All Change for the Old Bailey! + ***Intermission*** Hambletonian

Well, matters have come to a pretty pass in Parliament. Although I am sad at the implications, I am very glad - exhilarated even - by the latest events. The Daily Mail' campaign to prosecute various MPs for obtaining money by deception is a delightful prospect, as is Carswell's proposed vote of no confidence in the disgraceful Speaker Martin. I don't want to get too excited but I feel this is a very important moment in British political history - the collapse of the three-party consensus/stronghold might be on the cards. I hope this happens. Politics - the political class - in this country has been smug, out-of-touch, rancid and intellectually corrupt for a very long time. To speak plainly: it needs a terrific kick up the arse and now it may get one. Certainly, come the next general election we will be seeing less of certain long-term irritants - and a pack of new ones. As bus conductors used to say: 'All change, please!'

However, we all need a break and since I've done nicely on the Turf these last two weeks (big price winners and doubles and some nice wins at Newmarket) I thought I'd post this picture, which is late great Stubbs:

'...his last great masterpiece - regrettably absent from the National's show - Hambletonian, Rubbing Down (1800). In 1799, Hambletonian had contested one of the most famous match races of the era, four miles two furlongs at Newmarket against a horse called Diamond.

A vast crowd arrived for the race which, in a sense, did not disappoint. Hambletonian led until the final half mile, then Diamond began to close him down; it was head-to-head all the way to the post, when a final push gave Hambletonian victory by half a neck; but he finished the race half dead, blood streaming from the whip and spurs.

The horse's owner, Sir Harry Vane-Tempest, proudly proclaimed that there would be a painted record by "Mr Stubbs" of this victory. Yet Stubbs rendered Hambletonian not as a conqueror but as a magnificently bewildered victim: looming unsteadily into the foreground, supported by his impassive but sympathetic grooms, the pitiful brush of his tail standing aloft from his exertions.

Vane-Tempest rejected the painting. Why, it is not certain, although it may be that Stubbs's depiction of Hambletonian was a bit too damn womanish for a full-blooded sporting gentleman. Later, the painting appeared at the Royal Academy but, again, it was not well received. As Andrew Graham-Dixon has said, the realism of Stubbs was "a form of moral vision": 200 years ago, and indeed today, his love for his subject can still probe the soul to its depths.'

The rest is here.

Who Called Stephen Fry?

Luvviedom is Labourland. You'll have to walk an awful long way in theatre and the arts to find anyone who - publicly at any rate - isn't smugly pink or who is willing to criticise socialism's drawbacks, blindspots and mistakes. This is beginning to change in a small way, but not significantly. So it was no surprise to find Stephen Fry, the acceptable face of intellectualism for the dumbdown generation, defending MPs defrauding the taxpayer and political class fiddling in general. After all, the man is a convicted fraudster himself.

Stephen Fry is the kind of champagne socialist Fabian who has lots of opinions about everyday life but not much recent experience (by which I mean experience of average financial reality)of it - largely because he's a millionaire (I applauded Keith Richards years back when he said: "I don't comment on public afairs because I don't live in the real world" Quite so). Fry was a leading player in the noisily left-wing alternative comedy movement of the 80s - most members of which are now far richer, more powerful and more smug than the largely working class comics they hated so much 25 years ago (Fry does get some honourable exception here - he defended Bernard Manning and others) and are now firmly part of the Blairish British Establishment.

I'm very curious as to how Fry came to be asked on Newsnight on Monday about what he thought of the MPs expenses scandal. A television presenter and comedian is suddenly a political pundit for a night. Why didn't they ask Roy "Chubby" Brown as well? I'm not one for conspiracy theories but if there isn't some hidden connection between the interview and Labour's communications office I will be very surprised. Roughly speking, the BBC is an extension of Labour's arts and social policy and is the product of four generations of middle class Marxists; a sort of permanent socialist cultural government by television, radio and the net. The chances of Fry's consultation being 'accidental' are remote. I have put in a FoI request to the BBC asking who made the editorial decision to interview him and why. So should you.

Fry' comments, surprise surprise, had just the effect the Government would have liked - all of a sudden facebook comments started popping up applauding Fry's 'common sense' towards fiddling MPs. I can just imagine in the hours before Fry spoke on tv someone quite high up in the Labour media team saying, 'This is bad. We can't lose the Facebook generation over this. Isn't there anyone who can help us minimize this?...'

The Cat's Out of the Bag

YES YES YES!

NB: They've been trying to gag this legally for some time. Notice how the Commons authorities are calling the Old Bill - not to have the cabinet questioned for fiddling but to try and root out the whistleblower.

Follows-ups to the Hitchens/Dylan conversation

To Guy Reid-Brown:

Music + Theatre have always had lights and smoke and mirrors etc. Your aesthetic metaphysics, as it were, are all very well but would invalidate most music played outside of churches - and inside them, come to think of it - since the year dot.
I think rock and roll is theatre mostly, not much different to Music Hall. True enough it has become unpleasant and I find most of it aesthetically disgusting these days. The funny thing about rock and roll is that both the left and the right got it wrong - the left thought it was going to bring down civilisation and so did the right. In the end it just went legit and businessmen took over, as they always do. True, it's played its part in the coarsening of society but all aspects of popular culture have coarsened for many reasons and I don't think you can blame Elvis and the Beatles for that. The best of rock and roll balanced, so to speak, on conservative culture. By which I mean the major and minor acts of the rock and roll years had grown up listening in to a varied but accomplished musical culture. They knew they had to be 'good players' who knew their chops. This means *standards*. That is what has changed. Punk and knob-twiddling killed that off. An excess of democracy and equality if you will. Add that kind of relativism in with a culture where sub-groups of youngsters listen to one sort of music and you have a recipe for stagnation and a brinkmanship culture of 'shock value'.

G Whitfleld wrote: You might as well say "Tottenham Hotspur will outlast Peugeot" or "Boeing will outlast The Angling Times" for all the sense your remark makes.

My remark makes perfect sense: the people who took against things like Dylan are unlikely to be remembered, outside of History departments. Dylan is still a household name and will continue to be for many years. Let me repeat, I am not a Dylan fan, just someone who recognises Peter Hitchens psychological tactic: attempting to invalidate anything that falls outside his rather narrow vision of what constitutes conservative culture. I mean here's a man who doubtless would have supported the banning of 'When I'm Cleaning Windows' had he been middle-aged in the 40s. I'm calling for good critical judgement. Hitchen's attack on Dylan was lazy.

Hitchens and Dylan

Peter Hitchens has been slagging off Bob Dylan, here.

I felt moved to reply:

I note that Hitchens makes no mention of Dylan’s Damascene conversion to Old Time Religion (something, along with a mid-60s motorcycle crash, they both have in common). It isn’t mentioned because it doesn’t sit well with Hitchens’ thesis that Dylan is some kind of lefty. Well, of course he isn’t and I don’t think he ever was particularly. Joan Baez noted that she could rarely get him involved with her political campaigns. Dylan’s soul and imagination were matters of first importance to him, rather than fighting international capital and the Patriarchy.
I would love to have a recording of Noel Coward singing Subterranean Homesick Blues; but I would ALSO love to have a recording of Dylan singing Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Both would be good records that showed off each artist’s talents.
Peter Hitchens, like his vastly more intellectually capable fellow conservative Roger Scruton, is at his very weakest when dealing with rock and roll. Both men obviously have a vestigial regard for the music of their youth (Scruton admits to a great liking for Jailhouse Rock and Hitchens admits he can’t get Tambourine Man out of his mind) but it appears to clash with so much they have settled on believing in middle age (though Scruton’s conservatism started at school with a war on kitsch) that they snatch at weak arguments to invalidate it, even when the ordinary people they purport to speak for absolutely love it.
Vast stretches of Dylan’s work are lazy and rather rubbishy; he is also hellishly overrated. But in answer to ‘is any of it any good’: yes: the good sections are very good indeed, and this is why it lives on; it is memorable, musical and it touches people somewhere deep.
Had George Orwell lived on another twenty years I feel he might have written a rather good essay on the Dylan phenomenon. Starting from the default Orwell position of refusing to be impressed by what the ‘fruit-juice drinkers’ were raving about, I feel he might well have concluded that though a fair bit was pretentious humbug with a bit of canting, there was also a lot that retained what he would probably have called ‘a queer power to move’. Orwell would also have noted that something unusually complex and literary had proved so popular and commanded so much public interest. Hitchens laughs at Shelter From the Storm but lyrically it could almost be one of Kipling’s more eccentric works. Shelter from the Storm does nothing for me, but you can’t help thinking Hitchens’ laughter at it is the slightly hollow, trying-to-convince-oneself-it-is-rubbish laughter that must have rung through suburbia in the 60s.
The electric guitar changed the world, possibly not for the better but it changed it. As an instrument it can have an elemental power, despite sounding, as Scruton notes, like a machine singing, if a machine could sing. Dylan at his best has that power, as do other rock and roll acts, and this is why conservatives don’t like it. It cannot be dismissed as easily as television or drugs and the best of it – and I feel the best of it is now long behind us – was out of official control and conservatives, like socialists, have a secret horror of anything out of official control. It is one of the hidden contradictions of conservatism that they like liberty until it offends them. I dare say Mill has all this covered enough to satisfy Hitchens, but he really ought to ask himself WHY people find more solace in this stuff than in the Book of Common Prayer or Wagner. Benedict XVI recently lamented young people’s interest in rock and roll it but admitted they got something spiritual from it – he just wanted them getting their spiritual jollies from his organisation.
As for self-pity, what’s wrong with a little self-pity? I think it’s been the subject and motivation of some major art and furthermore I fully expect a scientific study to prove that a moderate amount of self-pity each month reduces one’s risk of heart disease, stroke and suicide by ten per cent – oily fish for the soul.
Hitchens seems a hair’s breadth away from yelling ‘DEVIL’S MUSIC’ at the top of his voice, like some Alabaman church worthy in 1955 – or maybe yet another conversion is on its way – to one of the more prominent eastern religions…?
The charge that Dylan has never grown up is also pretty silly: Hitchens should study Dylan’s last few albums, which have been refreshingly mature, lyrically and musically. What Hitchens is doing is a cheap bit of op-ed – use Dylan’s new album as a way of playing a well-worn rhetorical record one more time: 60s people never grew up. (Most people don’t grow up now because they literally cannot afford to – I would like to hear more from Hitchens on this subject)
I think Dylan will still be played in 100 years time. Of course, England then will be an Islamo-Rainbow-Pluralist state with climate change and nuclear fall-out problems, so Shelter from the Storm will be quite apposite for those times. I feel confident Dylan will outlast Hitchens – as he has outlasted Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse and Gerald Nabarro.

Who Will Unloose this Gordian Knot?

Two bits of news from the Gordian Knot (as I am now pleased to call this government and its travails) made me titter yesterday. One, Gordon has now enlisted his main sycophant, Balls, and Peter Mandelson to run a weekly strategy meeting to 'plan the government's response to future events'. Two, the Times reported that some Westminster insiders were saying that Hazel Blears was preparing for a leadership bid.

Blears has already been warned off by whoever is doing Gordon's enforcing work since McBride left the stage, but I wouldn't rule anything out. The whips and the spin doctors may have got everyone singing from the same hymn sheet for the month leading up to the council and EU elections, but once Labour has been savaged in them then open fighting will break out again and next time it won't go away so easily.

And to paraphrase Shakespeare, who will unloose this gordian knot? Brown's bunker meetings with Balls and Mandelson - identify the next shitstorm and think of mollifying cant upfront that can be disseminated to the front bench liabilities and the telly - will be funny. Balls will be supporting his mate and urging Gordon leftwards into more unaffordable divorced-from-reality ideas like electric car subsidies and moonshine rhetoric about education excellence and climate change; Mandelson will talk of nothing but media manipulation, the seminal fluid of modern politics. Mandy will have seen an opportunity here because if he knows nothing else he knows Brown is finished and was always box office poison anyway. That's why Mandy backed Blair all those years ago and pricked Brown off in the first place. Sooner or later Mandy will have to tell Gordon he's finished and if he doesn't come off the pool table he'll take the whole Labour Party over the cliff with him. Perhaps he will purr in Gordon's ear while massaging those heaving, stressed shoulders: '...come now, Gordon. Resign. You can't kill the party over this.' Mandy's voice will become sly. 'Think of...Keir Hardy'. This will cause the most monumental tantrum from Brown and Brown won't budge. Nothing in this universe will get him to budge but losing a general election. Once Brown's had his tantrum and hates Mandelson once again what will happen? Mandy goes for the leadership. As far as my odds compiling goes I'm putting Mandelson in as the favourite to do the Brutus and put himself up for the job. It's what he wants and he wants it bad. Watch that man.

Saeva Indignatio

I just want to drop back to the front page of The Times on Wednesday. The story concerned the three pals of Mohammad Sidique Khan - Sadeer Saleem, Waheed Ali and Mohammed Shakil - who were cleared of being part of his terrorist cell (Ali and Shakil have subsequently been imprisoned for attending a terrorist training camp). Security forces admitted that the two trials - cost: 100 million - were 'the last roll of the dice' to convict these men of helping Khan.
This par is worth remembering:

Detectives are certain that the bombers received help from within the Muslim community in Beeston, Leeds, which, they say, is reluctant to co-operate with police. Sources said that potential witnesses had been “actively dissuaded” from helping police. As many as ten sets of unidentified fingerprints were found in bomb factories used by Khan, 30, and the three other men who killed themselves in the attacks on three Tube trains and a London bus on July 7, 2005.

No justice for the victims (plenty of moolah for lawyers, though). That's becoming a regular feature of British life under Labour. But it isn't just the ancien regime political class at fault (though it probably would be quite easy to trace all sorts of official mistakes back to fears of contravening the leftist protocols which have been building up in English life for years), the police, as usual, have made their customary howlers too.
Consider:

A request from MI5 to West Yorkshire Police for information on the men from Beeston was never followed up. Scotland Yard also failed to pass the surveillance pictures to the FBI to show to Mohammed Babar, an al-Qaeda supergrass who organised a terror training camp in Pakistan attended by Khan.

And:

Even though the mobile telephone number of Khan had already appeared during an investigation into Q, a man from Luton who was using young British men to courier money to al-Qaeda in Pakistan, no further action was taken against him.

And:

If the police or MI5 had not dismissed Khan as a peripheral figure they might have followed him and Tanweer to Pakistan in the following December. It was there that the pair received the orders from the al-Qaeda leadership to attack London.

At the same camp was Muktar Said Ibrahim, the leader of the cell that attempted an attack in London on July 21. Members of another British terror cell, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, were also present.

Perhaps the security services would also have made the link to Mohammed Hamid, who styled himself Osama bin London. Throughout 2004 he organised jihad training camps in Britain to radicalise young men and send them to fight in Afghanistan and East Africa. Among those whom he trained were Ibrahim and the other three men in the 21/7 gang, Yassin Omar, Hussain Osman and Ramzi Mohammed.

Perhaps they would also have noticed how the hair of Khan and his fellow bombers was bleached by the explosives being made at their two bomb factories, which led to neighbours complaining about the smell.

A senior anti-terrorism officer insisted that the decision not to arrest the July 7 bombers before the attack was down to human judgment and a lack of resources, and had been the right decision at the time.

As it has become fashionable to say: yeah, right. The authorities ballsed this up and I hope that the victims' relatives pursue the police and this incompetent, useless Government over it.

Further noted items: Although Sadeer Saleem complained after his acquittal that he would always be connected with the bombs, he seemed to have forgotten he was an 'associate of the bombers and shared their beliefs', as John McDowall, head of Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard said. Even though I have come to expect jaw-dropping statements from fundamentalist Islamic fascists, this took the biscuit. Add to that this:

In a letter to his future wife, Mr Saleem hoped that they would have many children who could kill the “filthy kafir” (non-Muslims).

Now let's have a look at the situation in Beeston:

Detectives remain convinced that other people were involved in the preparation for the attacks on July 7.

The fingerprints of up to ten unidentified suspects were discovered at the bomb factories. They believe that accomplices are being shielded by the close-knit Muslim community in Beeston and said that they were frustrated by the lack of co-operation from residents.

Here I must balm my saeva indignatio with a little sarcasm: how vibrant and diverse that community must be! Doesn't it make you feel warm and fuzzy towards multiculturalism?* Doesn't it make you chest-swellingly proud of the wisdom and moral rectitude of the 60s and 70s leftist ideologues who worked sedulously to rid us of the guilt of Empire by building foreign enclaves all round Britain and stamping on English culture wherever they could? They were building a better world, don't ya know? And don't you dare complain, otherwise they'll call you Daily Mail.

Then there is the matter of the bookshop in Beeston of which Sidique Khan was a trustee. The report on this little hive of fascism and hatred is worth reading closely. Highlights:

Every room breathed the Salafi jihadist creed. It was shouted by the radical websites, argued in the literature and proclaimed in the store’s collection of graphic videos and DVDs. That it was every Muslim’s duty to wage jihad was as unquestionable as the certainty that martyrdom was an honour to be sought. The group dynamic, the hiking and climbing trips, potholing and white-water rafting, tightened the bonds.

and:

And all the while, well-intentioned public bodies were throwing money at the Iqra gang, whose projects included a school, a youth access venue and a gym. Grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds were made by the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward and the local council, churches and charities.

And there it is. Modern, we-know-best-you-don't, social democracy at work: Cowardice, the cultural cringe and national self-loathing worked out on a national scale on the taxpayer's nickel with deadly results. When you think that a white fascist, Nick Griffin, only had to open his mouth about Islam in the back room of a pub in Yorkshire to be arrested on the personal order of David Blunkett (see Rod Liddle passim in the Spectator), it is brought home to you once again that for a very long time the only fascist a lefty could see was a white fascist. Brown ones were, presumably, victims of poverty and racism.
Now, look at the testimony of Martin Gilbertson, an IT consultant who worked at the bookshop for two years and innocently helped the group develop secure computer systems. Get this:

He left in 2004 and says that he tried to warn the police of the danger brewing, but was not interviewed by counter-terrorism detectives until 52 innocent people had been murdered in London. Mr Gilbertson told The Times that he had become sickened by the febrile atmosphere and the “racist rhetoric” about filthy kafirs (unbelievers), Jews and America and Britain.

He knows how an apparently humanitarian anti-war message can mutate into a jihadist call to arms because he unwittingly helped Iqra to produce propaganda videos for mass distribution at Stop the War marches.

Gilbertson 'tried to warn the police but wasn't interviewed until afterwards'. If Gilbertson being brushed off has nothing to do with diversity/'sensitivity' protocols and their roots in the moral relativism of the Left, I'll eat my hat. Better we risk mass slaughter than upset anyone.

I think I'll leave it there. As my friend Mark Brentano has taken to saying during the years we've been on terrorist alert: walk safely.



*Because of mass-ignorance these days - nowhere more so than in the officially educated - I feel duty-bound to add a footnote explaining that my hostility to multiculturalism is a hostility to the obstinate socialist policy of multiculturalism, rather than a hostility to a multiracial aspect to society. You have to explain everything these days, and very patiently.

Iraq & Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

First things first: I am sorry I haven't posted recently. I've been rather busy on both work and leisure fronts but also taking some time to digest the McBride scandal and the budget ramifications.

Correct me if I'm wrong but in today's media coverage of the end of the British Army's combat mission in Iraq there seems a distinct lack of analysis into the machinations which took them there in the first place. Of course, I support and admire the soldiers who had to do that horrendous job and they deserve a good showing in the media. But today there was precious little - if anything - about our last Prime Minister, the media and the intelligence services and how they coalesced to shore up a pack of lies and distortions in order to invade Iraq. It was a disgraceful episode in modern British history and the people involved should be held up for opprobrium. The only trouble is that the media - apart from the Guardian, the Daily Mirror and a few pockets at the BBC (remember, that was when the Blair-sycophant Andrew Marr was head of political reporting) - collaborated in deceiving the public by playing up Saddam's 'threat' and minimising important dissenting voices, such as weapons inspectors and reiterating and expanding on Tony Blair's falsehood-packed speeches in the run up to war. Some few journalists have apologised for this; most haven't. Perhaps that explains the strange and deafening silence.

In that odd period leading up to the outbreak of war I was pro-invasion, mainly because I had begun to see that, many honourable exceptions aside, a large section of the organised anti-war brigade was composed of pious and under-informed students; Marxists who, as the far-Left always do, felt no ideological objection to jumping into bed with the new villains on the block, extreme-right-wing Islamic extremists and their pals who formed the third part of the stop the war crowd. Add to them the usual ragbag of conspiracy theorists, hippies, crypto-Jew-haters and tin foil hatters that still constitute the 'alternative scene' today. There were high-profile members of this crowd. Ian McKellen was in the Guardian in Jan 2003, I remember (I have a flashbulb memory of the moment - London was on high-terrorist alert and I was on the Tube going to the opening of a play I'd written), saying that he'd have appeased Adolf Hitler, 'because there's always got to be a better way than a war'.

So I heaped scorn on that lot. However, there was a one problem: the antis were correct on one central point - the case for war was false, a fabrication of Saddam Hussein's WMD capability. But Blair's new Labour had most of the press and tv in its pocket in those days and he got his war, a war most British people didn't want. That pack of lies got a lot of people killed and though I don't want to sound like George Galloway, I believe without doubt that Blair and Alistair Campbell should have ended up in court over the affair.

The insult added to the injury of this episode was that the government that railroaded the Army into the war then set about stabbing it in the back by consistently failing it logistically, a situation that continues to this day and which has caused the death of a lot of British soldiers one way and another (See Brown's decision yesterday to send only half the troops asked for in Afghanistan). An army officer of my acquaintance was very candid to me about Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007: "When it started we were up for it - we were bored. But then they never backed us up properly and now we've had enough. The Ministry of Defence is a disgrace."
Read this Standpoint article by a Min. of Def. mole for a snapshot of that Ministry in action.

It is only the Army that comes out of this with any honour. Blair's now earning 8,000 dollars a minute on the lecture circuit and telling the Pope how to run his organisation.

I'll close with a classic Anthony Charles Lynton Blair quote from around the time of the Gilligan scandal:

"I only know what I believe."

Just the sort of thing you'd expect a criminal to say.

Posters for my New Political Movement - more details to follow

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.

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.

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.

*I have always respected the Queen; as a teen Marxist I imagined what a revolution would be like – and decided that the Queen and “Charlie” would, if I was in charge, be allowed to live in exile, possibly training racehorses on the Isle of Wight),

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.

'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.

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.

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. . .

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.