR BUYRITES and Farahs. Here’s me on my way to school, winter, 1981,
FISH PASTE SANDWICHES in my carrier bag. I pioneered the shopping carrier bag as against the satchel and sports bag. (That, the fringe, the taste for Razzle and Jackie Collins, Tarzan and Biggles and the biro-smothered hands ((no, not Biggles and The Biro Covered Hands)) perhaps signalling the dysfunction that would overtake me in adult life). A radio plays:

And I never thought I’d feel this way, the way I feel about you…IT MUST BE LOVE, LOVE LOVE LOVE etc

. Much better than Labi Siffre’s original, was Madness’s.
That was a grim old, filthy-snowed under winter. My sister developed a penchant for Godley and Crème’s Under Your Thumb Forever. Sunday nights for her being all about listening to the new Top 40 on Radio One. My antagonism to fashion perhaps beginning with her love of Duran Duran etc. Have you noticed how nobody puts Duran Duran videos up on Facebook? Too fucking embarrassed. Anyway, winter passed and I decided I liked the mad bit in the middle of ABC’s The Look of Love. Following this, as I bounced my skinless leather football up from the playground one lunchtime, three girls from the year above snuck up behind and fondled – a recently learned word, that was- my bum. The most ‘at it’ one, a half caste girl, like a heftier Gauguinian amazon stuck her mauler down my trews. I told her to fuck off, so taken aback was I! But I walked away with leady you could have gone shark-fishing with. IT WAS A LONG AFTERNOON OF DISTRACTION IN MATHS. Something was happening… And lo, the following winter, 1982, we saw the Young Ones go in that boozer, Suggs go ‘You hum it and I’ll smash your face in’ and House of Fun begin. The elemental First Squirt could not be far away; indeed, this song seemed to augur it. THE FIRST NOCTURNAL SQUIRT had already happened before my molestation. During a dream about the television advert for a film called Xanadu starring Olivia N.J and after my nightly prayer that a nuclear war would not occur; I’d had the early warning beacons at Dover pointed out to me and thought, blimey, bit real. My parish priest gave it the biggun about CND from the pulpit and there was enough on TV. My idea of the next war was sort of The Tardis meets Reach for the Sky. That all changed when the BBC put Threads out, right, popkids? Anyway, back to Olivia N.J. Olivia had caught my eye at the cinema in Grease some years earlier, and the idea that you might literally fly off in a 50s car with your loved one remains attractive.
The summer of 1983 was rather wonderful and I seemed to spend all of it riding a bike near Selsey Bill. Which, incidentally, was mentioned in Madness’s Driving in My Car. But the song that summer, apart from Long Hot Summer was Wings of a Dove, WO-AH WO-AH. Released, so wiki informs me, on August 20, 1983. Then there was Our House, which I didn’t like for some reason that I can’t now remember. Then the acutely melancholic Michael Caine.
Oh well. I could go on – the weird winter of 1984 and The Sun and the Rain, the end-of-crush melancholy of Yesterday’s Men and my early pub expeditions with Uncle Sam by Madness playing (My old man thought Uncle Sam was great, he didn't see the anti-Americanism of it) and later their valedictory Ghost Train – but I’d better not: lest Reeves arrive at the Dog and say to Sunshine: ‘fucking old Jackanory Gazy sent me! Cunt wouldn’t shaddap, like usual. The only living boy in Penge East indeed! Who d’yer think you are, fuck sake, GUNTER GR-ARSE? Percy Proose? Clean yer elbows! Eat the Rail. Sit on it, Chachi!’ Sufficey to say that, one way and another, The Liberty of Norton Folgate stirred up a lot of memories for me.

And I never got to tell you about Sunshine and the Tooter’s Hat and how he threw a lighter at me. Oh well, see you in the bar.

I am sir, your royal, loyal correspondent.

The Colonel.

PS: All highlighted items in this letter will form the tracklisting for my next platter

*Nick R says calmly and instantly: China Crisis? What’s the big deal? What was that song about Amsterdam that came out at that time? Was it Lloyd Cole? I quite liked that.

Clock's Ticking

2009-07-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

There'll be some shouting and cursing in the bunker tonight. As close readers of this blog will be aware, I detest the Conservative Party; but anything that annoys Brown and his coterie puts a smile on my face. Oddly enough, I find this new Cameron Tory Party more repulsive than the old one. At least the old lot had lived in the real world. Look at this new MP, Chloe Smith. A 'former management consultant'. Ugh. God save us all from management consultants, policy wonks, spin doctors and all the rest of the know-nothing, gobbledygook-speaking clever dicks who infest politics today.

Chairman Johnson

2009-07-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry for radio silence but to be perfectly honest the only thing I feel like writing at the moment is rude words about this government. I mean seriously rude words. That old middle English/Germanic c-word, used in the plural.
Last week’s star c-word was Alan Johnson. His comments about the population reaching seventy million tempted me to write a green ink letter to him, interrogating his logic and beliefs. But is it worth it? Wouldn’t I be better off studying the form for Goodwood? Yes, I would.
Her Majesty’s Home Secretary said:

“I don’t lose sleep over the population reaching seventy million…I am happy to live in a multicultural society. I am happy to live in a society where we not only welcome those coming to live and work in this country but where we can go and live and work in other countries.”

First, indulge me some sarcasm. Since it is the lifeblood of the orthodox Left’s model of debate, I think I’m entitled to a shred of it: Oh, what a utopia! Behold the queues of British people wanting to go and live and work in Somalia or in a light bulb factory in east Poland! That reminds me of a facetious and doubtless Aaronovitch-borne wheeze in the Times back when Mandelson had his problems with the nuclear workers in the north, who were protesting about foreign workers. Mandelson, with Tebbitonian contempt, had blithely informed the strikers they ‘could go and work abroad’. The Times followed up with a feature showing vacancies in Eastern Europe. Salaries and medical provision were, naturally, not mentioned.
That whole episode demonstrated to me that even I had quite underestimated the arrogance in the Labour Party in the matter of dressing up Marxist internationalism as nothing more than the benefits of globalisation.
Back to Alan Johnson. As is traditional for the new Labour front bench, Johnson has been an active Marxist:

“…I was… CPGB [Communist Party of Great Britain]. I did consider myself to be a Marxist – I read more chapters of Das Kapital than Harold Wilson.” New Statesman, 29th November, 2004

Johnson comes out of union politics and, when I was a union shop steward, I met a few people like him. Self-righteous on a scale only seen elsewhere in organised religion, often shockingly deluded about human nature, enthusiastically conspiratorial and fanatically chippy.
His comments demonstrate a man committed to Marxoid ideology over any practical considerations. It has already been demonstrated that the mass immigration of the new Labour years has had negligible economic benefit and considerable ill-effect on the very people the Labour Party purport to represent. This hasn’t swayed Johnson. To put it simply, he’s so out of touch he doesn’t realise that the policy he is defending has driven down the salaries and driven up the rents and mortgages of people he entered politics to help. Jobs are now scarce and foreigners, it must be said, have taken a great proportion of them. I enjoy pointing out to right-on lefties that the old cab driver’s complaint of ‘foreigners taking all our jobs’ only became a reality under new Labour. They don’t care, of course, because it either hasn’t affected them or, and much more common, they are too badly informed or stupid to work it out for themselves. They cling to the idea that all criticism of the political class is based on lies made up by the Sun and the Daily Mail. If only.
Why are Johnson’s comments so outrageous? Add to the negative consequences of mass immigration already detailed we must also take into account the simple fact that Britain is a small and very overcrowded country in massive debt with a lot of problems and many more looming; it has an overloaded infrastructure that cannot be maintained or improved to meet the demand of 70 million people because of the huge financial problems the country faces. I would have a small bet on public spending falling consistently (Gordon Brown would call that ‘non-rising’) for perhaps a generation. For many "hard working families" - (c) Alistair Campbell, 2004 - these times will be hard times.
I find it amazing that anyone can actually support the Labour government given the simple facts on offer, without even mentioning the two silly wars. Peter Mandelson, the kingmaker and prime mover of the Labour government has now admitted that cuts are coming (after Brown denied it for months). This is an understatement. We have been told by Labour politicians and Labour client journalists that mass immigration was a sort of economic master trick that would obviate conservative spending niggardliness in the future. Even taking into account the recession – and politicians always should, though our current rulers told us it was impossible: 'no more Tory boom and bust' – Labour’s spending has taken the country into the foothills of bankruptcy, without much to show for it beyond a massive growth in public sector non-jobs and a huge expansion of state benefit. The miracle of migrant work has not saved us from a pension and investment timebomb nor filled the country's coffers.
Note Johnson’s outspoken support not for a multiracial society but a *multicultural* society, that is a society organised by the enforced state doctrine of multiculturalism, a classical example of satellite Marxism. This man, like so many other communist baby-boomers in the Labour Party, is a dangerous and destructive near-idiot, masquerading as cheerful cockney ex-postie with a heart of gold. He will be useful to Brown in the coming scorched earth movement of no-going-back-policy drives in the coming months.
The final irony, if he could but see it, is that Alan Johnson has become the thing he probably hated the most back in the 70s: a powerful and wealthy politician, ignorant of the problems of ordinary people.

Yentob and the BBC's future

2009-07-09T03:55:00.000-07:00

So, Alan Yentob, BBC arts panjandrum and a man whose biggest contribution to the world is a David Bowie documentary in 1975 and the Arena series, is in possession of the second-largest pension pot in the entire public sector, a figure of 6.3million pounds paying him a yearly divvy of 216,000 for the rest of his life. Paid for by we, the licence-paying serfs; people whose values, tastes and attitudes Yentob and his ideological colleagues despise and have been making war on one way and another for 30 years.
Even the Blairite middle-classes are choking on this one, if the comments on the Times website are representative.
I strongly suspect the young Guardian-scanners (I don’t call them Guardian *readers* anymore for obvious reasons) who form the backbone of BBC staff will be annoyed about this because it is becoming obvious that this baroque epoch at the BBC has now become a political eyesore and something will have to be done, or at least talked about being done, in due course; and that may mean the gravy train stops for them as well.
The current big idea, that the license be scrapped and the bill worked into people’s council tax, should be resisted violently. It is a typically crafty bit of political class thinking: appear to solve the problem in the eyes of the public while actually collecting even more money than the license fee brought in, therefore strengthening the BBC into the bargain. Once that television tax is made invisible, we will all be paying more to keep people like Yentob in luxury as they sedulously continue to promote the creed of the media baby boomer: Cultural Marxism in all its forms.
Until that happens I think it is quite likely the BBC’s solution to its profligacy will be to ask staff to take pay freezes/cuts in order to fund the vast pensions of its ageing senior management.
The orthodox left are never impressed when confronted with analogies drawn from Soviet Russia or the old Warsaw Pact countries. They weren’t in the 40s when Orwell used them and they aren’t now, when the socially liberal middle classes’ ability to gain power and privilege at the expense of the working and lower middle class (who they nominally support) is very strong indeed. But the analogy of the Nomenklatura is valid, and every day brings new evidence of it. Once again, one can only conclude that the ideas and belief systems of the liberal elite, cultivated in the Labour Party, liberal newspapers and think tanks during the long hiatus of socialism, 1979-97, have turned out to be far more disastrous than the hated Conservative rule, bad as that was. Private sector fat cats are hard to take but they have been a fact of life from, I would imagine, the first stone age man hoarded more coloured pebbles than any of his neighbours. However, I find public sector greed, cant, hypocrisy and self-serving behaviour just as objectionable, perhaps more, for obvious reasons.

As my comrade-in-arms (drinking crony) Mark Brentano pointed out as we lounged on Brighton beach a couple of weeks ago, the BBC must have been extremely pleased that Michael Jackson died when he died. Its senior management’s expenses indulgence had been partially exposed and its Director General was all over the papers and television hastily explaining why the largesse would have been larger had the claims occurred in the private sector. That was nonsense and even the political class’s (the BBC is the largest media arm of the political class) usual defenders in the Press were generally unconvinced by Mark Thompson’s explanations.
The expenses didn’t surprise or bother me much; the salaries, however, did. I won’t bother to repeat them here, suffice to say that, like most BBC employees, the senior management is massively overpaid. The top brass are paid more than any cabinet minister. This overpayment culture goes all the way down the ranks. I know people working there who are on absurd salaries for their level of expertise and knowledge. A News 24 presenter can be paid nearly a hundred thousand. Television presenters are paid enormous sums of money for doing jobs that require little more than the ability to appear agreeable and make banal small talk. The obscene salary of Jonathan Ross is the prime evidence of the modern, profligate and degenerate BBC.
I hesitated over the keys before typing the adjective degenerate. It smacks of Mary Whitehouse and the language of suburban repudiation that is seized on by lib-lefties as evidence of ‘fascist’ and ‘right wing’ arguments. And we all know what happens when you give a lib-lefty cause to damn your argument thus: the dialectic stops, because they have found a convenient way to stop thinking and discussing, something they generally don’t like doing anyway. Oh well. The BBC *is* degenerate in the sense of definition number one of the word in the Ox. Con. Dic. ‘Having lost the physical and moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline.’
There isn’t space here to detail the BBC’s long drift to its current mix of overwhelmingly leftist bias and its lazy and intellectually corrupt content. It was always full of lefties, but the lefties of yesterday, George Orwell among them, were a different breed. Generally speaking they still believed in the value of high culture and that for all its faults western civilisation had something to be said for it. That’s my kind of lefty.
What to do about the BBC? I favour abolition, because the corporation abandoned its remit long ago, or rather artfully began a comprehensive propaganda policy that could, if necessary, vaguely resemble its remit. Come their seemingly inevitable election win, if the Tories don’t take several huge axe-swipes at the BBC then they will miss a golden opportunity. One of the odd things about the Thatcher governments – and a sure sign of left-wing exaggeration about its vileness – is that they though they complained about the BBC they never properly attacked it by turning the money tap off, which is the simple way to silence the trendy left, because they never do anything with their own resources – it always has to be your cash they spend on the revolution.
However, I enjoy Radio 3 and other areas of high culture. I think a solution to the BBC could a massive downscaling, so the corporation has just two channels, one showing decent middlebrow family viewing and the other showing culturally elitist content with a total lack of populism: art, lit, philosophy, religion, ballet, history, science etc. Plus about half the radio output they have now. If this was done with sufficient rigour it would be very cheap and a beacon of civilisation in a country now showing the fruition of the forty year liberal education project: mass-ignorance, tastelessness and cultural relativism. It would also get rid of people such as Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton and the Yentobs of the next generation, of which there are many.

Sharia/Andrew Marr/Yvette Cooper/The Gods of the Copybook Headings

2009-06-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

The stories that caught my eye today are nicely representative of the dog days of this Thatcho-Socialist government. The Mail’s front page tells us that Britain has 85 sharia courts. This is the sort of story (along with stories about teen crime, drug abuse, immigration and cultural Marxism in the civil service) that the orthodox Left, be they Obs readers or Spartists, always depose by saying that the Mail has “made them up” or “exaggerated” them.
The story’s source is a report into British sharia courts by the think tank Civitas. The Muslim Council of Britain, a dubious organisation at the best of times, declares the report to be “scaremongering”. This is likely to prove a sort of integrity affidavit in reverse. I haven’t read the booklet yet but I’m willing to bet the information inside is far from fabricated or distorted. Yes, the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal is recognised under the same act as Jewish Beth Din courts, but Dr David Green, director of Civitas, says:

‘The reality is that for many Muslims, sharia courts are in practice part of an institutionalized atmosphere of intimidation, backed by the ultimate sanction of a death threat.’

It is clear to me this situation has come about and gained power due to the endemic cultural and moral relativism within the liberal elite*.
I am aware I make this point again and again, but since our rulers have no intention of easing up their agenda, I am afraid those of us who disagree must not cease pointing it out. Our rulers in government and across the major institutions have a great belief that their obstinate casuistry can prevail via a never-ending campaign of attritional pressure on the public; simply wearing everyone down and repeating and streamlining an official version of language, language designed to alter thought, and therefore reality.
Though it is admirably and cheerfully honest about the smugness and hypocrisy of the middle-class Left, Andrew Marr’s Observer column from Sunday, 28th February, 1999, is a great example of the totalitarian attitudes that have driven the “social democrats” of the last 20 years:

What then can be done? (Apart, of course, from widespread and vigorous miscegenation, which is the best answer, but perhaps tricky to arrange as public policy.) First, we need to raise still more taxes …And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off. The police are first in line to be burdened further, but a new Race Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives too.

Hmmm. Here we are, ten years later, with the BNP in Brussels and Marr’s beloved Labour violently hated by large parts of its purported constituency. Imagine if Marr’s proposal – final solution, so to speak – of effectively breeding the white working class of Britain out of existence was applied to other ethnic groups? There would be some little outrage, wouldn’t there?
But, even though it is obvious that relativism, pluralism and multiculturalism of the Labour project have been divisive and destructive, the agenda doesn’t change. They keep on with it. Witness today’s story about the Department for Work and Pensions busily engaged in sending to thousands of fake job applications to businesses to find out if they’re racist. This was a wheeze from Yvette Cooper’s (Mrs Edward Balls) Ethnic Minority and Employment Task Force within the Department of Work and Pensions. This story, more almost than the expenses racket, made my jaw drop. Possibly because I have extensive dealings with that ministry and have been shocked at its incompetence. Like so many departments under Labour, they cease to perform the basic function they are charged with and instead begin to carry out new and exotic functions borne from the abstractions of Oxbridge-educated Islingtonistas. Government by smart asses with gold-plated pensions and soft, pudgy hands.
It appears Gordon Brown has finally realised that the indigenous working class, white, black or brown, got the worse deal under Labour. So today he launches his ‘houses for British people’, a textbook piece of Labour moonshine, created by robbing Peter to pay Paul, i.e. nicking money out of the Transport budget and hoping The Sun will big the scheme up for them.
The proposal, like 99 per cent of government schemes designed to buy off public opprobrium, will quietly disappear into the deep freeze of civil service wrangling and bureaucracy in due course.
The other story I noticed, which shows up the sheer incompetence of the Brown/Blair double act, is the Army chiefs memo to the Iraq inquiry, saying that once the war had begun, funds for the Army were not released by Brown’s Treasury, which meant necessary tools to prosecute Mr Blair’s war were not available. The adverse affects of this have been seen in our newspapers many times. Blair has also been criticised in the memo by army chiefs. I wonder how they speak of him in the regimental messes? Which brings me, in a way, to Kipling’s great poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings, which speaks for itself:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

*I try not to overuse the phrase liberal elite, as it seems to break Orwell’s commonsense rules laid down in Politics and the English Language, but since there is a centre left ruling class of politicians and other bureaucrats, from the government through the civil service to the BBC, you have to use the expression.

Standing on the shoulders of, etc

2009-06-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

Drinking with a friend of mine on a boat by Embankment at dusk last night, I was reminded of these lines by Conrad, which are worth sharing:

'Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, "followed the sea" with reverence and affection, that to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled -- the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests -- and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith -- the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.'

Gazy McGonagall

2009-06-25T04:55:00.000-07:00

Newborn

I held the tiny ship with care,
As she grew accustomed to the air.
I knew not her, nor she me;
Her eyes shut tight – as well they might be.
Gripping fingers but no teeth,
Cheeks of fine, rare roast beef.
She’ll do for a journey crossing many borders,
Without a map and missing orders.
The voyage begins.

WG 25th June, 2009

Brown Studies/The Immigration Reckoning/Tory Millionaires/Yeats/62p trixie

2009-06-21T04:04:00.000-07:00

“Don’t say Brown, say ‘useless’” was, I believe, a commonly used jeer against Harold Wilson’s alcoholic Foreign Secretary Lord George-Brown in the 60s. Yes, it needs to be brought back into service.
The news that the autistic Scotch control freak (who, like so many control freaks, has no control over anything) will very likely step down before the next election made me pause for this thought: never elected, never voted out. Levered into power and inflicted on an electorate that could never stand the sight of him. What pathetic and dishonourable men govern this country. I would have a smidgin of respect for Brown if his arrogance meant he’d go to a general election, took the humiliation and destroyed his party along the way. Great leaders need a touch – just a touch, mind – of Ahab. (Good album/blog/novel title, that: A Touch of Ahab)
And the Labour Party does need to be destroyed. As does the Conservative Party. The Labour Party’s policies have become antithetical to civilised life. Ditto the Tories.
Of course, there are fringe benefits from Tory rule: they tend to not want to interfere relentlessly with personal liberty, they are a little more empirical, something we badly need at the moment. Unlike Gordon Brown, they won’t go running down to Buckingham Palace to serve notice on sexist monarchical lines of descent just when the British economy is going into full-scale meltdown. A Conservative government might – might – just be able to save British pubs, for example, or at least stay the execution, by reversing the punitive tax and other regulations, which Labour inflicted on them and which are now destroying them as a result. The Conservatives might be more practical in matters of law and order. Labour’s interference in that area has been truly disastrous. But by and large, the Conservatives will simply continue Blairism, which was Thatcherism with socialist spending plans. The rich and privileged will continue to be pampered, and everyone else can just lump it. This was proved to me last week when Boris Johnson announced his idea for an amnesty on illegal immigration. Boris doesn’t know shit about London life, as was proved with his ridiculous booze ban on Tubes and buses (incidentally, I flout this rule whenever I feel like it). Boris doesn’t have to queue. If he did he’d know that the basic objections to his plan – London is hellishly overcrowded and its services, from health to transport, stretched to breaking point – are correct and moral. But of course the Tory fetish is always and at all times a quick buck, and big business loves an immigrant who comes cheap and, to quote Boris’s adviser Anthony Browne, “pays their tax”. Socialists love them for their demographic-altering properties, as a McGuffin for all manner of non-negotiable culturally Marxist civic alteration and for vague righteous notions of post-colonial guilt (even if the immigrants come from Turkmenistan).
I never had a problem with immigration until Labour had been in charge of it for a few years. I don’t know anybody who did. Now I know lots, including members of ethnic minorities.
I could see the way things were going nearly a decade ago. I knew the people who would be the losers would be the indigenous poor of Britain, a constituency held lower in esteem by Blair and Mandleson than excrement on the bottom of their very expensive footwear. Both those men, with crocodile tears flowing, would be most hurt by that observation. But always judge a politician on what he does and not what he says. On that basis my observation is correct.
One of Blair’s most audacious feats of chicanery was achieved in the field of immigration policy. He simply and repeatedly lied, while the evidence that he was lying was freely available and often published. In 2005 he made a speech at Dover on immigration that perhaps was the ne plus ultra of new Labour doublethink. He said that his government was working hard to create strict controls on asylum seekers, which would therefore bring down immigration. This gave the impression that the main cause of rising immigration would be checked. Of course, asylum seekers never were the cause of rising immigration figures; it was the government’s policy of issuing work permits for non-EU residents and their dependents that accounted for the huge rise in immigration. A full account of the nuances behind this policy can be found here.
In the light of the recent election of two British fascists to the European Parliament everyone should be reminded of the key Labour policies that put those two men on the Brussels gravy train. They were policies held dear by the money and privilege-loving ex-Marxists who constituted the Labour front bench in the middle of the decade.
Three years after Blair’s speech at Dover, and eleven years after Labour’s victory, the first of many reckonings on one of their most obstinate policies was published. Note:

The verdict of the committee, which boasts a brace of ex-Chancellors, a former Bank of England governor, sundry ex-Cabinet ministers and prominent economists, is unambiguous. The record levels of immigration since Labour came to power have had "little or no impact" on our economic wellbeing, while the Government's assertion that immigration is essential in preventing labour shortages is "fundamentally flawed".

I was talking to a girl at a party last week, and she took a sort of amused stance at my concern at the rise of the far-Right. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry. The BNP getting elected wasn’t about immigration, it was just the credit crunch. It’ll all blow over.”
This is exactly what Edward Balls would say. It is the orthodox Left’s comfy place of denial. Just as soon as we can get another credit boom going, everything will be all right.
I don’t agree. Which, to return to my original point, is why both main parties need to be destroyed and new parties emerge. I believe we are at a crossroads: one road leads to a balkanised and deeply divided society, the other to a civilised and free society. One road is easy, the other hard.

But enough of that; we know which road the two Etonian millionaires will be driving us down come next election. I had a week away from this blog to concentrate on Royal Ascot, where I picked up some small winnings and nearly won the Tote jackpot. I was not in a financial position to attend, but was quite happy to watch it on television – the most telly I have watched for a very long time. It was enjoyable: two of my favourite popular musicians were there: Mr Rod Stewart and Mr Charles Watts of the Rolling Stones (himself a noted horse breeder) and the racing was the best you can see in the world. The star of the week was undoubtedly Yeats, who made history as the first horse to win the Ascot Gold Cup four times. What an animal. Had Yeats the poet still been with us he would have written a poem about Yeats the horse’s performance. Someone was very confident in Yeats’ abilities because they had 25,000 on him to win. Which he duly did. You can watch the race here. Note Johnny Murtagh crossing himself at the end of the race. Although I am a non-believer I found this rather touching.

Although I didn’t win the Ascot jackpot, I did place a 62p trixie on three horses running at Goodwood on Friday night. I was most pleased when it won me eight hundred pounds, or the equivalent of 16 weeks’ dole money. Victoria Sponge 12/1, Yes Mr President 8/1, My Shadow 7/1. My hat is off to the horses and jockeys.

The Last Raspberry

2009-06-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

The recession hasn’t actually started yet. By which I mean the public narrative of the recession hasn’t started yet because it hasn’t affected the public sector yet. It soon will. The recession proper will start the day the staggeringly huge subcutaneous membrane of paper shufflers and middle management in the civil service and public sector start getting their marching orders.
This section of society will have watched the events of the last ten months unfold with slightly worried eyes while safe in the knowledge that though the P45s were being handed round in the sector that pays for their padded existence they knew they were on for a pay rise. Well, sooner or later that party will be over and then the trouble will start in earnest.
Government sympathisers within the media may be reduced, but many journalists addicted to the Thatcho-Socialism of Labour are still at large and occasionally they lob a ‘green shoots of recovery’ story in to help out. A cheery economics reporter on the BBC this morning: “Why is everybody being so gloomy?’
Once the grim scythe comes towards his people, the state employees, the tune will change rapidly. Popular culture will suddenly discover the recession; indignation will appear; it’ll be like the early 80s all over again. Perhaps The Specials will make a record.
Had the economy had been wrecked by a Tory government we would have heard a great deal more from all movers and shakers in our culture by now. Brown would have been the butt of every comedian and DJ’s joke, as Thatcher, Major and their cabinets were in times of economic distress. But most of the people who control popular culture in Britain thoroughly approved of Blairism and new Labour (it was a superb way of being an absolute pig for money, power, advantage and privilege while maintaining you had a conscience and were not a ‘wicked Tory’. That is why so many TV and newspaper people were new Labour supporters) and still do. Now all the wheels are off the wagon and there is truckloads of evidence about sleaze, incompetence and downright deceit you might think there’d be an emerging strain of opprobrium for Labour, with its Goebbelsian deceit, its wars and its incompetence, but I don’t see much of that.
Contrast this with Cameron’s likely tiny-majority government come next year. There’ll be some noisy and righteous condemnations of government then. Marches, benefits, placards, the full monty Just you wait.

Encouraging events! Revolt in Iran and the Times’ leader calls Gordon Brown a liar (the Ed Balls fan club known as the Financial Times has, last Friday, also declared this government’s stance on spending plans to be dishonest).
I have nothing to say about the Iran rebellion other than I wish them the best of British luck, as people used to say, they are going to need it. Let’s hope Barack Obama can find some time to yell them on. That will upset Ahmadinejad but I don’t think that matters much, does it? As a pal pointed out to me yesterday, ever since Obama became King of America that country’s enemies have been rattling their sabres with rare energy. Do they sense a weakling has taken over from a bull in china shop?

Back to Brown. He’s unveiled the big lie that will take us to the general election: Labour Will Spend, Tories Will Cut. We know that this man is incompetent, but to castigate the Tories for spending figures straight out of your own government’s plans and projections is pretty incredible incompetence.
The money’s all gone and the only course of action any future government will have is to cut spending and raise taxes. It’s a simple as that.
I take no Thatcherite relish in this but I long ago came to the conclusion that if any form of modern socialism – fairness versus inequality of resource and opportunity – is to win the political argument then it must confront its many Achilles heels; the big one being bureaucratic sclerosis and managerialism. It won’t, but there you go.

Ooh, we get an Iraq inquiry. All done behind closed doors. What a surprise. It will be finished long after Brown is finished and I’m quite prepared to bet cash this very afternoon that the big dirty secrets of that epoch – and the major guilty parties – will remain largely untouched. The Iraq inquiry will be Labour’s last long raspberry at the truth.

Finally, a June Evening

2009-06-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

Free pleasures. The two landscapes are of the allotment up the road. My attempt to do Samuel Palmer with a mobile phone camera...

Email to a pal re Martin Amis's The Information

2009-06-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

How you going with The Information? It disappointed me in the end. FAR. TOO. LONG. No one now can hold a candle to him adjectivally, his similes are stunning etc As a stylist he is a nonpareil. Absolutely brilliant. But fuck me, 500 pages about this prick who hates his mate for being successful? With a few easy-to anticipate twists and a bit of existential anxiety thrown in – done very well, I must say, but it seemed tacked on to give the penny-plain story some…intellectual gravity? The usual stuff about West London shitholes all present and correct from London Fields. 500 pages! That’s a grand a page just for the advance. He goes for a Lear bit towards the end along the lines of what is the meaning of thunder. It was, I think, supposed to come across as the ultimate WHY but seems more like a whiney teen spliffhead in the park. I had a lot of good chuckles at it, though, his talent for escalating a humorous idea is great – mind you, some of the running jokes don’t come off – but the whole thing is about him, him, him; the world, the universe in fact, as seen by an extremely clever, wealthy writer who’s done a lot of drugs, been around a lot and is starting, to use Byron’s youthful phrase, ‘to grow tired of the sun’. Correction, not about the world but the world’s effect on him. There’s nothing wrong with this at all but the great novelists – trades descriptions act: he is referred to as such, or was before The Eagleton Incident – can take us over whole societies; this, however, is kind of close-up work at Tolstoyan length, with some galactic physics chucked in. On the other hand, apart from where it sags, you enjoy hanging out with this writer because every sentence, every word is considered, tasted and pushed to its limit on occasion – though sometimes not considered enough in my opinion: he has a fetish for those irritating DeLillo-ish sentences. Parody: ‘He got back behind the wheel, the wheel of the Micra. He knew the world hated him now. He knew it. He knew that. He knew.’
Know what I mean? Great impact now and again but it becomes a peccadillo you have to tolerate. The real thing about that book is that you end up thinking, fella, it CAN’T be *that* bad being you, can it? (he says both characters are based on him). As my mate Ryder said when Cobain topped himself: ‘Depression? Try being broke for months, walking to work every day and living on baked beans…’
I think the reason he got SO into 9/11 was that SOMETHING BIG AND IMPORTANT HAD FINALLY HAPPENED in his lifetime that he could write about. Bit more than the Stones at Earl’s Court and the Cold War that never really delivered. His old man had communism and world war two; all he’d had was sex, drugs and Nabokov. I still think my diagnosis of his prose as being ‘like Kingsley on skunk’ is accurate.
But still, RESPECK, as they say in the streets. He’s worth a million Hornbys and Parsonses. True, I am an unpublished novelist but you don’t have to be a carpenter to criticise a chair – hey, that could be a payoff line from Subterranean Homesick Blues…

W