When Richard Desmond dies...

...how will we be able to pay tribute?

It's a tough question, given that we need to be sensitive to the fact that he is, after all, a human being with a family and friends.

Probably the best thing to do, I've decided, would be to print a photograph of him dying - possibly already dead, who knows? - in order to pay tribute. That's what Desmond's OK magazine says it's doing this week. Not cashing in, no no. Not being macabre, no no. Paying tribute.

I know it's not the normal way that most people would 'pay tribute'. Ordinarily we use that phrase to remember someone fondly, rather than printing a ghoulish photo of the life ebbing away out of their body, but according to Richard Desmond it's the nicest way to mark the passing of a much-loved figure.

Desmond won't mind, then, as he's dying, if we stick a camera right at his dying fat fucking face and slap it on the front cover of a magazine so that everyone in the world can see that this is what a dying - or already dead, who knows? - person looks like. That would be a nice way of doing things, wouldn't it? After all, he's made it clear that's the right and proper way to deal with things.

Hang on a tick, though, what's this?

The grotesque image from the Paris car crash prompted calls for publications reproducing the photo to be banned in Britain. Around 1,000 copies of Chi, the glossy weekly magazine which carries the picture, are due to arrive in the country today, when distributors will decide whether to halt circulation of the offending issue. The Daily Express has decided not to show the photo.

Why, in that flashback to July 14, 2006, it appears that it's the Daily Express (owned by Richard Desmond, lest we forget) having a go at someone else for printing a photo of Princess Diana while she lay dying.

But but but... surely printing a photo of someone dying isn't 'grotesque'? Surely it's 'paying tribute'? No...?

Or was it just that the Express couldn't afford the Diana death photo rather than 'deciding' not to show it?

Either way, when Desmond does kick the bucket, let's all head round to his gaff with cameras to shove in his relatives' faces.

It's what he would have wanted.

Can you spot what's missing?

Here's a story about Prince Charles in today's Daily Mail:

Prince of Wales' funding from the taxpayer rose by almost a quarter last year, Clarence House accounts have revealed.
Cash from grant-in-aid and Government departments handed over to help Charles perform his duties jumped by 23.5 per cent to £3,033,000.

Strange though. Something appears to be missing. Where can it be?

His senior aide, Sir Michael Peat, said Charles had been mindful of the tough economic conditions.
'It's a recession and we have to say that we've looked at all costs very carefully,' he explained.

No, not there.

Sir Michael stressed that the increase was because the Prince was busier than ever.
'The Prince is entering his seventh decade. Many people would be slowing down but he seems to be going faster and faster.'

Nor there.

Odd.

Imagine if this story weren't about Prince Charles - let's imagine we were looking at a story about someone else in the public sector, for example a teacher, or anyone who works for a local council. Let's imagine it was about their wages, which would be considerably less than several million quid a year. Not only would their justification for their remuneration not come at the top of the story, but someone else would be sticking their oar in.

Yes, the Tax Payers' Alliance. They're incredibly vocal about every other piece of public expenditure, making sure they make it clear how awful it is. So why not this one? Why did no-one think to give them a bell? Or maybe they did... but the rent-a-quote weren't forthcoming on this particular occasion? Of course, with their lack of transparency, it's hard to know where they stand on things like a taxpayer-funded monarchy. If they were in favour, for example, they'd be sailing against the wind as far as Mail readers are concerned. Check out these comments:



I'm not sure if that's just kite-flying to try and provoke their readers into defending Charles, or whether that's what Mailies really think of the monarchy. Who knows? All I do know is that the TPA are incredibly silent on this subject, whereas they're normally flying out of the traps. It's refreshing, of course, to see a story about public expenditure without them being in it, and it's a welcome move if it means they're never again to be rung up by Mail journalists; but I don't think that's quite the case. So what's the difference between ordinary people who work for the public sector and Prince Charles - why does he escape the TPA's wrath?

Lower than a snake's belly

You know the audience in The Producers, who've just sat through Springtime for Hitler? You know the expression on their faces? It's something like this...



Well, that was the look on my face as I read this little gem from Britain's No 1 middle-market newspaper today:

Missing chef Claudia Lawrence 'got a kick out of married men and had 40 mystery lovers', claims friend

Do you know what I mean? There's a moment where you think to yourself: hang on a tick, did this really happen? Am I just making it up in my head? And then you look at it again, and again, and again, and you think: No, I didn't make it up at all. What I think I'm seeing with my eyes is what's actually there.

Sure, you might think, what with this blog and all, that I would have become somehow immune to being shocked by stuff like this, and you'd be kind of right. But then I really do think this is something lower than the lowest of the low. A woman is missing, presumed dead - how on earth is it in the public interest, in anyone's interest at all, and how does it benefit anyone, to have an unnamed 'friend' tell tales which may or may not be true, about a woman who is suspected to have been murdered? What do we gain from this? Anything?

The Mail even contemplates itself that the woman's relatives may have been distressed by her disappearance:



'Anguish' - yes, indeed. And what further 'anguish' might be caused to the missing woman's father by having salacious and superfluous details of his daughter's life splashed all over the papers? Again, the question must be asked: how does this benefit anyone at all? Does it?

What's the Mail's justification for this? They don't offer one, but instead leave that to the 'friend' (some friend!) of the missing woman:

Until now her friends and family have been reluctant to speak about any possible liaisons she may have had in the past.
But her friend said that it was important the public should be given a complete picture of her character, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.

And why is it 'important' that 'the public' should learn about these matters? Will a vital witness suddenly think "Oh I hadn't recalled anything about that well-publicised disappearance until I remembered details of the woman's sex life, and then it all came flooding back"? Or was there another sort of 'importance' involved in this whole story - a financial transaction that benefited that 'friend', perhaps? Surely if he really thought it was important the public knew he would tell everyone about it, not just the Mail on Sunday?

Here, then, is a textbook example of the kind of anonymous 'friend' that newspapers use all the time, while thinking it's perfectly acceptable that anonymous bloggers like NightJack should be outed at the first available opportunity - as the Mail described last week in a piece headlined "Bloggers beware" (I won't link to it as it's got pics etc of NightJack). Yet while someone like NightJack wrote in the public interest and gave a valuable insight into the life of a serving police officer, whether you agreed with what he said or not, you have to question how the public benefit from learning stuff like this - which may be completely false - from 'friends' of missing people.

The only hope we can all have is that Claudia Lawrence turns up safe and well, and sues the hell out of those who have printed such nasty rubbish about her.

Transparency and the TPA

Look, I know it's easy. It's the easiest thing in the world. You're doing a story about the public sector, you need someone to be able to say "Wuuuuuuurgh, isn't it awful, our tax pounds are being wasted by this" and you're five minutes away from deadline. Sure, a phone call to the Tax Payers Alliance might seem like the most sensible thing in the world. You know they're going to say whatever you want them to say. You know they're pretty much going to complain about public expenditure on anything ever, whether it's justified or not. Sure, it's a piece of piss story.

It's the same with broadcasters. You need someone to put the point of view that spending money on things is bad, if that money has come from the public taxes at some stage. It's a no-brainer, isn't it? Get on the blower to the TPA and they'll have someone droning away at you on radio or TV within seconds, no matter what the subject - they'll always have someone ready and waiting to be called into action to complain about taxation. Just send up the bat-signal and they'll get racing into action. Problem solved!

But do you know who you're dealing with? How transparent are the Tax Payers Alliance? They've become more and more popular in the media, thanks to the fact they're the go-to guys for a hack in a hurry who needs some derogatory quotes about the public sector spending money on things. But are they as transparent as they'd like the public sector to be? And if they aren't, why not? What possible reason might there be for them to be so coy about where their money comes from - particularly when their whole reason for existing is to complain about where money comes from?

Recently the TPA have been frothing at the mouth over MPs' expenses, particularly the redacted edition.

After MPs themselves have been allowed to go through all their own claims "redacting" information, there are some glaring gaps in what the public are being told. It turns out that "redacting" is a technical term for "obscuring potentially embarassing information with a big black marker pen".

Sounds fair enough, doesn't it? But then you have to remember this:

It’s simply not true that all political organisations are secretive about their funding. Most declare their income and expenditure, and some give a break-down of income sources, including donors. The TPA does neither. It publishes abbreviated accounts which means income and expenditure are withheld. The last time it published full accounts was in 2006, when it recorded an income of £130,000. But the current organisation has ten full-time staff across two offices, which suggests either its income has jumped substantially or it is loaded with debt.

But we don't know for sure, because the TPA are very shy. Is it fair enough that journalists harvest quotes from the TPA about transparency and probity, while at the same time they're extremely shy about where their own money comes from? Sure, it's not taxpayers' money and they have no legal obligation to disclose it - but then again, why not? What on earth would be wrong with letting us all know who is funding the TPA and where that money is coming from?

After all, they appear on the BBC, the taxpayer-funded broadcaster, often enough. Shouldn't we as licence fee payers know where this pressure group, which gets hours and hours of coverage thanks to lazy journalists at the BBC, is coming from? Shouldn't we be told what its aims are and why it's complaining about tax, rather than just that it is?

The way the TPA gets presented by journalists is as if it's some kind of independent think-tank which just happens to be really concerned about taxpayers' money. Which might be true, who knows? But what if there was another agenda there? Which people are funding the TPA, and what are they hoping to get out of it? Surely it would be fair enough that we should be allowed to know that - or does transparency only work one way?

There's a story there for a journalist who really wants to find out - rather than just ringing the TPA up every time they 'need a quote' about how bad the public sector is.

The MSM: Sulking bastards

We had a bit of fun on Friday afternoon with the Daily Mail's ridiculously skewed poll about gypsies. So much fun, it turns out, that they've done the grown-up thing and decided to take their ball away and stop playing, because when you go to where the poll was you instead find yourself on their main comment page.

Bless. Sensitive souls at the Mail, then. Now I'd like to think the reason they pulled the poll was because they realised it was ridiculously skewed and unfair, and not because they were taking a pasting in the numbers; but I'm afraid that might be a little naive of me to think that.

Interesting, though, to note this behaviour - and contrast it with the times when their stories get piled on by groups who aren't bleeding-heart soaking-wet left-liberal types, for example when the BNP descend on stories involving immigration and their own fascist political party, and manipulate the comments to make Nick Griffin and chums seem a lot more popular and well-supported than they really are. Does the Mail pull those stories or stop comments on those occasions? No, they don't. They think that's fair enough.

So essentially it's not things being hijacked per se that the Mail objects to; it's things being hijacked by liberals as opposed to fascists. I think that's worth remembering.

You'll see, by the way, that the Mail's columnists and hired heavies are still trying to press ahead with the "Wheelie bins are the agents of doom and we don't like them" drivel from last week.



David Mitchell writes a convincing argument against, and the good news from the poll results is that 57% of Mail readers agree with him:



You'll also notice a couple of other things. Firstly, the Mail is still asking its readers if Michael Martin should resign as Speaker of the House of Commons, several weeks after he did resign as Speaker; and also, that the Mail's poll on "SHOULD IMMIGRANTS BE FORCED (yes, forced) TO RESPECT BRITISH CULTURE?" gets 70% in favour. That is a far more offensive question that the gypsies one, but I guess it's going the way they want it to, so they're not going to be taking that one down any time soon.

But that's the way the mainstream media behave. When they don't get their way, they sulk and pout and stamp their feet. Emotionally, they are a two-year-old child. Take for example The Times's Anna Mikhailova, who manages in an entire article about the outing of NightJack last week to not make a single convincing argument for either the outing of NightJack or her own outing of Zoe Margolis, other than "We in the big boys' media have lawyers and things, bloggers don't, therefore, er, that makes it right what we did. Somehow". But I was intrigued by this:

It was only when I started full-time work that I realised how deeply I was being damaged. I would turn up to a meeting with new contacts and be greeted with a hesitant: “I’ve seen your blog.” Cue an extensive effort by the Sunday Times legal team to take it down — successfully, thank goodness.

Thank goodness they were busily trying to get someone's blog taken down rather than actually defending investigative journalism; what a proud moment for the Sunday Times that was.

Yes, so when the MSM want to get you - out come the big guns of the legal team, no questions asked. When you skew a poll the way they don't like - down it goes. When you skew it in the direction they want - it stays up.

It begins to strike me why the press have had so much fun with the MPs' expenses issue - finally they've managed to take the moral high ground, for the first time ever, by finding a group of people even more reviled than them.

Mail pwn3d on ridiculously skewed gypsy poll

I like seeing the Mail get pwn3d when it does a silly. Yesterday we saw how even the power of a front page lead and the hilarious writing skills of Richard Littlejohn, who should be Prime Minister, couldn't save them from opening up a wheelie bin full of whoopass.

And so to today, with the Mail attempting to follow up another story - this time about gypsies being given preferential treatment by some GPs - with a poll. But a poll isn't enough, they had to skew the question by asking "SHOULD THE NHS ALLOW GYPSIES TO JUMP THE QUEUE?" - in the style of the Daily Express, whose unparodiable nonsense when it comes to website polls has been going for ages now.

Thanks to the power of Twitter, people who think that poll was a disgraceful piece of crap (doesn't it make sense, when people live a transitory lifestyle, to give them some preferential treatment in seeing a GP? Not that it's a queue anyway, as many more appointments at GPs are bookable nowadays) have been able to register their displeasure, changing an overwhelming vote against those 'queue-jumping' gypsies:



And it's risen even further since that screen grab. So I make that Twitter 1, Mail 0.

Relatedly, below the Littlejohn article about gypsies there is this gem of a comment. Sometimes people find it hard to get comments on Littlejohn articles but this strikes me as a particularly excellent example of its kind:



"I love the UK, Spain" - that's world class. Not that I imagine Billericay Dickie's loyal readers have twigged...

It's wheelie bin a shit campaign

Before I wheel my own delightful bin out onto the kerb, I thought I'd share this treat from the Mail's website. They've gone all "ooh no, middle England is revolting against bonkers Brussels bastards telling us to RECYCLE things rather than stick it all in landfill, wasn't life better when nothing was recycled at all, there were no such things as rats or maggots before wheelie bins, it's all the fault of the green Nazi bastards" on us with yesterday's front page



and an accompanying hilarious article from Mr Brilliant Richard Littlejohn, who should of course be Prime Minister, according to some expat in Dubai in the website comments, who'd otherwise be complaining, without a whiff of irony, about Sharia Law in Britain and how there are too many migrants.

Anyway, so you'd think that would be enough to whip middle England into a pearl-clutching frenzy of hatred against the evils of wheelie bins, wouldn't you? Given all that prodding in the right direction, surely the vast majority of readers would be voting in favour of a ban, wouldn't they?

Wouldn't they?



Haha. I wonder if this is the 'silent majority' we hear so much about in the Mail?

*edit* and just look at Littlejohn. He can't help himself! When he's not talking about Nazis, he's talking about Hitlers! In fact, the only people Littlejohn *never* calls Nazis or Hitlers are the BNP. Funny that...

You mustn't take Melanie Phillips's word for it

...says, er, the Daily Mail, defending itself against accusations as the complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (of which Paul Dacre is a significant figure) about the (Paul Dacre-edited) Daily Mail, and stories about gay adoption. Don't Get Mad Get Accurate is a fascinating look into how the PCC works (or doesn't) for complainants, and the weasel tactics used to try and excuse things that people do complain about.

The PCC said:

While the column had been phrased in stark terms - the journalist had made one claim which was prefaced by "the fact is", for example - the author's claims would nonetheless be recognised by readers as comment rather than unarguable fact.

So while Phillips said 'the fact is', Phillips's readers would know she wasn't trying to say something like 'the fact is'; she was quite obviously (and only a simpleton wouldn't know this) saying 'I think'.

So there you have it. When Melanie Phillips says 'the fact is', it's reasonable to assume she is not stating a fact. According to her employers.

Here comes the hatred

Who do we think Mail readers blame for racist violence - the violent racists, or the violent racists' victims?

You knew, didn't you? Funnily enough, so did I.



You also knew the kind of comments that would be voted down by fellow readers. Comments like these:



Maybe they should be somewhere safer... NO! Romanians cost us little... NO! They work hard... NO! Is there not a more civil way than violence... NO! Surely they're not that bad... NO! Racist violence is disgusting... NO! Racism is always wrong... NO! It's like having your face pounded at. Now as ever I must supply the caveat that these voters on web comments needn't necessarily represent the majority or anything other than a small minority (oh the irony) of Mail readers; but then again, you have to wonder.

Earlier on, we saw how BNP propaganda is a cigarette paper away from Daily Mail stories; and how Mail columnist Melanie Phillips is almost indistinguishable at times from 'extremist' Geert Wilders. So it's not as if the Mail doesn't bring these fuckknuckles on itself; nor that it doesn't encourage them by putting across extreme views under a cosy cardigan of fluffy lifestyle features.

If you'd like more evidence (h/t to ParentStudent) then I suggest you head along here, to Allison Pearson's bit of hate for the day, where she roars:

No, madam, it's you who have offended MY values

Although the URL gives us a clue as to the original headline



which must have been "No, madam in a burkha... etc"

Anyway, it's the kind of inane babbling you'd expect from a Mail columnist, laced with more than a slight whiff of, well, see for yourself:

So imagine my friend's surprise when she got off at the same station as burkha girl and saw this 'penniless innocent' whip out a credit card from under the folds of her dress with which she promptly bought a Tube ticket.
Jane was so incensed she sent me a text message, explaining what she'd witnessed. It ended: 'Attack of Burkha Rage. Grrr.'

"I got a text from my friend because someone in a burkha got let off something by someone" - so fucking what? If someone didn't give the woman a ticket, and she was trying it on, then that's their fault for being a soft touch, not the woman in the burkha for trying it on (if she did). What of this 'burkha rage'?

Yet Burkha Rage has become our personal shorthand for someone taking the mickey out of our country and its tolerant ways.

Tolerance like yours, Allison? Or that of your readers? Look how tolerant they are!



Some of those comments are about Fatma Lemes, whose case was covered the other day, while others are just plain vitriol about burkhas.

But what of that headline? Where did the woman in Pearson's story ever complain about having HER values offended? Nowhere. Not at all, hence the hasty editing, to imply that Pearson was talking about uppity Muslims in general, not just the one on the train. You know, how we can lump together people in burkhas with East European Muslims - they're all pretty much the same, aren't they?

The more you read it, the more depressing the conclusion - that behind all the powder-puff lifestyle, fashion and other trash in the Mail, there's a pretty horrible agenda.

Midwives and immigrants

Here's some news from the Royal College of Midwives, flatly squashing some BNP propaganda:

The Royal College of Midwives has hit out at the British National Party (BNP) over suggestions immigration is fuelling a crisis in NHS maternity care.
The RCM said it "rejects absolutely the BNP's assertion that immigration is a problem".

I wonder where on earth that kind of disgraceful propaganda could have come from? Where did the BNP get their information on immigration affecting maternity care?

Oh. I see.

It doesn't come as a tremendous surprise, does it?

Who fancies a quiz?

Here's a fun game to keep you occupied. No Googling, now. You simply have to guess who said the following statements - Melanie Phillips or Geert Wilders.

1. "Socialists are the most inveterate cultural relativists in Europe. They regard the Islamic culture of backwardness and violence as equal to our Western culture of freedom, democracy and human rights. In fact, it is the socialists who are responsible for mass immigration, Islamization and general decay of our cities and societies."

2. "The nation-wrecking ideology of multiculturalism and the Marxist redefinition of racial prejudice into racism – ‘prejudice plus power ‘– which have turned our society inside out are the product of the left."

3. "Voters have been told in effect that there is nothing standing between national suicide on the one hand and racism on the other. If you don’t want the former, you are automatically branded with the latter."

4. "And so, the voters have had enough. Because they of course realise that Europe is going in the wrong direction. They know that there are enormous problems with Islam in Europe. They are well aware of the identity of those who are taking them for a ride, namely, the Shariah socialists."

5. "They are areas of very high immigration where the transformation of the ethnic, religious and cultural landscape has made indigenous inhabitants feel strangers in their own country — and yet they are told they are racist for saying so"

6. "Mass immigration, demographic developments and Islamization are certainly partly causes of Europe’s steadily increasing impoverishment and decay."

7. "Above all else, we should absolutely refuse to countenance the spread of Sharia law, which is not only inimical to our own deepest principles but aims to supplant our own laws. Yet we are turning a blind eye to the steady Sharia-isation"

8. "Just like communism, fascism and nazism, Islam is a threat to everything we stand for. It is a threat to democracy, to the constitutional state, to equality for men and women, to freedom and civilisation. Wherever you look in the world, the more Islam you see, the less freedom you see."

9. "The problem, however, is that it doesn't understand what Muslim extremism is. Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has 'hijacked' and distorted Islam, it will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself."

10. "Of course, there are many moderate Muslims. However, there is no such a thing as a moderate Islam. Islam’s heart lies in the Koran."

11. "In the war being waged by radical Islamism against the west, such symbolism [as mosque-building] is of the utmost importance and significance. It is itself a strategic weapon of cultural and religious demoralisation."

12. "We will have to close down all radical [mosques] and forbid the construction of any new mosques, there is enough Islam in Europe."

Tricky, no? So there you have it - Geert Wilders and Melanie Phillips. One a dangerous extremist with vile views; the other a Dutchman with silly hair.

If you enjoyed that quiz, you'll enjoy this blog post from Blood & Treasure, who has managed to get hold of some exciting Melanie Phillips copy...

*update* Oops, forgot the answers! 1 Geert 2 Mel 3 Mel 4 Geert 5 Mel 6 Geert 7 Mel 8 Geert 9 Mel 10 Geert 11 Mel 12 Geert

More pesky ethnics daring to be upset by things

I mentioned earlier about a new kind of Mail story I'd noticed* - minority people daring to be upset by something and wanting some form of redress (or, to put it another way, "those uppity foreigns getting in a tizzy, they probably don't care anyway, they just want to use Human Rights or Health & Safety or something to try and get some compensation, not that you'd get it if you were white, eh guv, gawd blimey it's the bloody one-armed black lesbians innit?")

Well, here comes another story, this time about a Jewish couple. At first glance you'd think Mr and Mrs Coleman were your ideal Daily Mail readers - middle-class, suburban, presentable, not extremists, just nice everyday Brits. Wrong! Because they've dared to be upset about the fact they're devoted to their Jewish faith; and not only that, but they've got the brass neck to complain about something! Wurrrgh! Bad! Naughty! Wrong!

Dr Dena Coleman and husband Gordon claim they cannot leave their holiday flat on the Sabbath because when they do they automatically trigger the light in the communal hallway - contravening a religious ban on turning on electrical items from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday because it constitutes 'creating fire'.

Now I don't claim to be a particular fan of this couple's God, or any other, and if you want to not make fire on the sabbath because your big beardy sky-man says you can't, then that's up to you. I can't say it seems particularly sensible to me, but what do I know? It strikes me as just a neighbourly dispute, the kind that happens all the time for all kinds of reasons, not just religious or ethnic/cultural ones - but those don't end up in the media, do they? What's the difference with this one?

The claim also accuses the company of breaching their rights under the Equality Act 2006 and Human Rights Act 1998.

Every time those words are written, a big red alarm goes off in the Daily Mail batcave. The big "YUMAN RITES" symbol goes flashing across Gotham City and Paul Dacre comes sliding down a ruddy great pole to his old-fashioned typewriter to concoct another crock. Yes, it's our old friend the Human Rights Act - something which, if I can be excused for mixing up my comic-based metaphors, is Kryptonite to the Mail. Even if the Human Rights Act, in bright red ink, said that Paul Dacre should be given a billion billion pounds, it would still be decried as the most heinous thing ever. Which when you think of it is quite odd. Since when did 'Human Rights' become such a wince-inducing phrase? I kind of quite like the idea of human rights. I think they're good things. In Mail-land, of course, it conjurs up horrific images of gays, blacks and all kinds of deviants suing for compensation - which is the narrative we're getting here.

Another compare and contrast with the Beeb, who have also covered this story (as they did with the soldiers compensation one earlier), but do it slightly differently. While the BBC quotes an anonymous neighbour who is rather diplomatic and conciliatory, and who says:

One of them, who did not wish to be named but attended a management meeting last week with the couple, said: "For some time there has been discussions around here about the lights being on all day, which is crazy.
"Light sensors mean the lights only come on when you require them to be on, which is common sense.
"This couple are observant Jews. They have a religious problem with this.
"It has gone further than it should have done, I think they have jumped the gun.
"They did come to a meeting and put their point of view forward.
"The general view was that despite any differences the matter should be resolved as quickly as we can.
"It just seems to have been blown out of all proportion."

The Mail's anonymous neighbour is a little different:

One resident, who did not want to be named, said: 'It has caused quite a stir here, there have been a lot of arguments.
'There has been a meeting about it and many of the residents aren't happy.
'There's a feeling that things shouldn't be changed just to suit people in one flat when everyone else is happy with it.
'I don't think the rest of us would think twice about the lights but they're going to great lengths to get it changed so they must feel very strongly about it.

'

Now of course it might just be that these are just two points of view from two different people. But the clincher comes, as it so often does, with the readership. While the BBC decides it can just tell a story, the Mail has do some fishing among its Brains Trust, and so we get the best rated comments saying this:



And the worst rated comments saying this:



I do love the way things like 'courtesy' and 'respect' get squashed so readily by these commenters. How dare people show courtesy! How dare people show respect! Grr!

So there you have it. Muslims, Jews, black people, anyone from a minority... if you're going to sue anyone for anything ever, you'd better beware - the Mail will be after you, and their readers will be all too ready to pass withering judgement.

* It's probably not new at all, just that I've only just noticed it, staring me in the face like a particularly unflushable shite.

Where did I put that cloak of anonymity?

...or pseudonymity, or, to be completely pedantic in my case, allonymity?

According to those fearless investigative journalists at The Times, who have got to work cracking the big story of the summer, an anonymous copper who's written an award-winning blog shouldn't be allowed to remain anonymous - and may potentially face disciplinary action - because...

Well, there's the problem, isn't it? What exactly is the 'because'? Because what? Why shouldn't this chap be allowed to blog away under a pseudonym for the rest of his natural life? As Justin has pointed out, it's not as if The Times themselves don't use anonymous 'sources', 'friends' and 'insiders', when they need a story.

Can The Times, in the public interest, tell us who helped them out NightJack? Or will they snivel behind the 'cloak of anonymity' they think should be given to their sources, but not to people they want to expose? Strange how it should be one rule for one, and one rule for another. Why is there no byline on the Times leader column? Why not put the author's identity there? Why not out pseudonymous diary columnists, horse racing tipsters and everyone else in the press if it's open season? Oh but I forgot, it only works one way, doesn't it? Especially if you're the Times, who outed the blogger Girl With A One Track Mind because... well, again, it's the 'because' that I'm finding difficulty with.

And all those people who have ever commented under pseudonymous identities on the Times's website...? Should they now have their IP addresses revealed and their identities exposed? Why not? If it's good for someone, why not for someone else? It's not as if there aren't worrying precedents for this kind of thing happening anyway.

I wouldn't mind if the Times had been using its power to expose hypocrisy, or fraudulent behaviour, or reveal that NightJack wasn't a serving copper, for example, but this is none of those things. It's just a cheap shot, and it's pisspoor journalism.

As for me - I'll hide behind that ever-diminishing cloak for the time being, if you don't mind. It's not that I have anything in particular to hide, you understand; it's just that I do have another life outside of this internet world, and never the twain shall meet, as far as I'm concerned. It's everyone's right to have free expression, and mine wouldn't be particularly curtailed by having my real name on here - but interesting blogs like NightJack are under threat because the Times won't show the same courtesy to people who aren't on its payroll as it does to the whistleblowers and sources and 'friends' who help it make its stories. That tears away the figleaf of morality and 'public interest' they're holding up over their mouldy little meat and two veg. They don't really care, so long as it gets them the scoop. Well now you've got it, and well done, you did it for a pointless, meaningless story that no-one gives a flying one about, rather than real investigative journalism. Wow, I bet you're proud of yourselves.

Remember all that sympathy for the Gurkhas?

There's a new type of Mail story I've noticed recently - I can broadly describe it as "minorities trying to get compensation" and it seems to be quite prevalent - in the Mail's news list, anyway.

Today, for example, we have a story about a black teacher who was denied compensation after being poisoned by a pupil, a (blue-eyed) Muslim woman who won compensation for sexual harassment at work (though the Mail claim this can't possibly have been true because they have pictures of her wearing - horrors! - a vest top) and a story about soldiers mainly from Commonwealth countries who are suing the MoD after getting trench foot.

Do you see a pattern emerging here? It's not just brown people, as we can see from the Bosnian Muslim woman, but I think this is an entirely new strand of story - of course, people go to court to sue for this, that and the other every day; but the Mail has focussed on a Muslim woman, a black woman and some foreign soldiers. Not that the Mail don't often cover white people suing, of course, because they do; but I can't help wondering if these stories don't just fit in more with the Mail's own ideas about the marvellously oxymoronic Littlejohnism of 'diversity Nazis' running the country and giving precedence to minorities to get on the no-win-no-fee gravy train.

The Mail likes to position itself as being distinct from all these things. And no wonder it snorts with derision at those who would dare to seek redress through the courts, given the thousands upon thousands of pounds it has to pay out every year for the complete crap it prints about those who are fortunately wealthy enough to complain in court rather than go through Paul Dacre's Press Complaints Commission. So perhaps it's not just moral rectitude that sees it take this stance - if only people couldn't sue, they'd make thousands more in profit.

Just as the Mail's repeated stories about deliberately false rape accusations, without putting them into perspective with the number of convictions (or indeed unproven but nonetheless true rape accusations), has skewed readers' perceptions of the issue so much that on every story about rape where readers are invited to have their say, there is an assumption that most women are just 'making it up' to get a payout, I wonder if the same thing isn't happening here. There are dozens of tribunals that take place every day - which ones are the Mail picking, and why might we think that should be?

Incidentally, the Mail use a curious image to illustrate the story about soldiers getting trench foot - the image of Victoria Cross hero Johnson Beharry, with the caption:

Soldiers from warmer Commonwealth countries, like Grenadian Private Johnson Beharry VC (pictured), are far more susceptible to cases of Non Freezing Cold Injury (NFCI)

Er, right. Except Johnson Beharry isn't suing, and he hasn't had trench foot, so why use a picture of him? Is it to show Mail readers what a black person looks like, in case they've forgotten?

And do you remember all that middle-England sympathy for the Gurkhas recently? Do you think the same kind of sympathy extends to soldiers from Commonwealth countries who served the Queen and were let down by shoddy kit? If you do, you don't know Mail readers very well...

That's okay then - give them an aptitude test. If they fail then they don't get to join up. The forces are not in control of the theatre of operations they might be required to operate in and if you are incapable of tolerating the climatic conditions required of such service, get and do something else. I'm ex forces and tolerance of such conditions is a matter of common sense and an absolute precondition of service - it never did me any harm and I've seen the worst you can get. You damm well know what you're signing up for. Next we'll hear is they want out because they're being shot at. IT'S THE JOB STUPID!!
- Tough, UK, 16/6/2009 10:39

It'd be nice to think that's a spoof or a parody, but I'm pretty sure it isn't. Also:

If you have managed to contract trenchfoot, it is down to your own neglect.
- GB, London, 16/6/2009 10:37

Also, there's a subtle difference between the way the Mail and BBC tackle this story. Mail:

One ex-soldier from Nigeria, who was discharged after suffering NFCI, told the programme he contracted it on winter exercises in Wales and now faces constantly sore feet and fingernails which drop off.
"Your feet are stuck in your boots. They are swollen and your fingers feel stiffer to move," he said.
"I was told 'Soldier on, and stop being a wimp'."
He told Today that the Home Office had refused him a visa to return to the UK for the final medical he required to get £150,000 compensation.

Beeb:

Scott Smith (not his real name), from Nigeria, was medically discharged from the army after suffering NFCI.
He had only been in the UK for a few months and contracted the condition whilst on winter exercises in Wales.
He described the experience: "Your feet are stuck in your boots. They are swollen and your fingers feel stiffer to move"
But when Mr Scott complained he says he was told to "just get on with it".
He said: "I was told: 'Soldier on, and stop being a wimp'."
Now back in Nigeria, Mr Scott's fingernails continue to drop off and his feet are constantly sore. He also says he finds it hard in his native country to get treatment for his condition.
The MoD has admitted liability in his case, he said, but to get compensation worth £150,000 he needs to undergo a final medical in London.

It's a subtle difference, but it's there. You could read the Mail story and not realise the MoD had admitted that particular case; I don't know why they felt it important to leave out that detail, but it does make you wonder.

The enemy within

Last week's horrific shooting in a Holocaust Museum in Washington DC proved - if we needed proof - that people who might terrorise and slaughter in the United States are very often folk with white supremacist leanings.

Rumbold at Pickled Politics points out that the shooting has led to attempts to ascribe one far-right racist wingnut's actions to Muslims. Yes, you read right, Muslims. Apparently a racist would commit a crime against a Jewish target - though let's not forget (and so many people have) that the murdered security guard was black - because of Muslims somehow. You don't believe that anyone would be that thick? Think again.

Fact is, some people are racist. Give a racist a gun and you've got problems. Give an extremist of any kind - yes, including extremist Muslims - a gun and you've got trouble. But please, this wasn't a crime committed because of the left, or because of multiculturalism, or because of Muslims, or because of antisemitism - it was a crime committed through hatred, pure and simple. Not just hatred of Jews, but hatred of black people too, which is why the security guard was murdered. And this is one guy, acting alone, and the motives for the crime seem fairly self-evident. Sure, he may have believed in NWO and 'truther' wingnuttery but that doesn't make him a leftie; it merely was another way of reinforcing his racism, as it is for a lot of people, I'm afraid.

Now comes news of another crime - a gang has been arrested after the murder of an immigrant following a shooting at his home in Arizona. Our friends at the Daily Mail have covered this story in a rather interesting way:

A female vigilante from an anti-illegal immigration group led a raid on a house where a man and his nine-year-old daughter were shot dead, it emerged today.

All this 'female' business is quite weird. Is that the most interesting bit of the story? Not that a child has been murdered, but because there was a woman involved?

What I'm interested in is the word 'vigilante' because this crime appears not to have been committed on the basis of killing a drug dealer, but rather stealing his money and killing all the witnesses:

He said: 'The husband who was murdered has a history of being involved in narcotics and there was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location as well as the possibility of drugs.

So that's not vigilantism, that's pure and simple cold-blooded crime, if true. So this woman may or may not have had links to a so-called vigilante group, but it emerges she was kicked out at some stage anyway and went to plough her own furrow. Now she's accused of this crime, is it anti-immigration motivation? Or is it just greed? Let's not jump to conclusions, or it would make us just as bad as those who were so quick to ascribe all sorts of incorrect motivations to the Holocaust Museum shooter.

It might be worth monitoring the comments at the bottom of that Mail story to see what the Brains Trust come up with, though.

Maddie: The patsy

Here we are, then. I wrote back in May of Maddie 'suspect' Raymond Hewlett:

This second element to the story is important - the dead can't sue; and "Did he take Maddie secrets to the grave?" stories are probably already being prepared for if and when he does succumb to his cancer. Sorry if this sounds brutal, by the way, but it's a brutal business.

And today:



'McCanns fear he will take his secrets to the grave' - strange, then, that when Hewlett offered to speak to their representatives, spokesman Clarence Mitchell said:

Mr Mitchell told Sky News: "He should have indicated yesterday that he was happy to talk to us."

Well no, it makes perfect sense. It's important not to talk to a dying man because he didn't speak to you on the particular day you wanted to, and therefore never find out what he wants to say, but then go on to worry that he might take his secrets to the grave. There's nothing contradictory in there, is there?

So, here we have it. Hewlett is forever going to be smeared with this crime. He probably didn't do it, and there's no evidence he did, but he's a paedo, he was in the same country, and so that'll just about do. He fits the bill, and the total and utter lack of evidence can be brushed under the carpet. And besides, he can't sue, so he's doomed.

A classic of its kind

I often wonder if people on the BBC's Have Your (Reactionary) Say messageboard are kosher carpet-thumping little Englanders foaming at the mouth like a can of recently-shaken warm lager; or whether they're simply Mike Gigglers collaborating in a huge mass participation art installation in order to represent the most insanely reactionary and bile-filled views as being the most popular ones in Britain.

I'd always like to think the latter. I'd like to hope there's a secret club to which I haven't yet been invited, who meet up once a week to chat about tactics and how they're going to make something really unimaginative, foam-flecked and dimwitted be voted to the top of the pile. In my mind it's an ironic OuLiPo-style artistic collaboration between self-styled Bohemian artistes, all designed to subvert the medium of internet commenting and messageboards. If Joe Orton were alive nowadays you just know that Edna Welthorpe would be turning up on these messageboards all the time, sucking everyone in.

And then you read this comment, in response to the innocently titled discussion "What can be done to tackle child poverty?"



And you think: No. They really must be fucknuts.

Depressing.

The Mail: Making everyone unhappy

Sometimes it's easy to forget that the Mail makes everyone unhappy. You know, it's simple enough to expect someone like me - a disgusting Guardian-reading liberal - to be annoyed by what I read in there. At the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Mail, you'd expect me to be a bit peeved by what the likes of Hitchens, Phillips and Littlejohn have to say. That much is pretty obvious.

But then I got to thinking: the Mail doesn't make Mail readers happy either. It makes them miserable. It makes them frightened, disappointed and frustrated. It makes them angry. They would like to live in a Britain that's like a great big Thelwell cartoon, with lots of nice middle-class people being pleasant towards each other and plump little children riding horses. And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way.

But instead of presenting to its readers that kind of Britain, it shows them a Britain that bears as little relation to reality - a place where immigrants jumping over the fences at Sangatte are cheerily waved into the country, allowed to stay despite being illegal, given priority in the housing queue, given thousands of pounds on benefits and generally bleeding the hard-working British taxpayer dry.

The Britain the Mail presents to its readers is a place where anyone under the age of 45 is most likely a violent drug-crazed hoodie who spends all their time on the evil internet, looking at Facebook, which detaches them from society enough to be able to carry out psychopathic violence against anyone who leads a normal or respectable life. It's a place where these criminals are given lovely air-conditioned luxury cells, that's if they go to jail at all, because more than likely they'll be allowed to charge the taxpayer to get off their crimes because of "Human Rights".

That Britain is also a place where a shadowy liberal elite are in charge of all institutions, particularly the hated BBC, where the horror of political correctness and the diversity brigade have meant that anyone harmlessly buying a golliwog, calling a black person a nigger or saying they think women can't do jobs as well as men gets hauled over the coals. It's a place where nice, ordinary white middle-class folk find themselves discriminated against, and minorities of every stripe get given priority in everything ever. In short, it's the world that only really exists in the mind of BBC Have Your Say commenters, Noel's HQ and Doncaster Mayor Peter Davies; it's that confected place where the criminals are allowed to get away with everything, Britain's gone Bonkers and Health & Safety and Political Correctness have corrupted our once-great country and made it horrible.

Who would want to live there?

So, far from making people like me annoyed while giving its archetypal reader something to cheer to the rafters, the Mail wants to make us both angry. Me because I know they're talking rubbish; they because they're having their very first fears confirmed. We both end up disappointed and dismayed, for very different reasons. And it needn't even be that way.

And then there's another kind of anger that the Mail brings out. It's a place where I think everyone in the entire country can join as one - those of us on the left, on the right, everywhere.

So I propose an experiment. I believe that the Mail can make anyone angry, no matter how calm they were to begin with. Go and have a long Radox bath, read a nice book and feel completely relaxed and happy with the world. Feel contented and pleased with yourself and the world.

Now take a deep breath and remove all sharp objects from the immediate vicinity, because this isn't going to be pretty.

Exhibit A. Read this article by Naomi Greenaway. The headline "When you find your cleaner wearing the same outfit as you, isn't it time to reach for designer labels again?" should be a clue as to the foulness within. Naomi:

Last Thursday, just as I was leaving the house for a business appointment, my cleaner arrived - wearing exactly the same dress as I was. A £15 H&M special. She was about to scrub the loo. I was heading off to do an interview.
I know I'm not meant to admit this, but I spent the rest of the day feeling quite substantially less than a million dollars - and the dress I'd once loved, and thought of as a fantastic, stylish bargain, is now shoved in the back of my wardrobe, unlikely to see the light of day until its trip to Cancer Research.

Angry yet? No...? Well then let me bring you exhibit B. It's one of those 'he says, she says' articles, by Anne Shooter and Tom Sykes, two of the finest brains working for the Daily Mail. There's even an introduction by Allison Pearson, just to get the hackles up.

Pearson:

Surely the whole point of the female chassis is to get a passing mate to slow down, wink his indicator, pull over and revv those engines till the spark plugs pop. That's what Mother Nature designed the female for.

Shooter:

In fact, when I have ever lamented my rather generous proportions, they have only ever given my bottom a good squeeze and told me not to be ridiculous.

Sykes:

Why do we have to pretend we like saggy bottoms, stretch marks and drooping boobs?
That's what we get in real life anyway.
The truth is it takes courage to admit that what gets your imagination racing is the most two dimensional of blonde bimbos.

Are you raging? Are you foaming at the mouth? Are you prepared to commit an unspeakable act of violence against a furry animal? No...? No...?! Well then this will tip you over the edge. Exhibit C (hat-tip to Feminazery) is this story about an actress, sensitively headlined

Why sexy Transformers star Megan Fox is not body perfect... she has clubbed thumbs

Oh noes! You mean to say a woman isn't entirely 100 per cent perfect?

On close inspection, Megan's thumbs almost look more like toes - although they haven't held her back in her career.

And yes, there are pictures, showing you that indeed, this woman's thumbs are very slightly different from normal! Horrors! Shall we burn her as a witch? Shall we force her to quit her chosen career because she is slightly different? Is that what we'll do then?

By now, you should be tearing the wings off butterflies and destroying entire buildings with your bare hands. If not, you're clearly unflappable, and immune to the power of the Mail. In which case, I congratulate you. For the rest of us, I'm afraid, it's a couple of hours in a darkened room with a picture of a nice fluffy kitten to bring us down from the zenith of rage...

Is the BNP racist?

The answer is here, and you'll see when you go there why it's important to link there.

You wanted them. You've got them.

The Daily Star today has a bit of fun and urges its readers to chuck a chapatti at hell-faced "gas chambers were a total lie" idiot Nick Griffin:



After yesterday delighting in the egg-chuckers' assault on the Churchill-dog-headed cyclops of hatred.

That's all very well, but it was revealed this week that BNP voters decided that the Star (along with the Sun) was their paper of choice (thanks to Drivelcast for the tipoff):

One third of them read the Sun or Daily Star as against one in five adults generally; just 6 per cent of BNP voters read the upmarket papers (Times, Telegraph, Guardian etc), which is less than half the national average.

As I've said a million times before, you must wonder what Express and Star owner Richard Desmond, a prominent Jewish businessman, thinks of having so many of his readers supporting someone who doesn't believe in the Holocaust. But then, he shouldn't be surprised that his papers have attracted them. Let's not forget



how the Express decided that every single new job in the country went to a migrant, even though it was quite demonstrably obvious to everyone else in the world - particularly those of us who've had a new job and who aren't migrants, for example - that this was not the case. It wasn't a mistake that Desmond's publications made once, either.



And it wasn't shy about deciding that it didn't want Muslims as readers:



If YOU are a Star reader then YOU aren't a Muslim, quite clearly.

After all that thinly veiled racism from their paper of choice, BNP supporters who take the Star can be forgiven for being a bit confused. After all, the Star told them it was a whites-only paper; the Star said ALL jobs had gone to migrants.

They wanted the BNP fans - and now they've got them. No use trying to scare them off now. Richard Desmond's publications courted the racists, the ideological descendants of those who wanted to wipe out people like him and his family. No point trying to be sorry about that now.

Perhaps a better way to scare off the BNP might be to do front-page leads about how migrants haven't STOLEN ALL OUR JOBS. Or how the BBC doesn't put Muslims before YOU. Maybe the Star should do that...? But I'm not holding my breath.

What makes a story a story?

News broke late last night of a potentially big story, with horrifying implications - there had been a shooting in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. News tickers jumped into life. Rolling news steamed down to the scene.

But then... something changed. It's very much business as usual again today. The shooting has disappeared from the TV broadcasts and hasn't merited much of a mention online - though here is the BBC's article. Why might that be...?

American media reports say the man is a white supremacist who has served time in prison for violent offences.

It's not always instructive to go for a compare and contrast, but there was a massive explosion of interest in a story of terror suspects arrested a few weeks ago, even though

A federal law enforcement official described the plot as “aspirational” — meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives — and described the operation as a sting with a cooperator within the group.

So there were 'terrorists' arrested without any weapons or explosives, who had an aspiration to attack Jewish targets. Leave aside speculation into what encouragement that their handlers had given them in selection. These are men who didn't kill anyone. But:

Law enforcement officials identified the four men arrested as James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen, all of Newburgh. One is of Haitian descent, according to law enforcement officials, and at least three were United States citizens. They are all Muslim, a law enforcement official said.

David Neiwert pointed out at the time:

And that word, "aspirational" -- where have we heard that before? Oh yeah.
That was the word U.S. Attorney Troy Eid of Colorado used when he announced his decision not to pursue the case of the white-supremacist tweakers who were caught trying to kill Barack Obama in Denver. He called their plot "more aspirational than operational".

You'll remember that these weren't the only guys who'd attempted to attack Obama. There were also the guys who had planned to murder the President while dressed in white suits with white top hats - essentially like Cab Callaway. Yet for all these racist wingnut 'aspirational' plots, it's the one which involves the big bad bearded bogeyman that received the most attention.

And yet... when a white wingnut - someone with a long history of racist views - actually goes beyond 'aspiration' and commits murder in a Holocaust Museum, then that's deemed a story not worthy of more than a few paragraphs. It was a similar story with the case of a Florida man with fierce anti-immigrant views, who went beyond 'aspiration' and slaughtered two Chilean students, wounding three others.

You have to wonder whether this is just a case of what makes a story a story - in other words, while a white supremacist nut attacking Jews is fairly routine, it's disembodied from a narrative which involves a Muslim conspiracy which is a war against the West - a far bigger story with foreign policy implications. Whereas it's easy to dismiss white terrorists, like the far-right freakshow caught with ricin last week, as being tragic loners, there's always a tendency to imply that Muslim extremists - often probably just as much fantasists, loners and 'aspirational' terrorists - are somehow connected to a spectral network whose tentacles emanate from the places where our soldiers are busily fighting wars.

Compare that with the wild amount of coverage being given to a woman accused of child sex crimes in Plymouth, whereas men are much more regularly accused and convicted of similar shocking offences. It's "man bites dog" in one sense. A white racist with a gun shooting at Jews is just a nutcase; a brown racist with a gun shooting at Jews could be part of a much bigger plot. Whether they really are or not is one question - and whether we should discriminate against people committing hate crimes in our coverage of them is another.

Taking things literally

I was in the book shop the other day and I saw this:



Jon Gaunt is factually correct, of course. The country in which we live is indeed called Great Britain, and not Rubbish Britain. Moreover, I can't think of a single country in the world which has the word "Rubbish" in front of it - though one or two probably deserve it. But I couldn't help wondering if he was taking things just a smidgen too literally, and if he shouldn't perhaps start looking at things on a slightly smaller scale. For example, this person



has the name "Gaunt" as a surname, but doesn't look especially gaunt to me, if we're going to take things as literally as the author of the book mentioned above. Perhaps "Fat Bigoted Shithouse" would be a better surname...?

Just a suggestion, no pressure.

A feast of lovely links

First, you must go here. Here's what you get when you don't vote. Here's what you get when people who ordinarily rant on BBC Have Your Say actually get elected to office. Here's what you get when people who normally ejaculate anger in every conceivable direction, like a spinning Dalek, are confronted with the natural consequences of what they say. Here's what you get when someone who promises to break the law to voters is told that he can't do what he wants.

Yes, it's Doncaster mayor Peter Davies, being cheerfully eviscerated by BBC Sheffield reporter Toby Foster. Too many brilliant exchanges to list here, but here are just a couple of my favourites:

TF: Well, I mean… these are the reasons people voted for you. Very bold points, as you said. Er, you’re going to cut translation services for non-English speakers - that’s a very bold point. It’s more than likely illegal, isn’t it?
PD: I dunno… again, I’ve got to find this out. It’s-
TF: Well it is - let me tell you it is, under the European Court of Human Rights it’s illegal.
PD: -Well, well, well let… we’ll look into this - we’re getting council’s opinion on what I can do and what I can’t do, and that’s…
TF: No, no, you said in your manifesto you would definitely do it.
PD: Yeah, well, I… well, I, er, if, if somebody comes in the way and stops me doing these things, then that is an insult to democracy.
TF: So what was the point of your manifesto? You might as well have said you were going to fly to the moon if you’re just going to say now that you can’t do it.

and:

TF: You’re going to cut the Gay Pride funding.
PD: Yep.
TF: Erm, how much did Doncaster Council fund Gay Pride?
PD: Haven’t got a clue, I haven’t looked into… I haven’t got the details, I… I haven’t even started-
TF: About right, isn’t it? So how much did… how much was it worth to Doncaster?
PD: How…er, what?
TF: The Gay Pride march. 8,000 people in town for a day.
PD: I don’t know. They can still come. There’s nobody stopping them coming.
TF: So you don’t know what it costs, you don’t know what it earns, but you’re banning it?
PD: I’m saying that… hard-pressed taxpayers money should not be spent on promoting any type of sexuality whether it’s straight or gay.
TF: But for all you-, but for all you know it could be making a fortune for the town - you don’t know, you’ve not even looked at it.
PD: Well, it, er… it may, it may or it may not, I’m telling you what I’m not doing, and again it was on the manifesto, it was quite clear people appeared to like what I was saying.

Cor, there are some seriously bad times ahead for the people of Doncaster. Kudos not only to the BBC man for the demolition job, but also to blogger Andy Smith for the transcribing.

Amid all the soul-searching from the left about the BNP's election success, here's an excellent story from Five Chinese Crackers:

This morning though, there was only a lone silver disc lying in the middle of the grass, spotted with drizzle and a single blade of grass stuck there looking like a green crack. Somebody had written over it in thick black marker. Instead of an album title and artist or a cramped track listing were these words around the outside:
Fuck all you blacks
And squashed in a block at what was obviously the bottom of the circle:
Im gonna have to start killing you scum
I stood, blinking at it for a while, listening to the rain lightly spotting my coat. I looked up to see if there was any sign of who put it there, which was stupid when I started thinking about it so I looked back at the disc to make sure I hadn't imagined it.

Pigdogfucker also has the definitive answer on whether the BNP are right or left wing, in the face of all the 'Ah, they're actually on the left' sophistry that's oozed out over the past few days. And it's hard to disagree.

Lenin has a delightful picture of Nick Griffin after yesterday's egging, not looking defiant or smug, but scared and stupid. Now I know that there are some who'd prefer things like egg-chucking at Griffin not to happen, and I can see that point of view. I just happen to think that seeing his fat smelly face looking frightened and upset is a wondrous thing. For sure, the way to defeat the fascists is to engage the working class into politics they can believe in, to work hard on real solutions to poverty and unemployment, and to fight at every turn to denounce the lies spouted by prejudiced idiots about immigration and multiculturalism. Yes yes, I know that. But making that vile fascist tit look stupid is a good thing. Satire is egg-chucking without the actual egg, and we need that too. We need all kinds of attacks on Griffin, making him look ridiculous in every sense, exposing his nastiness and making him into the national joke he is.

Rhetorically Speaking, for example, points out just how confused and bewildered Nick Griffin actually is, blaming everyone he can think of for people chucking eggs at him, as opposed to the fact that people hate him because he's a racist cunt. Here's a man who has described the Holocaust as a hoax, doesn't believe in global warming and now thinks the Labour party is funding egg-chuckers. I want every single word of his transcribed, just like Peter Davies - there's going to be comedy gold in there!

Incidentally, it appears that a terrorist plot was smashed last week and lethal chemicals were removed from the suspect's house. You may not have noticed because no-one gave a shit about it. Why? Well he was white, of course.

Mark Steel has a look at New Labour's legacy:

They might as well have a frog as their leader, and Ed Balls would be on Newsnight telling us the frog isn't the problem, and the way he responded to some sharp criticism by hopping off the table shows his determination, because they haven't got a clue. This is why they're in a much worse mess than the one in 1983. Back then, although the election was a disaster, the Labour Party had active branches in every area, with thousands of young members bursting with ideas of why they wanted to run local councils or the country. Now the branches barely exist, debate has been eliminated, and all that's left are careerists frightened of losing their careers.

And finally, it's loveable old buffoon Boris Johnson deciding that he doesn't like people saying nasty things about him, so uses taxpayers' money to fund a political attack. Peter Davies, please take note. If you want to be a really shit mayor, you've got some way to go.

This apple is a hovercraft

**Warning: Rambling, brackets and tortured analogies ahead. No muttering at the back about 'So what's new?' - all right?**

Here is a picture of an apple.



Now to you it might look like a nice juicy apple, but to me it's a hovercraft. And I'm going to prove it's a hovercraft, through the power of my own brilliant political analysis.

Yes, it may look like an apple. I grant you, it's green, as many apples are. And yes, it does indeed appear to be the shape of an apple. If it were in front of you, your olfactory organ might well tell you that it smells of what your brain recognises as apple. But it's not an apple; it's a hovercraft. The reason why I know this and you are struggling to get to grips with the concept is that I am very dazzlingly clever and you are, intellectually, a mere silly person scratching round in the mud looking for chewing gum and fag-butts. Do you see?

You see, I can't see anything that it has in common with apples. In fact, I think it has far more in common with hovercrafts. Hovercrafts, for example, float on water, and so does this object. Admittedly you may not see many children bobbing in a washing-up bowl for hovercrafts, but this object is a hovercraft. Also, the object pictured above, if you chucked it into the water off Folkestone or Dover or one of those places, could well find its way to Calais or Boulogne or somewhere like that, given a bit of luck and a prevailing current. I ask you - does that sound like the behaviour of an apple - or can we think of something else that crosses the channel by floating on the water... a hovercraft, perhaps? Aha! Yes! That must be it, mustn't it?*

Yes, I'm talking about the silliness regarding the BNP and whether it's on the left or the right. Is it left-wing? In some ways. Is it right-wing? In some ways. Is it a bunch of fascist bastards and scum? Yes, I think there's something we can all agree on, isn't it?

As Sim-O puts it:

The BNP are both left and right wing. They’re also neither. They take what they think is popular policies and feelings and adopt them adding their own racist spin on them.
Isn’t that enough to be going on with? Do you really need anything else to distance yourself from them? Are you such a complete twat that you need to keep repeating the fact that they are left/right wing hoping that people will take it in and equate all people of that stripe a fascists?

Sadly, a lot of people are such complete twats.

No-one wants to be linked with the BNP, fairly understandably, because they're a shit-shower of hatred and racism aiming to divide society, they lie about stuff, their supporters are quite often Nazis and they are really unpleasant people. Sure, they may want to nationalise some things but that doesn't mean they're a cigarette paper away from the Greens. Sure, they may want to stop immigration but that doesn't mean they're right next door to UKIP... oh. Bad example. But you get the general idea. Politics isn't an easy grid where you can try to nail people down to one side or the other; to imagine it is you have to be pretty unambitious about your brain. We all know people who are economically liberal and socially conservative, and vice versa.

(By the way, those of us who consider ourselves to be (broadly) on the left (if we must use such terms) will be familiar with the tendency of the left to hate themselves more than anyone else. That's something which has led to the usual recriminations about "It was all No2EU's fault, it was all Socialist Labour's fault, if only we'd all voted Green then it would've been all right and the BNP wouldn't have got in..." Which is toss. It's not as if there isn't any difference between the parties. If the Greens wanted more people to vote for them, they should have had more attractive policies, not just relied on people holding their noses to keep out the fascists. That time may come under first-past-the-post in a general election, of course, but it's not for now. A Very Public Sociologist says it a bit more articulately than me:

Underpinning this is the naive assumption electoral support for political parties can be wielded like trade union block votes. Had No2EU avoided the North West, then all or a good proportion of those votes would have been drawn to the Greens. But is is never as simple as that.

Exactly. It's not as simple as saying: "You're on the left, you must do this, if you don't it's all your fault". Things aren't that simple and people do have different priorities. The Greens are largely in favour of the EU, for example, and No2EU, well the clue's in the name, isn't it? You can't just suppose that a vote for one is exactly the same as a vote for the other - going back to what I was saying earlier, a vote for UKIP has some things in common with a vote for No2EU, but there are an awful lot of things different, and it's not just 'left' and 'right' which are at play.

In the meantime, here's a juicy apple.



* I am aware that cross-channel hovercrafts actually stopped several years ago. Don't write in. I don't care. Tortured analogies do not care for pedants; they carry on into the distance like a small child juggling with tins of sardines while a Space Invaders arcade machine from 1983 dances at their feet.

The disconnect

What do you think that Mail and Express readers think of their newspapers describing the BNP as 'extremists' in articles today?

Mail:



Express:



You'd expect scenes like these with the Mail and Express, of course, given the line they take with immigration and race stories. But it's not just those newspapers, of course. As ever, BBC's Have Your Say poses an innocuous question and attracts the usual storm of faeces:



(God, wouldn't you hate to put questions up on the BBC's Have Your Say messageboard? "What do you think about cheese?" "IT'S ABOUT TIME THIS DISCREDITED GOVERNMENT LISTENED ON IMMIGRATION"; "Do you like the smell of pine trees?" "THIS CORRUPT BUNCH OF ROBBER MCCLOWN WILL BE KICKED OUT, BRITAIN HAS SPOKEN, I AM GOING TO VOTE BNP IN FUTURE" and so on and so on forever. I'd last about five minutes, I think.)

As I always say, the BNP and its fans are good at piling on to all forums to create the impression that they're more popular than they actually are. If they were as popular as they appear to be from Daily Mail story comments, for example, then they would have got many more than just two MEPs last night. But they didn't. Yes, nearly a million people voted for a racist party last Thursday, but many, many millions more didn't. We are many; they are few. They'll always vote; we need to as well.

So, what do you make of it?

New Labour have been obliterated. They're finished. It's over. There's no point thinking they're anything other than destroyed. While many other centre-right Government parties in Europe held their votes despite the economic crisis, New Labour have been taken to the cleaners.

After years of targeting wavering Tory voters to try and fight for the few thousand swing votes needed to take a general election, taking for granted the millions who traditionally voted Labour because they believed it was the right thing to do, New Labour have seen it all come home to them. As soon as the Tories have got their act together and come up with a half-decent presentation - albeit without any actual policies or principles other than making Dave Cameron's extremely rich mates pay even less tax than they do already - those wavering voters have gone back to where their natural instincts probably were.

New Labour moved further and further to the right, and couldn't understand why its vote fell off a cliff. For years they had just assumed that Labour voters had the blind loyalty of football fans and would simply turn out and put an X next to the Labour candidate, regardless of what he or she actually stood for. This treating of real supporters with contempt can be seen in Labour's destruction at the polls. What's a good enough reason to vote Labour? Don't they just want the same things as the Tories - who seem a bit more competent and less tainted by the mistakes of the past 10-11 years?

Why bother voting for Labour? They don't listen. They don't care. They treat you with complete and utter disregard. When they wanted to go to war, they didn't care that it wasn't what the people wanted - in particular, their core voters. They couldn't care less. They wanted war, so voters were ignored, and traditional Labour voters were patted on the head and patronisingly told that this spivvy bunch of pompadoured barristers knew what was best for them, and that they should shut up and let the clever people get on with Government. And now they wonder why those voters didn't turn up when the party really needed them. They shouldn't wonder.

Labour have made the country a worse place. Sure, their die-hard supporters, clinging to the wreckage this morning, will point to things like the minimum wage, but it's not enough. The gap between rich and poor has got wider, under a Labour Government. The country has gone to war against the will of its people, under a Labour Government. The political class has decided to assault the freedoms and liberties of the people as part of its 'war on terror', under a Labour Government. Citizens have been tortured, under a Labour Government. The Minister for immigration has sounded like a hard-right attack dog, under a Labour Government - and yet this morning they will be wondering why so many have voted for the fascists of the BNP and the anti-immigration UKIP.

And that's the other story - that so many people have voted for hatred, prejudice, racism and fear. Look at the figures and it seems that the extreme right vote has merely held up in certain areas of the country while other voters haven't bothered to turn up, but whatever the reason, we woke up this morning to two BNP MEPs. That means more money for the BNP, more momentum they can take into future elections, and more legitimisation for a bunch of thugs whose policies are a sick joke. It means the fight against them has to go on, and get stronger. It's not an argument for first-past-the-post; it's an argument for the other parties giving a shit about the electorate and actually coming up with decent policies. You don't need to pander to the far-right to see them off at the ballot box; there's no way you can make racists suddenly see the error of their ways. What you have to do is try to ensure that the vast majority of the population have somewhere to put an X that they feel happy with. That's what New Labour have failed to do.