Posh knickers and Misogyny

Latest in the seemingly endless barrel-scraping attacks that the right-wing press are throwing at Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats is this story (by the legendary Jan Moir) about the wives of the leaders. In it, she criticises Clegg's wife, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez (whom she annoyingly keeps referring to as 'Mrs Clegg' as though repeatedly saying "How dare she not take her husband's name!") for going shopping for underwear at Rigby and Peller, a rather expensive lingerie shop, claiming that perhaps the Cleggs are not as close to ordinary plebs like you and I as they pretend to be. 

The article gets my goat on several points. Let's dissect each of them. Firstly, Nick Clegg has never hidden his public school education, has never tried to go about identifying himself as being an ordinary bloke - that's just how he comes across, and that's because he's probably slightly less stage-managed and more genuine than David Cameron. His wife also works as a lawyer, and typically they don't get paid minimum wage - so when she buys clothes I'd personally be very fucking surprised if she bought her underwear at Primark. The socialist in me doesn't like to see people pissing money away on expensive food, or clothes, or cars, but I hate hypocrisy even more. The Daily Mail shouts "Look! See? They're posh and have nothing to do with the likes of YOU!" whilst at the same time trying to get us to vote for an Etonian and his shadow cabinet of Etonians, who arguably have even less to do with the likes of us, and are openly declaring their plans to cut inheritance tax for their closest chums.

Secondly, I take issue with the notion that Miriam is somehow doing something wrong by staying at work and not accompanying her husband on the campaign circuit like some appendage. It smacks feminism in the face squarely with it's patriarchal suggestion that a woman's place is BY HER HUSBAND'S SIDE no matter what, even if it means giving up her own very lucrative job to do so. Miriam has very wisely said "Screw that - that's your job, Nick, and this is mine" as any woman should be able to do without fear of mockery or ridicule.  This line of reasoning extends to a kind of slightly disapproving frown that she wields too much influence over her husband by 'encouraging' him to take a day off from his important campaigning to spend a day off with his children who have been stuck in Spain for the last week or so. I'm sorry, Jan, but 'encouraged'? You don't think that maybe, just maybe, Nick might have been missing his boys and might just have a) needed some time out, and b) wanted to see them again and spend some time with them? You think he needs to be 'encouraged' to do this? Do you even know any human beings, Jan? Or have you been too long enclosed in the misogynistic bubble of the Daily Mail, where men caring for their children is seen as weakness, and should be done by the little subservient women? Moir sums up this anti-feminist mindset when she says, "For don't you feel that the wives could do a little more to help their floundering husbands in this yo-yo election?" No, Jan. I don't. Because that's their job, not their wives'. I also don't approve of the way she tries to hilariously insinuate that Miriam's dominance over her husband extends to beating him up if he doesn't empty the dishwasher. Seriously, read the piece, it's in there, I kid you not.

Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, and still on a feminist rant, this appallingly facetious mentioning of Miriam as 'Mrs Clegg'. She has clearly decided not to take her husband's name, in a move I applaud wholeheartedly, and yet Moir uses it as a stick to hit her with. It's like she's being all sniffy and saying "Well, you might have chosen to try to be all feminist and clever, but I'm still going to call you Mrs Clegg, because you're a nuaghty little woman who should have done the right thing and being utterly subjugated by your husband. So there." 

Another corker from Moir, and another black mark against the Mail in what surely must be a record fortnight for black marks against them. 

Murdoch Shapes The Election Even More

Last night's election debate was lots of fun, Cameron and Brown clearly both learned a lot of tricks from Nick Clegg. Watching it, and keeping one eye on the Channel 4 poll tracker, was also very informative and backed up what I was thinking; namely that Clegg was having his star moments, but Brown was definitely controlling the debate far more powerfully; he was making the points that the other two were having to answer, and rarely vice versa. Cameron meanwhile was again very light on actual details of policies - when pressed by Nick Clegg to give a figure for the Tory's proposed cap on immigration, he consistently avoided answering - but big on rhetoric, and the whole 'vote for change'. Cameron appears to be trying to win an election on shallow soundbites, and people just aren't convinced. The Channel 4 poll ended with Clegg hovering at about 50%, Brown on around 30% and Cameron languishing at the bottom with only 17%. 

But then Sky's polls came up, and Sky News started telling everyone that Cameron had won the debate. The polls were somehow showing Cameron in the lead. What the fuck? Were they even watching the same debate I was watching? Because I'm pretty sure that Cameron had his arse handed to him on a plate for most of the time, only having a real moment when he stopped Brown in his tracks over the leaflets (although the Tories accusing any other party of using appalling scaremongering made my hypocrisy meter explode). Other than that, Cameron floundered, failed to answer questions until, getting visibly annoyed and trapped by Brown's insistence that he tell people what he was planning to do with free eye tests and prescriptions for the elderly, he snapped and made up on the spot that they were going to keep them. Nobody watching that could possibly see anything other than a desperate ad lib on Cameron's part. How then were the polls so different?

Well, to be fair the Yougov polls are often referred to by Private Eye as the Anyresultyouwantguv polls, and if they were paid for by Murdoch because, y'know, Sky being his channel and all...

Let's also cover the facts of the production of Sky's coverage; Nick Clegg, noted last week for his down the lens eye contact, was consistently denied as much camera time for his eye contact as David Cameron, I noticed. Cam was allowed moment after moment to stare pleadingly down the lens, whilst Clegg was viewed from the sides, from the back, and occasionally from the front, when he was directing his attention elsewhere. The questions were also selected by Sky News, so you have to ask whether any questions got filtered out that might have made Cam look even worse than he did. The pundits afterwards seemed hell-bent on painting Cameron as the king of the debate, which made me think that either they have no idea how people actually win a debate, or they are deliberately fabricating it in order to make the sluggish minds of the majority of viewers question what they had just witnessed. Lets face it, the press do tend to view themselves as the gatekeepers of information, and this election is starting to highlight just how seriously they take that role. From the Sky News bods frothing about Cameron's 'victory' after a dismal performance, to the Daily Mail's apoplectic attacks on Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, to James Murdoch and Rebecca Wade storming the Independant's offices because the naughty Indie dared suggest that Murdoch was trying to influence the vote with his mighty army of right-wing media outlets, we've seen the press' masters role in events highlighted dramatically, possibly more dramatically than ever before. People need to know this. People need to see what goes on here. They need to be made aware that they are being played for fools by the likes of Murdoch and Dacre. The Mail's vitriolic attack on Clegg alienated some of its readers, showing that you can, indeed, go too far.

The big question is, though, will this fake reality that is being projected by Murdoch et al affect voters? Will people do as they are being told and go back to voting Tory again in the haze of media bullshit? Or are enough people seeing the vague shapes of the manipulators moving behind that haze, and not liking it? We'll see in a fortnight, I guess.

When Did 'Liberal' Become a Dirty Word?

Am I missing something? At some point in this life of 36 years did I somehow manage to miss the moment that believing in equality among people who are biologically identical save for the colour of their skin, their sex organs and their sexual preferences became somehow evil in comparison to the mindless bigotry that the right (sometimes brazenly) espouses? What happened? At what point did 'liberal' become a dirty word? 

In the US, the so-called Tea Party held their first big conference in the US, and it seems like this damage to the perfectly good idea of being liberal was done across the pond first by the increasingly histrionic paranoid racist right-wing fucknuts who don't believe the Republicans go far enough. Among the wonders bounded around by these scary people (who each paid over $500 a ticket, to keep a certain class of people out, let's not forget) during this conference were truly terrifying; apparently Obama only won the election because the US no longer has a civics literacy test - a test that was deemed illegal in 1965 because in the Southern States blacks were not allowed to attend the same schools as good ole white children, and then had to pass a literacy test in order to be able to vote, thus disallowing them the ability to vote. In other words, because they allow blacks to vote, we now have Obama. Doesn't matter that Obama's support came from most of the US on the grounds of policy and from a hell of a lot of white people, to this bunch of foaming racists it's all just a part of an evil liberal conspiracy to destroy the purity of the United States ("if 30% of the population were Hispanic, we wouldn't be America any more"). 

Another corking soundbite from the convention was this; "the Blues beat the Reds and they came back Green...(environmentalism is) the greatest threat to America now and in the future". Right. So people not wanting to toast the planet and destroy the ecology that allows us to survive here is somehow just communism under another guise? Do these people ever listen to the words that spit forth from their snarling mouths? Even the most basic logic and facts would overcome that argument. Oh but wait. Here comes a prick at the convention wearing a t-shirt that says "Annoy a liberal - use facts and logic" - these cunts wouldn't know what facts and logic where if they broke into their house with the words "Facts" and "Logic" painted on their bodies in luminous paint and proceeded to alternately punch the aforementioned cunt, repeating the words "Facts" and "Logic" with each blow. Facts, logic and the Far Right are not easy bedfellows. Most of the people I know who are left or liberal or both have reached their positions from a combination of respect for the actual facts and the understanding of logic. I'd love to see one of these teabaggers try to use 'Facts and logic' to defend their brainless brand of racism against the usual array of weaponry (ie, facts and logic) that the average liberal can bring to bear.

It's scary to watch Fox News clips with people like the bizarre madman Glenn Beck and the shouty, bag-faced cuntiferousness that is Bill O'Reilly, and these loud-mouthed retards have a mainstream media platform from which to denounce the evils of liberalism, pausing only long enough for the cameraman to wipe the flecks of spittle from the camera lens. I am convinced that Glenn Beck in particular spends most of his life in a special rubber-walled room, heavily sedated until he is due to go on air, at which point the production team pump him up with a cocktail of amphetamines and crack to the point where his already considerable schizo paranoia achieves a kind of paranoid singularity which then begins to suck in the rest of what is left of his mind, leaving nothing but a faintly glowing event horizon of screams, wuffles and crying about how much he loves his country. The fact that this concentrated beam of fact-free insanity is directed into millions of US homes every week is just frightening and not a little sick. How is it that in the 21st century such fabricated, jingoistic bullshit is actually lapped up by people? Is it because of a lack of good political education? I think everyone should have to study sociology before they leave school - the Far Right loves the ignorance of the masses, because it is a void into which they can ejaculate their propoganda, distortions and prejudices.

It makes me angry that 'liberal' is used as an insult. The very definition of the word from the Free Dictionary is as follows;

a. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.

b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

c. Of, relating to, or characteristic of liberalism.

Only in the insanity of the Far Right does this word become an insult.

Climate Change Deniers are the New Creationists

So some scientists got into trouble for trying to delete emails in order to prevent deniers access to personal emails that might or might not have had anything to do with their climate change reserach. Their explanation was that they receive ridiculous numbers of requests under the Freedom of Information act from deniers using it as a tool to a) hold up their work while they have to deal with the request and b) use their complete lack of scientific knowledge to punch holes in perfectly acceptable research.

This latter point I can all too easily understand. People like to assume that science is always based on hard numbers that don't need altering, and then claim that science is a fraud when the raw data doesn't seem (to their simple eyes) to stack up. One of the things the deniers are complaining about is about how some researchers removed Japanese weather stations over 300m from their research progressively, leaving the (colder) 300m plus ones in place of older measurements, but ground level ones from later measurements, thus fiddling the figures. Welcome to science, where you have to try to control for variables that  are fundamentally uncontrollable, ie the fact that Japan didn't have many ground level weather stations in those days - almost all of them were over 300m. In order to keep the record, you then have to calculate a formula that works out from the 300m + figure what the ground level figure might have been, and then use that figure in your data when you start the analysis - not the original, colder figure.  More accurate later data can be drawn unaltered from the ground level stations, and so the data from the 300m+ weather stations can be safely ignored - it's not needed anymore. 

Another argument trotted out by deniers is the fact that 75% of weather stations used for Californian figures are on the beach. Apparently this is based on the 'common-knowledge' assumption that it is always warmest at the beach because people go there to lay out in the sun in their swimsuits. As usual, a few seconds on Google provides the casual researcher (ie me) to find that there is a simple and non-cheaty reason why they used weather stations near the coast for this sample. California has a very variable temperature difference between highs and lows the further you get away from the coast due to the way that the air flows are blocked by the Sierra Nevada mountains and the sheer difference in elevation of different parts of the state once you get a few miles inland. The coast is the only place to get consistent and reliable results if you want a genuine average temperature result from California. If the scientists had wanted to cheat, they could have just taken daytime readings from the inland desert weather stations; they didn't, they just tried to get a realistic reading of California's average temperatures without having to do endless work controlling for the hot and cold spikes from the inland stations. They did this by taking readings from the cooler coastal areas.

What scientists and those who at least have a vague knowledge of statistical analysis and science understand, most people don't. This isn't saying that most people are stupid, far from it - the majority of people usually trust science. You don't see many people wondering if their TV set is going to work or not, or whether the Moon is suddenly going to get all uppity and decide to fall on us. Deniers, however, wield a special branch of ignorance. Not only do they not understand science, but they actively have an agenda to fight it.

Nick Davies, in his excellent book 'Flat Earth News' (which I advise everybody to read), covers a lot of very interesting ground about the climate change lobbying - not only the deniers, but also the truth mangling that goes on by groups like Greenpeace which then adds fuel to the deniers' fires when discovered. In the US, fake grass-roots organisations were set up by oil companies (Davies refers to these fake groups as Astroturf groups) in order to provide a platform for issuing climate change denial press releases to the wire news services. These press releases (which are usually either bullshit pseudo-science, manipulations of the truth or just lies) are then picked up by the press, who, being overworked and understaffed, don't fact-check the piece and just publish it as is, sometimes with little more than a bit of rewording to make it appear as though they had written the story themselves. One key feature about astroturf groups is that they appear from nowhere, issue press releases and encourage people to lobby their politicians on the issue, but they don't seem to need any funding, nor do they seem to be looking for new members. There are good examples of exposed astroturf groups here and here. The latter example unmasks how the tobacco industry in the US used astroturfing to try to deny the damage that was being done to smokers' health, to downplay medical evidence, or even discredit scientists or their research. And the motivations for the oil and coal industries today are exactly the same; profit. If global warming were accepted by the politicians, then energy producers (the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters) would have to adhere to strict legislation to reduce their CO2 emissions, and this would cost them a lot of money. They would have to make huge modifications to all of their processes, from mining through to the actual energy production. Naturally, being fat greedy cunts, they don't like to part with any money whatsoever, and the lives of the rest of the world in 100 years time don't matter to businessmen who only care about themselves right now. So they try to find ways of weaselling out of it, and the best tactic is to fight the evidence, and attack the climate change science publicly. 

The biggest problem science has in this battle is that it is not used to this battlefield. Scientists like to think that arguments can be won by the best theories and the best fit with the evidence. In an ideal world, this would be the case, but they underestimate the power of public relations, which the big energy industries are all too comfortable with. A press release here, a 'leaked document' from a company paid scientist there, and suddenly the papers are all over the story, because any conflict like this is news. As mentioned earlier, journalists don't have the time to fact check what they print, and so these stories are published and the ordinary person thinks that scientists are all liars and that climate change isn't happening at all. Scientists simply can't hack this form of disinformation warfare, they lack the temperament and the experience (not to mention being unable to fund their own astroturf groups). Remember the much-touted list years ago of '400 scientists against climate change' that Senator James Inhofe shouted loudly about? Turns out that 'scientist' is a fairly loose term, and a large number of the 'scientists' on the list were actually economists, with a smattering of theoretical physicists, inventors and a tiny representation of actual geologists, at least one of whom (Agnes Genevey) has had their anti-climate change work viciously torn apart by scientific peers. And the petition by the a crackpot anti-socialist organisation that claimed 32,000 signatures of scientists? The petition was on the internet to sign - I'm not too sure about whether Perry Mason, Michael J Fox and Ginger Spice are particularly respected for their contributions to climate science. Let's face it, anybody can sign an internet petition and claim to be a top climatologist - a fact that, I suspect, was not lost on the people who set up the petition, but they were hoping that fact would get lost in the media. And it did. The list of 32,000 scientists made it into the news without question, and only when groups of scientists and environmental bloggers got hold of the list did these flaws start to come out.

What is starting to happen here is almost exactly like Creationism. Science is not about public relations, or about forcing research down a certain line; facts are facts, and when enough scientists check these facts and perform their own studies, there is either a consensus, or there is a need to create a new theory to fit the facts. At the moment, there is most definitely a scientific consensus that a) global warming is happening, and that b) it is being driven by our emissions of greenhouse gases. Data for research is manipulated, but not in the way the deniers claim - it gets manipulated in order to make it more realistic and to control for variables outside scientists' ability to control, for example the data from Japanese weather stations, or the data collected from the Californian coast. The deniers point and shout loudly at what they see as flaws, but which are not flaws to anyone who understands statistics or science; the trouble is that all of this bogus astroturfing and blind news reporting of these atstroturf groups press releases then begets a bunch of moron-level devotees who then swamp the 'have your say' columns of the newspaper websites with their eye-swivelling, name-calling rants, people who use terms like the 'loony left', who find it amusing to refer to 'Idiot Nick-Nucks Can't Do A Sum McBroon', and who love to close their self-congratulatory posts with mindless phrases like 'Sauce for the goose' as though they have clearly blown apart all of the oppositions arguments with their fetid pile of uninformed twaddle. Phrases like that are more like the smile on the face of a child showing off his latest shit. These fucktards are the same people who have the same reaction to immigration, or to suggestions that equality legislation is sound and valid (a transparent window into their mindset comes from a post about 'Harriet Harperson' on the Express' comments section where the poster suggests that 'there is an empty kitchen sink out there it's time she filled the vacancy' - so, not totally misogynistic at all, then). In short, these are exactly the same sort of people who prop up the idiocy of Creationism.

Creationism has been an evolution denier since day one, and it frankly astounds me that over 150 years since the Origin of Species, these ignorant fucktards are still given a platform from which to attack a perfectly valid science which has a veraitable mountain of evidence, both fossil and genetic, to support it's claims; indeed, evolution is one of the few scientific theories that has been pretty much universally accepted across the disciplines that it crosses over. They've had 150 years to accumulate this impressive store of illuminating evidence, and still the Creationists stand there with their hands on their hips and a snarky smile on their lips declaring that 'if evolution happened, surely there would be some evidence for it?' The trouble with climate change is that if people don't believe in evolution, it isn't going to mean a global catastrophe (unless you count the sudden sharp drop in IQs worldwide as a catastrophe) - climate change deniers are playing a dangerous game with everyone's lives and the lives of everyone's grandchildren, and one that has far more serious implications for our planet than a bunch of cretinous brainwashed religious nuts who refuse to open their eyes.

Have I Missed The Point About Inquiries?

I always got the impression that an inquiry was like a miniature, but less strong, courtroom, where people have to face some damned tough questions about their part in controversial events. Take the big one in the media at the moment, the Chilcot inquiry over the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, for instance. I welcomed it, thinking that the smug bastards who set the whole thing in motion and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in order to, basically, steal oil and sell rebuilding contracts to their own people, would have to face a hard line in inquisition for their actions. I for one was looking forward to seeing Tony Blair actually shit himself on live television from the fear of knowing just how indefensible his own position really was.

It looked like I might be in luck when he arrived; the Guardian describes him as looking quite terrified; pale and shaking visibly as he poured himself a glass of water. And so he should, because he knows that there are questions he could face that would strip his story to the bone and reveal it for the tissue of lies and misdirections that it is - and despite his training as a barrister, a good attack would leave him writhing like an upturned tortoise, with nowhere to go.

How fortunate for him that the panel of questioners seemed almost sympathetic to his plight, and appeared to be trying really hard to make him feel at ease; firstly by feeding him huge, vague and safe questions that allowed him to obfuscate to the point of insanity (even I wasn't sure which question he was answering half the time because a) the questions were so long-winded and unfollowable that they stuck in your mind like, oh, what's the name of that fellow on TV whose name you can never remember? and b) Blair turned every answer into a miniature lecture on 'doing the right thing' and 'feeling beyond any doubt' that he was 'doing the right thing'). He visibly relaxed when he realised that this was a panel he could dominate with ease. The questioners might as well have just said to him "Well, you feel that you've done the right thing, obviously, and you certainly think that Iraq is better off now than it was in 2002, is that correct?" To which he could then have just answered "Yes" and we'd know just about as much as we do today, after 6 hours of hearing the smug prick drone on with endless misdirections and cheap get-outs (it's so easy to shirk responsibility for over half a million deaths by saying that you were absolutely convinced that you were doing the right thing over and over again). Only Lord Lawrence Freedman seemed to make him squirm when he told the ex Prime Minister the death tolls for just the months of January in Iraq in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and yet instead of turning this into a fierce attack on whether or not Blair still felt that the Iraqi people were better off by comparing how many of his own countryfolk Saddam killed in the previous twenty years with the total death toll caused by the US and UK invasion and the subsequent occupation, he instead let Blair, once more, dominate the floor by leading them somewhere else.

I personally would have loved to ask him some questions. For instance, I would have suggested that, on the basis of intelligence alone, there is a country in the world with a high number of known Al Qaeda operatives within its borders; a large number of sympathetic Muslim extremists; an active and well-known nuclear weapons program; and, compared to the Western nations, a fairly lax security setup around that nuclear program. Yet it doesn't seem that at any point anybody considered invading Pakistan and demanding that they get rid of their weapons of mass destruction. But then Pakistan doesn't have much in the way of lucrative oil reserves, does it? 

So despite the very real threat of Al Qaeda managing to steal a nuclear weapon from Pakistan with the intent of using it in a terror attack, Blair and Bush instead chose to invade a country who have never particularly shown any great belligerence to anyone outside of their immediate vicinity (they warred with Iran, and invaded Kuwait, but I don't ever remember hearing about Saddam wanting to attack the US or UK or any other non-local country) and who didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction anyway. Iraq, did, however, have a huge number of oil fields, and even in the early weeks of the war, I recall seeing a press conference at which one of the US generals declared that "controlling the oil wells is our number one priority" which I recall made me bitterly laugh out loud at the brutal honesty of it. The politicians can wriggle and slime all they want, but even the grunts on the ground there knew what their real priorities were. Regime change? Meh. The US in particular has a great track record for regime change, but it's usually been in toppling democratically elected but slightly socialist governments to replace them with oppressive and brutal regimes that they can then make deals with more effectively. Weapons of mass destruction? Meh. Pakistan has them, India have them, Israel has them, and I don't see anyone calling for them to disarm, despite the way that Israel likes to throw it's US purchased military might at Palestinian civilians in their endless tit-for-tat battles. 

I would have attacked his assertion that Iraq now is better off than it was under Saddam Hussein by throwing the figure of people killed by Saddam himself in Iraq. Many figures are bandied about, some claim that 800,000 people died under Saddam's reign, but that actually breaks down to about 500,000 killed in the war against Iran, 100,000 killed by us in the first Gulf War, and possibly up to 200,000 in Iraq's gulags. So technically, Saddam can only really be held to be responsible for about 200,000 of those deaths, because the US funded his war against Iran, and we massacred 100,000 ourselves the first time round. Yet since 2003, the deaths from violence are estimated to be as high as 600,000, in a peer-reviewed Lancet study. Official Iraqi (and therefore heavily tainted by the presence of their occupiers - sorry, their best friends, the UK and US forces - suggest lower figures of just over 100,000. No surprise there. Even if the Lancet, who are not usually known for making things up out of thin air, are exaggerating, I'd take the figure as a midway point and say actual casualties are more like 400,000, that's still a shitload more than Saddam himself killed. Twice as many, in fact. Three times as many, if you believe the Lancet's figure. So 200,000 died as a direct result of Saddam's general cunty-dictatorness, which is never good, but at least 400,000 died as a result of our invasion. Hm. Difficult to say there whether the people are better off than they were. I mean, obviously the dead ones are not better off, and the living ones who have lost children or parents or siblings, they're not better off either and are probably already signed up to some insurgency group in order to avenge the wrongs done to them. And the living ones who didn't lose anybody, but now have to face an Iraq dominated by religious fundamentalists shooting at each other and at them, I'm not too sure they're better off either. But at least they don't have to worry about ending up in one of Saddam's gulags anymore. They just have to worry about being killed by US or UK troops or insurgents. Brilliant. Welcome to our Vietnam, folk.

Nobody questioned Blair either about the unfeasibly complicated and dense arrangements he has built around his finances. He has created, apparently, an impenetrable web of off-the-shelf companies and special companies, formed partnerships with himself at various points, and left it so mangled that nobody seems to be able to track where money is coming from and where it goes to. How convenient. If he had nothing to hide, why go to such incredible lengths to hide his income? Because it might show large payments from the sale of stolen oil, perhaps? Backhand payments through Bush's similarly convoluted arrangements for his part in the war? Or is it just to sidestep tax and hand over millions to his children? Whatever the arrangements, not many ex PMs, even hard-nosed capitalist Thatcher, managed to blag over £14 million in the short time after leaving office. Where is it all coming from? And where is it all being funnelled to?

There were no hard questions about the legality of the war, despite the testimony of senior legal experts earlier in the week suggesting that it was made quite clear that the war would be illegal without a second UN resolution - again, the panel allowed Blair to wax eloquent on the topic, subverting their questions and again performing sleight of hand misdirections.

You have to ask why. Why did they go so easy on Blair? Why were the questions of even the usually more effective members of the panel so wishy-washy and easy to hijack? Why did they let him hijack the questions? The general consensus in the press backs up what I thought as I watched the performance yesterday; Blair was deliberately given an easy ride. I want to know why.

Right Wing Idiot Fails To See Irony In Own Rant

I love right wing commenters on newspaper sites. They never seem to fail to amuse me with their eye-swivelling, raging invective against anybody they see as being 'not right'. This time, however, it's the entire country that is the target for their impotent rage. In a comment following on from this piece in the Telegraph came this rant about Labour's Britain:

"A mental picture of Labour’s achievements since 1997

* UK bound illegal immigrants massing in Sangatte

* Fat, career benefit claimants sat in front of the TV

* Drunken girls fighting outside a pub at 1:30 am

* Reams of costly regulations sitting on my desk

* The sun reflecting off of a speed camera on the A3

* The sneaky paedophiles hiding around every corner

* The big yellow signs that say…. £1.16 per litre

* The tax bill I paid this morning

* Dole scrounging aliens calling UK soldiers murderers

* A shop full to the brim with Chinese imports

* The empty space where once stood a beat policeman

* The car tax disc costing more than some cars

* Very young girls pushing prams

* 3rd world countries humiliating UK armed forces

* Britain as the world’s laughing stock

* Brown & Blair stepping off their chartered BA 777

* Pay nothing for 1st year, then 5 years interest free

* Hayes – Middlesex, or Karachi?

* The end of saved-for luxury items – a ‘must have’?

* A knife glistening as it catches the sun’s light

* India’s space missions – Britain’s baby bonds

* Fat people waddling down the road like pregnant ducks

* Can’t read, can’t talk, can’t write – ready for work

* The have-a-go hero sentenced to 5 years in prison

* The teenage girl ignoring me as I hold the door open

* CCTV & bolted gates on schools & nurseries

* Talent: – Elton, Bowie, Floyd? – No, Leona & Cheryl

* All foreign English football clubs – Uhh?

* The death of Great Britain"


Anton Vowl was right on his blog to call this a mental picture indeed. Trouble is, it's so easy to co-opt any or all of those statements into a blast against the state of Britain after years of successive Tory governments. Here's my attempt:

• UK bound foreign finance organisations coming to pick the bones off our declining industrial base
• Fat, career benefits claimants sitting in front of a TV - unemployment reached a record high of over 3 million in the mid-eighties that has never been beaten - though the Tories came close again in the early 1990's.
  
• Drunken men fighting outside pubs at 1:30am
• Lack of important regulations protecting workers from overwork, low pay, poor conditions, workplace bullying, and poor safety standards resulting in our workforce being one of the lowest paid and overworked in Europe
• The sun reflecting off the sinking hull of the General Belgrano after being sunk on Thatcher's orders despite it being outside the exclusion zone and heading away from the exclusion zone
• The sneaky paedophiles lurking around every corner - we just hear about them more now since the media decided that paedophilia was an epidemic
• The big signs across the gates of mines, docks and steelworks saying 'CLOSED'
• The council tax bills we all have to pay every month
• Soldiers being sent to die and kill to essentially keep a Prime Minister in power
• Shops full to the brim with imports from Taiwan and China
• The empty space where once stood a beat policeman before the Tories decided to pull police off the streets and make them fill out forms instead
• Car tax has always cost more than some cars
• Very young girls pushing prams - Britain had the fourth highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Western world in 1996. Under a Tory government.
• 3rd world countries humiliating British armed forces - we didn't actually win the Falklands, Argentina still lays claim to them to this day...
• Britain as the world's laughing stock - how those Europeans laughed at our low wages, dying industry, culture of overwork, and lack of protection for the most vulnerable in our society
• Thatcher stepping out of her private RAF helicopter
• The start of the culture of irresponsible lending to try and escape the black hole of the recession that, ultimately, led to another recession.
• Canary Wharf - London or New York?
• The end for saved-up-for luxury items thanks to record unemployment and a massive recession
• A knife glistening as it catches the sunlight - knife crime is not a new thing. Ask Peter Sutcliffe.
• Europe's space missions - Britain taking children's school milk off them to reduce education spending
• Fat bankers waddling into chauffeur driven Daimlers
• Record levels of illiteracy due to slashing on education spending that resulted in fewer teachers, larger class sizes and employing cheaper non-qualified non-teaching assistants to help instead of qualified teachers
• Have a go heroes have always ended up coming off worse if they happen to survive - it's the British law (that the Tories didn't try to get changed either when they had the chance) that lands such people in prison.
• Teenage girls ignoring people when you hold the door open for them. Because they're fucking teenagers.
• Lack of adequate security in schools and a consistent refusal to acknowledge the potential dangers of not spending money to help schools increase their security by successive Tory governments that eventually let a man walk into a primary school in Dunblane and shoot a classroom full of five year olds.
• Talent - Elton? Bowie? Floyd? No. Bros and Wham!
• All foreign-owned British industry - huh?
• The death of Great Britain, and its replacement with Thatcher's hateful, rich-coddling, poor-denigrating abysmal shithole of a country, obssessed with wealth but denying it to millions 

It's so easy to just reel off a list of things that are bad about the state of a nation - but in my case I also made at least a vague attempt to tie in why these things were bad as a result of Tory policies down the years, whereas Mr Dimwit commentator seems to think that somehow Labour should be going round schools talent scouting future David Bowies or Elton Johns, whilst simultaneously he also ignores all of the excellent musical talent this country has produced in the last thirteen years (I also did this in my list simply to show how stupid a statement it is - the eighties - like the last thirteen years - produced some excellent music). What always galls me about such frothing right wing attacks is the lack of thought and research that goes into their emotive rants. When I get cross about something, I rant about it, but I also check my facts to make sure that, whilst ranting, I don't end up looking like a total tit. It makes sense. Most conservatives don't seem to understand the simple idea of checking your facts - this goes all the way up to their biggest newspapers, too, sadly, where fact takes second place to making things up or misrepresenting the truth in order to push a right wing agenda (or, in the case of certain popular newspapers, a right-wing, racist and homophobic agenda).

I can't help but wonder if conservatives fall into two categories; the very, very stupid and easily led, who agree with what they are told as long as it makes them good and angry (immigrants stealing our jobs and shouting abuse at our troops? THE BASTARDS! String 'em up!) and don't really think about checking the facts of what they're told; they are gullible, overly trusting of 'official sources' and not given to critical thinking. The other type are very, very clever and know  perfectly well that they are peddling bullshit to the other type, and they manipulate them cynically in order to sell newspapers or gain political power. No wonder the Tories are attacking 'soft subjects' at colleges and schools, and specifically mention Media Studies - a subject that often contains modules encouraging students to view what the news and newspapers tell us in a far more cynical and critical light. If everybody gradually learned that the newspapers are full of PR, manipulation and lies, conservative politics would be buggered.

Money Is Shit

I hate money. Money is the root of all evil. Well, that and the X Factor. But money is the the rancid, sloppy dog diarrhoea that you slip on when you're not looking that makes you stink like an ill hound's arse for the rest of the day; it's the big fat knife wedged in the side of your head that you keep catching when you turn round and flicking pieces of your own brain out through your eye sockets; money is the patch of black ice on the corner of a road that just doesn't seem that icy, just before a bend that will lead you flying through the air on a mountain pass for several seconds before smashing you and your car into an unrecognisable metallic splat in a ravine, possibly killing a baby deer in the process. I don't like money.

To be specific, I don't like the power it gives people who know how to make more. I'm not talking about shopkeepers who are often as fucked as the rest of us, financially; I'm talking about the big financiers, the bankers who balls up the economy, have to be bailed out with taxpayers' money, and only a year later have the sheer bald-faced cuntiferousness to actually award themselves the same obscene bonuses that they have been awarding themselves for decades. A million here, £750k there, a few hundred thousand here, there and everywhere. Current estimates put the overall bankers bonus figure this year in London at around a billion pounds. That's about enough to buy Doncaster. Or a three bedroomed house in Kensington. Even ditzy old Boris Johnson, who seems to me to be generally a bit like a political Father Dougal MacGuire wandering around going "Ted, Ted, I'm confused. What's going on?", has gone from defending the bankers against calls to hit their bonuses with a supertax to suddenly realising how much they're paying themselves, then remembered with a shake of his mussed up hair that we're still kind of in a recession, and has now started denouncing the greedy swines. His original argument was that up to 9000 bankers would leave the City if the supertax was levied. Fuck 'em. Let them go. Because the one big obstacle to controlling the (largely US owned) banks and their executive excesses, is about to disappear.

Yes folks, no longer will bankers be able to hide behind the threat of pulling up shop and going back to the US where they can give themselves whatever bonuses they like, because now Barak Obama has decided that something needs to be done to cap their avarice. And if the US is serious about doing something on this score, then the greedy bankers are, frankly, buggered. Once the US starts the ball rolling, other countries (the UK included) will follow suit. We'll start to see tax haven after tax haven getting rolled up, and finally the bankers will have to start doing a dishonest day's work for a still ridiculous sum, though not quite as obscenely ridiculous as it was before.

I personally have my doubts that it will happen. Not because of Obama - I like Obama, he has good ideas - but because of the fact that he will have to get this through the Senate, past a fair number of greedy Democrats and a whining truckful of unfeasibly wealthy Republicans, many of whom have their hands dirty in the finance world. It's a noble plan, but I doubt whether it will get off the ground. However, the mere threat of it is absolutely putting the shits up the bankers, and that gets my vote every single time.

Here's my idea. Abolish money. That's right, get rid of the shitty, life-wrecking stuff. Let's get everyone to work, but we don't earn anything; we just get to live in our homes, have our stuff, everything is free and we all provide our labour for the sakes of keeping the whole thing still running. Work for a year, then take a year off - get to do something you enjoy for a year, write a book, do some dangerous extreme sports like base jumping or laughing at policemen. Seriously, it'd be great. Ahh, but what of those terrible, human, competitive urges, I hear you ask? Simple. In the centre of each town is a stocks, and in those stocks are chained some of the greedy shitbag bankers who fucked over our economy for the sake of lining their own pockets, and every day you can kick them as hard as you like in the balls. Whoever gets to make them scream the loudest gets an ice cream. And this happens every day. People will queue for miles. I would. And as soon as I'd had a go, I'd go straight to the back of the queue again for another. Smug, arrogant, greedy bastards.