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. . .
Thursday, 22 January 2009
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.
Sunday, 30 November 2008
***Racing Interlude***
I was sorry to see that Sam Thomas fell off the favourite for the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury yesterday. It's happening every weekend. Champion Trainer Paul Nicholls must be starting to think the team's jinxed. Ruby Walsh injured and Thomas unseated every other ride. There was some incredible jumping at Newbury yesterday.
A lesson from the third world*
*Health warning: If you work for The Guardian, its style guide forbids you to use the experession 'the third world'.
How refreshing to see that India's home minister Shivraj Patil has taken moral responsibility for the Bombay** attacks. (The BBC has quotation marks around moral responsibility; doubtless they are seen as ironic apostrophes in the minds of news editorial.) When was the last time a British cabinet minister said and did that? About the time of the Falklands War, I would have said. Yes, there have been many resignations, but they have taken place after absurd levels of personal lobbying, media lobbying, prying, negotiation and outright blackmail.
** Yes, I called it Bombay. And so, apparently, do many of its citizens. The name was changed by Hindu nationalists. How funny to see British cultural marxism (that's PC in its correct terminology) rolls over and sops to a nationalist whim (the nation state being the Original Sin of man's relationship with topography and the prime reason everywhere must become EU sector no. 78978979; in other words nowhere). Why? Whatever a post-colonial country does is right. Handsome is as handsome does, as my old granny used to say. And when it is airbrushing its history of the mark of the imperial oppressor it is very right indeed. But many Indians still call it Bombay. My brother-in-law works there from time to time and confirmed this.
How refreshing to see that India's home minister Shivraj Patil has taken moral responsibility for the Bombay** attacks. (The BBC has quotation marks around moral responsibility; doubtless they are seen as ironic apostrophes in the minds of news editorial.) When was the last time a British cabinet minister said and did that? About the time of the Falklands War, I would have said. Yes, there have been many resignations, but they have taken place after absurd levels of personal lobbying, media lobbying, prying, negotiation and outright blackmail.
** Yes, I called it Bombay. And so, apparently, do many of its citizens. The name was changed by Hindu nationalists. How funny to see British cultural marxism (that's PC in its correct terminology) rolls over and sops to a nationalist whim (the nation state being the Original Sin of man's relationship with topography and the prime reason everywhere must become EU sector no. 78978979; in other words nowhere). Why? Whatever a post-colonial country does is right. Handsome is as handsome does, as my old granny used to say. And when it is airbrushing its history of the mark of the imperial oppressor it is very right indeed. But many Indians still call it Bombay. My brother-in-law works there from time to time and confirmed this.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008
Hostages and killings in India
I see Muslim militants have gone on a killing bender in India.
Just before I saw the news of the attack I was pondering what might happen if we did the sensible thing and left Afghanistan and Iraq. Would all this just stop or would there be new gripes? I've also thought for quite some time that holiday-making anywhere near anything that calls itself a mujahideen is bad news. I see this getting worse. I suppose in the end they'll be pulling people off the street here and decapitating them. I'll keep an eye out and see if Iqbal Sacranie or Inayat Bunglawala have much to say on this.
Just before I saw the news of the attack I was pondering what might happen if we did the sensible thing and left Afghanistan and Iraq. Would all this just stop or would there be new gripes? I've also thought for quite some time that holiday-making anywhere near anything that calls itself a mujahideen is bad news. I see this getting worse. I suppose in the end they'll be pulling people off the street here and decapitating them. I'll keep an eye out and see if Iqbal Sacranie or Inayat Bunglawala have much to say on this.
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