Friday, 17 April 2009
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Cohen's Orwell Rant and Expenses
Nick Cohen’s boozed-up rant at the Orwell debate provoked a few thoughts. He gives the impression the prize is a kind of repository of Orwelline writing virtue. It isn’t. If it was they would never have awarded it to our old pal David Aaronovitch, who was and is one of the greatest new Labour sycophants; a man who, by propagandizing the new Labour project, gave his energy and approval to the corruption of language via a partnership of government spin doctors and "client journalists", which was one of the most troubling features of the Blair years. As Orwell and Auden pointed out, when language gets corrupted thought gets corrupted; and corrupt language and thinking has been in great evidence in the past 11 years and beyond. Auden, in September 1, 1939, called the 30s a low, dishonest decade. Well, the past decade can easily be so described. Cohen's points about a de facto conspiracy among the BBC and the Guardian to do down Euston Manifesto type journalists who won't swallow the Left's take on Islamism and related matters is worth serious consideration.
However, if you, like me, revere Orwell, you will be slightly surprised to find that not only has David Aaronovitch won the award in the past; but so have Polly Toynbee, Johann Hari and, last and least, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I either didn't notice at the time or I have erased it from my mind because it is too painful to be held there. Toynbee and Hari have never written a word I have found 'original, beautiful', or 'showing steely analysis and courageous independence of mind'. They simply parrot Islington dinner party socialism/big government solutions, even when big government solutions have been found as wanting as small government sink-or-swim. I would re-award the prize to Toynbee myself if she had the 'courageous independence of mind' to admit that her - and Labour's - big ideas for the poor have caused more harm - to the poor and everyone else - than good. I can't help thinking George Orwell would have noticed by now.
As for Alibhai-Brown, she is an incompetent writer who, I suspect, prospers in the London media scene because she is a Pakistani Muslim who, like so many of her demographic, can exploit an imagined slight or deploy a greivance faster than you can say 'institutional racism'. I once made a study of her Evening Standard columns. They were like the extended and ever so slightly loopy letters you see in local newspapers. I dare say the editor found it easier to run them than to ask Alibhai-Brown to write coherently. I know for a fact the sub-editors at the Independent, where she also plies a trade, thought she was a moron. See her "interview" Nick Cohen here about a book he wrote and she, unbelieveably, hadn't bothered to read.
Cohen says Gordon Brown connived at Martin Bright's removal from the New Statesman, on account of Bright's attacks on Ken Livingstone at a time when Gilligan was uncovering the excesses of Chairman Ken's fiefdom and making the first big cracks in the Livingstone and therefore Labour power base. This I can well believe. Brown is a vengeful control freak. But Cohen goes too far in calling Oborne and Hitchens 'utterly mediocre men'. Hitchens is pompous and priggish, but he's no client journalist for the Tories - who he hopes will be destroyed - in the way that Aaronovitch and Toynbee have been for Labour. He's written two interesting and compelling books that, while badly flawed, ask some very powerful and awkward questions of the ruling class and has been prepared for the public ridicule and opprobrium that it caused him. He has also visited countries such as Pakistan and South Africa and exposed terrible truths about them. That's quite Orwelline, I think. Oborne's book, The Triumph of the Political Class, is a work that the author of Animal Farm would have positively relished, notwithstanding Oborne's conservatism. Cohen decries both Hitchens and Oborne because 'they are on a hundred grand a year'. Well, I don't suppose Cohen has felt that nothing-but-fluff-in-your-pocket feeling for quite some time either.
Also, both Hitchens and Oborne have exposed more Doublethink, Goodthink and Crimethink, in other words the many ugly truths behind the new Labour media mirage than Martin Bright and many another centre-left writer have (and it is important to remember that the literary prize circuit is mainly a liberal\left-wing talking shop - note the judges, Comrade Ian Jack and Left-Wing BBC Millionaire Pensioner Jennie Abramsky). They reckon Ms Abramsky, a Holland Park Comprehensive aristocrat, has the biggest pension in the public sector. That'll keep Mandelson awake at night). Bright admitted in his Despatches programme, if memory serves me right, that he kept quiet for a long time about Livingstone and his various abuses for the sake of not handing any advantage to the Right. Almost every centre left journalist in London did, didn't they?
Saw Jacqui Smith's "difficult" interview on Channel 4 tonight. Shameless and arrogant (very much giving the impression she was doing us a favour by even deigning to discuss it - a typically baby boomer political class stance) - and the cockney accent's getting stronger by the day. Does she think that will help her in Redditch? Start packing yer bags, Jacqui, your seat's already lost. She's insisting she's done nothing wrong. Channel 4 News' fact list is useful in reaching a conclusion.
Best news item was this list, going back four years, of MPs' receipts and expenses that is due to make an appearance in full by July. Panic is spreading in Westminster. According to the news report, some MPs are considering going to law to stop the public seeing them. Squeal, piggies, squeal!
I hope the policeman who deliberately shoved Ian Tomlinson to the ground moments before he died will be punished appropriately and not allowed, as so often happens, to effectively get away with it.
However, if you, like me, revere Orwell, you will be slightly surprised to find that not only has David Aaronovitch won the award in the past; but so have Polly Toynbee, Johann Hari and, last and least, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I either didn't notice at the time or I have erased it from my mind because it is too painful to be held there. Toynbee and Hari have never written a word I have found 'original, beautiful', or 'showing steely analysis and courageous independence of mind'. They simply parrot Islington dinner party socialism/big government solutions, even when big government solutions have been found as wanting as small government sink-or-swim. I would re-award the prize to Toynbee myself if she had the 'courageous independence of mind' to admit that her - and Labour's - big ideas for the poor have caused more harm - to the poor and everyone else - than good. I can't help thinking George Orwell would have noticed by now.
As for Alibhai-Brown, she is an incompetent writer who, I suspect, prospers in the London media scene because she is a Pakistani Muslim who, like so many of her demographic, can exploit an imagined slight or deploy a greivance faster than you can say 'institutional racism'. I once made a study of her Evening Standard columns. They were like the extended and ever so slightly loopy letters you see in local newspapers. I dare say the editor found it easier to run them than to ask Alibhai-Brown to write coherently. I know for a fact the sub-editors at the Independent, where she also plies a trade, thought she was a moron. See her "interview" Nick Cohen here about a book he wrote and she, unbelieveably, hadn't bothered to read.
Cohen says Gordon Brown connived at Martin Bright's removal from the New Statesman, on account of Bright's attacks on Ken Livingstone at a time when Gilligan was uncovering the excesses of Chairman Ken's fiefdom and making the first big cracks in the Livingstone and therefore Labour power base. This I can well believe. Brown is a vengeful control freak. But Cohen goes too far in calling Oborne and Hitchens 'utterly mediocre men'. Hitchens is pompous and priggish, but he's no client journalist for the Tories - who he hopes will be destroyed - in the way that Aaronovitch and Toynbee have been for Labour. He's written two interesting and compelling books that, while badly flawed, ask some very powerful and awkward questions of the ruling class and has been prepared for the public ridicule and opprobrium that it caused him. He has also visited countries such as Pakistan and South Africa and exposed terrible truths about them. That's quite Orwelline, I think. Oborne's book, The Triumph of the Political Class, is a work that the author of Animal Farm would have positively relished, notwithstanding Oborne's conservatism. Cohen decries both Hitchens and Oborne because 'they are on a hundred grand a year'. Well, I don't suppose Cohen has felt that nothing-but-fluff-in-your-pocket feeling for quite some time either.
Also, both Hitchens and Oborne have exposed more Doublethink, Goodthink and Crimethink, in other words the many ugly truths behind the new Labour media mirage than Martin Bright and many another centre-left writer have (and it is important to remember that the literary prize circuit is mainly a liberal\left-wing talking shop - note the judges, Comrade Ian Jack and Left-Wing BBC Millionaire Pensioner Jennie Abramsky). They reckon Ms Abramsky, a Holland Park Comprehensive aristocrat, has the biggest pension in the public sector. That'll keep Mandelson awake at night). Bright admitted in his Despatches programme, if memory serves me right, that he kept quiet for a long time about Livingstone and his various abuses for the sake of not handing any advantage to the Right. Almost every centre left journalist in London did, didn't they?
Saw Jacqui Smith's "difficult" interview on Channel 4 tonight. Shameless and arrogant (very much giving the impression she was doing us a favour by even deigning to discuss it - a typically baby boomer political class stance) - and the cockney accent's getting stronger by the day. Does she think that will help her in Redditch? Start packing yer bags, Jacqui, your seat's already lost. She's insisting she's done nothing wrong. Channel 4 News' fact list is useful in reaching a conclusion.
Best news item was this list, going back four years, of MPs' receipts and expenses that is due to make an appearance in full by July. Panic is spreading in Westminster. According to the news report, some MPs are considering going to law to stop the public seeing them. Squeal, piggies, squeal!
I hope the policeman who deliberately shoved Ian Tomlinson to the ground moments before he died will be punished appropriately and not allowed, as so often happens, to effectively get away with it.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Yes, Dave, But Who *Paid* For It?
Jacqui Smith; discuss. David Aaronovitch did yesterday in his Times column. Aaronovitch, it seems to me, has been waiting for an opportunity to present his readers with a defence of the institutionalised corruption of parliamentary perks. This opportunity has eluded him for some time, because he knows full well that even his powers of sophistic argument cannot defend shameless fiddling by the political classes. But, lo and behold, Smith's porn-on-the-taxpayers' tab suddenly suggested itself. 'Our stinking prurience' roars Dave, 'will bring about the subornation of public servants.' Because 'the media and the public will always find something to condemn in what MPs were getting up to'.
This made me think: hang on, Dave, you're a decaffeinated Marxist and fervent Blairite social democrat, you've spent most of your life banging on about 'The People'. But isn't it funny how when the chips are down, according to Dave, 'The People' are almost always wrong? In other words 'The People' don't deserve or shouldn't want to know that their Home Secretary has effectively embezzled 100,000 pounds by claiming her sister's spare bedroom is her main home and they don't deserve or shouldn't want to know that every tiny expense, from a bath plug to pornography, is being coughed up by 'The People'. They ought not want to know that the House of Lords has peers prepared to direct their activities in any direction for five grand an hour.
Comrade Aaronovitch hasn't had much to say about that strange contradiction in his political thought. Instead, he snatched at the opportunity afforded by those journalists disapproving of paid-for porn to show how open-minded he is about porn. Good luck to him. He's looked at porn in his time, I have and so's everyone else. So what? I don't care that it was porn, I care who paid for the porn.
He seems very exercised by 'hypocrisy' of journalists disapproving of pornography. But has he ever railed against the hypocrisy of journalists who laid down at the feet of Alistair Campbell and new Labour and entered into what was effectively a conspiracy to deceive their readers?*
Dave deplores that the political class (Labour, Lib Dem and Tory) is now liable to be exposed to further public derision because a database containng a trove of expenses abuses, fiddles and sharp practice is being hawked round the the national newspapers. He says The People's 'stinking prurience' has created a market for this database and the subornation of public servants. As Rigsby used to say in Rising Damp: 'Myyyyyyyyyyyyy God!' Let me tell you something, Davey boy, the subornation of public servants really got going when politics became a gold-dusted, perk-encrusted career and not a vocation for people who had useful life experience, principles and wisdom.
One of the problems, if not the problem with powerful socialists/social democrats is that money, though the most important thing in their lives, is not actually very real to them. Where money comes from is not a matter of first or even secondary importance; where it goes is terribly important. There's always some more to be requisitioned from somewhere and anyone who asks any questions about this is decidedly infra dig. This all comes out of the studied money snobbery of the educated centre-left classes who came of age under the Thatcher years. Very few of them, it seems to me, have lived hand-to-mouth on money they have chiselled out of working in normal jobs outside the public sector, which is the only way to really understand money and how ordinary people, new Labour's 'hard-working families' aka 'The People', think about it. The greatest example of this is Gordon Brown, whose one big idea to solve the 'Crunch is to burn The People's money (their future earnings) to get another debt boom (aka the British Economy) going again.
Talking of which, the G20 party might as well go home without meeting. The French and the Germans disagree with Gordon and Barack and that's that. Hardly a cosy love-in of one-world-ism...
On the political right, Simon Heffer in the Telegraph addresses the same issue at Aaronovitch, and makes slightly more sense, but his column soon sinks into a dreary political speech about 'reform'. Given the sort of people currently in politics and those bubbling under (who I suspect will prove to be even more shameless) how can MPs reform themselves? I don't believe it is possible.
*source: Private information and Peter Oborne's Triumph of the Political Class; Simon & Schuster 2007, pages 233 onwards.
This made me think: hang on, Dave, you're a decaffeinated Marxist and fervent Blairite social democrat, you've spent most of your life banging on about 'The People'. But isn't it funny how when the chips are down, according to Dave, 'The People' are almost always wrong? In other words 'The People' don't deserve or shouldn't want to know that their Home Secretary has effectively embezzled 100,000 pounds by claiming her sister's spare bedroom is her main home and they don't deserve or shouldn't want to know that every tiny expense, from a bath plug to pornography, is being coughed up by 'The People'. They ought not want to know that the House of Lords has peers prepared to direct their activities in any direction for five grand an hour.
Comrade Aaronovitch hasn't had much to say about that strange contradiction in his political thought. Instead, he snatched at the opportunity afforded by those journalists disapproving of paid-for porn to show how open-minded he is about porn. Good luck to him. He's looked at porn in his time, I have and so's everyone else. So what? I don't care that it was porn, I care who paid for the porn.
He seems very exercised by 'hypocrisy' of journalists disapproving of pornography. But has he ever railed against the hypocrisy of journalists who laid down at the feet of Alistair Campbell and new Labour and entered into what was effectively a conspiracy to deceive their readers?*
Dave deplores that the political class (Labour, Lib Dem and Tory) is now liable to be exposed to further public derision because a database containng a trove of expenses abuses, fiddles and sharp practice is being hawked round the the national newspapers. He says The People's 'stinking prurience' has created a market for this database and the subornation of public servants. As Rigsby used to say in Rising Damp: 'Myyyyyyyyyyyyy God!' Let me tell you something, Davey boy, the subornation of public servants really got going when politics became a gold-dusted, perk-encrusted career and not a vocation for people who had useful life experience, principles and wisdom.
One of the problems, if not the problem with powerful socialists/social democrats is that money, though the most important thing in their lives, is not actually very real to them. Where money comes from is not a matter of first or even secondary importance; where it goes is terribly important. There's always some more to be requisitioned from somewhere and anyone who asks any questions about this is decidedly infra dig. This all comes out of the studied money snobbery of the educated centre-left classes who came of age under the Thatcher years. Very few of them, it seems to me, have lived hand-to-mouth on money they have chiselled out of working in normal jobs outside the public sector, which is the only way to really understand money and how ordinary people, new Labour's 'hard-working families' aka 'The People', think about it. The greatest example of this is Gordon Brown, whose one big idea to solve the 'Crunch is to burn The People's money (their future earnings) to get another debt boom (aka the British Economy) going again.
Talking of which, the G20 party might as well go home without meeting. The French and the Germans disagree with Gordon and Barack and that's that. Hardly a cosy love-in of one-world-ism...
On the political right, Simon Heffer in the Telegraph addresses the same issue at Aaronovitch, and makes slightly more sense, but his column soon sinks into a dreary political speech about 'reform'. Given the sort of people currently in politics and those bubbling under (who I suspect will prove to be even more shameless) how can MPs reform themselves? I don't believe it is possible.
*source: Private information and Peter Oborne's Triumph of the Political Class; Simon & Schuster 2007, pages 233 onwards.
Saturday, 28 March 2009
Brown; Queen; world war; horses
As the country steams on oblivious, while the lookouts shout “many icebergs, dead ahead”, it’s quite fun to get up in the morning and see what fresh madness the government is proposing. It excelled itself this morning – Brown’s gone up to Buck House to bully the Queen about gender equality and religious discrimination in the monarchical line of descent. I like to try and avoid sarcasm, but the only thing to say here is: How very useful, Gordon!
As has become customary, the Labour Party finds it necessary to pander to the forces of reaction – in this case the Church of Rome (makes a change from you-know-what) – in order to carry on attempting to destroy English culture. It is what one wearily expects from them. However, to attempt it in the current grave situation is foolish and arrogant. It is clear evidence that the government has become an ancien regime and Brown its megalomaniac – and I use that word advisedly – leader.
I suspect this could be the beginning of a scorched earth policy for the Prime Minister’s last period in office. Sir Jim Rose’s folly-packed education reforms (puppet master: Ed Balls) also suggest this.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/25/primary-schools-twitter-curriculum
The Queen* who clearly has more regard for this country in her little finger than the Labour Party has within its entire rank-and-file, will have something colourful to say in private about Brown’s sense of timing and priorities. The recurring Westminster whisper, which says our Prime Minister is quite seriously autistic, seems truer than ever.
While Brown is tinkering with the Monarchy’s diversity policy, this is happening in northern Pakistan, just 110 miles from Islamabad:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5974726.ece
I’m starting to think that, all global problems considered, we’re heading for a world war. You read it here first.
Now, for a bit of racing talk: Paul Haigh, a fine two-fisted racing journalist, has resigned from the Racing Post. The Guardian covers the fall-out here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/mar/26/horse-racing-betting-week-paul-haigh-racing-post
Although Haigh is a bit of a contrarian, his column was a refreshing dose of reality in the paper. His points about the paper’s shortcomings are all too true. They are running scared from the issue of corruption and even “gamesmanship” in the sport. The reason is obvious: the editorial team is paranoid about libel. However, when I used to work there I rapidly discovered that quite a few people had little working knowledge of libel laws. I did and saw straight away that they were being way too conservative in censoring criticism of jockeys and trainers. They simply did not understand the law of fair comment and its elasticity. The other reason that more trenchant criticism of riders and trainers does not appear is because of fear that friendly relationships built up with yards for the purposes of news and features will be compromised. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the paper’s relationship with bookies.
Haigh put the poor punter – skinned alive between the players and the layers – first. The paper is good at being enthusiastic and poetic about racing – and you need that, because at its best it is an exciting and worderful sport – but utterly hopeless at wading into shit and dubious bread-and-butter bookies’ racing. I soon realised that there is a great hostility at the Post to taking the piss out of racing and pointing out, in broad, non-actionable terms, how corrupt it can be.
And it can be corrupt. At some point during most weeks of the Flat or National Hunt season I will find myself in a betting shop watching a horse at a very large price with no form or some poor form from way back suddenly come steaming home to win or make the frame. You know it stinks. You know there’s a huge chance that the horse has been ridden in an illegal fashion many times to manipulate its handicap rating and its price/odds. Some pointers: the betting shop commentary goes very quiet (libel), the racecourse goes very quiet and the punters in the betting shop get angry and hurl their slips at the screen. Sometimes questions are asked by the stewards, sometimes not. A colourless report will appear in the racing press the next day. Someone’s had a killing. Haigh is right, the Post’s circulation is in precipitous decline, its tipsters are pretty useless (Pricewise’s jumps season record has been pisspoor and I did better than him for Cheltenham) and its sycophantic attitude alienates potential readers. If it doesn’t become disputatious, essential and feared, it will perish, and that will be a sad thing.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
'Britain's First Shariah Compliant Newspaper'
Melanie Phillips on a particularly offensive Guardian editorial (which looks very much like the handiwork of Seumas Milne).
Hannan does what Variety used to call 'socko biz'
I did enjoy this. He's much better than those two little nerks on the Tory front bench. A tip of the hat to Mark Brentano for this.
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
KING AND QUEEN
Well, Oborne was right, wasn’t he? He said in the Mail last week he’d heard rumours that Mervyn King was getting scared about the borrowing levels. Now we know there *is* a rift between the Governor of the Bank of England and Brown and Darling after King’s comments at the Treasury Select Committee. He knows the truth: the debt level and Government deficits is terrifying; the IMF have given warning that Britain is facing the biggest Government deficit in the West and King has sensibly decided he doesn’t want to end up in the same historical dustbin that our Prime Minister is heading to, labeled ‘the man who abetted the man who bankrupted Britain.’
He’s getting that ‘I want to go to the toilet’ feeling, is old Merv, make no mistake about it. It’s logical that he should. He’s interested in the account books; whereas Gordon and Alistair are only interested in retaining power, at any price, even if they have to get your great-great-great-great grandchildren into debt doing it.
King may not be the only one getting the fear. The most significant thing in this story is that the Queen called King in for a private audience. She’s never done that before, ever. Wouldn’t you like to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation?
Keep your ears cocked in King’s direction.
Naturally, the Government said there was no disagreement between King and Darling/Brown. Another day, another lie; what’s one more at this late stage? Watch Brown as well - he'll be looking for ways to make King sleep with the fishes.
He’s getting that ‘I want to go to the toilet’ feeling, is old Merv, make no mistake about it. It’s logical that he should. He’s interested in the account books; whereas Gordon and Alistair are only interested in retaining power, at any price, even if they have to get your great-great-great-great grandchildren into debt doing it.
King may not be the only one getting the fear. The most significant thing in this story is that the Queen called King in for a private audience. She’s never done that before, ever. Wouldn’t you like to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation?
Keep your ears cocked in King’s direction.
Naturally, the Government said there was no disagreement between King and Darling/Brown. Another day, another lie; what’s one more at this late stage? Watch Brown as well - he'll be looking for ways to make King sleep with the fishes.
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Aaronovitch - the view from the bunker
It’s always worth reading David Aaronovitch’s editorials in the Times on Tuesdays because as a leading ‘client journalist’ and sycophant for New Labour his pieces reveal the current state of the government’s mindset.
And the mindset is whiny and defensive, to say the least. Yesterday’s column was so extraordinary that I undertook the unusual and onerous task of reading it a second time just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
The first three-quarters was a rambling, sophistic defence of the socialist surveillance state (with a picture of Hitler and Himmler for good measure. Caption: ‘we should defend democracy because the alternative is far worse’ – nice, simple, false dichotomy schoolbook socialism). The fact that we are being spied on at almost all times when we are in public is nothing to worry about, Dave reckons. People blather on about how this vast system of bureaucracy and monitoring could well be used by an unscrupulous government for nefarious purposes (I would have said it already is, but that is another story) BUT, says Dave, that’s bollo because bad governments are bad governments and behave badly, regardless of CCTV cameras, databases, ID cards.
The fact that first and ancient principles are ignored here was expected – it’s the people who own government, not the government who own people (socialists can never get their heads round this one, even when they’re shooting their mouths of about social democracy and people power), therefore the absolute minimum of cataloging is a natural defence of liberty. What I didn’t expect was the last quarter of the column, where Dave suddenly – rashly, in my view – listed what he sees at the achievement of Labour in power. Now, don’t laugh:
‘But what about. . .what went right? The new schools. The defeat of bullying. The new hospitals. The waiting list reductions. The expansion of nursery education and parental rights. The city regeneration. The Right to Roam.’
Er, and that’s it. Rather a measly list. The new schools? What, the ones where skunk and knives are rife, where the police bounce the gates at 3.15 and local paper reports a knife arch being invested in? The defeat of bullying?
That isn’t what I see in the streets and on the buses round here, quite the reverse. Trendy teaching methods are the royal road to more sociopaths, not less. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. Parental rights? I think that translates as the screaming chav who comes up and berates the school for mildly reproaching her little darling for being a bully (sorry, they don’t exist anymore). The city regeneration? What like the sixty million quid The Public, a postmodern public arts space which closed because of a total lack of interest from the public and a ridiculous and impracticable design?
What Dave should do every week is talk about Iraq and Afghanistan, the two ‘progressive’ wars he and his buddy Tony were so hot on. You rarely hear him, or Christopher “windbag” Hitchens on these subjects these days; and we all know why.
Dave also says we shouldn’t get ‘impatient’ with foreign workers or immigrants. How very Mandelson (I would imagine they were muckers at Weekend World in the 70s). Just think how righteously angry the young Dave Aaronovitch (who repeatedly yelled “Trotsky” on University Challenge) would be with a lardy, well-heeled Times journalist with a big house and lots of moolah telling the indigenous poor and unemployed to stop moaning about how difficult a long-term government policy has made their lives and how high it’s made their rents and how small it’s made their wage packets. Heavens, what an Establishment prig, he would have cried. The young Aaronovitch would have identified today’s Aaronovitch as a member of wealthy, out of touch ruling class. Like Mandy, a sort of Marie Antoinette of the Blairite ancien regime.
PS: It was nice to see him have a pop at “potty mouthed right-wing bloggers” – one aspect of social democracy Dave probably finds regrettable. . . Of course, anyone who uses the internet to disagree with current centre-left orthodoxies becomes a ‘right-wing blogger’. This has been a Polly Toynbee tactic for a long time. You just say the word, like “witch” in the seventeenth century.
And to think, this man won a prize named after Orwell. . .
And the mindset is whiny and defensive, to say the least. Yesterday’s column was so extraordinary that I undertook the unusual and onerous task of reading it a second time just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
The first three-quarters was a rambling, sophistic defence of the socialist surveillance state (with a picture of Hitler and Himmler for good measure. Caption: ‘we should defend democracy because the alternative is far worse’ – nice, simple, false dichotomy schoolbook socialism). The fact that we are being spied on at almost all times when we are in public is nothing to worry about, Dave reckons. People blather on about how this vast system of bureaucracy and monitoring could well be used by an unscrupulous government for nefarious purposes (I would have said it already is, but that is another story) BUT, says Dave, that’s bollo because bad governments are bad governments and behave badly, regardless of CCTV cameras, databases, ID cards.
The fact that first and ancient principles are ignored here was expected – it’s the people who own government, not the government who own people (socialists can never get their heads round this one, even when they’re shooting their mouths of about social democracy and people power), therefore the absolute minimum of cataloging is a natural defence of liberty. What I didn’t expect was the last quarter of the column, where Dave suddenly – rashly, in my view – listed what he sees at the achievement of Labour in power. Now, don’t laugh:
‘But what about. . .what went right? The new schools. The defeat of bullying. The new hospitals. The waiting list reductions. The expansion of nursery education and parental rights. The city regeneration. The Right to Roam.’
Er, and that’s it. Rather a measly list. The new schools? What, the ones where skunk and knives are rife, where the police bounce the gates at 3.15 and local paper reports a knife arch being invested in? The defeat of bullying?
That isn’t what I see in the streets and on the buses round here, quite the reverse. Trendy teaching methods are the royal road to more sociopaths, not less. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. Parental rights? I think that translates as the screaming chav who comes up and berates the school for mildly reproaching her little darling for being a bully (sorry, they don’t exist anymore). The city regeneration? What like the sixty million quid The Public, a postmodern public arts space which closed because of a total lack of interest from the public and a ridiculous and impracticable design?
What Dave should do every week is talk about Iraq and Afghanistan, the two ‘progressive’ wars he and his buddy Tony were so hot on. You rarely hear him, or Christopher “windbag” Hitchens on these subjects these days; and we all know why.
Dave also says we shouldn’t get ‘impatient’ with foreign workers or immigrants. How very Mandelson (I would imagine they were muckers at Weekend World in the 70s). Just think how righteously angry the young Dave Aaronovitch (who repeatedly yelled “Trotsky” on University Challenge) would be with a lardy, well-heeled Times journalist with a big house and lots of moolah telling the indigenous poor and unemployed to stop moaning about how difficult a long-term government policy has made their lives and how high it’s made their rents and how small it’s made their wage packets. Heavens, what an Establishment prig, he would have cried. The young Aaronovitch would have identified today’s Aaronovitch as a member of wealthy, out of touch ruling class. Like Mandy, a sort of Marie Antoinette of the Blairite ancien regime.
PS: It was nice to see him have a pop at “potty mouthed right-wing bloggers” – one aspect of social democracy Dave probably finds regrettable. . . Of course, anyone who uses the internet to disagree with current centre-left orthodoxies becomes a ‘right-wing blogger’. This has been a Polly Toynbee tactic for a long time. You just say the word, like “witch” in the seventeenth century.
And to think, this man won a prize named after Orwell. . .
Monday, 16 March 2009
King not amused by Brown's big punt
One of the best reasons for having a flick through the Daily Mail on a Saturday is Peter Oborne’s column on Westminster. Oborne, whose brilliant Triumph of the Political Class is a handbook for those disgusted at/despairing of British politics, doesn’t muck about. His column on Saturday revealed that Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, is none to happy with Gordon Brown’s last big punt on the stalled economy: printing more money, or, as the spin doctors would have it, quantitive easing. These few pars were significant, I thought:
Although the Prime Minister wants details of this plan to be unveiled at the time of next month's Budget, I can reveal that it has met with unexpected and powerful opposition from the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King. The Governor is very worried about the Labour Government borrowing yet more money and launching a mammoth public spending splurge.
The Governor's reservations have been passed to Treasury officials via unofficial channels. One of the main reasons for Mervyn King's deep concerns is that he is determined not to go down in history as the Bank of England governor who presided over the collapse of the creditworthiness of the British state.
He is increasingly worried that extra government spending will damage the official credit ratings that are awarded to the Government as an independent yardstick of the health of the nation's finances. If our rating were downgraded, it would have a severe effect on the ability of the Treasury to raise more money on the international currency markets because it would be forced into paying a much higher rate of interest.
Earlier this year, there was speculation that the world's premier rating agency, Standard and Poor's, was ready to take the unprecedented step of lowering its rating for British government creditworthiness from its gold-plated triple 'A' classification to a lesser grading. It eventually held back from making such a damaging move. Since then, however, the outlook for the British economy has darkened.
Crucially, the decision to print extra money has very badly compromised the integrity of the Government's debt financing and it also now looks certain that Chancellor Alistair Darling will be forced to revise sharply upwards his forecasts for borrowing in his Budget. Mervyn King is therefore afraid that Gordon Brown's 'fiscal stimulus' will result in the downgrading of Britain's credit rating on the basis of pessimistic predictions about the Government's ability to repay its debts.
The Bank of England is under no illusions of the dire consequences that could follow. Above all, there would be flight of foreign capital from Britain, leading to the collapse of sterling in the international currency markets. More worrying would be the consequence for interest rates.
At present, the Government's gold-plated 'AAA' rating means that it can repay loans at a beneficially low interest rate. But if Britain's credit rating were lowered, the Treasury would be hit by having to pay much higher interests rates for loans. This, in turn, would lead to the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee being forced to sharply raise base rates for everyone - thus driving the country even deeper into recession. Such a crisis of confidence is exactly what happened in the Seventies when interest rates soared into double figures and when Labour Chancellor Denis Healey was forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to save the country from bankruptcy.
The rest is here. Let's see what happens. Reading this story reminded me of a news story a week or more back, when Brown was calling for countries to give more money to the IMF. Perhaps he knows a country that's going to need it . . .
Although the Prime Minister wants details of this plan to be unveiled at the time of next month's Budget, I can reveal that it has met with unexpected and powerful opposition from the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King. The Governor is very worried about the Labour Government borrowing yet more money and launching a mammoth public spending splurge.
The Governor's reservations have been passed to Treasury officials via unofficial channels. One of the main reasons for Mervyn King's deep concerns is that he is determined not to go down in history as the Bank of England governor who presided over the collapse of the creditworthiness of the British state.
He is increasingly worried that extra government spending will damage the official credit ratings that are awarded to the Government as an independent yardstick of the health of the nation's finances. If our rating were downgraded, it would have a severe effect on the ability of the Treasury to raise more money on the international currency markets because it would be forced into paying a much higher rate of interest.
Earlier this year, there was speculation that the world's premier rating agency, Standard and Poor's, was ready to take the unprecedented step of lowering its rating for British government creditworthiness from its gold-plated triple 'A' classification to a lesser grading. It eventually held back from making such a damaging move. Since then, however, the outlook for the British economy has darkened.
Crucially, the decision to print extra money has very badly compromised the integrity of the Government's debt financing and it also now looks certain that Chancellor Alistair Darling will be forced to revise sharply upwards his forecasts for borrowing in his Budget. Mervyn King is therefore afraid that Gordon Brown's 'fiscal stimulus' will result in the downgrading of Britain's credit rating on the basis of pessimistic predictions about the Government's ability to repay its debts.
The Bank of England is under no illusions of the dire consequences that could follow. Above all, there would be flight of foreign capital from Britain, leading to the collapse of sterling in the international currency markets. More worrying would be the consequence for interest rates.
At present, the Government's gold-plated 'AAA' rating means that it can repay loans at a beneficially low interest rate. But if Britain's credit rating were lowered, the Treasury would be hit by having to pay much higher interests rates for loans. This, in turn, would lead to the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee being forced to sharply raise base rates for everyone - thus driving the country even deeper into recession. Such a crisis of confidence is exactly what happened in the Seventies when interest rates soared into double figures and when Labour Chancellor Denis Healey was forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to save the country from bankruptcy.
The rest is here. Let's see what happens. Reading this story reminded me of a news story a week or more back, when Brown was calling for countries to give more money to the IMF. Perhaps he knows a country that's going to need it . . .
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
Dhimmi Shelter + Cheltenham Days 1 and 2
Anjem Choudary, leader of the demonstration against the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment, appeared on GMTV this morning to defend his actions. A summary of Choudary’s utterances and political stances can be found, with references, here.
Kate Garraway interviewed him and soon found herself flummoxed by his topsy-turvy logic – British soldiers compared to Nazis, protestations of being British while simultaneously referring to Saddam Hussein as ‘our’ dictator (make of that what you will), defending his actions as his democratic right while being an ardent hater of democracy, imagining that ‘British people living in Iraq’ would make the same protests as he and his colleagues had if Iraqi troops were fighting in Britain. Yes, but Anjem, they wouldn’t *be* living, would they? He even had a moan, without a trace of irony, about ‘the far Right’.
A short while after the interview was over, Garraway’s co-pilot, Andrew Castle, referred to Choudary in a conciliatory fashion as ‘a very intelligent man’. Then both presenters shrugged, smiled and said: ‘well, this *is* a democracy. . .’
Can you imagine them treating a member of Combat 18/National Front/BNP like that? Did those two even know who Choudary is or what he has said? About giving women 100 lashes for adultery (he said this on Nicky Campbell’s debate show on the BBC recently), assassinating the Pope, saying Christmas is 'evil' and executing non-Muslims?
Get used to seeing interviews like that on the television. Lazy, under-briefed TV presenters going a couple of rounds with a fascist enjoying/abusing the full ethnic minority indulgence our society provides, and getting soundly beaten. Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ahoy! Talking of mad, “Mad Mel” Phillips, as the journo branch of the chattering classes like to call her, writes well here on related subjects.
Professor Roger Scruton writes a brilliant article for Azure here on the problems we face and what we might do about them. Even though it is Scruton’s familiar record, he adds in extra thoughts – Christianity, religion based on irony and Jewish metaphysics; western civilisation, held together and powered by none other than our old friend alcohol. He also makes the important - and one would think obvious - point that the current approach towards radical Islam - conciliation, apology, cultural suicide - won't stop radical Islam, it will encourage it. Roll on the day when our pisspoor government can see this.
I didn’t have a too bad first day at Cheltenham (by which I mean backing horses running at the Festival; I certainly can’t afford to visit). I won a few hundred quid and punted accumulators which, had they come off, would have landed me three hundred and eighty grand. No selection was absurd; all were fancied horses. Ah well.
I did OK-ish today, though I rashly lumped on Tony McCoy’s mount in the 4.40 and it came 18th, an unusual wash-out from the champion jockey. Still, the Sporting Life website tells me some poor sod at the Festival had five grand each-way on it.
Kate Garraway interviewed him and soon found herself flummoxed by his topsy-turvy logic – British soldiers compared to Nazis, protestations of being British while simultaneously referring to Saddam Hussein as ‘our’ dictator (make of that what you will), defending his actions as his democratic right while being an ardent hater of democracy, imagining that ‘British people living in Iraq’ would make the same protests as he and his colleagues had if Iraqi troops were fighting in Britain. Yes, but Anjem, they wouldn’t *be* living, would they? He even had a moan, without a trace of irony, about ‘the far Right’.
A short while after the interview was over, Garraway’s co-pilot, Andrew Castle, referred to Choudary in a conciliatory fashion as ‘a very intelligent man’. Then both presenters shrugged, smiled and said: ‘well, this *is* a democracy. . .’
Can you imagine them treating a member of Combat 18/National Front/BNP like that? Did those two even know who Choudary is or what he has said? About giving women 100 lashes for adultery (he said this on Nicky Campbell’s debate show on the BBC recently), assassinating the Pope, saying Christmas is 'evil' and executing non-Muslims?
Get used to seeing interviews like that on the television. Lazy, under-briefed TV presenters going a couple of rounds with a fascist enjoying/abusing the full ethnic minority indulgence our society provides, and getting soundly beaten. Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ahoy! Talking of mad, “Mad Mel” Phillips, as the journo branch of the chattering classes like to call her, writes well here on related subjects.
Professor Roger Scruton writes a brilliant article for Azure here on the problems we face and what we might do about them. Even though it is Scruton’s familiar record, he adds in extra thoughts – Christianity, religion based on irony and Jewish metaphysics; western civilisation, held together and powered by none other than our old friend alcohol. He also makes the important - and one would think obvious - point that the current approach towards radical Islam - conciliation, apology, cultural suicide - won't stop radical Islam, it will encourage it. Roll on the day when our pisspoor government can see this.
I didn’t have a too bad first day at Cheltenham (by which I mean backing horses running at the Festival; I certainly can’t afford to visit). I won a few hundred quid and punted accumulators which, had they come off, would have landed me three hundred and eighty grand. No selection was absurd; all were fancied horses. Ah well.
I did OK-ish today, though I rashly lumped on Tony McCoy’s mount in the 4.40 and it came 18th, an unusual wash-out from the champion jockey. Still, the Sporting Life website tells me some poor sod at the Festival had five grand each-way on it.
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Hobspawm: Only the 'C' Word will do, if I'm honest.
While 'progressive' media outlets (BBC, Guardipendent) have been apologising and praising him (now he's a Companion of Honour), Steven Glover in the hated, reactionary, bigoted, lunatic Daily Mail, lays out a calm, sane, measured case against Eric Hobspawn, the Communist historian and apologist for the Soviet Union.
As a young man, 'Frogspawn', as I call him, wrote a worthy pamphlet on how the Nazi-Soviet pact was a jolly good thing. OK, young men say silly things, and, as Alec Guinness says in Lawrence of Arabia, '...young men must say their say.' But what of old men? Here's Frogspawn being interviewed by Michael Ignatieff in 1994. Asked whether 'the radiant tomorrow' promised by Stalin would have justified 'the loss of 15 to 20 million people', Mr Hobsbawm simply replied: 'Yes'.
Note the details of Frogspawn's influential position in British high culture.
The fact that Seumus Milne thinks Hobspawm is 'the greatest historian of the 20th century' should ring warning bells among thinking people. Read Milne's own nauseating apologia for Stalin and totalitarianism.
That this shameless old loon has been made companion of honour in a country and a system he would like to have seen destroyed demonstrates we are being governed by idiots (need I mention the disgrace of giving an honorary knighthood to Ted Kennedy - what would his Nazi-lovin' old Pa say?). Tell your friends. Spread the word.
The fact that we're governed by idiots* may explain why 'Britain is now so overwhelmed by Islamist extremists and terrorist plots that our foreign policy has become subservient to our desperate need for intelligence' That the CIA is now operating here and 'dining on chicken madras in West Yorkshire'. Tim Shipman's piece is worrying but not surprising; not if you've read Londonistan, that is.
In other news: I remember sitting in a pub with mates during the last recession ('No more Tory boom and bust' - Gordon Brown, '97, '98, '99, '00, '01, '02, '03, '04, '05, '06, er, er, er. . .) and someone said: 'I dunno why they don't just print more money.'
Well, maybe that person's running the Treasury now. It's funny, after all these years politicians are praying for inflation.
*By idiots I mean people in their 50s who devoured Frogspawn at university and captured and buggered up every institution they could get their hands on. Probably on account of the burning injustice of an old codger once telling them to stand up for the national anthem or get a haircut - most middle-class lefties' entire worldview is borne of incidents of great oppression like that.
As a young man, 'Frogspawn', as I call him, wrote a worthy pamphlet on how the Nazi-Soviet pact was a jolly good thing. OK, young men say silly things, and, as Alec Guinness says in Lawrence of Arabia, '...young men must say their say.' But what of old men? Here's Frogspawn being interviewed by Michael Ignatieff in 1994. Asked whether 'the radiant tomorrow' promised by Stalin would have justified 'the loss of 15 to 20 million people', Mr Hobsbawm simply replied: 'Yes'.
Note the details of Frogspawn's influential position in British high culture.
The fact that Seumus Milne thinks Hobspawm is 'the greatest historian of the 20th century' should ring warning bells among thinking people. Read Milne's own nauseating apologia for Stalin and totalitarianism.
That this shameless old loon has been made companion of honour in a country and a system he would like to have seen destroyed demonstrates we are being governed by idiots (need I mention the disgrace of giving an honorary knighthood to Ted Kennedy - what would his Nazi-lovin' old Pa say?). Tell your friends. Spread the word.
The fact that we're governed by idiots* may explain why 'Britain is now so overwhelmed by Islamist extremists and terrorist plots that our foreign policy has become subservient to our desperate need for intelligence' That the CIA is now operating here and 'dining on chicken madras in West Yorkshire'. Tim Shipman's piece is worrying but not surprising; not if you've read Londonistan, that is.
In other news: I remember sitting in a pub with mates during the last recession ('No more Tory boom and bust' - Gordon Brown, '97, '98, '99, '00, '01, '02, '03, '04, '05, '06, er, er, er. . .) and someone said: 'I dunno why they don't just print more money.'
Well, maybe that person's running the Treasury now. It's funny, after all these years politicians are praying for inflation.
*By idiots I mean people in their 50s who devoured Frogspawn at university and captured and buggered up every institution they could get their hands on. Probably on account of the burning injustice of an old codger once telling them to stand up for the national anthem or get a haircut - most middle-class lefties' entire worldview is borne of incidents of great oppression like that.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
BBC's Cosy Memories of 1984
Since my post on Harry's Place went down such a storm (quite unexpectedly, I may add) yesterday, I thought I might as well chuck some more thoughts into 'net discourse.
Today’s BBC TV Lunchtime News’s item on the 25th anniversary of the NUM’s great strike in 1984 made me think a few things. First of all, pointing out BBC leftward bias is like painting the Forth Bridge or rolling a pea up Everest with your nose. However, sometimes you have to do it. Having been an NUJ officer and rep I am always interested in how the NUJ-heavy BBC news staff cover union stuff.
The main thrust of Savage's report was not on the why or wherefore of the dispute but on the miners' resentment of the police's behaviour. A classic culturally Marxist take on an historical event (and a handy way of avoiding any parallels and ironies with today's burgeoning industrial disputes). The police's behaviour is a clause in the story, a huge and important clause, but a clause nonetheless. Virtually the first image we saw was of Arthur Scargill being arrested. The audience's familiarity with a complex industrial dispute that occurred a quarter of a century ago is, interestingly for this dumbed-down, user-friendly organisation, taken as read. We get straight into what interests Savage and, presumably, his BBC editors: police clashing with miners at Orgreave and testimony from one NUM man of police heavy-handedness and 'fascist' behaviour. Naturally, no mention was made of the murder – by miners – of taxi driver David Wilkie. Note Kim Howell’s testimony.
Savage then finished his report (not in the net version) by reminding us that a Conservative government was in charge during the miner’s strike (a Labour government wouldn’t be so high-handed and institutionally crass to striking industrial workers, now would they?) and ended with this final line: ‘. . .to the people of Yorkshire, Arthur Scargill will always be a hero.’
But not in Nottinghamshire, eh, Danny? Unless this 25th anniversary is going to move around locations other than Yorkshire, it appears that the Beeb have decided to commemorate the strike in a very one-eyed way. The nuances of the strike – the disagreements among miners and mineworkers’ organisations – were ignored. It was presented rather in the manner Soviet TV must have recalled the 1917 revolution – bloody, glorious, necessary and united against the forces of reaction.
While I still take the side of the miners’s cause of fighting for their livelihoods and kicking against a high-handed, monetarist government uninterested in their personal plights, Scargill, it seems to me, is a boneheaded Communist and unapologetic admirer of Stalin. See here. I’d bet you could find a fair few people in Yorkshire, never mind anywhere else, who wouldn’t have a good word to say about the man. You wouldn't know any of that from Savage's pisspoor work.
Final thought: Mandelson and the steelworkers. But no great outcry from reporters such as Savage about *that* (or the nuclear workers' complaints). Better to live in the comfy past, where tories were villains and Stalinists heroes.
Today’s BBC TV Lunchtime News’s item on the 25th anniversary of the NUM’s great strike in 1984 made me think a few things. First of all, pointing out BBC leftward bias is like painting the Forth Bridge or rolling a pea up Everest with your nose. However, sometimes you have to do it. Having been an NUJ officer and rep I am always interested in how the NUJ-heavy BBC news staff cover union stuff.
The main thrust of Savage's report was not on the why or wherefore of the dispute but on the miners' resentment of the police's behaviour. A classic culturally Marxist take on an historical event (and a handy way of avoiding any parallels and ironies with today's burgeoning industrial disputes). The police's behaviour is a clause in the story, a huge and important clause, but a clause nonetheless. Virtually the first image we saw was of Arthur Scargill being arrested. The audience's familiarity with a complex industrial dispute that occurred a quarter of a century ago is, interestingly for this dumbed-down, user-friendly organisation, taken as read. We get straight into what interests Savage and, presumably, his BBC editors: police clashing with miners at Orgreave and testimony from one NUM man of police heavy-handedness and 'fascist' behaviour. Naturally, no mention was made of the murder – by miners – of taxi driver David Wilkie. Note Kim Howell’s testimony.
Savage then finished his report (not in the net version) by reminding us that a Conservative government was in charge during the miner’s strike (a Labour government wouldn’t be so high-handed and institutionally crass to striking industrial workers, now would they?) and ended with this final line: ‘. . .to the people of Yorkshire, Arthur Scargill will always be a hero.’
But not in Nottinghamshire, eh, Danny? Unless this 25th anniversary is going to move around locations other than Yorkshire, it appears that the Beeb have decided to commemorate the strike in a very one-eyed way. The nuances of the strike – the disagreements among miners and mineworkers’ organisations – were ignored. It was presented rather in the manner Soviet TV must have recalled the 1917 revolution – bloody, glorious, necessary and united against the forces of reaction.
While I still take the side of the miners’s cause of fighting for their livelihoods and kicking against a high-handed, monetarist government uninterested in their personal plights, Scargill, it seems to me, is a boneheaded Communist and unapologetic admirer of Stalin. See here. I’d bet you could find a fair few people in Yorkshire, never mind anywhere else, who wouldn’t have a good word to say about the man. You wouldn't know any of that from Savage's pisspoor work.
Final thought: Mandelson and the steelworkers. But no great outcry from reporters such as Savage about *that* (or the nuclear workers' complaints). Better to live in the comfy past, where tories were villains and Stalinists heroes.
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Hitchens Minor and the Snow
Peter Hitchens, that entertaining, priggish remnant of the Daily Express (the paper that was delivered to my working class tory place of upbringing) in the days when it was a real newspaper (the Daily Mail of its day) and not the bland, weird newspaper-in-an-occupied-territory publication of today, has been ranting about how cowardly and pathetic people were because they didn't go to work during last week's blizzards. I was compelled to reply at his weblog:
'I think Hitchens' comments about snow, while in his best and most splendid style of exaggeration, show how out of touch this commentator is. It is certainly true that the official classes are risk-obsessed but are people risk-obsessed? Not so much. People who didn't go to work last week certainly weren't scared of snow, because they were all out playing in it for about four days! Some very few died taking risks in it. No, the reason why people didn't go to work is because, and this is where Peter Hitchens is totally out of touch, most employers offer rubbishy pay, no pension, job security or prospects. In a country where a morally bankrupt political and economic class reward themselves vast amounts of workers' (I so prefer that to taxpayer) earnings, where the banks are given billions for failing and then divvy the money they've stolen up for bonuses, why on *earth* would anyone who lived and worked in the real world get their knickers in a twist about getting to their place of work?Hitchens is a journalist - as am I - and this is one of the easiest trades ever. The fact that hundreds of thousands of lazy, dozy graduates are fighting, at all times, to enter it, is proof that it is a wheeze of a job. Hitchens is paid a large salary to say the same thing every week (most of it common sense. It seems provocative now, but George Gale and John Junor were saying this sort of thing all the time 25 years ago and nobody turned a hair - and it never stopped the slide towards the Blairite pigsty neither), where he ought to be touring round British workplaces, looking at wage/rent ratios, house prices, company and shareholder behaviour. Then he would realise that there's little point having a pompous protestant work ethic if you're in the kind of scam economy we're in. As he will know from his Marxist training, privilege clouds the eyes...'
'I think Hitchens' comments about snow, while in his best and most splendid style of exaggeration, show how out of touch this commentator is. It is certainly true that the official classes are risk-obsessed but are people risk-obsessed? Not so much. People who didn't go to work last week certainly weren't scared of snow, because they were all out playing in it for about four days! Some very few died taking risks in it. No, the reason why people didn't go to work is because, and this is where Peter Hitchens is totally out of touch, most employers offer rubbishy pay, no pension, job security or prospects. In a country where a morally bankrupt political and economic class reward themselves vast amounts of workers' (I so prefer that to taxpayer) earnings, where the banks are given billions for failing and then divvy the money they've stolen up for bonuses, why on *earth* would anyone who lived and worked in the real world get their knickers in a twist about getting to their place of work?Hitchens is a journalist - as am I - and this is one of the easiest trades ever. The fact that hundreds of thousands of lazy, dozy graduates are fighting, at all times, to enter it, is proof that it is a wheeze of a job. Hitchens is paid a large salary to say the same thing every week (most of it common sense. It seems provocative now, but George Gale and John Junor were saying this sort of thing all the time 25 years ago and nobody turned a hair - and it never stopped the slide towards the Blairite pigsty neither), where he ought to be touring round British workplaces, looking at wage/rent ratios, house prices, company and shareholder behaviour. Then he would realise that there's little point having a pompous protestant work ethic if you're in the kind of scam economy we're in. As he will know from his Marxist training, privilege clouds the eyes...'
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
So much is happening – how could I have been so lazy? Well, I haven’t been: I’ve been engaged on other creative work. But:
Over the last week or so I’ve enjoyed/laughed sardonically/smiled ironically at many things: Including: Blair ‘expressing doubts about Iraq’. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/4395367/Tony-Blair-admits-daily-doubts-about-the-war-in-Iraq.html
The Peers scrimmage, with an especial delight in Lord Truscott, a former Communist with links to the old Soviet regime, who now charges thousands an hour for alleged corrupt lobbying practices (I insert the allegedly out of journalistic habit. The Sunday Times has got him on tape offering it). Wahay, up the revolution, eh? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1133117/Revealed-The-secret-Soviet-past-sleaze-peer-Truscott.html
This, like Cameron and Trevor Hemmings http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5654196.ece is one more story in a line of stories, stretching endlessly into the past and future about the corruption and cronyism of what Peter Oborne calls the Political Class. This cannot end, because the backbone of all the parties is shot away with indifference. They have hardly any members and money is only going to come from sucking up and doing parliamentary favours for millionaire businessmen.
Depressing, eh?
Green fascism popped up with a vengeance when Jonathan Porritt (remember him? A Greenpeace drone who, many moons ago, had a something of a vogue in the Daily Telegraph. I notice he’s received a knighthood since he last came to my attention and is juiced in, as they say in Vegas, with the Government) asserted that couples who had more than two children were being irresponsible. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/4424856/Government-green-guru-Sir-Jonathon-Porritt-calls-for-two-child-limit.html
This particular nonsense makes me think this will be the seed for some dire green paper of the future about making three-child households virtually illegal through punitive taxation (special exemption for Muslims and certain other groups on account of cultural differences).
Oh Brave New World!
Dr Pippa Hayes, a Devon GP, refuses to help women who want larger families. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5627484.ece
Dr Hayes, had she lived 90 years ago, would have been the kind of socialist who applauded HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw and all the eugenicists and utopians who were so perilously close to the German aryanistas. This is what is known as liberal fascism: freedom trounced by utopians with their obdurate sense of righteousness, desire to impose uniformity of opinion and thought, and their many non-negotiable demands. In the 60s, Dr Hayes would have been busy in public libraries, denuding them of Biggles books and any non-state-mediated images of commonwealth natives.
Need I spell out the ironies of the ‘shutting down Guantanamo’ farce?
Here’s something that should concern you if you work for a living in the real world – the public sector have had a 33 per cent increase in their pension pot since last year. Another eleven billion quid. No wonder the bloke who used to sit next to me spent all his time combing the civil service gateway site. Those of us in the private sector will be working till, oh, we drop, to keep that lot comfortable from their late 50s onwards. Workers’ paradise!
It is hard to say which television channel is the worst – that is like trying ascertain which dog shit is the worst-smelling – but Channel Four is a particularly repellent mixture of toytown liberal politics, soaps and other low-grade mental pornography. It comes as no surprise to find the company has 19 senior execs and they are all on 190,000 grand plus bonuses.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article5627579.ece The disclosure, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, is embarrassing for the broadcaster, which claims it will have an annual shortfall of £150m in its finances by 2012.
If you went to the right sort of parties fifteen years ago, and found yourself seated next to one of those 19 who are paid more than the Prime Minister for serving up a diet of Justin Lee Collins and Big Brother, you would have found a great deal of righteous talk about ‘fat cats’. As Tony Benn likes to say, things move on.
And moving on swiftly; a few years ago most Guardian readers I knew would simply not accept that Iran had any ambitions to make missiles or become a player in the nuclear warhead game. In those days the law of my enemy’s enemy is my friend had come into vogue with a vengeance among the fashion specs brigade. The official line, which leaked out of the Guardian and Independent – and backed up with, IIRC, the usual BBC propaganda – was that believing Iran wanted nuclear weapons was a neocon fantasy http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/sep/27/obama.mccain.foreign.policy
But now this http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=99107
Best story of the week is the strikes over foreign workers and Peter Mandelson’s reaction to them. 1) Go and work in Europe, 2) Stop being Xenophobic.
Make no mistake, this is going to be the first of many clashes within the Labour Movement between the Labour Party ‘intellectuals’, the skinny-latte and mung bean salad set who have never done a day’s work in their lives, and the ordinary workers who get shafted by the British Government’s sell-out to EU law. The seeds of contradiction were sown long ago, but Mandy, and our Prime Minister, thought that a sea of cheap money would always ward off the deadly day. The public would be doped on credit and not bother about a damn thing (a lesson in practical governance they learned from the consequences of Mrs Thatcher’s economic reforms). Not so now. Mandelson, being totally pro-Europe and a millionaire social democrat, has nil point sympathy with the local unemployed. This is a version of the Labour Party to make old Keir Hardy spin in his box.
Today, the Times, being a propagandist organ of the Political Class, has a facetious double-page spread in its hopeless yummy mummy supplement, Times2, backing up Mandelson by detailing how British workers can go and work in places such as Uzbekistan. Salaries are not mentioned.
My God, that is a paper full of cunts. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/career_and_jobs/article5654362.ece
Lastly, rarely, something good in Times2. A piece about female war arists (it wasn’t just the excellent Dame Laura Knight): http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5652289.ece Feminist and postmodern art theorists, please note: Thorneycroft and Hudson have never felt neglected as women artists, nor that men were promoted above them. “No, I always actually felt quite equal to the men,” Thorneycroft says. They knew they were good at what they did. They drew simply, with speed and expedience, and although probably unaware of it, these women were moving aside the indulgences of Expressionism and restoring a figurative clarity to the art of the day.
AMEN
Over the last week or so I’ve enjoyed/laughed sardonically/smiled ironically at many things: Including: Blair ‘expressing doubts about Iraq’. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/4395367/Tony-Blair-admits-daily-doubts-about-the-war-in-Iraq.html
The Peers scrimmage, with an especial delight in Lord Truscott, a former Communist with links to the old Soviet regime, who now charges thousands an hour for alleged corrupt lobbying practices (I insert the allegedly out of journalistic habit. The Sunday Times has got him on tape offering it). Wahay, up the revolution, eh? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1133117/Revealed-The-secret-Soviet-past-sleaze-peer-Truscott.html
This, like Cameron and Trevor Hemmings http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5654196.ece is one more story in a line of stories, stretching endlessly into the past and future about the corruption and cronyism of what Peter Oborne calls the Political Class. This cannot end, because the backbone of all the parties is shot away with indifference. They have hardly any members and money is only going to come from sucking up and doing parliamentary favours for millionaire businessmen.
Depressing, eh?
Green fascism popped up with a vengeance when Jonathan Porritt (remember him? A Greenpeace drone who, many moons ago, had a something of a vogue in the Daily Telegraph. I notice he’s received a knighthood since he last came to my attention and is juiced in, as they say in Vegas, with the Government) asserted that couples who had more than two children were being irresponsible. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/4424856/Government-green-guru-Sir-Jonathon-Porritt-calls-for-two-child-limit.html
This particular nonsense makes me think this will be the seed for some dire green paper of the future about making three-child households virtually illegal through punitive taxation (special exemption for Muslims and certain other groups on account of cultural differences).
Oh Brave New World!
Dr Pippa Hayes, a Devon GP, refuses to help women who want larger families. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5627484.ece
Dr Hayes, had she lived 90 years ago, would have been the kind of socialist who applauded HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw and all the eugenicists and utopians who were so perilously close to the German aryanistas. This is what is known as liberal fascism: freedom trounced by utopians with their obdurate sense of righteousness, desire to impose uniformity of opinion and thought, and their many non-negotiable demands. In the 60s, Dr Hayes would have been busy in public libraries, denuding them of Biggles books and any non-state-mediated images of commonwealth natives.
Need I spell out the ironies of the ‘shutting down Guantanamo’ farce?
Here’s something that should concern you if you work for a living in the real world – the public sector have had a 33 per cent increase in their pension pot since last year. Another eleven billion quid. No wonder the bloke who used to sit next to me spent all his time combing the civil service gateway site. Those of us in the private sector will be working till, oh, we drop, to keep that lot comfortable from their late 50s onwards. Workers’ paradise!
It is hard to say which television channel is the worst – that is like trying ascertain which dog shit is the worst-smelling – but Channel Four is a particularly repellent mixture of toytown liberal politics, soaps and other low-grade mental pornography. It comes as no surprise to find the company has 19 senior execs and they are all on 190,000 grand plus bonuses.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article5627579.ece The disclosure, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, is embarrassing for the broadcaster, which claims it will have an annual shortfall of £150m in its finances by 2012.
If you went to the right sort of parties fifteen years ago, and found yourself seated next to one of those 19 who are paid more than the Prime Minister for serving up a diet of Justin Lee Collins and Big Brother, you would have found a great deal of righteous talk about ‘fat cats’. As Tony Benn likes to say, things move on.
And moving on swiftly; a few years ago most Guardian readers I knew would simply not accept that Iran had any ambitions to make missiles or become a player in the nuclear warhead game. In those days the law of my enemy’s enemy is my friend had come into vogue with a vengeance among the fashion specs brigade. The official line, which leaked out of the Guardian and Independent – and backed up with, IIRC, the usual BBC propaganda – was that believing Iran wanted nuclear weapons was a neocon fantasy http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/sep/27/obama.mccain.foreign.policy
But now this http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=99107
Best story of the week is the strikes over foreign workers and Peter Mandelson’s reaction to them. 1) Go and work in Europe, 2) Stop being Xenophobic.
Make no mistake, this is going to be the first of many clashes within the Labour Movement between the Labour Party ‘intellectuals’, the skinny-latte and mung bean salad set who have never done a day’s work in their lives, and the ordinary workers who get shafted by the British Government’s sell-out to EU law. The seeds of contradiction were sown long ago, but Mandy, and our Prime Minister, thought that a sea of cheap money would always ward off the deadly day. The public would be doped on credit and not bother about a damn thing (a lesson in practical governance they learned from the consequences of Mrs Thatcher’s economic reforms). Not so now. Mandelson, being totally pro-Europe and a millionaire social democrat, has nil point sympathy with the local unemployed. This is a version of the Labour Party to make old Keir Hardy spin in his box.
Today, the Times, being a propagandist organ of the Political Class, has a facetious double-page spread in its hopeless yummy mummy supplement, Times2, backing up Mandelson by detailing how British workers can go and work in places such as Uzbekistan. Salaries are not mentioned.
My God, that is a paper full of cunts. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/career_and_jobs/article5654362.ece
Lastly, rarely, something good in Times2. A piece about female war arists (it wasn’t just the excellent Dame Laura Knight): http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5652289.ece Feminist and postmodern art theorists, please note: Thorneycroft and Hudson have never felt neglected as women artists, nor that men were promoted above them. “No, I always actually felt quite equal to the men,” Thorneycroft says. They knew they were good at what they did. They drew simply, with speed and expedience, and although probably unaware of it, these women were moving aside the indulgences of Expressionism and restoring a figurative clarity to the art of the day.
AMEN
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Hear the piggies squeal
In a rare split among the Political Class, Cameron has turned away from New Labour in the voting for MPs exemption to expenses FoI enquiries.
Two bits from this morning’s Times – which seem to have got lost on their way to the internet version – are: ‘The Tories announced that they were forcing all MPs to vote against the proposals on Tuesday evening. Until then, the matter was a one-line whip that several Tory MPs planned to ignore. “It was my understanding that we had reached a perfectly satisfactory agreement,” said one Tory backbencher. “But then Cameron had to interfere. His desire to look whiter than white is frankly ridiculous and causes damage without him realizing it. I mean, would you want to show the public every single receipt you claimed for?”’
And:
‘The attempts to block publication of receipts has led to speculation that Labour MPs, and Ministers, face embarrassment when they are published.’
NOT JUST Labour, as the backbencher’s quote demonstrates. . .
Two bits from this morning’s Times – which seem to have got lost on their way to the internet version – are: ‘The Tories announced that they were forcing all MPs to vote against the proposals on Tuesday evening. Until then, the matter was a one-line whip that several Tory MPs planned to ignore. “It was my understanding that we had reached a perfectly satisfactory agreement,” said one Tory backbencher. “But then Cameron had to interfere. His desire to look whiter than white is frankly ridiculous and causes damage without him realizing it. I mean, would you want to show the public every single receipt you claimed for?”’
And:
‘The attempts to block publication of receipts has led to speculation that Labour MPs, and Ministers, face embarrassment when they are published.’
NOT JUST Labour, as the backbencher’s quote demonstrates. . .
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Obama Love and What it Means
The Obama inauguration, as broadcast by the BBC was a queasy mix of wet cacks, left-liberal BBC journalists gushing and a little frisson – from some of the BBC interviewees, not Obama himself – of black supremacism. The tirade from Joseph Lowry that followed Obama’s charismatic (in the religious sense) sermon (Obama sounded far too much like Samuel L. Jackson making his biblical speech in Pulp Fiction for my liking) made me laugh sardonically. ‘White must do what is right’? I would have said that they already had, and in fairly large numbers, otherwise today’s party would have been for some other candidate.
The immediate ramification in England will be how the Left (and by that I mean all points between the Socialist Worker through Marcus Brigstocke and Guardipendent readers to Liberal Democrats) come to terms with the ending of hostilities to the Land of the Free. Justin Webb is back from Washington to begin Obama’s British PR campaign on the BBC’s Today programme. Matt Frei was pre-orgasmic this afternoon. There will be comedy, bewilderment and hypocrisy in this, as old and entrenched attitudes have to be put aside to accommodate The Messiah’s new ministry of love.
I apologise only half-heartedly for all this cynicism, sarcasm and negativity. Battered and ravaged as England is by Blairism and its even more lunatic perversion, Brownism, I can do nothing more than cast my mind back to the summer of 1997, when I was so happy and excited that the bloody Tories had been vanquished. I can’t help feeling this is the situation in America – the wicked witch is dead, hurrah! Fair enough but what is to come? If it is anything like what we have had here, then Americans should worry. For Blair did not take us into a renaissance – the very word used repeatedly by his many media friends in 1997 – but oversaw a precipitous decline in individual liberty, standards in education, private and public morality, law and order (the weakening and politicizing of the Police and the dismantling of sentencing guidelines), not to mention starting two pointless, unfinished wars; plus the creation of a human rights industry that has conjured court scenes and legal loopholes straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Then there’s the commitment of the armed services to various theatres of war while quietly reducing their funding and failing to ensure adequate equipment (an English disease I doubt the Americans will suffer from); and finally, an irresponsible credit boom, which has now surely put this country on the road to bankruptcy. All in the name of ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘social democracy’. I predict a similar fate for America. Blair-ism taught me a hard lesson: Careful what you wish for.
Ah, yes. The credit crunch. I was credit-crunched last week and now have no job. I won’t be the last journalist getting the axe, no sir. Maybe, when a few more are collecting their job club cards, a general revelation will occur about what the Blair years actually meant. Let me tell ya: An illusory, debt-based boom that doped the public while the Government and its army of apparatchiks, PR people and journalists planned their utopia, based on access to the public purse, Champagne Socialism and a deep loathing and ignorance of their own country and its institutions and customs. All it came down to in the end was massive governmental interference and bullying in all areas of public and private life, the maintenance of a massive welfare dependency bloc, and, last but not least, mass immigration as an article of faith. That’s why London is grotesquely overcrowded, why chavs and rude boys are ubiquitous, why I have to wait two weeks for a doctor’s appointment, why wages in bottom-end jobs have hardly risen in 11 years and why it now costs about six hundred quid a month to live in a bedsit. It is also why when unemployment reaches four million (the figure, when all social security euphemisms are rounded up, will be more like 10 million) there’ll be some very unpleasant scenes in ‘vibrant and diverse multicultural areas’.
But Labour are the NOT-THE-TORY-PARTY, so we all have to just keep believing, right, kids?
The last thing to say is this: The Americans, by their natures, will get the hump with socialism a lot quicker than we did (did we ever, anyway?). At least I hope they do. If they don’t, I fear for the West, I really do.
The immediate ramification in England will be how the Left (and by that I mean all points between the Socialist Worker through Marcus Brigstocke and Guardipendent readers to Liberal Democrats) come to terms with the ending of hostilities to the Land of the Free. Justin Webb is back from Washington to begin Obama’s British PR campaign on the BBC’s Today programme. Matt Frei was pre-orgasmic this afternoon. There will be comedy, bewilderment and hypocrisy in this, as old and entrenched attitudes have to be put aside to accommodate The Messiah’s new ministry of love.
I apologise only half-heartedly for all this cynicism, sarcasm and negativity. Battered and ravaged as England is by Blairism and its even more lunatic perversion, Brownism, I can do nothing more than cast my mind back to the summer of 1997, when I was so happy and excited that the bloody Tories had been vanquished. I can’t help feeling this is the situation in America – the wicked witch is dead, hurrah! Fair enough but what is to come? If it is anything like what we have had here, then Americans should worry. For Blair did not take us into a renaissance – the very word used repeatedly by his many media friends in 1997 – but oversaw a precipitous decline in individual liberty, standards in education, private and public morality, law and order (the weakening and politicizing of the Police and the dismantling of sentencing guidelines), not to mention starting two pointless, unfinished wars; plus the creation of a human rights industry that has conjured court scenes and legal loopholes straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Then there’s the commitment of the armed services to various theatres of war while quietly reducing their funding and failing to ensure adequate equipment (an English disease I doubt the Americans will suffer from); and finally, an irresponsible credit boom, which has now surely put this country on the road to bankruptcy. All in the name of ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘social democracy’. I predict a similar fate for America. Blair-ism taught me a hard lesson: Careful what you wish for.
Ah, yes. The credit crunch. I was credit-crunched last week and now have no job. I won’t be the last journalist getting the axe, no sir. Maybe, when a few more are collecting their job club cards, a general revelation will occur about what the Blair years actually meant. Let me tell ya: An illusory, debt-based boom that doped the public while the Government and its army of apparatchiks, PR people and journalists planned their utopia, based on access to the public purse, Champagne Socialism and a deep loathing and ignorance of their own country and its institutions and customs. All it came down to in the end was massive governmental interference and bullying in all areas of public and private life, the maintenance of a massive welfare dependency bloc, and, last but not least, mass immigration as an article of faith. That’s why London is grotesquely overcrowded, why chavs and rude boys are ubiquitous, why I have to wait two weeks for a doctor’s appointment, why wages in bottom-end jobs have hardly risen in 11 years and why it now costs about six hundred quid a month to live in a bedsit. It is also why when unemployment reaches four million (the figure, when all social security euphemisms are rounded up, will be more like 10 million) there’ll be some very unpleasant scenes in ‘vibrant and diverse multicultural areas’.
But Labour are the NOT-THE-TORY-PARTY, so we all have to just keep believing, right, kids?
The last thing to say is this: The Americans, by their natures, will get the hump with socialism a lot quicker than we did (did we ever, anyway?). At least I hope they do. If they don’t, I fear for the West, I really do.
Monday, 5 January 2009
Email to a friend
Comrade,
In some ways the thought of a proper disintegration excites me, as it probably does you. All the eyewash and wallpaper of the last 20-odd years suddenly melting and the truth of our situation being brought home. However, we'd be the some of the first people to be killed in a Mad Max world of chavs, rude boys and Islamists. I did advise you some years ago to keep your great uncle's webley service revolver well oiled (if you had one) for when our third world permanent visitors start fighting out their religious wars here and/or punishing us kuffirs for simply existing. I don't back down on that. But I think slow national decline is far more likely than a sudden breakdown. As Professor Scruton points out ad nauseum a civilisation cannot last when pluralism is the ruling ethos and kitsch and sarcasm is the only high culture left. What is left, as Larkin asks, when disbelief has gone? Other cultures move in on it and destroy it as it begins to evaporate. This is what is happening. But it happens slowly, like the way you one day turn around and notice that nobody drinks light and bitter anymore and jukeboxes have vanished (the first juke box was installed in a bar in San Fran in 1889, FACT-UH).
The Times, travesty of what it once was, is still a useful guide to the national suicide note simply because it is the notice board of the well-heeled centre-left baby-boomer political and civil establishment. Witness its foreign editor, Beeston, today in The Agenda ’09 supplement, saying that:
a) It is generally thought that Iran will have enough fissile material to make one nuclear warhead this year, the 30th anniversary of the revolution.
b) …but let’s hope Israel doesn’t bomb their nuclear programme, because. . .
c) …Iran might get a moderate leader because its economy has gone pop under Ahmadinejad…
d) . . .and, OF COURSE, Barack Obama must surely be able to talk the Iranians out of any rash nuclear strikes on Israel.
So there you have it. Rather a fool’s paradise. But these people were the people who have allowed Blair, warmonger, millionaire twelve times over and chief protagonist in the creation of the Human Rights legal industry and the financing and creation of the chav/migrant, horrendously overpopulated welfare state, not to mention his sidekick’s debt bubble politics, to enjoy a fairly healthy reputation, instead of waking up and recognising the man was a worse prime minister than Thatcher. Have you noticed how the tv/media/comedian/arts classes have FUCK ALL to say about Blair? Remember how they went on and on and on about Thatcher? How Thatcher was lampooned morning, noon and night everywhere except the telegraph and mail? How every bit of policy was minutely picked apart, every ministerial hypocrisy, every piece of behaviour that ran counter to policy, every payoff, every executive directorship? With New Labour, not so much, even though their snouts have been in the trough just as long now. Witness Patsy Hewitt (remember her?) getting fat executive positions within the sector she used to be minister for. How the lefties shrieked when arseholes like Norman Lamont used to do it. Now? Tumbleweeds.
Witness the education reforms and schools as ‘places of learning’. You know full well these will be battery farms where ‘racism, climate change and homophobia’ will be taught by rote by teachers with cockamamie degrees and forehead piercings. All very fashionable, man, but I can’t help feeling the end of it will be a population too ignorant to understand when its individual and collective freedoms, liberties and democracy are taken away on some non-negotiable pretext or other the establishment of the day demands. In fact I’d bet on it. Tebbit predicts that the mullahs will go legit – suits, quangoes, easy-to-read booklets – now Whitehall is so full of E heads with their Foucault and their Jeff Buckley records. They know how easy it’s going to be to turn this shop over. Ladbrokes are giving 5/2 on Labour winning the next election. It’s kind of like when Danny in Withnail & I says: ‘they’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man, it’s over’.
It might not happen and Old England muddles through. But, uncle, what would you put your dinner money on?
In some ways the thought of a proper disintegration excites me, as it probably does you. All the eyewash and wallpaper of the last 20-odd years suddenly melting and the truth of our situation being brought home. However, we'd be the some of the first people to be killed in a Mad Max world of chavs, rude boys and Islamists. I did advise you some years ago to keep your great uncle's webley service revolver well oiled (if you had one) for when our third world permanent visitors start fighting out their religious wars here and/or punishing us kuffirs for simply existing. I don't back down on that. But I think slow national decline is far more likely than a sudden breakdown. As Professor Scruton points out ad nauseum a civilisation cannot last when pluralism is the ruling ethos and kitsch and sarcasm is the only high culture left. What is left, as Larkin asks, when disbelief has gone? Other cultures move in on it and destroy it as it begins to evaporate. This is what is happening. But it happens slowly, like the way you one day turn around and notice that nobody drinks light and bitter anymore and jukeboxes have vanished (the first juke box was installed in a bar in San Fran in 1889, FACT-UH).
The Times, travesty of what it once was, is still a useful guide to the national suicide note simply because it is the notice board of the well-heeled centre-left baby-boomer political and civil establishment. Witness its foreign editor, Beeston, today in The Agenda ’09 supplement, saying that:
a) It is generally thought that Iran will have enough fissile material to make one nuclear warhead this year, the 30th anniversary of the revolution.
b) …but let’s hope Israel doesn’t bomb their nuclear programme, because. . .
c) …Iran might get a moderate leader because its economy has gone pop under Ahmadinejad…
d) . . .and, OF COURSE, Barack Obama must surely be able to talk the Iranians out of any rash nuclear strikes on Israel.
So there you have it. Rather a fool’s paradise. But these people were the people who have allowed Blair, warmonger, millionaire twelve times over and chief protagonist in the creation of the Human Rights legal industry and the financing and creation of the chav/migrant, horrendously overpopulated welfare state, not to mention his sidekick’s debt bubble politics, to enjoy a fairly healthy reputation, instead of waking up and recognising the man was a worse prime minister than Thatcher. Have you noticed how the tv/media/comedian/arts classes have FUCK ALL to say about Blair? Remember how they went on and on and on about Thatcher? How Thatcher was lampooned morning, noon and night everywhere except the telegraph and mail? How every bit of policy was minutely picked apart, every ministerial hypocrisy, every piece of behaviour that ran counter to policy, every payoff, every executive directorship? With New Labour, not so much, even though their snouts have been in the trough just as long now. Witness Patsy Hewitt (remember her?) getting fat executive positions within the sector she used to be minister for. How the lefties shrieked when arseholes like Norman Lamont used to do it. Now? Tumbleweeds.
Witness the education reforms and schools as ‘places of learning’. You know full well these will be battery farms where ‘racism, climate change and homophobia’ will be taught by rote by teachers with cockamamie degrees and forehead piercings. All very fashionable, man, but I can’t help feeling the end of it will be a population too ignorant to understand when its individual and collective freedoms, liberties and democracy are taken away on some non-negotiable pretext or other the establishment of the day demands. In fact I’d bet on it. Tebbit predicts that the mullahs will go legit – suits, quangoes, easy-to-read booklets – now Whitehall is so full of E heads with their Foucault and their Jeff Buckley records. They know how easy it’s going to be to turn this shop over. Ladbrokes are giving 5/2 on Labour winning the next election. It’s kind of like when Danny in Withnail & I says: ‘they’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man, it’s over’.
It might not happen and Old England muddles through. But, uncle, what would you put your dinner money on?
Sunday, 4 January 2009
A new game for journalists
One of emerging trends of credit crunch journalism is the ‘look, it’s all going to be rather difficult, but keep thinking positively and it will all be fine’ articles. There was one in The Times ‘Body & Soul’ section on Saturday and a larger one in the Sunday Times today. Yesterday’s was all life coachey: ‘if you become negative, negativity will come into your life’. NO LAUGHING AT THE BACK THERE!
Today’s was Brian Appleyard, baby-boomer journalist par excellence, whose sycophancy over Bob Dylan’s autobiography (‘member dat? How quickly, these days, ‘momentous cultural events’ disappear without trace) and prediction that the baby boomer generation would ‘abolish death’ are just two things that promote sardonic laughter in me. Appleyard started off by saying how much good the coming slump would do us all. True, if it really means goodbye to the crass, consumerist, greedy Britain we’ve known for the last decade and more then I will be more than happy and so will many others. He said we’ll all be slimmer and more grounded and healthier (but anxiety, depression and suicide rates would – ahem – rise).
It was a load of space-filling waffle, like most newspaper content. But what gets me about this new trend is that the people writing it, the usual suspects of yummy mummies and overpaid feature scribes, won’t be affected by it, it’s a refreshing new abstract for them to spin features off. None of them will see the inside of a dole office and a fortnight’s wait for a payment and a diet of canned food and value bread. None of them will lose their houses. None of them will have to hustle alongside ex-Woolworth employees – and the three million migrants new Labour assured us we needed – for crappy jobs in grim towns where the whirligig of time has brought in his revenges on all those bien pensant ideas the liberal political class have forced through school, town hall and court. Now these Blair-believers fulfill the role of New Labour outreach workers and priests, offering guidance and benediction to the ordinary people who allowed themselves, or had no choice, but to get washed away as the ship sinks. I find it unseemly.
Today’s was Brian Appleyard, baby-boomer journalist par excellence, whose sycophancy over Bob Dylan’s autobiography (‘member dat? How quickly, these days, ‘momentous cultural events’ disappear without trace) and prediction that the baby boomer generation would ‘abolish death’ are just two things that promote sardonic laughter in me. Appleyard started off by saying how much good the coming slump would do us all. True, if it really means goodbye to the crass, consumerist, greedy Britain we’ve known for the last decade and more then I will be more than happy and so will many others. He said we’ll all be slimmer and more grounded and healthier (but anxiety, depression and suicide rates would – ahem – rise).
It was a load of space-filling waffle, like most newspaper content. But what gets me about this new trend is that the people writing it, the usual suspects of yummy mummies and overpaid feature scribes, won’t be affected by it, it’s a refreshing new abstract for them to spin features off. None of them will see the inside of a dole office and a fortnight’s wait for a payment and a diet of canned food and value bread. None of them will lose their houses. None of them will have to hustle alongside ex-Woolworth employees – and the three million migrants new Labour assured us we needed – for crappy jobs in grim towns where the whirligig of time has brought in his revenges on all those bien pensant ideas the liberal political class have forced through school, town hall and court. Now these Blair-believers fulfill the role of New Labour outreach workers and priests, offering guidance and benediction to the ordinary people who allowed themselves, or had no choice, but to get washed away as the ship sinks. I find it unseemly.
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
A quick round up
A quick round up.
Journalists should not look down from too great a height on Karen Matthews, convicted last week of the Shannon Matthews scrimmage. I agreed with a pal who works on a famously loathed tabloid when she said: ‘One thing nobody is saying is how this bunch of public school-educated mockneys,’ – the reporters on said organ – ‘were taken for a ride by two chavs in the middle of nowhere, addled on drugs and with barely two brain cells to rub together’. Journalists, immensely self-regarding and often possessed of low intelligence and imagination as they are, have trouble facing up to things like that. Only Liddle in the Sunday Times mentioned it. Having said that, scamming Fleet Street, albeit on a more morally acceptable level than the Matthews is easy enough if you know what to do and have a few contacts. Tabloids, especially these days, manned as they are by the dozy, credulous, Princess Diana-fied Facebook generation, will always be prey to this kind of bullshit.
I say they ‘always’ will be, but Andrew Sullivan says newspapers will be gone very soon now. I think the same, basically. Like so many other things, the internet will kill them without adequately replacing them. Democracy and the exposure of abuses of power are at stake here and in the wake of the newspaper decline the tin pot gods of internet comment, where conspiracy theories and juvenile sarcasm rule the day, will gain influence. This will suit the postmodernists just dandy, because ‘there will be no truth’ - but theirs. To the Chomsky and Michael Moore-gobbling student-minded there are no truths – except theirs. Aside from seeing less of Simon Cowell and Kate Moss and others of their type, no good can come from the death of newspapers, rubbishy as they mostly now are.
Reading of newspapers, and the interest and attention needed to stimulate literacy generally, will also be sapped by Sir Jim Rose’s education proposals. Backed by Ed Balls and, I would imagine, the majority of Labour, they will be remembered as a flashbulb moment in the history of British political and educational folly. History, geography and religious studies will be moved into a ‘human, social and environmental studies programmes’. Oh dear.
This is, of course, a modern leftist’s ideal: Abolish the past and control the present. Indoctrinate children with the new religions – climate change and a spurious internationalism, which, as we saw with Germany and will see with America, when the going gets tough is a rather meaningless Islington dinner party fancy. ‘Politicians back it,’ said a BBC news reporter last night, ‘and teachers want it.’ I bet they do. I’ve met quite a few young, new ‘teachers’ in the last few years (they have expanded as a class – no pun intended – since Labour poured millions into the education system, with only a decline in literacy and a rise in anti-social behaviour to show for it) and as a rule I have found them to have been unintelligent, politically, culturally and morally empty – except for eco-platitudes, multiculturalism and a ragbag of the hand-me-down shibboleths of 1968 learned at ‘university’. They were also, almost to a man and a woman, immensely hypocritical about how they referred to the white working class and Asian/Black ethnic working class. The latter referred to in the careful, utopian language of Cultural Marxism; the former as ‘chavs’. I wouldn’t mind betting that these education reforms will be seen, by those with the nous to recollect and work it out, as one of the larger death knells of literature, democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law in Britain.
Journalists should not look down from too great a height on Karen Matthews, convicted last week of the Shannon Matthews scrimmage. I agreed with a pal who works on a famously loathed tabloid when she said: ‘One thing nobody is saying is how this bunch of public school-educated mockneys,’ – the reporters on said organ – ‘were taken for a ride by two chavs in the middle of nowhere, addled on drugs and with barely two brain cells to rub together’. Journalists, immensely self-regarding and often possessed of low intelligence and imagination as they are, have trouble facing up to things like that. Only Liddle in the Sunday Times mentioned it. Having said that, scamming Fleet Street, albeit on a more morally acceptable level than the Matthews is easy enough if you know what to do and have a few contacts. Tabloids, especially these days, manned as they are by the dozy, credulous, Princess Diana-fied Facebook generation, will always be prey to this kind of bullshit.
I say they ‘always’ will be, but Andrew Sullivan says newspapers will be gone very soon now. I think the same, basically. Like so many other things, the internet will kill them without adequately replacing them. Democracy and the exposure of abuses of power are at stake here and in the wake of the newspaper decline the tin pot gods of internet comment, where conspiracy theories and juvenile sarcasm rule the day, will gain influence. This will suit the postmodernists just dandy, because ‘there will be no truth’ - but theirs. To the Chomsky and Michael Moore-gobbling student-minded there are no truths – except theirs. Aside from seeing less of Simon Cowell and Kate Moss and others of their type, no good can come from the death of newspapers, rubbishy as they mostly now are.
Reading of newspapers, and the interest and attention needed to stimulate literacy generally, will also be sapped by Sir Jim Rose’s education proposals. Backed by Ed Balls and, I would imagine, the majority of Labour, they will be remembered as a flashbulb moment in the history of British political and educational folly. History, geography and religious studies will be moved into a ‘human, social and environmental studies programmes’. Oh dear.
This is, of course, a modern leftist’s ideal: Abolish the past and control the present. Indoctrinate children with the new religions – climate change and a spurious internationalism, which, as we saw with Germany and will see with America, when the going gets tough is a rather meaningless Islington dinner party fancy. ‘Politicians back it,’ said a BBC news reporter last night, ‘and teachers want it.’ I bet they do. I’ve met quite a few young, new ‘teachers’ in the last few years (they have expanded as a class – no pun intended – since Labour poured millions into the education system, with only a decline in literacy and a rise in anti-social behaviour to show for it) and as a rule I have found them to have been unintelligent, politically, culturally and morally empty – except for eco-platitudes, multiculturalism and a ragbag of the hand-me-down shibboleths of 1968 learned at ‘university’. They were also, almost to a man and a woman, immensely hypocritical about how they referred to the white working class and Asian/Black ethnic working class. The latter referred to in the careful, utopian language of Cultural Marxism; the former as ‘chavs’. I wouldn’t mind betting that these education reforms will be seen, by those with the nous to recollect and work it out, as one of the larger death knells of literature, democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law in Britain.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Ray Winstone on Scum Britain
The 'hard man' actor Ray Winstone was in the Mail on Sunday yesterday ranting and raving about Britain having gone to the dogs, what with an incompetent yet dictatorial government (ZANU-LABOUR as Matthew Parris in the Times noted they are now being called in the wake of the Damien Green scrimmage), an emasculated police force, filthy hospitals and much else wrong. Sample:
"‘I wouldn’t mind if you could actually see something being done with all the money they take off in taxes. But I don’t see more police on the streets. I don’t see more schools or hospitals being built. What I see is no one on the streets and then a legal system that doesn’t support the coppers when things finally get to court. There are criminals getting off every day in this country.
‘I see people going into hospital ill and coming out worse with an MRSA bug they’ve picked up from an unclean ward. And I see so many people coming into this country that we can’t cope.
‘As far as knife crime is concerned, what’s wrong with getting tough? First offence, a warning. Second offence, five years and third offence life.
‘I’m happy for anyone from any other country to come here if they want to work, but I’m not happy to support everyone for nothing. I don’t want anyone taking the p***. If you’ve come into our country and you commit a crime, you should be deported. End of story.’ He shakes his head. ‘To me, this all makes sense.’"
He goes on to intimate that he supports the death sentence.
There's quite a lot of implication and one or two big ironies in this. Obviously I am not surprised that Winstone, an ex boxer, Essex born and bred son of a licensed cabbie turns out to be a working class conservative of the old school. What is surprising and amusing is that he must be one of the very few actors in Britain who holds these views or makes them known. If he was 30 years younger and looking to get on, saying the above mouthful - or anything half as strong - would destroy your career in a trice, the British Theatre being a closed shop of left wing platitudes ranging on a spectrum between the Redgraves' lunacy to a simple calculation that when 'social democracy' is in charge the money tap (funding) comes on with a veangeance. Winstone's fellow 'social realism' actors, Philip Davis and Tim Roth are champagne socialists of the common-or-garden variety. I wonder what they'll say about their old mate when they hear what they'll call a crypto-BNP diatribe?
Another irony to consider is that Winstone loathes the criminality, violence, drug and welfare addiction which has spread through the land. Yet he himself must implicated in this. Every thug I ever met had a working knowledge of Winstone's hard man oeuvre, most especially that repugnant, did-far-more-harm-than-good film Scum, which was a classic example of the exploitation movie dressed up as political filmmaking. Have I not heard boneheaded, Stella-swilling, line-racking morons 'doing' Winstone's 'who's the daddy?' speech, usually before the fisticuffs kick off, many times? Monkey see, monkey do. That's the sober lesson of television's impact.
Then there's the director who launched Winstone's career, the Liverpudlian left-winger Alan Clarke, he must be spinning in his grave to hear the boy dissing welfare claimants and migrants. One thing's for sure, Ken Loach won't be calling him up.
"‘I wouldn’t mind if you could actually see something being done with all the money they take off in taxes. But I don’t see more police on the streets. I don’t see more schools or hospitals being built. What I see is no one on the streets and then a legal system that doesn’t support the coppers when things finally get to court. There are criminals getting off every day in this country.
‘I see people going into hospital ill and coming out worse with an MRSA bug they’ve picked up from an unclean ward. And I see so many people coming into this country that we can’t cope.
‘As far as knife crime is concerned, what’s wrong with getting tough? First offence, a warning. Second offence, five years and third offence life.
‘I’m happy for anyone from any other country to come here if they want to work, but I’m not happy to support everyone for nothing. I don’t want anyone taking the p***. If you’ve come into our country and you commit a crime, you should be deported. End of story.’ He shakes his head. ‘To me, this all makes sense.’"
He goes on to intimate that he supports the death sentence.
There's quite a lot of implication and one or two big ironies in this. Obviously I am not surprised that Winstone, an ex boxer, Essex born and bred son of a licensed cabbie turns out to be a working class conservative of the old school. What is surprising and amusing is that he must be one of the very few actors in Britain who holds these views or makes them known. If he was 30 years younger and looking to get on, saying the above mouthful - or anything half as strong - would destroy your career in a trice, the British Theatre being a closed shop of left wing platitudes ranging on a spectrum between the Redgraves' lunacy to a simple calculation that when 'social democracy' is in charge the money tap (funding) comes on with a veangeance. Winstone's fellow 'social realism' actors, Philip Davis and Tim Roth are champagne socialists of the common-or-garden variety. I wonder what they'll say about their old mate when they hear what they'll call a crypto-BNP diatribe?
Another irony to consider is that Winstone loathes the criminality, violence, drug and welfare addiction which has spread through the land. Yet he himself must implicated in this. Every thug I ever met had a working knowledge of Winstone's hard man oeuvre, most especially that repugnant, did-far-more-harm-than-good film Scum, which was a classic example of the exploitation movie dressed up as political filmmaking. Have I not heard boneheaded, Stella-swilling, line-racking morons 'doing' Winstone's 'who's the daddy?' speech, usually before the fisticuffs kick off, many times? Monkey see, monkey do. That's the sober lesson of television's impact.
Then there's the director who launched Winstone's career, the Liverpudlian left-winger Alan Clarke, he must be spinning in his grave to hear the boy dissing welfare claimants and migrants. One thing's for sure, Ken Loach won't be calling him up.
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