Tweeting Tottenham

What an eventful day. Whilst David Cameron is away, and George Osborne is on Holiday in California (coincidentally, the same week that the US credit rating is downgraded…. that’ll teach them, for letting him into the Country), from my tiny screen in an old miners cottage in Victoria, Australia, I have followed minute by minute coverage of the Tottenham riots. Twitter is a great tool. It has the power to both inform, and be woefully incorrect. The riots have been the top trend today. So I followed along on Twitter. More specifically, following the right winged reaction to the riots in Tottenham.

The causes remain unclear. All I know is that a man was shot and killed by police, which led to community outcry over the abuse of power by the Met. The Met is saying that their officer was shot at first, and fired back, shooting a gangster who was armed. In that case, I have no sympathy for the man. If you fire at the police, then don’t express shock when you’re fired on. It is hardly a case of police injustice and brutality, if the man had shot at police. That actually is about as much as anyone knows. Twitter is alive with people telling me about their “reliable witness“. As if i’m supposed to just accept the reliability of a supposed witness. If it is true that the guy shot first, the fact that he even carried a gun, suggests he wasn’t exactly an innocent victim of police brutality. The problem is though, many people claim he wasn’t armed and didn’t fire. Given the Met’s recent record, one can hardly trust their statements. I am not entirely sure who to believe, and think the adage of “innocent until proven guilty” applies to both the Met and the dead man on this one. No one knows the truth other than the police officer involved.

The riots seemed to start with a protest against police brutality, and just turned into a mass loot. The community of Tottenham this morning will be in ruins. The riot will have caused more pain to the innocent people of the city, than anyone else. It cannot particularly be defended.

The Right Winged outcry was the most outrageous of the comments sweeping Twitter, shortly followed by Sky News journalists begging the public for information, given their own apparent incompetence.
Here are some of my favourites:

- The opportunistic attacks on multiculturalism are a little unnerving. The situation in Tottenham is not a multicultural issue. Muslims are not fighting Christians on a daily basis across the Country. People live quite happily 99/9% of the time, side by side. Kids play with each other in schools regardless of cultural background. Multiculturalism has absolutely worked. On the whole, people live together in harmony. That is a testament to the brilliance of multiculturalism. I can sit discussing football with Sikh, Muslim and Jewish friends without it becoming a full scale riot.

The people tweeting comments like those above, tend to conveniently ignore the 99.9% of the time when absolutely nothing is happening in the way of destructive race relations, and focus on the 0.01%. The Tottenham riots, are not a part of that 0.01%.The used it as a chance to express their vicious Nationalistic ideology, their fascist bullshit. And when brought up on it, they say the following:

- I then asked this idiot to elaborate on the correlation between Marx’s Das Capital, and the Tottenham rioters. He responded with this:

So far, right winged tweeters have blamed black people, jewish people, Chinese people (One had wondered why a Chinese takeaway hadn’t been looted and thought it convenient), people on benefits, socialists, students and anyone with slightly darker skin. Amazing.

The entire thing could have been avoided, had someone shone the Bat Boris signal. Only Boris could have stopped the madness, from his Boris Bike.

The curse of Letwin

The Conservative Government REALLY need an Alastair Campbell. Desperately. They attempted to secure a Campbell figure to head their PR team, with the [sarcarm] brilliantly managed and executed appointment of Andy Coulson.[/sarcasm] It would take a top PR team most of the day, every day, to ensure Oliver Letwin, the Minister of State for Policy, keeps his grotesque mouth closed whenever someone from the press is around, because he betrays the idea that the Tories have change, or modernised, since, well, around the 19th Century. Letwin is a left over from a group of Etonians who clearly and misguidedly believe they have a right to rule by way of their heritage. It is an arrogance that the Cameron Government will never shake, because they are the living embodiment of that privileged arrogance. They have disastrously inter-breeded this mentality with a Thatcherite economic mentality that is as dangerous as it is out-dated. His disastrous face, screams contempt for anyone who isn’t Oliver Letwin. He is a PR disaster. It is one of the many reasons (another being massive incompetence and dishonesty – which we’ll come to later) that he was overlooked when the Tories were searching for a leader. Hell, they even chose Iain Duncan Smith, does anyone remember him?

With a face looking as if someone had created him out of the concept of pompous twat, Oliver Letwin has once more allowed the Conservative Party mask it currently shrouds itself in, to fall, revealing a Thatcherite brigade just as frightening and dangerous as their 1980s counterparts.

Letwin had told a consultancy firm, that his proposals for public sector reform should instill:

“some real discipline and some fear”

He said this, because he believes the productivity of the public sector has failed. It is a strange comment and angle to take, given that the private sector has spent the past four years creating sovereign debt crises’ everywhere it goes. Productivity is very difficult to measure in the public sector, because the public sector is not about creating anything. Investment in the public sector has seen waiting lists for operations down year on year since the last Tory administration. Teaching standards are also up. The public sector does not “make” things. So talk of productivity in comparison to the private sector, is futile and misleading. It strikes me as wholly patronising that a man such as Oliver Letwin has the balls to lecture public sector workers – teachers, doctors, nurses, firemen – on what “real discipline” is. They are not children. They also did not claim public money for ludicrous items like mortgage interest payments. Also, the public sector hasn’t spent twenty five years creating a system of easy credit to boost the excessive pay of CEOs and Managing Directors, whilst the average worker saw overall increase in wages? And then when the company or bank failed miserably, the “fear” was THAT pertinent that the CEOs are given massive pay offs and lovely big bonuses. All this, whilst the public sector is told constantly, and has been told constantly, from Thatcher, to Major, to Blair, to Brown and now to Cameron, that it is not good enough, that it must be modelled on a failing private sector built on squeezing productivity out through long hours, a mountain of stress, and all for less pay whilst the big boss is compensated for his little contribution to overall productivity with huge salary and bonuses; and that their jobs are always on the line. A private sector model should be as far away from inflicting misery on the public sector, as possible.

It isn’t the first time Letwin has revealed his hostility to those less fortunate. Earlier this year, he surprised and disgusted the most posh of Tories, Boris Johnson, by telling Johnson:

“We don’t want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays.”

- At least he recognises that the North suffered horrifically with the gutting of jobs and thus wealth during the Thatcher years. Though he seems to have suggested that it is perfectly okay for the wealthy Southerners to pay for expensive holidays and that holidaying abroad should be based on wealth. I expect he thought he was at home with Boris, and could reveal his true feelings, but sometimes posh Tory twats seriously misjudge the situation, and regret the fact that their well crafted public self has been set on fire by their real self. This seems to happen a lot with Letwin. And now on to why I referred to his as a hypocrite:

In 2005 Letwin used the phrase “Wealth Distribution” in a positive light! I know! I was shocked too when I first read it. A Tory, interested and supportive of wealth distribution? Surely not! Well, actually, not. 2005 was the year Cameron was trying to pose as being a “progressive conservative“, deeply contradictory term yet one he managed seemingly to work. Letwin clearly took on that contradictory term, by trying to fill out a left wing term with right winged substance in the hope that no one would scratch below the service. He said:

…….not by trying to do down those with most but by enabling those who have least to share an increasing part of an enlarging cake.

- In practice what this means is, a desire to scrap the top rate of tax for the richest, a desire to lower the Corporation tax rate to the lowest recorded level, a desire to allow companies like Vodaphone a get out of jail free card by writing off their tax debt, whilst at the same time cutting allowance for the disabled, the elderly, according to a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Letwin must be talking about the 16000 less police Britain will have after this Parliament; according to the leaks that the Guardian currently has; the Tory’s new director of policy Steve Hilton, suggesting abolishing maternity leave whilst also abolishing ALL consumer rights legislation. Just to reiterate….. this man, is the Nation’s DIRECTOR OF POLICY. Now i’m not saying these idiotic and deeply right winged ideas of Hilton’s are likely to become a reality. To suggest so would put me on the same wavelength as the manic Right Wingers who would constantly suggest that New Labour were about to ban England shirts and change the name of Christmas, or ban you from being white. Letwin must believe Hilton’s ideas will “enable” those with the least to a share of an increasingly large cake. Tories consider Hilton a genius…… not just because of his ideas (which aren’t in any sense a spark of genius) but also because he doesn’t wear shoes in Downing Street and they consider this “wacky”. In their defence, it is as wacky as most Tories are likely to see, given that they are born wearing business suits, slick back hair, and spend the next twenty years trying to hide the fact that their schooling experience is a plethora of homoeroticism cunningly disguised as a love of “Rugger“. It can’t have been too many years ago when gay and black people were described by most Tories as “wacky“. Hilton, like Letwin, is politically dangerous.

The reason why Letwin is hypocritical in his desire to do away with the idea that public money can actually do good, is because he used public money to claim over £80,000 for his Cottage in Somerset, in order to heat the place, empty the septic tank, £1000 in mortgage interest and most beautifully of all…… over £2000 to repair a leaking pipe underneath his tennis court. So much for “real discipline and fear“.

Either the Tory Party spend some time searching and investing in a decent PR figure, or they sew Oliver Letwin’s mouth closed, he is a liability to the Conservatives, and a liability to humanity.

As above; So below

I have argued in the past that the list of ten rules handed from God to Moses, in the Abrahamic traditions are rather oddly thought out rules, if not a little lazy. Exodus shows that the first few laws from the Ten Commandments are just those of a jealous God asserting his authority. A bit like a Boss telling you you must remain loyal to him at all times. The next few are obvious. Do not kill. Given that Homosapien had – against all odds – out lasted Homoerectus, Homoneanderthalensis and a whole host of other lines in the Homo genus, it is a bit patronising to think that we didn’t realise we shouln’t kill each other, for the few million years prior to God deciding to intervene. And to my surprise, God doesn’t ask us not to rape, or not to molest children, in his most important set of rules to date, instead he wastes one of his rules telling us not to take his name in vain. It is a disturbingly weak and ill-thought out set of rules from his Holiness.

That being said, the common argument from Christians in the West is that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments. That the genius of the Old Testament is that the Decalogue is still relevant today, because all Western law is derived from it. The problem is, if one has even a slight grasp of human history, one finds a glaring weakness in this argument; The Ten Commandments were not original to Moses.

According to Saint Jerome, Moses was born around 1592 BC. So that would put the Christianity perspective on the time of the handing down of the Ten Commandments to around 1540BC maybe? Anyway, that’s irrelevant, because around 3200BC there existed a tribe of people who lived in Egypt called the Kemet. They seem to have been a civilisation of black Africans who lived a rather advanced existence, just slightly before the Early Dynastic period, and so predating Pharoah Narmer who is identified as the man responsible for uniting the different tribes of Egypt, thus becoming known as the first Pharoah of Egypt. The unified Egypt incorporated ideas and beliefs from the tribes that it unified, one of which was the Kemet concept of “Ma’at“. Ma’at was the principle used as a guide on law, morality, truth, and spirituality that was needed to help unify Egypt. The principle was depicted as a Goddess – also called Ma’at – who was said to be in control of the stars, the sky, law, and men. The deified the concept of Ma’at. She was essentially the main God. The Kemet people could therefore be described as a Monotheistic people. The guiding principles of Ma’at were set out in what is known as the 42 Declarations of Purity. They are as follows:

I have not committed sin.
I have not committed robbery with violence.
I have not stolen.
I have not slain men and women.
I have not stolen grain.
I have not purloined offerings.
I have not stolen the property of the god.
I have not uttered lies.
I have not carried away food.
I have not uttered curses.
I have not committed adultery, I have not lain with men.
I have made none to weep.
I have not eaten the heart [i.e I have not grieved uselessly, or felt remorse].
I have not attacked any man.
I am not a man of deceit.
I have not stolen cultivated land.
I have not been an eavesdropper.
I have slandered [no man].
I have not been angry without just cause.
I have not debauched the wife of any man.
I have not debauched the wife of [any] man. (repeats the previous affirmation but addressed to a different god)
I have not polluted myself.
I have terrorised none.
I have not transgressed [the Law].
I have not been wroth.
I have not shut my ears to the words of truth.
I have not blasphemed.
I am not a man of violence.
I am not a stirrer up of strife (or a disturber of the peace).
I have not acted (or judged) with undue haste.
I have not pried into matters.
I have not multiplied my words in speaking.
I have not polluted the water or the land.
I have not worked witchcraft against the King (or blasphemed against the King).
I have never stopped [the flow of] water.
I have never raised my voice (spoken arrogantly, or in anger).
I have not cursed (or blasphemed) God.
I have not acted with arrogance.
I have not stolen the bread of the gods.
I have not carried away the khenfu cakes from the Spirits of the dead.
I have not snatched away the bread of the child, nor treated with contempt the god of my city.
I have not slain the cattle belonging to the god.

- They are prefixed with either “I have not” or “I am not” in their original form, because the Kemet people believed when you died you would be judged, and you must be able to recite all 42 of the above. They were often scribed onto tombs of the dead. The 42 differ slightly in the way they are worded and the order in which they are applied from tomb to tomb depending on how each individual related their life to Ma’at, but they are essentially the same.

It is a far more elaborate list, with many declarations that should most definitely appeal today, much more so than the 10 Commandments. For example, we do not need “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain“, though we would absolutely have benefited from “I have not polluted the water or the land“.

The 42 Declarations of Purity contain eight of the ten commandments. They were known all over Egypt at the time of Moses, because they were the guiding principles of the entire State. The picture at the top of this blog entry shows a scene from the Book of the Dead, depicting a human heart weighed against the feather of truth and justice which is from the hat of the Goddess Ma’at. Egyptians believed they were to be judged against their conformity to Ma’at. Moses and his people supposedly came out of Egypt, they had lived their lives in Egypt, they would have been in constant contact with those principles. It is therefore unwise to suppose, based on Faith alone, that Moses received these laws from God, rather than reworking and shortening the original list of laws that would have governed his life up until that point.

The Kemetic people believed that the heavens and Earth were governed by the same principle (Ma’at) and you are likely to see “As above; So below” written on Kemetic tombs from the Predynastic period. The term refers to a reflection of the material World within the spiritual World; if one follows the Ma’at principles, one will lead a positive life both materially and spiritually. Similarly the Ten Commandments were expressed as both a spiritual and material way of life. It would appear however, that the author/s of the Old Testament, and Exodus in particular chose among their Ten commandments, the most possessive and power hungry laws to force their people to abide by, for reasons I presume can only be for the fact that fear, and particularly fear of the unknown – God – is the key ingredient for power.

So it would appear that the basis of our civilisation is not the Ten Commandments set out in Exodus (historians are pretty unanimous in their insistence that the Book of Exodus is entirely historically inaccurate). We are living by the Kemet principles; a small tribe in North East Africa, on the Nile Valley, 3100 years ago.

Phone Hacking, The BBC, Left Wing Conspiracies and Boris!

There are a lot of blogs and articles surrounding the staggering resignations, deaths, arrests and revelations surrounding the Met and its Press Office run almost entirely by ex-News Corp journalists and their incompetent handling of two investigations; the utterly absurd judgement and ignorance of the Prime Minister; the shameful opportunism of Ed Milliband; with regard to the News Corp hacking issue. There are hundreds of articles and new revelations popping up every day. So I wanted to a somewhat different angle to this, and run down a tangent.

Though first, it seems that the Prime Minister is on the very brink of being dragged underwater and his Premiership drowned (I say that, with a lasting smirk on my face) as it emerged that not only was Coulson brought into Tory Party HQ, but also Ex-News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis, who is one of the people who have been arrested so far, was an adviser to Coulson after Coulson began work for the Tories. This is particularly toxic for Number 10, because Wallis has already brought down Met Chief Sir Paul Steve Stephenson and Deputy Met Chief John Yates after it was revealed that the Met had employed Wallis as a PR consultant. This will be worth following, because even Tory blogger Iain Dale makes the extraordinary suggestion that Cameron could be brought down by this scandal. This is echoed with Tory blogger Mark Thompson offering up Theresa May as a replacement for Cameron, after betting agencies were taking 6-1 bets on Cameron being brought down, down from 100-1 two weeks ago.

Anyway. Onto the main point.

At Prime Minister’s questions last week, Tory MP for Beverley and Holderness, Graham Stuart asked the Prime Minister if the police would also be investigating what he refers to as a “criminal conspiracy” at the heart of the previous Labour Government and the Murdoch Empire, into the desire to undermine Tory Peer Lord Ashcroft in the run up to the General Election.

I think it necessary to evaluate the character of Graham Stuart MP directly, as to discern whether his little outburst is worthy of our attention.

When Graham Stuart was at Cambridge, he was the Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association. His term also coincided with a scandal, in which voting for his election was seen as suspicious and irregularities in the outcome meant that eight of his colleagues in the CUCA resigned in protest. Eight!

As well as having a face you just want to slap, and being a little bit untrustworthy at election time, he also managed to acquire the services of the repair men to resurface his private road leading up to his luxury mansion, at a usual cost of £2,500….. for free. There are potholes on the public roads around the town that he lives, but instead the resurfacing was used for his private estate.

But even if he had to pay for the road (which he didn’t), he would be able to, with the money he saves on his fortune, through his expense claims, which he thinks are perfectly legitimate. According to his forms, that I have spent the past couple hours of my apparently boring life reading through, he claimed half the electricity bill, half the rent on the flat which comes to £1400 a month, half the council tax, food, internet, phone, mobile phone, digital camera, tripod, an Egyptian cotton satin sheet worth £40, £240 on bed linen from John Lewis which he says represented “good value for money“, four £86 pillow cases, £8,500 on food between 2005-2009, he claimed £85 from a company called “Freestye Design” whom design company logos. I wondered why he’d be using a company like that. When his expenses were released, he said:

“if anyone has any questions or queries about individual claims they are more than welcome to email me or contact my office and I will do my best to answer them.”

So that’s exactly what I did.
He didn’t reply.

So, given that this man has a bit of a dodgy typical Tory character, one has to examine his question. The point he was trying to raise, was that Tom Baldwin, Head of communications for Ed Miliband, had obtained information about the Tory Lord’s tax affairs illegally. It’s an odd charge to make, given that no one is likely to feel all that sympathetic toward a Lord, worth over £1bn at the heart of a Government (who, indeed, is the largest donor to the Tory government) whose mantra is “save save save!!” Money must be saved everywhere, disabled people must lose out, children must lose out, everyone who isn’t rich must lose out…….. except for Lord Ashcroft, who isn’t contributing to the save save save mantra, because the “illegally obtained information” showed that he is classified as a non-dom, which means he doesn’t pay any UK tax on his fortune made abroad. Yet, he is part of a legislature, that insists the UK is on the “brink of bankruptcy“. He is hardly likely to foster the sympathy of a public, in the same way that the hacking of Millie Dowler’s phone gained. The Tories are actively trying to divert attention away from themselves, because not only did David Cameron appoint Andy Coulson (they clearly want, and desperately need an Alistair Campbell), but Boris Johnson, the Tory Mayor of London referred to the hacking scandal last year, as a Left Wing conspiracy. Whenever a Right Winger uses the term “left wing conspiracy” to refer to something they do not like (it happens alot in America, who, any time a gay guy says he wishes to get married to the love of his life, some lunatic Republican insists it’s all part of the “gay agenda“), I often want to bang my face against a wall and weep for the sanity of that particular section of humanity. Take Janet Daley writing in the Telegraph yesterday:

…..that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre.

Firstly, she does what most right wingers do, and suggests the BBC has a horrid left wing bias. She will no doubt point to some illogical evidence to back up her point, whilst ignoring all evidence to the contrary. The BBC, to me, has no real bias. It is almost impossible for a media organisation to be objective when objectivity itself is impossible with regard to politics. For example, whilst Daley will claim that Euroscepticism doesn’t get treated as a legitimate political view on the BBC, it is equally as important to point out (which she doesn’t) that the BBC personality who presents all their Westminster shows, is Andrew Neil, a man who was in the Conservative Club at the University of Glasgow, was a Conservative Party Research Assistant, and stood side by side with his former boss; Rupert Murdoch at the launch of Sky in the 1980s, before becoming a writer for the Daily Mail. It is almost impossible to become more right winged, before morphing into Margaret Thatcher. And he presents all of the BBCs Westminster coverage. The Daily Politics, sees Andrew Neil flanked by Labour MP for Hackney, Diane Abbott (never been a minister, or taken particularly seriously in politics) and Michael Portillo, a former Tory Defence Secretary, Shadow Chancellor, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Secretary of State for Employment, and potential leadership candidate. The balance is tipped very much in the direction of the Right on this one.
The political editor at the BBC is Nick Robinson. One quick google search shows that Robinson, during his time at Oxford, was not just a member, but President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. He was National Chairman of the Young Conservatives. Before the 2010 election he compared Cameron to Disraeli. After the election when the coalition agreements were being debated and drawn up, he referred to a Lib/Lab coalition as a “Coalition of losers“. And contrary to the views of the those of us on the Left, on his blog Robinson says of Cameron:

David Cameron prides himself on being bold when big moments occur – challenging for the Tory leadership in 2005, calling on Gordon Brown to have a snap election in 2007 and that “big, bold and generous” offer to form the Coalition in 2010.

What Robinson has done there, has metaphorically kissed and caressed a photo of David Cameron.

Daley is so blissfully ignorant to the fact that the past two years has seen the political discourse dominated by the desire to see deep public sector cuts rather than tax hikes for the wealthy; it has seen the emergence of the desire to revert back to the Capitalism that indeed failed and brought the World crashing down with it from both Labour and the Tories, and it has seen the discourse in the media and from the mouths of politicians everywhere throw spear after vicious spear at the hearts of anyone on benefits or in a Union. The NHS has been attacked, the Welfare state has been attacked, Universities have been attacked, the public purse has been attacked, and yet the very people who caused the mess in the first place have been given vast pensions and allowed to go free. A Guardian poll yesterday showed the Tories ahead of Labour, which all suggests that the public discourse and its limits are very firmly in the court of the Right Wing. A left wing discourse would, above all, launch a sustained attack on the very need for public sector cuts in the first place, it would be calling for a complete reinvention of the economic system as opposed to ignoring the inherent flaws which WILL lead to another crash, it would be unequivocally supportive of the Unions and public sector workers rather than painting them as out of touch, greedy, and overpaid, it would be constantly presenting the information surrounding Corporate tax avoidance and the obscenely high cost to the taxpayer rather than attacking the single mum who claims a few quid more than she perhaps should. As a left winger, it is an insult to hear the discourse of the political landscape in this country referred to as left wing. But that is the superb nature of right winged discourse, unless we’re throwing anyone with an Asian complexion out of the country, privatising the NHS, and shooting the families of Union leaders in the face, they will insist the Country is too left wing. Boris Johnson did that when he claimed the coverage of Phone hacking was all part of a left wing conspiracy. The same Boris Johnson who will now, in his short term as Mayor of London, see the arrival of the third Met Commissioner on his watch. Not a great record. So that’s Boris, Cameron, The Met, Lord Ashcroft (who we are now supposed to feel sympathetic toward) and Graham Stuart MP, who have not had the greatest of records pertaining to the phone hacking scandal.

Back to Ashcroft. In 2005, he commissioned two polls by YouGov and Populus. The polls were huge, and were set up to help the Tories target marginal seats, therefore it is most certainly in the public interest. He commissioned them and paid for them through his company which is based in Belize, which means he didn’t pay any VAT on them. The Guardian estimated that he owed £40,000 in unpaid VAT. Ironically, Vince Cable, now part of the Tory government funded by Ashcroft, said at the time:

“This is quite serious. We are now not talking just about Ashcroft’s non-dom status, but about systematic tax avoidance in funding Conservative party activities such as polling.”

- So why on Earth should I care that a man who sort to keep his tax details private whilst funding a Party who would almost certainly allow his abuses to continue as they gutted the public purse, had his details extracted illegally? There are levels of poor conduct within the journalist arena, and those conducted by Brooks and Coulson and the Met (the Chief of the Met had a meeting with the Guardian to urge them to drop the phone hacking investigation last year) and in-directly, David Cameron, is far far worse than those by Tom Baldwin.

Graham Stuart MP should quit his ramblings and just go back to his mansion, and lay on his Egyptian Satin tax payer funded sheets.

The saga continues…

The wisdom of Philip Davies, MP

A couple of nights ago, Twitter was alive with the news that Tory MP for Shipley, Philip Davies had stood up in the House of Commons and said this:

“If an employer is looking at two candidates, one who has got disabilities and one who hasn’t, and they have got to pay them both the same rate, I invite you to guess which one the employer is more likely to take on.

“Given that some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, cannot be as productive in their work as somebody who has not got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable that, given the employer was going to have to pay them both the same, they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk.

“My view is that for some people the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help.

“If those people who consider it is being a hindrance to them, and in my view that’s some of the most vulnerable people in society, if they feel that for a short period of time, taking a lower rate of pay to help them get on their first rung of the jobs ladder, if they judge that that is a good thing, I don’t see why we should be standing in their way.”

Philip Davies ideal England is one in which sweatshops, full of people with disabilities create cheap goods for the overly privileged Tory benches to feed from, whilst the sweatshop bosses drive up to the gates of Downing Street in their brand new Mercs, accompanied by a lovely big donation for the Tory Party.

Perhaps we could use the £161,300 in expenses he claimed rather dubiously in 2009, on top of his £65,000 a year salary, to pay people a better salary? On the subject of his expense claims, he claimed the most of all Bradford MPs, and claimed £10,000 more on his second home allowance than Bradford North MP Terry Rooney. I am not entirely sure how that’s warranted, or helps him does his job to a greater degree. Incidentally, claimed for more in second home allowances than my dad makes in a year. Unsurprisingly, he clings onto this gravy train by opposing much needed Parliamentary reform. The lobby for Parliamentary reform, Power 10 label Philip Davies as one of the six MPs who will happily block reform of Parliament. This isn’t surprising, given just how much he has financially benefited from the current corrupt nature of Parliament.

Nevertheless, there is an unnerving essence to a member of our national legislature, insinuating that a person’s worth should be based solely on their physical or mental capability, and then using defensive rhetoric, heartfelt sentiment, to sound as if he only wishes to help disabled people, rather than line the pockets of his Party’s donors, and make it easy for employers to exploit without worry. It is equally as unnerving for a politician to tacitly suggest that wage discrimination is not only acceptable, but entirely the fault of those who are being discriminated against. His words sound as if he is suggesting being disabled is a lifestyle choice, that requires a bit of a punishment. That punishment should apparently be an agreement to work for less money that one needs in order to live, along with the added expense that comes with certain disabilities.

It would be right to point out that those with disabilities, who Davies wants to be paid less, did not cause the financial problems we’re now in. Ironically, for Davies, it was the private sector’s excessive greed (of which he clearly has no problem in promoting) that caused the mess, through unproductive excess profit being used – not to pay people better even when it had accumulated enough to easily manage paying more – but on dodgy asset deals. The problem in 2007 wasn’t that there appeared to be a lack of capital caused by the need to pay disabled people, or anybody a national minimum wage, but by the fact that there was an abundance of concentrated excess capital that wasn’t being put to good and productive use. Wages were stagnating for the majority of people, whilst wages at the very top climbed higher and higher. That, is entirely the fault of the private sector. Is Davies saying that if we dropped the minimum wage, wages would flourish, failed Tory economics would be proven right, and disabled people would be working shorter hours, for a loyal boss, who paid wonderfully? Because I foresee a bunch of employers driving even bigger Porsche’s whilst their £2 an hour disabled employees can no longer afford adequate care. Davies certainly didn’t offer any added benefits that some disabled people may require due to being paid below minimum wage. Grants for specialised equipment? Incomes and the ability to pay for necessary care and equipment cannot always be planned for even on a week to week basis, for those suffering certain disabilities. To promote the idea of wage discrimination against those with disabilities, at the same time as cuts to Disability Living Allowance take hold

It is a minimum wage for a reason. Do we really believe employers wouldn’t use an “opt-out” for their own advantage? Wages at the top are already obscenely high in the private sector. In 2009, for example, the chief executive of the Anchor Trust, which provides home for the elderly, took home £391,000. Anchor Trust is a charity! Whilst donations are down and employees are facing redundancy it is ludicrous for a CEO of an organisation that so many people rely on, to take home almost £400,000 a year.

I continue to be of the opinion that if an employer cannot afford to pay somebody a decent enough wage to live on, he/she shouldn’t be running a business. They are a danger to the public. £5.89 is not a lot of money, and to suggest that the rest of us are entitled to at least that, whilst a disabled person is entitled to less, purely because of a natural affliction is sensationally regressive.

The far right narrative is the problem, not minimum wage legislation. Philip Davis is attempting to remove responsibility for fair pay away from the employer, and onto the employee. Citizens UK found that of the companies in London willing to sign up to paying their lowest paid members of staff a “National living wage” rather than a “National minimum wage”, of £8.30 an hour, they managed to lift 3500 families out of poverty in 2009. It didn’t have an adverse affect on prices, in the same way as the minimum wage introduction in the late 1990s didn’t have an adverse affect as many Tories claimed it would. Campaigners for a National Living Wage are screaming out at Tesco, who have failed to ensure their cleaning staff are paid a fair living wage, despite the company making £3.8bn profit last year. Employers do not, ever, take paying their staff a respectable wage seriously. Ever. Surely if they were made to pay more, of which they can definitely afford, the money would be divided among a workforce who would pay more tax, and use the added disposable income on goods and services from businesses across the Country, rather than wasting it on the very very small band of wealthy elites?

A study in America called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” , found that job applicants with a white sounding name are 50% more likely to be asked back than an applicant with a white sounding name. The researches sent out 5000 applications in sales, marketing, clerical and customer service positions. The names they used were a mix of white sounding names, and black sounding names. The report showed that white applicants with stronger resumes than other white applicants received 30% more callbacks, whereas black applicants with stronger resumes than other black applicants received just 9% more callbacks. It proved that regardless of credentials, black applicants were 50% less likely to get a callback than a white applicant. I wonder if Philip Davis thinks black Americans should agree to work for less money than their white counterparts, purely because they are black? What about a black person with a disability? Back to slavery?

We should though, not be surprised by the ignorance that Philip Davis displayed. Here is an MP who voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, which state that it is unlawful to discriminate when selling goods or services, education or facilities based on sexuality. Davies therefore thinks it is acceptable for a school to expel a gay student. Or for a shop to ban a lesbian lady purely for her sexuality. He also voted against removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords. So, he wants more freedom for shop owners to ban people based on sexual orientation (individualism and all that Libertarian bollocks) yet that same individualism, he doesn’t extend to the most privileged of people passing that privilege onto their children, who may or may not have worked or produced anything worthwhile in their entire lives? Oh the hypocrisy.

In 2011 he even invented his own logic based on a lie, when it comes to making cigarette packaging plain:

“I believe that the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes is gesture politics of the worst kind. It would not have any basis in evidence and it would simply be a triumph for the nanny state and an absurd one at that.”

- The objection I have with the line “it would not have any basis in evidence” is that it does have basis in evidence. Cigarette companies spend millions on their packaging, and over the last couple of decades, they have used the idea of “light” packaging to sell products to people who believe smoking “light” fags, means less danger. A 2004 British Medical Journal research article found that:

The increase in lung cancer risk is similar in people who smoke medium tar cigarettes (15-21 mg), low tar cigarettes (8-14 mg), or very low tar cigarettes (≤ 7 mg)

- So smoking a cigarette from a package that claims to be “ultra light” means nothing. But do people really believe “ultra light” means they are at less of a risk of developing lung cancer? Does the advertisement on the packaging work? If it does, then Davis is either a liar, or a massive idiot. Well, surprisingly……. he’s a liar or a massive idiot. A University of Toronto research paper, titled “‘Light’ and ‘mild’ cigarettes: who smokes them? Are they being misled?” published in 2002 found that:

In 1996 and 2000, respectively, 44% and 27% smoked L/M (light and mild cigarettes) to reduce health risks, 41% and 40% smoked them as a step toward quitting, and 41% in both years said they would be more likely to quit if they learned L/M could provide the same tar and nicotine as regular cigarettes. These data provide empirical support for banning ‘light’ and ‘mild’ on cigarette packaging.

- The policy of plain packaging is absolutely based on evidence. It is time we started to ignore the “nanny state” hysterical screams from manic, misinformed, ignorant right wingers.

Not only that, but in 2006, after an act of vandalism was initially blamed on a group of Muslim men, Davies said:

“if there’s anybody who should fuck off it’s the Muslims who do this sort of thing.”

- It later turned out that the act of vandalism was caused by white men. Davies did not apologise, nor did he take the same tough far-right, BNP-esque line with the white vandals as he had done when he imagined the vandals were all muslim.

You might think the incessant stupidity stops there. You’d be wrong. In 2009 Davies asked:

“Is it offensive to black up or not, particularly if you are impersonating a black person? Why it is so offensive to black up your face, as I have never understood this?

Maybe he would be happy for black people to take a pay cut after all.

An absurd introvert

Learning about myself is like reading a book I need to reread over and over to understand. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness had that affect on me. Read a page, sit and wonder what was just implied, reread the page out loud, put the book down, decide I’ll give it another go tomorrow night. I can’t imagine being in Sartre’s mind, though there must be a serenity in being able to so openly spill your insecurities and create an entire new branch of philosophical thought from them.

If I sit listening to my mind, I confuse myself excessively and have to take a minute to meditate on those confusions before ignoring them, and deciding I’m just being over analytical. Nonetheless, it is quite vicious much of the time, to feel a sort of annoying hot poker jabbing at your brain, whispering “who the fuck are you?” whilst you’re trying to focus on menial life chores.

I decided long ago that I adhere to the philosophy of absurdism made famous by Albert Camus. I discovered this absurdist leaning after becoming most annoyed by a certain work etiquette and a work colleague who seemed to embody it, like Camus’ Sisyphus quietly pushing the rock up the hill only to watch it fall down again and again. I had taken a tray of food over to a table in an uninspiring conference room. An old portrait of the owners’ grandma as a toddler plagues the far wall. An old fireplace confirms my suspicion that the whole place had failed to progress beyond the 1950s. The dullness of the room was reflected in the dullness of the people sat around the conference table waiting for their overpriced dinner to arrive. I had been asked to help take the food out, a joy that I rarely partake in, not least because it is about as intellectually stimulating and as jubilant an occasion as realising you have no toilet roll left in the house during a moment of terrible bowel discomfort. Anyway, I took a tray to the table, placed it down, took the food from the tray and put it neatly in front of the gentleman. We talked for 30 seconds or so about the local football team, and we laughed about something. He was actually very pleasant. He seemed desperate to talk to someone other than the lifeless souls who had gathered around the table to eat, like robots refilling on oil. He gave me a tip too. At my workplace, they don’t normally tip. I walked out of the room and my colleague said, in a brash tone, with a stare that could cut through solid lead, said “I cannot believe you just did that“. After giving her a look of confusion, she told me that I should NEVER put the tray down on their table because it makes us look terribly unprofessional. At that moment, it struck me, just how pointless and meaningless my job was. Just how useless an existence it is to say that your full time job, is to serve rich people. She told me it was awful to put a tray down on a table; she became red with anger. To an outsider, it was as if I had gone into that room, quietly walked over to the table and waved my willy in their faces. It was an absurd situation, of which I had to laugh. I laughed at her. Not intending to be rude, I just laughed, which is rude, but I honestly don’t care. The situation deserved a laugh, and it just spontaneously came out of my face, it couldn’t be stopped. The whole episode was so insignificant it holds more meaning to me, than much of my life so far. That very episode changed my philosophical self reasoning far more than any other.

Discovering your life and your essence are absurd; putting an end to what is seemingly considered an innate search for truth and purpose, by accepting thoroughly that truth and purpose are simply man made concepts that are vastly incompatible with the chaotic and aimless nature of the universe and the random process of natural selection, we must then discover who we are individually. This is the tricky part. There are so many contradictions in my personality and so many faults and flaws that I cannot pin down exactly who I am and this frustrates me. I want to be fully rounded, I want to understand myself entirely and I want to know that I am in control of who I am and what I do.

I think it is fair to say I am decidedly introverted. I would be happy living my life with no interference from anyone else. Whereas many people can count “good listener” as a positive personal trait, I can’t. I may act it, I may pretend to care, but ultimately I am easily bored by the stories of others, I get anxious about how to respond, especially if those stories are excessively trivial. I hate clubbing, I hate too much socialising, I prefer solitude and thought. I like my own company and time to myself. I like losing myself in a book. I may come across as ignorant and at times I wont talk much, answering everything with a simple “yeah“. This is either because my mind is wandering, or I have very little interest in what is being said to me, and feel any response would be forced and inadequate. The only person I like listening to, and being around is Ash, which is probably a good thing. We went viewing homes around Bendigo in Australia last weekend. Beautiful, and yet affordable homes. We both want a personal study room, to lock ourselves away in when we need to be alone. Often you will hear people insist that a happy relationship and a happy family is achieved by spending quality time together, and that’s true. But equally as important is having your own space. Independence is a feature I must never compromise, nor would I ever wish to throw myself so deep into someone else’s life that they feel less independent. If I feel my control over my own life is under threat, I pull away and start to question the route down which my life has rolled. I do not particularly need anyone else. I simply need to know that my World remains my World. Over my domain, I am a control freak.

Carl Jung brilliantly hypothesised that introversion and extroversion are chemical reactions in the brain; the introvert experiences large energy surges when alone or in a small group, whilst the extrovert thrives on less cortical arousal, needing instead outside stimulation. I am far more comfortable writing about how I feel, than actually telling people, because whilst I know I’m being completely irrational, I subconsciously presume that no one wants to hear my ranting, in the same way that I don’t particularly want to hear the rantings of others. I cannot abide people bitching endlessly about each other, or quite clearly having issues with each other and not communicating them. I notice the unneeded tension that I am not a part of, and wonder why the fuck I am in that situation, feeling slightly uncomfortable. I suppose introvert is simply a synonym for prodigiously self involved. That is certainly what “blog” is a synonym for. Or maybe it is the climax to a series of insecurities that chip away but never get faced. I don’t know which line of reasoning I prefer. Spending too much time around others drives me close to insanity and drains me of all energy, I get all anxious and need to get away. Life is not a waste of time, if it is spent on introspection, and reflection, as long as it doesn’t eat away at you. It is a constant search for an identity that seems to so fleetingly blow in the wind. There is an impeccable beauty in the solitude I feel when I am sitting on the beach wall at Dawlish Warren on the English south coast, in the early morning, with no one else around, the sounds of the sea at that particular place is the most serene and perfect of all places in my World. That is where I go when I close my eyes at night.

That is me.

Barcelona ’11

I don’t often write sports blogs, but tonight I thought Barcelona’s Champions League victory at Wembley over Manchester United, worthy of a special entry.

The Champions League is the best of the best. The World Cup is great, but for a neutral, the Champions League is ridiculously exciting. I guess for Manchester United, to simply relive being masterfully outplayed in 2009, again in 2011, it isn’t that much fun.

Usually football exists like every other subject in my fickle life. I immerse myself in every aspect of the beautiful game, for two or three years, and then decide I’m bored of it for a year. Being a Leicester City fan has that affect. When you’re eleven years old and you see your local side draw 3 – 3 with Arsenal in a classic game, suddenly a 1 – 0 win at Doncaster isn’t all that exciting, twelve years later.

But every so often you see a stroke of genius that reminds you why football is the greatest sport on Earth.
A couple of years ago, watching Ronaldinho for both Brazil and Barcelona was like watching a masterclass in the sport. I just presumed it didn’t get any better than that. I’d watch the slow motion replays of the immense skill he had with a ball, and think “Okay, that’s just not possible”, whilst spending hours out in the garden trying to imitate it.
Tonight, Barcelona proved once again, that their current squad is perhaps the best that has ever existed. The 2010/11 Barcelona team is a team we will be talking about when we are old. I imagine in the same way my dad talks about the Manchester United of the ’60s. The Holy Trinity; Denis Law, Bobby Charlton, George Best Manchester United side. That is the level of brilliance that Barcelona have reached. Their football is so easy on the eye, it’s such a privilege to see. Real Madrid’s years as the Kings of La Liga were great, but nothing in comparison.

In 2010/11 Manchester United are the Champions of England. We may as well say, of the United Kingdom, because Celtic and Rangers really don’t offer much of a challenge in Scotland, other than the challenge that includes sending bullets to the Celtic manager (a man who was fantastic during his playing days at Leicester). A Manchester United squad that can happily sit Berbatov on the bench most weeks, and not even include him in the Champions League final squad; their top scorer, is a team that is always going to be dangerous. That being said, they aren’t the golden team that everyone keeps suggesting. The cry of “this is the best United side i’ve ever seen” is a little bit dubious. They aren’t that great. 2 – 2 at Bolton, 2 – 2 at home to West Brom, 0-0 at Sunderland, 2-1 loss to Wolves. The Manchester United 1998-1999 team were far superior.

Plus, they have become incredibly dirty. Their loss to Wolves, breaking their unbeaten run revealed their nasty side when Giggs decided he’d just start attacking people for no real reason. The refusal to talk to the press afterwards. Tonight, Valencia played dirty, pushing his luck as far as he could, to make up for his impotence on the field. A team that cannot deal with losing, is not a respectable team, regardless of what they win, and the manager who seemingly struggles to discipline his overpaid toddlers having a tantrum whenever they don’t get their own way, is not a great manager, regardless of the amount of titles he has won. Sir Alex Ferguson is a genius. But he’s a prick. I cannot imagine Sir Matt Busby, or Brian Clough, or Bill Shankley would have the nerve to stand on the touch line yelling at the linesman, or pointing at their watch as if managing a top team is equal to managing the entire fucking sport itself. Ferguson has no class, he’s like a child, and he cannot deal well with losing.

The gulf between Manchester United (perhaps the 2nd best team in the World at the moment) and Barcelona, is staggering. Tonights Champion’s League final was like watching the 2002 Brazil World Cup winning team VS the celebrity charity matches Sky One put on every year with Rod Stewart and Ralf Little. United had just one shot on goal, and that was Rooney’s goal. Barcelona had 12 shots on goal. This dominance was reflected in the possession. Barcelona enjoyed 63% of the possession. I had predicted a 3-1 scoreline a couple of weeks before to a few friends, who had insisted it’d be closer than that. I am now smug. To United’s credit, Rooney was a class act again. He seemed frustrated with the lack of support he was getting in the last quarter of the pitch at Wembley. The find of the season, Hernández really had no input in the game, Valencia gave the ball away allowing Messi to exploit the mistake time and time again, Giggs was appalling (can I say that? Will he sue me?) and the massively underrated Park Ji-Sung was hardly noticeable. Barcelona toyed with them. The Messi goal came from nowhere. United seemed to try to close Messi down, leaving space elsewhere, noticing the space, filling in the space, leaving Messi with time to do what he does best.

David Villa’s goal, looked like he was just having fun. Like it was simple. A day at the park with a few friends, rather than against the team who had just won the English Premier League for a record breaking amount of times.

It is incredible for me, as a 25 year old, who likes to kick a ball around on a park with friends, to see the level of brilliance that Messi has acquired at only 23. His movements are very George Best-esque and of the top players that have graced the game during my life time (Zindane, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Henry, Gerrard, Rooney, Figo, Shevchenko, Christiano Ronaldo), they don’t seem to come close to Messi. He is of course complemented by having 10 of the best team mates you’re ever likely to see on a football field, but even in the Argentine side, he shines brighter than the rest. Perhaps i’d be that great, if I had the back up of Iniesta and Xavi. Who knows?

It is going to take a supremely class 2011/12 side in La Liga and the Champions League to stop Barcelona repeating the 2010/11 season.

Give it a couple of years, and Leicester will get the job done.

The UK: According to the American Right.

It is always flattering when a manic, incessantly paranoid, overly hysterical right winged American takes a pop at me. When you read what they say, and you’re literally taken aback by the shear nerve to print so much ignorance and bullshit apparently without any form of irony, you have to stand a little bit in awe. You really have to put aside your thoughts that perhaps they are a parody, and you have to make yourself believe that people really do think like them. Once you come to the realisation that they are absolutely serious in what they say, it feels like you have just been bukakked with stupid.

The blogger “Pumabydesign” wrote a blog recently, suggesting that President Obama’s visit to the UK has been marred by unexpected amounts of hate aimed towards him. Like we’re all somehow on the same page as the Republicans in America in our displeasure (and subtle hints of racism) toward the President.
She starts her tirade of bullshit thusly:

Apparently, the Muslims in Europe have not received the memo that Barack Obama is one of them.

Marvel at the stupidity. I think it was an attempt at humour. Though, Right Winged Americans do seem to accuse Obama of being anything they have heard Glenn Beck say recently. The black man with the funny name MUST be a Muslim. Why else would he……………. pump more troops into Afghanistan, kill the leader of Al Qaeda and …… oh wait. She may aswell have started her blog with “We all know Obama is a marxist fascist socialist gay muslim terrorist spanish secretly over weight female foreigner….” It would have made just as much sense. It is fascinating the level to which Right Winged America will drop, to insult a President. It suggests that politically, he’s doing something right. I knew, that trying to reason with such idiocy would be difficult, but I read on….

Speaking of which, if Obama thought that his visit to the UK was going to be a total love fest, WRONG! What a disappointing revelation it must have been for the one to see that the anti-Obama crowd was much larger than the pro-Obama crowd.

- The protesters actually numbered about three muslims and the same anti-war protesters that sit outside Parliament every day declaring anyone who walks past them to be a war criminal. The streets were clearly lined with Obama supporters. A stark contrast to George W Bush’s visit to London, in which the Mall was closed off…….. in fact, Central London itself was closed off, because the entire country despised the man. The atmosphere in London is entirely different with Obama. I pointed this out to the slightly vacant Pumabydesign, only to be told I am using propaganda. Which essentially means that anything that doesn’t come from Fox News is quite clearly Progressive Marxist propaganda. So, she wouldn’t risk being hypocritical herself with the propaganda would she? No of course not.. that’s why her source for that particular blog is……….. The Daily Mail.

In case you’re not aware of the Daily Mail, it is a right winged tabloid, that tacitly supported the Nazis in World War II, claims pretty much everything in the World causes cancer (including being a black person, candle-lit dinners, hugging, and blow jobs) and has since made it the mission of the paper to print as many misleading articles as possible. Here’s a great, current example of that. The Mail On Sunday printed a story claiming the BBC will be paying Tim Henman £14,000 a day to commentate on the Wimbledon Championships this year. The problem is, it isn’t actually true. Then, buried deep in the US section (for absolutely no reason), a few days later, the Mail said this:

On May 15 we said Tim Henman was being paid £200,000 by the BBC for commentating at Wimbledon this year.
In fact we have been informed that his fee will be substantially less than that. We apologise for the mistake and are happy to set the record straight.

- Happy to set the record straight, after outting him as a £14,000 a day commentator on your front page, and then correcting your lack of quality journalism and your right winged lies, on a page absolutely out the way of anything relating to the story whatsoever……. whilst the original story is STILL on the site? What a reputable source.

Speaking of reputable sources, the Mail article that the quickly-losing-all-credibility Pumabydesign published, quotes Anjem Choudary, whom she presumably takes the idea from that everyone actually hates Obama. Choudary said:

“The anti-Obama camp is far bigger than the pro-Obama….”

Choudary is the leader of Islam4UK, which is proscribed under anti-terrorist laws in the UK. Choudary’s group claims homosexuality is the same as rape and paedophilia (he could join most US Christian organisations so far), that children aren’t safe in the hands of Secular teachers, and that anyone who insults Mohammad should be killed. In short, the guy is insane.
Selman Ansari of the group “Progressive British Muslims” says of Islam4UK:

“We’re concerned that terrorist organisations are dodging their bans by simply reforming under a new name. We can’t let the extremists intimidate people and spread their lies within the British Muslim community. I call upon the police to investigate whether Islam4UK is just Al-Muhajiroun by another name.”

Choudary claims that all non-believers are committing a crime against God and should be punished. The Islamic political editor of the New Statesman, Medhi Hasan writing in The Guardian sums up just how reputable Choudary really is:

“Is Choudary an Islamic scholar whose views merit attention or consideration? No. Has he studied under leading Islamic scholars? Nope. Does he have any Islamic qualifications or credentials? None whatsoever.

Now, apparently Pumabydesign wasn’t going to stop there. Oh no. She wanted to spout some more terribly moronic bullshit. But this is even better than the one above. Her new blog entry takes a pop at me. I feel flattered.
She goes on:

The futile one would, therefore, be more than pleased to learn that radical Islamic cleric Anjem Choudary is launching an endeavor to accelerate the Islamization of the UK.

Did you see my mention? She didn’t fucking link to my blog, like I did to her. Though using links to other blogs may be a bit too complicated for this most simple of apes. Her premise is simple enough, she is informing me that the aforementioned lunatic Choudary wants to create a radical Islamic Britain. No shit. We know that’s what he wants. In the same way that we know the Communist Party want Communism in the UK, or that the British National Party want an all white UK. It doesn’t mean it’s about to happen, or is happening. And the phrase “accelerate the Islamization of the UK” is massively misleading. I didn’t realise this was happening? But, given that Pumabydesign lives thousands of miles away and seemingly knows nothing about our Country, I figured she MUST be right and I MUST be wrong. So I walked through my city (which has one of the largest muslim populations in the UK) And imagine my surprise when I found my city to have fallen into Islamic hands since reading her blog. I took a photo to illustrate this point:
Here was Leicester a day ago:

Here is Leicester today:

How did this happen? Pumabydesign quite rightly asks:

How long will it be before the stoning begins in the UK?

- Manic hysteria and the worst type of propaganda akin to 1930s Germany and the fear of the Jews taking over, you might say? Absolutely. According to the 2001 census (the census results for 2011 are not out yet) show that the muslim population makes up 2.7% of the overall population. There is 13% more Atheists (of which I am proudly one of them) than Muslims, which is about 7,000,000 more .Of that 2.7% of muslims, most do not support Choudary. In fact, Choudary’s most publicised attack on the UK was the poppy burning. He advertised it all over the place expecting hundreds of thousands of Muslims to turn up and burn a poppy on Rememberance Day. The Daily Mail obviously jumped on it and published pictures of the Muslims burning the poppies. What they didn’t point out, was that under 36 muslims turned up. That’s 36 out of 2,000,000. Which is 0.0018% of Muslims. THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!!!!!!! All 0.0018% of them! ARGH! The Daily Mail had a choice. They could either print a story about very very few insignificant Muslims burning poppies, or they could say “1,999,964 Muslims didn’t burn a poppy today“, or they could just not have mentioned it at all because to mention such an insignificant event would hold no purpose but to incite hate, and spread bullshit through the intolerable garbage like the type spewed by pumabydesign. They went for the first option, and predictably, the Right Wing decide it is evidence that the UK may as well change its name to Englandistan. Not only that, but those 36, were all members of Muslims Against Crusades, a group formed after Islam4UK was proscribed. So, Choudary’s own group. What news source does Pumabydesign cite this time? …….. The Daily Star. Seriously, i’m not making this shit up. She really is that ridiculous. If you’re wondering what the Daily Star is, here is todays front page story (try to picture all the news in the World today, even in the UK today, the World news, what is happening on the planet we inhabit, when you read this FRONT PAGE story):

RYAN GIGGS was fighting to save his marriage last night after wife Stacey ditched her wedding ring as she left their £5million mansion.

- A Manchester United Footballer’s wife has left their house.
Full of quality journalism, reputable source number three!

Perhaps she means that radical Islam is infecting our political system?
There are eight muslims in the House of Commons. Eight, out of 650 MPs. That’s hardly taking over. Not only that, but none of the eight are radical. One of whom, Labour MP Sadiq Khan, argued in an article for the Fabian Society, that Muslims should ditch the victim mentality and integrate more with the rest of the Country. Hardly about to start suggesting the immediately implementation of Sharia Law. Maybe she means the House of Lords. The Lords currently has 26 Lords Spiritual (Anglican Church Bishops and Archbishops), and one Muslim Lord. One Muslim Lord out of 789 Lords. Wow, they really are infiltrating every aspect of our life.
So i’m going to hedge my bets and suggest stoning isn’t going to begin any time soon.

But, it was nice to get a mention in a blog that is so lacking in any kind of substance, intellect, or accuracy.
Thanks!

This could be 1983

The Conservatives haven’t changed. It is true that they are the epitome of what it means to be wealthy, privileged, and have an in-built mechanism of contempt for anybody who isn’t wealthy and privileged. I find their politics to be vicious and nasty, and their economics to be self serving and hypocritical. They are typical of the type who wish to use a system to climb to the heights they have, and then burn the ladder up which they or their family before them, climbed.

They will always use the “deficit” (which isn’t that bad) to justify the unjustifiable, simply because no one except a tiny band of elite scumbags will ever accept their economic principles. Libertarianism is dangerous and unhealthy to a civilised society. It is built on the premise of judging a nation by how rich its most wealthy have become, how concentrated that wealth has become, rather than how society protects its most vulnerable.

Their language is arrogant, vicious, dirty, and out dated, to match their political stance. Here is a few examples of Tories being Tories.

Wandsworth Council today announced plans for the Autumn, to charge children £2.50 to use the local park. It is in response to the £55mn it needs to find in spending cuts. Instead of fighting the obvious manipulation of figures from the Treasury which suggest we’re on the verge of becoming Greece (which we aren’t), and instead of pointing out that the Treasury is in worse shape now than it was when Labour left office, and expected to get worse, with regard to inflation and unemployment……… the Council has just accepted the bullshit, and decided that along with the disabled and the unemployed, children should be the next to be hit. We now have more property millionaires than anywhere in Europe – creating an horrendous property apartheid especially in the South, we have a banking system that has managed to get away with causing chaos, and we have a mass of Corporate tax avoiders costing the system £25bn a year….. and yet Wandsworth Council think the way to go is to make children aware that from now on, any ounce of fun, is going to cost them money. The excuse? The same typical excuse Libertarians use all the time, the same tired, nasty excuse Tories have been using for decades:

“Why should Wandsworth taxpayers subsidise children from other boroughs?”

- Who thinks like that? It makes me squirm.
If that’s the case, why should the majority of left leaning voters (over 57% at the 2010 election) subsidise the jobs of a right wing government? I don’t want our family tax money to pay for our Tory MP to live so comfortably. I don’t want our tax money to go to paying a National debt whilst the very wealthy manage to pump their money into offshore accounts, and be allowed to claim expenses on running those offshore companies, against the UK tax they don’t pay. We are subsidising their ability to pay nothing. They couldn’t run a successful business in the UK, and offshore its profits, without functioning roads, a decent healthcare system, a property protection system like the police force, an education system to prepare their future workforce. And yet, their right to offshore, is supported by our Government who instead choose to attack children’s parks. Great.

The Tories main campaign poster in 2010 was this:
- So imagine our surprise when Mark Britnell, who made it into the Top Ten of the most influential people when it comes to healthcare in the country by the HSJ, former Director-General for Commissioning and System Management for the NHS and now “health policy expert” on David Cameron’s personal NHS advisory group said this to a group of Private Healthcare lobbies, organised by private equity firm Apax:

“In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer. The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.”

Minister for Health Andrew Lansley, who is worth an estimated £700,000, and spent the Labour years flipping his second home, claiming expenses for renovating a cottage designated his second home, before selling it for a tidy profit, before claiming for furniture for his flat in London now designated his second home, insists that he isn’t considering NHS privatisation. One wonders what his most charitable donor, John Nash, of Private Health company Care UK thinks about that. Nash donated £21,000 to Lansley’s private office, whilst they continue to make 96% of their profit from the NHS. Care UK stand to make a great deal more from increased involvement of the private sector in the NHS.

Cameron promised that front line jobs would not be cut from the NHS, before the election. Vowing to protect the NHS is a big vote winner in the UK. Cameron knew that. He then didn’t win the election, didn’t get a mandate, and so decided to rip the NHS to shreds. According to Unison, 500 jobs at St George’s Hospital in South London are to go, along with three wards and 100 beds. Similarly, Kingston Hospital in South West London announced that around 20% of its workforce will need to go, to meet the governments cost saving demands. The government repeatedly claims it is increasing spending on the NHS in real terms. Another lie. NHS spending is set to grow by less than under the Thatcher years, which is when the NHS was gutted almost to complete meltdown. Here’s how that “increase” looks on a graph:
Between 1997 and 2010, the number of doctors increased by 57% and nurses by 31%. Funding rose from around £1bn a year (less than Philip Green paid his family in dividends in 2009, which he financed by taking out a loan, which in turn reduced his Corporate tax rate as the interest on the loan could be offset against Corporate profits of his firm Arcadia) under the Tories, to £4.3bn under Labour, which increased the activity of the NHS by over 40%. It worked. We are healthier now than we were in the 1980s, we are living longer, and morale in the NHS was higher than the 1980s. Increases in spending this year, when adjusted for inflation, will be 0.024% from April 2011. Great. In fact, Sir David Nicholson, Chief executive of the NHS said this about the new spending plans for the NHS:

there has never been a time where we have had four years of flat real growth. It is unprecedented.

- There are many Tories that will argue consistently and poorly, that Osborne and the Tories are championing the NHS and funding it amazingly well beyond all recognition. Listening to them, is perilous.
Waiting lists are already sky rocketing. In Coventry, it was reported that there would be a 13 week waiting list for Hernia repair at Walsgrove University hospital. That has now increased to 26 weeks and should be considered “just a guideline” as lists are likely to increase again this year.
According to County Durham & Darlington NHS Foundation Trust:

Trust is undertaking a £60m cost cutting exercise to be delivered by 2014, including £20m in 2010/11. The trust is also cutting 300 beds. 300 nursing jobs will be lost through natural wastage Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust: equivalent cost savings of around 200 fewer jobs are required to meet financial targets. In cash terms, the trust is making cost efficiencies of £25m over 3 years. City Hospitals Sunderland: The Trust undertook a £22.5m cost cutting exercise for financial year just gone. NHS County Durham and Darlington : The NHS service providers in County Durham and Darlington are undertaking a £200m cost cutting exercise over the next 3 years. The trust is cutting 62 senior nurse posts and replacing them with 78 more junior posts. In addition, County Durham PCT has identified 110 management posts for redundancy.

The managerial posts are “in addition” to front line nursing.

Cameron told a female Labour MP in the House of Commons – the NATIONAL LEGISLATURE – to “calm down dear”. One wonders what Tory MP for Loughborough Nicky Morgan thought of this childish, sexist outburst from our Prime Minister, given that she was seen visibly laughing in the House of Commons at that pathetic remark, yet accused ME of being sexist when I simply asked if she had asked a planted question a few weeks back.
This comes a few weeks after Cameron took a swipe at ethnic minorities in his attack on multiculturalism, in which he mentioned Islam and Muslims 36 times in twenty minutes, and Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist not a single time. It was an attack on Islam, to the point where even Nick Griffin called the speech “provocative” and members of the EDL said that Cameron “understands us”.
That came about a week after Osborne referred to an openly Labour MP in the Commons as the “pantomime dame”. It isn’t surprising, their stance on homosexuality, given that whilst 100% of Lib Dems, and 99% of Labour MPs voted to repeal the nasty little Section 28 law that banned anything positive being said about homosexuality in schools, only 24% of Tories voted to repeal it. And whilst 100% of Lib Dems, and 95% of Labour MPs voted in favour of allowing gay adoption……. only 6% of Tories voted for it. So that’s homophobia, sexism, and racism all within a year. What else is left? Ah yes, class.
David Shakespeare, leaders of the Tory Councillor for Buckinghamshire Council said that poor northerners who are losing their jobs due to the cuts, should go down to London and pick the fruit of the land owners down south, instead of seeking job seekers allowance. He also said:

‘The North may replace the Romanians in the cherry orchards, that may be a good thing’

- Not even a necessary thing? Not even a regretful thing? A GOOD thing? He doesn’t mind kicking people out of their work and their jobs, he thinks it’s a great thing, because they’ll come to the south and work on his land for next to no money! He’s happy that the North is about to be gutted, again, of all funding whilst the south thrives, again, like the 1980s. Luckily I am from the Midlands, so I’m not sure i’d have to pick this overweight Tory prick’s fields, but i’m not sure if I have to bow as he drives past in his luxurious horse and cart.

Osborne announced this week that he was going to make it easier for companies to cut pay, cut pensions, dismiss people, and be allowed to get away with being discriminatory. In essence, he plans to make job security as unsafe as possible. It will be golden news to people like my boss. It is an attack on the workforce again. Presumably he will moan about Unions trying to hold the country to ransom whilst he attacks the rights of as many workers as possible, expecting us all to just bend over and take it. I hope the Unions unite and fight, I hope for a period of industrial action on a scale never seen before, and I hope a general strike is called as soon as possible If it is going to be a case of a very wealthy minority making life as miserable and difficult as possible for the many, then I hope the many fight back. Osborne claims employment rules are holding back job creation. He of course, is wrong. Job creation is held back significantly by a vast majority of big bosses plundering money into dodgy stocks or increasing their salaries beyond recognition. Why not cap private sector managerial wealth to a percentage of the lowest paid? Therefore when the lowest paid gets an increase, so does the highest paid. The extra-profit to be used to employ new people. Why attack the right of the workforce to a decent level of job security and working conditions? Why is that the only solution? Do you know what else creates job losses? It is happening on a smaller scale across the country, cuts are having affects on jobs and livelihoods. Cuts….

Derby’s Historic Industrial museum has had to close, 9 job losses.

Bishop Aukland College – 179 jobs losses.

South Tyneside College – 200 jobs to go.

Tyne Metropolitan College – 66 jobs to go.

Stockton Riverside College – 23 jobs to go.

City of sunderland College – 69 jobs to go.

Newcastle College – 171 jobs to go.

East durham college – 76 jobs to go.

New Cross library, Crofton Park library, Sydenham library, Grove Park library, Blackheath library all to close.

Oxford Brookes University – 400 support staff received “at risk” letters.

Diss weekly Youth Centre praised by police for helping troubled children, to close, and staff to lose their jobs.

Taunton Primary School – no more music teacher, no more music lessons.

A Big Society initiative – new volunteers to help out at museums in Hampshire – to replace 25 staff who have lost their jobs. Unpaid staff to replace paid staff. Great.

Five libraries in Lewisham to close.

Cuts to NHS disabled transport in Dumfries – jobs losses expected.

50% of pupil support assistants assigned to children with special needs, to be cut in Aberdeen.

21,000 job losses at Lloyds……..

….. former Lloyds boss Eric Daniels takes home a bonus of £1.45mn…..

….. new Lloyds boss António Horta-Osório takes a signing on fee of £6mn and a salary of £1.6mn.

In short, the poor need jobs to live. The rich need the poor to be as close to slaves as possible, reliant entirely on them to be able to eat, to be called lazy and scroungers and attacked as greedy if they unionise or refuse to work for a piss poor boss in piss poor conditions for piss poor pay. It is not a plan to increase job creation, it is a plan to enable the very wealthy, to get even more wealthy – to buy an extra yacht to fill the void in their soul – by asking more and more of their staff for as little as possible, and it’s always been the case. The project is designed to make people believe their tax money is wrongly being used, not just by people who claim to have a physical disability whilst they play tennis and golf 24 hours a day, but also by children playing on swings in the town next to yours, as opposed to the fact that your tax money is actually used to make sure that the wealthiest get massively insane tax cuts with Corporation tax expected to drop from 28% in 2010….. to 15% in 2020. That is what your tax money is funding. Make sure the man in the expensive house in Notting Hill thanks you for his lovely new Mercedes….. but don’t let your kids play on the park next to his house, you scrounging scumbag.

The progress the country has made since the hell of the 1980s, is about to be burnt to the ground. Do not be fooled into thinking this “has to be done”, it is Conservative party ideology, they have waited over a decade to have this chance.

They are attempting to replace compassion, with greed, and it’s working.

Like life

Sometimes I just want to write.
I don’t know why, but it becomes a sort of irreproachable desire that overwhelms whatever it is I am doing at the particular moment and I want to write. I have hundreds of drafts of random blogs I’ve started when the propensity to sit down at my laptop and arrange thought patterns into words massacres all other modes of thought. And then I get frustrated with the direction the blog takes, knowing it has no real ending, and so I just give up and wallow in languid self pity. I am told this is common for people who enjoy writing. Perfectionism is a fucking bitch. So I thought i’d just write, and see where it leads, and when it ends it ends. And like life It has no overwhelming purpose or meaning, and just imposes itself on those it chooses without aim, quickly forgotten. Bits and pieces imprint themselves on the memory of the back of the darkest reaches of the consciousness, but its essence is always there contributing to what it is (even in the smallest and seemingly insignificant ways) that makes you, you.

I was five when we moved away from Cavendish Road, just off of Saffron Lane. I vividly remember a significant amount of enlightening episodes from before the move. Here are a few:

I remember the fucking horrendous accents – I hate the Leicester accent. I have made a conscious effort over the years to eradicate it from my own speech. If being beaten up badly, and then being spat on as you lay crying in a wrecked ball in a shit filled gutter could be conveyed through an accent, it would be the Leicester accent. It does however provide some beautifully crafted sentences I over hear a lot. Today, in Tesco, a boy on his mobile phone, said “yeah well Josh can suck the fucking piss out of my dirty black nips”. I have never in my life wanted to kill someone for raping the English language, whilst at the same time wanting to worship him as the God of beautiful sentences, so much.

I remember a man being kicked in the face by two other men and then being chased away.

I remember drawing a picture of a boat and my teacher pinning it up on the door of the classroom. I was so proud. But we lived in the social darkness and backwardness of Tory England then, as we do now, and no one told me that pursuing art for art sake is irrelevant in Tory England, we should aim for a life in a call centre instead. Beauty is the destitute office with the distinct smell of printer ink, in Tory England.

I remember adorning myself in Leicester City blue and white and walking down to Filbert Street with my dad, past the rows of cars with Leicester City badges in the windows, and drifting into the wind with the same fans week after week. I was born one year after Gary Lineker moved to Everton from Leicester. The early 90s weren’t the greatest years for Leicester. Though I saw them play in the most exciting Wembley play off final i’ve ever seen, when Swindon Town beat us 4-3 after we went from 3-0 down to 3-3. Steve Thompson was the man on the back of my Leicester shirt that year. The walk to Filbert Street down Saffron Lane was one of the highlights of my childhood. I once saw a man push a grown woman down a flight of stairs of the double decker stand at Filbert Street, she smacked her head and passed out. That wasn’t such a highlight.

I remember my dad and I watching a sunday league football match on Nelson Mandela park, when the ball was manically kicked out of play, and smashed me in the face. The guilty player (who I am adamant even now, should be shot) came over deeply apologetic, and is now one of my dads good mates. My dad befriended my abuser. Thanks dad.

I remember walking downstairs one morning to find our shop had been broken into, the windows smashed, and police talking to my dad. This is pretty normal when you live a few doors in from Saffron Lane. The terraced houses all look the same; the towering army of Edwardian brick chimney tops, street after street. England. But the street is usually full of kids kicking a ball, and old women with nets over their hair for some uninspiring reason. Mrs Spick lived opposite us. I always thought ‘Spick’ was a name that conveyed the feeling of living in cramped streets. She was about 50. I vividly remember the awful smell that emanated from her. She spat when she spoke. Missus Spick spat when she spoke. Oh how the structure of language can disguise the vile essence it is trying to convey. Which leads me onto the next memory.

I remember the day I learnt the word “cunt”. I was 5. I overheard a man on my street call his girlfriend a cunt. We Leicestarians know how to treat our ladies. I didn’t know what it meant, so I thought i’d put this wonderful new addition to my vocabulary to use immediately. My friend who was over with his mum, and I were playing with our wrestling figures. I was Brett Hart, he was Crush. Crush attacked Brett and kicked him across the room. I didn’t hesitate any longer, “you cunt”, I yelled as loud as I could. The helper at our shop overheard me and went insane at me. So I called her a cunt too. I didn’t know what it meant, but the reaction was amazing. One single word could cause an atomic bomb to explode around me? This was like gold dust! Thus began my fascination with the power of language. Word became both exciting, yet largely meaningless and empty. My year 7 English teacher told my parents I would never be a reader and i’d never be a writer. I’ve told this story to a lot of people, because it explains exactly why I struggle at times with my confidence. She used language to convey her stupidity and ignorance and I knew it even back then. Just because I didn’t like Shakespeare, nor her, I was doomed to sit dribbling on myself and getting fat in a dark room with nothing but a TV for entertainment. What a cunt.

I remember cricket. I come from a cricket background. My dad played cricket. He now coaches cricket. He loves cricket. My mum catered for cricket testimonial matches. I could often be found in a hired out old pub, surrounded by people in grey suits talking about who should and shouldn’t make the team. Cricket is an odd game. It is played by kids, coached by the kids grown up, and watched by snobs. The pub rooms and the snobs always smelled of real ale. I can remember the smell so distinctly. Sometimes I miss it. Real ale, and old leather from the seats in the pub rooms. I played cricket for the school for a few years. I was pretty good too. But my god, it’s a boring sport.

I remember being told by our school that we should be careful because there is a man roaming the area trying to take kids by offering them sweets. I have only just learnt that all schools do this every year to teach kids about the risk of paedophiles. But when I was younger, it sounded to me like they were warning us against taking sweets from people. Why would they do that? If someone is offering me sweets, I should say no? Only people who offer kids sweets, want to kill me? All of them? This confusion led me at the age of seven to accuse the shop keeper at the end of the road of trying to take kids, because he sells Snickers. In a shop full of people, me, a kid, accused the shop keeper of being a child molester. Great. Thanks school! Not only did you make me believe I could be Fritzled at any moment, you also ruined the life of the nice corner shop owner. I hope you’re happy with yourselves.

I remember a man a few doors down from us, who was in his 90s and had one leg, the other had been blown off when Saffron Lane was bombed during the war. On the BBC war website, a writer who was eight years old during the war writes:

The worst bomb damage that I saw was in Cavendish Road, on August 21st 1940. I was with my dad in his lorry on the coal wharf at Danvers Road. The air raid siren sounded, it was just after ten o’clock. Dad made me go into an air raid shelter near by, when the all clear sounded, I came out of the shelter and we could see the smoke rising. Dad was worried as it looked to be in the direction of where we lived. He said “come on son we had better go and see if mum is OK”. As we came up the Saffron Lane past the end of Cavendish Road the gas main was blazing and I could see lots of bomb damage, many buildings were in ruins, people were just being rescued with ambulance’s and fire engines all around. This was less than half an hour after the raid. Six people were killed

All I knew from the history of my street, was that it had been destroyed during the war. This one guy in his 90s used to say this his knee in his one remaining leg hurt, and he’s lucky he doesn’t have to deal with pain in the other one. He was fascinating. Here is a picture of the building that got hit. Our place was a few doors up from here:

The houses are pretty much exactly as they were back then. Though, minus that massive gaping hole on the corner.

I remember my primary school teacher had some sort of odd mental breakdown whilst reading a book with me one day, and started to sing “the wheels on the bus” whilst stood on a table. She then collapsed and was taken away by the school nurse and a few teachers. It’s funny because I worried about her. We never saw her at school again. Years later I saw her driving.

End.

Bricks and mortar

This is Samantha Cameron, the wife of David Cameron:

This is a section of 300,000+ people:

The public are very similar to Sam Cameron, in that they’re being fucked by David too.

This is a gimp:

A gimp is traditionally expected to keep quiet and do as he’s told. He has a master. He must take all the abuse, he mustn’t have an opinion, and he must be kept on a short lead in case he disobeys.

This is Nick Clegg:

Nick Clegg has a master, does what he’s told, has had his opinion beaten out of him, and now just obeys. Right now, you are drawing a comparison in your minds between Nick Clegg……… and a gimp.

I went to the TUC rally in London on Saturday, accompanied by close to half a million people. This is what I saw:

Support from all over the place.

My favourite banner quote all day.

My thoughts exactly:

The march across the Thames.

£250 for bacon? Bloody Aussie’s. First they give us Fosters, and now overpriced bacon.

The reason this amazing human being looks so bright, is because he jumped in front of my shot at the very last second. He makes this picture so brilliant.

I am fully aware that this guy holds a bit of a resemblance to me. This is worrying.

The spirit of Che!

Damn right.

Possibly a little bit extreme. Unless we’re now referring to the Foreign Secretary, as “The Hague” in which case, I fully support this.

Lots of families!

The Met officer looks pretty guilty to me. He must really fucking hate Starbucks. He is probably one of those annoying people who insist on talking to you about their favourite coffee.

Carnival type of atmospheres at marchers are fantastic. This man has moves!

The aftermath at Trafalgar.

The Business Secretary, Lib Dem Vince Cable today said he was listening to the Unions, but would not budge on the Coalition’s plans for austerity.
In 2010, before the election, Cable said this:

“We have deep, long term problems….. a financial aristocracy which regards tax paying as something for little people not themselves.”

“People are desperate to see the back of this Labour government. But they don’t want the same old Tories. And make no mistake they are exactly the same.”

Today on BBC Radio, speaking about the top rate of tax, Cable said this:

“It moved up to 50p in an emergency because we had to have a sense of solidarity that everybody was bearing some of the pain, and the chancellor said in the budget that we’re going to have to move away from that. I agree with him. The Liberal Democrats agree with him.

- Essentially what he is saying is there doesn’t need to be a ‘sense of solidarity that everybody is bearing some of the pain any more’ because whilst the disabled, the elderly, and the most vulnerable lose all sorts of care, Cable is allowing the richest few to pay less tax. What an obscene man he has become. I wonder if the Vince Cable of 2010 who warned of the “same old Tories” would appreciate the Vince Cable of 2011 becoming one of the same old Tories. It is the biggest ideological attack in many many years. It is not the “only way”.

The issue from Tory MPs and those who seem to have very short memories, and an apparent lack of attention to detail, now seems to be that no one is setting out an alternative, to deep austerity. As if Neoliberalism is the only possible way. The problem with that is…
1) Labour set out an alternative before the election.
2) Pre May 2010 Lib Dems had an alternative.
3) Reforming the clear imbalance between cuts and taxes is an alternative. Tax more, do not cut Corporation tax, raise it. Impose a stricter set of regulations on banks and impose a far far higher levy. Robin hood tax. Close all tax avoidance loopholes. Ensure that Companies such as Diageo agree to pay back all of what they owe over a set period. Do not abolish tax on offshore profits bought back to the UK. DO NOT abolish the 50p tax rate, as Vince Cable announced would be abolished as early as 2013. Stop promoting the idea that we are like Greece. We aren’t, in any way like Greece, nor were we heading that way. That’s an alternative. It is a wholly left wing alternative, but an alternative nevertheless. Keynes set out an alternative. Stiglitz set out an alternative. Roubini, McCulley, Romer, Krugman, Pettifor, Pissarides, Kalecki, Blinder, and many many other economic and political theorists have many different alternatives than deep austerity. Thereisabetterway.org sets out alternatives. To ask ordinary people to sacrifice their jobs and their livelihoods, for the sake of a mass of tax cuts, is not the only way. To claim no one could possibly come up with an alternative, is massively ignorant.

Violent action is provoked by violent economic policies.
There is an alternative.

The Tory banking Legacy

‎”Last Friday I visited Rawlins community college in my constituency and spoke to a very bright group of economics students. We discussed the fact that Governments cannot spend money they do not have. The students understood that; why does my right hon. Friend think the Opposition do not”

- screamed Nicky Morgan, Conservative MP for Loughborough in the House of Commons today asking the Prime Minister a deep and probing question (as you can see) about the financial situation. Another wonderfully planted question that was met with the usual hysterical “yeeaaah” jeers from the Tory back benches, the same joyful jeers they gave when George Osborne announced 500,000 extra jobs losses last year.

I cannot stand planted, pointless, useless, deceptive and simplistic questions on PMQs, they undermine the entire political landscape, they make it weak and simply theatre with half truths and just plain bullshit. It should be treated with the contempt that it treats the public with.

I emailed Morgan to ask her about that. I said:

Hi Nicky,
Today in Parliament you stood up and asked quite clearly a planted question along the lines of “Why does no one understand that Right Winged economics is the only way to run a Country” (clearly ignoring the horrific legacy the IMF imposes whenever it feels the need) and how all the economics students you spoke to at Rawlins agreed.

She opened her reply with:

Thank you for your e-mail which I have read and you have got your many points across. And thank you for insulting my intelligence – I am quite able to prepare my own questions. Do you assume I am not able to do so because I am a woman or a Conservative or both?

There is so much wrong with that opening, I struggle to know where to begin. It is not me who is insulting her intelligence. Firstly, she is insulting the intelligence of the entire electorate who have to put up with the pantomime that she perpetuates with such childish questions, every week. And if I were her, I would rather people believed the question was planted because the question: “The students understood that; why does my right hon. Friend think the Opposition do not” is not suitable for the very short time the PM gets to answer questions during what is supposed to be an adult debate over a subject that is going to cause people misery for years to come, to ask such pointless questions. It is insulting to all of us. It isn’t a fucking game. To the people who will struggle to put food on their families tables, standing out in the dole queue week after week, who can’t afford Christmas next year, disabled people who will lose their support and have no idea how they will cope now; it isn’t a fucking game. It is people’s lives. Real lives. Nicky Morgan is treating peoples lives like a game. She should be ashamed.

To suggest it was “insulting her intelligence” that I didn’t believe she devised the simple question herself is also illogical. I think she is far more intelligent than that, and was given that question. If she truly believes it took an intelligent mind to practically say “Does the Prime Minister agree that he’s a God?“, and believe that is a suitable question to ask, then she is definitely an idiot and her intelligence should certainly be called into question at the next election.

Secondly, suggesting sexism? Really? Is that even worth commenting on? How did such a pathetic person get elected? When you have to invoke sexism or racism or anything of that calibre in a debate that has absolutely none of the characteristics of a sexist or racist argument, you are drastically clutching at straws. If I’d have said “Thank you for your time, oh by the way I have some ironing that needs doing“, I could understand.

What a woefully simplistic idiot she (and Tories in general) really is. This is a woman who came to our University and told us all that businessmen make the best MPs, so it is unsurprising that her view is so intensely, well, wrong.

Firstly, I hope Nicky Morgan practices what she preaches, and doesn’t have a mortgage, an overdraft, or any other outstanding debt. Because to spend money she doesn’t have, would be a little bit hypocritical of her.

Secondly, One wonders what Nicky Morgan thinks was likely to happen when her Party deregulated the banking industry in the 1980s, and when William Hague in 2001 told reporters he would promote people to his Shadow Cabinet on the basis of their commitment to banking deregulation. Did she think that would encourage responsible banking? If she did, she is massively naive, if she didn’t then she is just massively hypocritical.

Firstly, it is essential to note that the value of money doesn’t exist. It is an illusion. It is not backed by gold or silver or anything. It is just an idea; the collective idea of a population. Other than it being an idea, it is just paper and metal. You could use anything as money that is not backed by gold or silver. If we all believed each hair on our heads was worth the same as a pound coin, then we’d use the hair on our heads. There is no reason why not. We invented this concept of money, assigning mystical value backed by nothing important, and now that money controls our lives. Money is simply a medium of exchange now, like any other. Fish was used as money on the East coast of Colonial America once. The idea of money is good, because it is flexible in size and it is always in demand. The idea of money is bad, because for it be portable, its value must be high for a small amount. For that, you need a source that is in scarce supply with a high price (gold). Paper money attached to nothing, is worthless. In fact, gold has all the qualities one would require for a medium of exchange. It is durable, it is scarce, it is portable, it is divisible, far more so than any other commodity.

Banks in the UK can back the money with worthless IOUs. This is known as fractional-reserve banking. What it means is a bank only has to hold a relatively small amount of money in its reserves, the rest it can lend out.
So for example:
Person A deposits £1000.
The bank keeps 10% as reserves.
So the bank keeps £100.
The bank lends out £900.
The bank can lend that £900 as an IOU promissory note to more than one borrower (for the purpose of this example, we’ll say it can lend to three different borrowers).
Over time, each of those borrowers pays back the £900.
So the bank gets the £900 back, and an extra £1800, in new money.
The bank can then take that £2700 it now has, and keep 10%, and lend the rest out.
So the bank has made a fortune, yet only actually has £900 in reserves.
Banks issue many IOUs based on the single deposit.
So if we all marched to Lloyds TSB and demanded our money from our accounts at the same time, the bank would not have it.
In essence, the bank is lending money it doesn’t have, on a grand scale.

The free market advocate of the 19th Century, Condy Raguet noted that credit expansion in the Financial sector will always result in depression. He advocated strong regulations on the banking sector, which he had deemed to be a bit of a beast in need of taming.

Morgan, in her email, said:

I’m afraid I totally disagree with your remarks. In particular you refer to the deregulation of the financial sector and easy credit – which happened during the 13 years Blair and Brown were in power.

- No it didn’t. It was perpetuated under Blair and Brown, but it definitely didn’t begin under Blair and Brown. Another vast manipulation of the truth; something Conservatives are becoming quite the professionals at. The 1986 Building Societies act and the Financial Services Act for example, were definitely key de-regulatory acts, brought into being, under Thatcher. The influx of credit card users and the housing market boom that followed, in the early 1990s through to 2007 (and looks set to continue) was both Tory and Labour’s fault. The entire economy, since at least the 1980s has been based on debt and debt alone. Debt, by definition, is money we do not have.

Nicky Morgan should be fighting tirelessly to stop the fraudulent nature of the banking industry, opposing the deregulation that her own party introduced, and insisting that tuition fees be abolished (debt, money we don’t have), mortgages be abolished (debt, money we don’t have) and in fact every other form of debt, if she truly cares about not spending money we don’t have.

The mouth of a river in spring

When I was six, before life became work, and taxes, and benefit cheats, and women, and racism, and war, and men in suits, and bin collections, and Churchill car insurance, and bank charges for unplanned overdrafts, and Company mission statements with their empty phrases, and burnt out cars, and call centres, and fights to prove you’re masculine, and cars, and alcohol and other games that adults play, I got so angry at my mother one day that I ran away. It was a big decision. I packed my rucksack with crayons and a yoghurt, and ran away.

I braced myself for the harsh conditions I expected I would face as I set out on my trek.

Before I continue, I thought I should explain the state of mind I was almost always in, as a child. And nothing explains that state of mind better than a picture of me apparently pretending to be a surfboard.

If that isn’t enough, here is a picture I drew a couple of years later. I think this should convince you of my state of mind. And also, convince Tate Britain that I have been overlooked far too often for the Turner Prize.

Anyway, I had ran away from home.

I lived for the next ten minutes in a bush at the bottom of the garden, before making my way back across the hostile environment of the 20 or so feet to the house, to get back home because it was a bit cold, and I liked Saved by the Bell. I was under the impression that my mother must be going mad with worry, and the police might now be in the house, and that it’d teach her for not buying me the football magazine that I wanted.

Whilst I was in the bush, I decided that the ladybird that was on the leaf next to me, was called Daisy and that she was playing hide and seek with another lady bird and that I had to tell the other lady bird that I hadn’t seen daisy, if the other lady bird were to ask. The other lady bird never appeared. I guessed this was because Daisy had chosen a fucking amazing hiding place. She was on one leaf out of the hundreds of thousands of leaves that were enjoying the great British springtime. The leaf she was perched on was facing downwards. I decided that the leaf must be helping Daisy out but I couldn’t decide whether this was cheating or not.

I vividly remember wishing Daisy luck with the rest of the game, and that if I were her, i wouldn’t hide in the shed, because I once put all my action men figures in there and they are now covered in spider webs from the World’s biggest spiders. I used to think the dad spider (which was obviously bigger than my house) would eat me if I tried to rescue my action men. One day a few months later, I hatched a profound plan to rescue the action men (and wrestling figures), by creeping into the shed, with a beanie hat on, and my face covered by my hands, and making what I had decided were “spider noises” to trick the dad spider. It worked. The dad spider must have fell for my tricks. I felt so fucking clever. The action men and wrestling figures are now gathering dust in my loft, because my room is too full of work on the “qualitative methodology in research journalism“. So, when I remember all my little imaginative games (which I believed were real at the time), in those ten minutes in that bush when I was six, I had an imagination that I now envy twenty years later.

“We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting “

It is like a door that is slowly closing, to a room full of imagination. Every year that passes, the door creaks ever so more toward being fully closed, as your mind is taken up with things that do not make us happy, or achieve anything of any worth. I try to peek inside that door, when I am taking photos, or writing in my notebook, but it still requires much thought and consideration to enjoy. When I was six years old, it took no effort to believe that a ladybird on the leaf next to me, was enjoying the sun, with a game with her ladybird friends.

Imagination is limited to dreams now. When I was a child I had no need for dreams at night. My imagination in real life was adequate. Some days, I was a professional footballer who was only six years old, but had become the most successful goal scorer in history. The commentators would say “He’s incredible. The greatest that ever lived“. Other days I was a professional boxer. The World Heavyweight Championship was my pillow. I would put it on my stomach and use my mum’s dressing gown tie to tie it around my waist.The commentators, quite coincidentally would say “He’s incredible. The greatest that ever lived“. I was the greatest that ever lived at a lot of things by the time I was seven. I could sleep easily at night without having to dream, knowing my World Heavyweight Championship would still be there in the morning. Now, I dream every night. I remember every second of every dream. I interpret it as a desire to imagine. My mind simply telling me “Okay forget everything about your boring day, here is what matters……” followed by a dream about a theme park being built in my street over night and no one knowing who did it or where it came from (a genuine dream I had not too long ago).

When I see a ladybird now, I don’t even acknowledge it. I don’t count its spots. I don’t even give it a name and a back story. I am too busy thinking about the NHS reforms.

How sad.

I want my imagination to explain why I prefer the mouth of a river in spring, to the grey lifeless buildings filled with the grey lifeless people with their grey lifeless language, that frequent them, even though those lifeless buildings are where the money and the apparent “dignity” lies and why those grey lifeless people in the grey lifeless buildings with their grey lifeless language, don’t congregate every evening, to forget their colourless lives, at the mouth of a river in spring.

The grand of Duke of… underage sex brothels.

I don’t like dentists.
They exist only to hurt my face. I went to the dentist yesterday for two fillings. Today, my face feels eerily reminiscent of when I used to go to boxing and was furiously punched in the face by the kid with the hardest punch.

Instead of saying “Just two simple fillings today then”, in purposely misleading language to disguise the hell you’re about to face, like a cannibal saying “I’m having a man over for dinner”, he should have just said “Okay Jamie, I’m seriously about to make it feel like i’ve just raped your face. Then I might stamp on it. Just for fun. Oh and I have a fit assistant stood next to me, so you wont say no, because it’ll make you look like a wimp if you do. Is that okay? Good!”

He then makes me wear the most ridiculous looking shades in the World and puts a baby-like napkin around my neck. He then sticks a suction machine in my mouth. Any shred of dignity I had left is slowly wished away when he suddenly invites three female students to come and watch. He then decides that with me looking cool in my shades, a napkin to stop any drool, and a suction thing in my face, that now’s the time for small talk. So I have a numb face, a suction thing, the threat of dribbling everywhere, and three female students staring into my face. The only possible way it could have been less dignified, is if I shat myself at that moment.

Despite the horror at losing all dignity, I comforted myself by insisting that even if I were to shit myself, whilst being watched by students, and having my face raped by a crazy man in a white uniform, I would still be far more dignified than Prince Andrew. And that comforted me.

It emerged last week, that our marvelous Prince is good friends with a convicted Paedophile – Jeffrey Epstein, and has spent many fun filled weekends at Epstein’s mansion over in the U.S. A lady who used to help run Epstein’s mansion, admitted that lots of underage girls were seen topless and sometimes naked, in Epstein’s company, but insisted:

‘He was a very kind man and, while I don’t approve of things he’s been accused of, I liked him very much,’

One of those friendly paedophiles. I wouldn’t be happy if the Duke of Golf was making friends with the nasty type of paedophile. Anyway, Epstein was accused by over 40 girls between 13 and 17, of sexually abusing them, after they were recruited by other young girls to massage him. He served just 13 months in jail. He struck a plea bargain deal with US prosecutors, meaning he admitted minor charges, and so was unable to be tried for the more serious of crimes.

FBI agents found a list of names on his computer, and when asked if these men had also abused young girls, he pleaded the fifth amendment, suggesting that if he told the truth, it would be incriminating. The list includes famous people, and politicians.

One girl who was willing to testify against Epstein, named Jane Doe 102, now revealed as Virginia Roberts, now married and living in Australia, noted that she was just 15 years old when she had been:

sexually exploited by Epstein’s adult male peers including royalty

Roberts says that Epstein flew her to meet the Prince in 2001, and Andrew asked how old she was. She said she was 17, and Epstein’s girlfriend (Ghislaine Maxwell – daughter of late media owner Robert Maxwell) said:

“He’ll soon have to trade her in”

They all laughed, including the Prince.
Here is the Prince with Virginia Roberts, when she was 17 years old.

The FBI contacted Roberts years later to say that they found evidence that Epstein had been secretly filming her when she was in the bathroom, on the toilet.
This man is good friends with our Prince! Doesn’t it make you proud?

This comes almost a year after Wikileaks published files from a US Diplomatic cable showing that the US Ambassador was shocked at how rude and arrogant the Duke was. Referring to anti-corruption investigations, the Duke said:

“those fucking journalists … who poke their noses everywhere”

It seems he is unhappy that as a man who was born into privilege and given the job as UK trade envoy, simply to give him something productive to do, he should be above the law when it comes to corruption when involved in a massive Al-Yamamah arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia. He is also close friends with Gaddafi’s son – Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi and it is suggested the Duke may have played a part in the release of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi. Clearly he believes he should be allowed to partake in corrupt practices, and then relax at an underage sex brothel. We should leave him alone! The poor hereditary millionaire.

But it’s okay! Because his ex-wife must be able to provide some level of dignity back into a family of undignified over-privileged massive twats, right?
Wrong.
In 2009, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was caught offering access to her husband, Prince Andrew, by Mazher Mahmood of the News of the World posing as an Indian businessman, for £50,000. She is now a bankrupt alcoholic and her husband is friends with a paedophile.

My undignified experience at the dentist, is nothing compared to Prince Andrews escapades.

Prince Andrew, like Charlie Sheen, is currently winning.

The Corporatocracy

In 2010 the U.S Supreme Court over turned limitations to Corporations financing political broadcasts in the U.S. They argued that to limit financing from Corporations would be an attack on their first Amendment rights. They didn’t however set how why they have defined Corporations as some kind of living organism that has political rights in the first place. It is a worrying precedent. It means all of a sudden that Corporations are like people. Only richer and more powerful, with very different interests. People tend to vote for safe jobs, better healthcare, safe products, and a decent level of funding for education. Corporations want weak labour laws, low Corporate taxes, and regulations (safe products?) as minimal as possible.

A lifeless, soulless, dead entity like a Corporation, having the rights assigned to people, is an awful step in the wrong direction. Should a Corporation like ITT have rights, in the US? ITT owned 25% of Focke-Wulf, the manufacturer of the Luftewaffe Nazi aircraft that was used to shoot down American airplanes during the war. It then won $27,000,000 in compensation after the Allied’s bombed the Focke-Wulf factory during the war. ITT also made radar and radio equipment used by the Nazis. ITT were funding the killing of Allied troops. ITT also helped to fund Pinochet’s control over Chile. One of the most evil dictators in the World. Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of ITT during the war, was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery for his service to the Country.

Exxon, whose named used to be Standard Oil of New Jersey, are responsible for shipping oil to the Nazis, even after Pearl Harbour. They also contributed, through a bunch of subsidiary companies, to Himmler’s personal fund. They now have the same rights as US citizens.

Profit before people.

The 2010 ruling means that climate change takes a back seat because it isn’t in the interest of oil companies. That the 1% of scientists who dispute man made climate change will be the only ones who are listened to. American Petroleum Institute, whose members include Exxon, have began to finance mainly Republican candidates this year. Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs quite openly said:

“At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.”

Koch Industries Inc, gave $1.79mn to candidates. 90% of those candidates were Republicans. This of course comes as President Obama proposed ending subsidies for Gas and Electric companies by 2012. Apparently those companies aren’t happy that their Welfare cheque is about to be scrapped. A Welfare cheque that adds up to over $45bn. Their Republican bitches will of course defend them. But no universal healthcare! Healthy citizens = bad. Rich oil companies = great.

Republicans in the US House of Reps voted to cut off all funding to the UN Climate Change panel, the IPCC, because according to Blaine Luetkemeyer, a Missouri Republican:

“The IPCC is an entity that is fraught with waste and fraud, and engaged in dubious science, which is the last thing hard-working American taxpayers should be paying for”

The idea that it is “dubious science” is laughable. And the phrase “hard working Americans” is an empty one. Those same hard working Americans, I doubt want to see their money going to a mass of Corporate tax cuts either. Blaine Luetkemeyer’s claim of “dubious” apparently isn’t without irony, given that in 2004 he introduced a bill, based on Biblical principles, to the Missouri State Legislature, to define marriage as between a man and a woman. All for personal “freedom” as long as he gets to define what “freedom” means.

One the “dubious science” claim surrounding Climate Change, it always seems to come from Republicans. So I wondered why that could be? And then I found this. It shows Oil company contributions for 2010, and which Party – Republican or Democrat – those funds went primarily to. I think it’s pretty conclusive.

Roy Blunt, the United States Senator, from Missouri and whose campaign funds came mainly from big oil ($293,400 altogether) opposes cap and trade and supports drilling for oil on US coastlines. The League of Conservation Voters, who work to turn environmental issues into national priorities said that Blunt is:

“In his twelve years in office, Rep. Roy Blunt has taken good care of Big Oil by maintaining their costly tax breaks while continually voting against opportunities to create clean energy jobs, reduce pollution and improve fuel economy for Missourians,”

One wonders who runs the World? What a wretched democracy we all seem so proud of.

America is not the only country who laughably refer to their Corporatocracy as a Democracy. Britain is just as bad. Our Tory Government is funded heavily by the financial sector and very wealthy individuals. Apparently there is no money left to pay for the care of disabled people, or to keep arts centres open. But there is money, for a 83% tax payer owned bank to offer its CEO a £4.5mn bonus in shares, on top of his 3.2mn bonus for 2010. There is enough money to give one man, a bonus (on top of his salary) of £7.7mn. We are still an economy controlled by the Financial sector. It is not Capitalism.

The Municipal Governing Body of Greater London is the City of London Corporation. It’s main control is over the City of London financial district. There are residents whom live there, but their vote is not very important, given that the majority of the votes for that region, are given to Corporations. They are called “non-residential voters”. Corporate voters. A Corporation may appoint a number of people to cast votes on its behalf based on how many employees it has. The employees don’t get a say, the CEO gets the vote. Those who are appointed voters can vote twice. Once for their Corporation and once for their own vote. Residents of the area can only vote once. It is one big Corporatocracy. The Republicans over in the States would be proud. They’d some how manage to refer to it as “freedom” and “giving power back to people“.

Corporate regulation is essential. Corporations have one legal requirement: profit. Humans, i’d argue are motivated not just by profit, but also by compassion, loyalty, doing the right thing, the advancement of the species and survival. Corporations, by law, must ignore all that stuff if it conflicts with their ability to make profit, and that is a dangerous thing.

Today we learnt that the Tory Government’s next line of attack against its much hated public sector (which, again, remember did no wrong, and caused no problems itself) is the attack on public sector pensions, because they are unfair in relation to private sector pensions. Well, instead of forcing equal misery across the public sector to match that of the private sector, why don’t you make the private sector pay up more?

Damn right i’m a Marxist, especially in this climate of horrendous shock right winged economics.

Let’s stop referring to Corporatocracy as Democratic.
Let’s stop referring to Corporatocracy as freedom.
Let’s stop blaming government for failings, when Government is pretty much owned by the Corporate World.

The point is, Corporations do not deserve rights. They are not people. Government is supposed to work for the people, not for the very wealthy, and at the moment there is no government in the Western World that is not wholly run for the benefit of the very wealthy. It is not democracy. It is not at all what the Founders envisaged.