24 August 2010

SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL

One can now add to that proverb, WRITE NO EVIL, if the ‘we’re all one society, appeasing, down-on-my-knees-begging-you-please, Islamic loving, inclusivity obsessed, multiculturally aware, touchy-feely, rightwing-hating, individual freedom go-to-hell, I care more than you care and the State knows best’ Guardian newspaper gets its way.

In this Saturday’s edition (21st August 2010) under the headline ‘Rightwing Blogs lead ‘War on Islam’ the Guardian gave vent to an hysterical rant against rightwing opinion and female blogger Pamela Geller in particular. Written by Chris McGreal, peace and blessing be upon him, it was a ludicrous attack on activist Geller that ultimately says more about the soft mainstream Islam-loving chattering classes and their fear of the new right than it did about Pamela Geller.

For the left the rise of grassroots activist movements like the Tea Party Radicals, the English Defense League, new political parties or the relentless rise of the right on the Net via the Blogosphere and related websites has usurped the left’s old street protesting stomping ground. Once the Left basked in the knowledge that ordinary people were by and large on their side, Trade Unions could muster thousands of followers, students were generally of the left, radical politics, activism and mass movements were of the left, and the right, where was the Right?

The right, in fact, was either perceived as Conservative, straight, male, Christian and white or shaven-headed, cranially-challenged, bigoted, straight, male and white. Worse, both were seen as being partnered by dull, plump, child-bearing dullards who were either Thatcher clones or broken bones and, who were, bar the odd exception, utterly asexual or sexless.

The left may have had followers of both sexes, but their dedication and pursuit of the monosexual being meant that each partner was often bearded, sandal wearing and obsessed with their diet, and as such were accompanied, in the main, by a bizarre array of multi-sexual, transsexual, cross-dressing, muesli-munching, hormonally-challenged, dungareed wearing, saddos whose idea of a good time was reminiscing about how much they’d collected for the striking miners in the eighties and planning their party of parties to celebrate the imminent death of Margaret Thatcher. Yet lurking on the edges of these leftwing clans were some of the world’s beautiful people, radical chick, could also be radical chic. From black-clad, capitalist-killing members of the Baader-Meinhof gang to free-lovin’ little rich girls, the left had them all.

But not any more. The Right got a growing army of discontented, sassy women and, at its head, Sarah Palin, a Republican hockey-mum and moose-hunting, heaving-bosomed, far right goddess who gave every red-neck American their biggest hard-on in years. Palin came along at a time when the US right was in free fall and the United States was still reeling from the aftermath of September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, foreclosures and the Credit Crunch and the election of the first black President of the United States. These events, momentous and challenging, happened at a time when the incumbent Republican President Bush was floundering and failing to take a lead. The American people wanted change and got it big time in the election of President Obama, a man whose radical, left leaning agenda, would soon galvanize the grassroots right in ways not seen in the US for years, if at all. It is this grassroots movement in the US, and from the US to the rest of the world, that is so alarming the left and its mouthpieces like the Guardian.

The left’s goon squads are now on the attack and when they attack they attack big time, first, as with Sarah Palin, they will attack their target in the media, they will ridicule and besmirch your family (as long as you’re white), your religion (as long as its Christian) and your character and if that doesn’t work the left runs to their legal friends to find ways of shutting you up, shutting you down, and banning you or all three.

For the UK left and the soft left establishment our Democracy is not enshrined in law or laid down in a Bill of Rights, it is fluid, changeable, and bendable. Not so much a constitution as a flexible solution to a problem should it arise, and as the new left creates laws, like for instance the law of religious hatred, so the left’s legions of litigators utilize them to silence and cajole its enemies. The UK’s array of new gagging orders are both vile and one of the single biggest attacks on free speech the UK has ever seen.

It's no coincidence that the abolition of an antiquated law like Blasphemy, which only applied to Anglican Christians and was hardly ever used, should, in fact, have heralded in a vastly more effective and draconian law that made it a crime to incite or promote religious hatred, a catch-all phrase that can mean anything and effectively protects Islam and other religions from criticism. Likewise protest movements like the English Defense League can be banned from marching if the local, often politically motivated, police think the EDL’s presence might upset the local residents.

Expect to see the ‘threat of disorder’ wheeled out again and again now when EDL and similar bodies attempt to march. Beyond that, the Commission for Racial Equality is heaping one legal challenge after another on the British National Party in its stated aim of bankrupting the party and destroying it for good, thus effectively denying a voice to a million voters. Would such a tactic, say used by the Conservatives against the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party, have been any more acceptable? The EDL and the BNP may well be unpleasant and be represented by some pretty ghastly individuals but their growth is indicative that something in society is wrong and shutting them down is not going to make the root causes that created them go away.

Now the left is moving on Bloggers, blogger and campaigner Pamela Geller is, according to the Guardian and Civil rights groups, guilty of "hate speech" for her repeated warnings of "Islamic domination" of the US. Further she has, according to the McCarthyist left leaning political monitoring group, The Southern Poverty Law Centre, mixed political exploitation with ‘hate-mongering‘. As a result Geller has, according to the Law Centre’s spokesman Marc Potok, ‘crossed the line from legitimate debate’, as it is in his words, wrong to ‘talk about conspiracies on the part of Muslims to dominate the United States’.

The whole article was implying that Pamela Geller and her ilk must be silenced, that their attacks on Islam and Muslims amounted to hate-speech and as such were committing a verbal ‘crime’ punishable by law. This is the left’s answer to everything now. If it offends ban it, gag it, silence it. The left has created a chaotic world of mass immigration, moved peoples from country to country without any thought as to the consequences, it has promoted lifestyles which are often at odds with people’s beliefs and done so regardless of the indigenous population. Now when grassroots movements against these decisions grow amongst the people the Left actively seeks to destroy those movements and deny the people a voice.

The Left and the mainstream Establishment will silence the people at its peril because every time a moderate is silenced, is mocked, or his ideas pilloried, then the more extreme will become his efforts to be heard and the more extreme his need to make the state and the establishment listen.

17th August 2010

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Watching the news, reading the papers and seeing our politicians in the UK, in Europe and in the US could make one feel that the excitement and impending sense of economic doom predicted by so many since the end of 2007, 2008, last year and this year, was over. That the world had moved almost effortlessly from sub-prime crisis, to credit crunch to ‘lets have lunch’ without anyone getting hurt, give or take the odd Greek bank worker and the occasional British Prime Minister voted out of office.

The stock markets, have lurched, inched, spurted and crawled inexorably upwards in recent months and commentators and the media instead of using scary words like crash, depression, the Thirties, mass unemployment, social breakdown, collapse, credit crunch are now soothing us with words like; employment, new jobs, low interest rates, controlled cutbacks, bank lending, work force, skills, cohesion and of course everyone's current fave, coalition. Of course there are still a few yobs out there on the fringes swearing and shouting expletives like; double-dip, recession, deflation, inflation, pensions, baby-boomers, pensions, rising unemployment and, lest we forget, Quantitative Easing. But generally the world is calm. Or is it?

The world’s decision to use a Keynesian approach to solving its economic woes has temporarily calmed things, but the stimulus has been at a massive cost, particularly in the US where the home of capitalism has shown itself to be weak in the face of crisis, preferring the soft option, high taxes, Healthcare Reform, and delaying hard choices for the future. Yet that future could only be months away. Already the effects of the first stimulus are waning, consumer spending is slowing again almost before it started rising, house prices are still falling, new house building can barely get it together to erect a flag-pole let alone a new house and meanwhile evermore foreclosures beckon as debt carries all before it. Yet the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration’s only answer is another, bigger, stimulus package, more Quantitative Easing and ever more spending. It’s like having maxed-out all your credit cards, mortgaged and remortgaged the house and borrowed everything you can from the bank and your friends, yet you still believe if you can just borrow more it’ll be alright.

The effects of the first stimulus are fading because it didn’t create anything meaningful and props up businesses that should close. More money will just prop them up longer and create more meaningless jobs and when its removed or its effects wane then the failing businesses and McJobs will go to anyway. Better to get the pain over and build anew than risking a bigger collapse and hyper inflation in the months and years ahead. Stimuluses only work if there’s something to stimulate, if the patient is dying, then sometimes its kinder to let him die..

In the UK too, talk of cuts are beginning to be talked down and the threat of big cuts to social services moderated. The UK though will have to wait until October this year to find out exactly what is to be cut so it would be churlish to harp on and heap criticism on the Breakback Coalition before they have had a chance to show their true colours. I suspect though that given their current moniker that they will be multi-coloured as they try to be all things to all men. In which case they’ll please no one and disappoint all.

The US and potentially the rest of the West could be heading towards a double-dip recession or, in reality in the US, a full-blown, no-nonsense Depression, where nature will do what the governments of Bush, Obama and the Federal Reserve have failed to do and that is to burn away the rubbish so that a new economy and new businesses can rise from the ashes. The only genuine alternative is the half way measure of hacking away at the economic mess through cuts, but it remains to be seen if the UK coalition government has what it takes? If we have then we may avoid America’s fate, if not we to may see the dark clouds of Depression before too long.

4th August 2010

SCUM NATION 2 - EXTERMINATE

Reading the UK’s newspapers one gets inured to the daily horror stories of some elderly woman being pummeled to death by some feckless thug, or how some one, some son, daughter, father, mother, has been stabbed, kicked, beaten, to death and so on infinitum until one's brain turns off. However, every now and then some incident, or event trips a raw nerve and triggers a response. For me it was the story of a twenty five year old man who kicked and trampled on a goose before ripping its head off while still alive in front of a group of horrified children in a park. This vile piece of subhuman scum was sentenced to 25 weeks in prison and will no doubt be free to inveigle his cronies with tales of his daring bird killing in a matter of months.

The Guide Dog Association has also reported that at least three of its dogs are attacked by pit bull type gang dogs every month while out walking their owners on the lovely streets of England’s green and pleasant land. These attacks often result in the guide dog being left injured, traumatized and unable to function again as a guide dog while their blind owners already difficult life is made that much more awful.

Every day, like crimes against people, crimes and cruelty against this country's animals increase. The one difference from the awful crimes perpetuated on a daily basis against people is that animals cannot speak out or write to their MP, they cannot do anything other than trust in us to protect them and, in that, as with most things, we are failing.

The thug that unleashes his psyched up fighting dog on a hapless guide dog for a laugh will no doubt derive similar enjoyment from smashing an old lady's face in, or sticking a knife into someone for their ipod or wallet. Equally, the sub human bacteria that ripped the head off a goose is probably, as a recent article published in the New York Times by Charles Siebert stressed, well on his way to hurting people or children as many of the world’s vilest killers began their careers killing animals before turning to people.

But there is more here than just feeling sad and angry at the bestiality of some people, which is that we tolerate them. The 25 week sentence for our goose killer is nothing. The vermin that did it is unemployable, has never worked and probably never will. He has cost us money since he was born so, conversely, his financial sentence on the state and our taxes lasts a life time. His punishment costs us money and his release will cost us even more. No doubt his new found notoriety will increase his sex appeal among scum women and soon his State-funded home will echo to the pitter-patter of little scum feet dragging themselves across the floor. These little baby scum soon-to-be-sadists will no doubt start by torturing small animals and tormenting daddy's pit bull, which, if it doesn’t eat them, will put them in good stead for killing a few more of God’s creatures when they reach adulthood.

The fact is that he, and thousands like him, are human vermin, they contribute nothing to society yet cost a fortune and their families cost even more. They steal, rob and take on a huge scale. They breed, consume and contribute absolutely nothing off any worth creatively, societally or intellectually and now they hurt and abuse, and their scum offspring will do the same, only worse. We tolerate them because we are afraid of them and because we think we are civilized and can do nothing else, as any punishment beyond the conventional would be barbaric, that somehow they can be ‘saved’ and made ‘nice’, like us. That little scum gangstaman will sit down outside his crib and sip Pinot Grigio while his ho's hand out canapes. Or that our cool goose killer will turn over a new leaf having studied venetian antiquities at Her Majesty's Pleasure and start saving little scally scum boys and girls from turning to a life of crime. I think not.

What we have is an increasingly barbaric, vicious and, in many cases, barely human  underclass, which we still treat as if we were Victorian missionaries on a crusade to save and civilise. Why? So that we can make them like us? Well, we know that’s not going to happen. Or is it to make us feel better? That we’re doing something for these poor people? Or is it that we cannot believe that our adventure and creation of a welfare state has failed and, instead of producing a happy working class, has produced a hybrid sub-human every bit as ghastly as if they been spawned as the direct result of mutating their DNA and cross-breeding them with rodents.

Scum, like goose-head man and the gangs of hooded bacteria than hang around our streets and parks stabbing people with the wrong postcode or menacing the blind, can’t be civilized because it isn’t worth the money or the man hours to try and do so. Far better to kill them or at the least sterilize them like we do strays, so at least they can be stopped breeding. They have NO purpose and we should stop pretending that they do.

The increase in the number of cases of cruelty and killing of animals should be a wake up call to all of us. We are not civilized and our society is not civilized, if it were incidents like this would not happen and therefore saying that society cannot kill is a non starter. Society can and should kill because we can’t. We live by the rules, the scum that kill animals and people don’t, and because of that the state has to be tough and do what we can’t and remove these people from our society permanently and not just for 25 weeks.

16th July 2010

BANG MY HO TO MAKE THE ECONOMY GO

At the very moment that European governments are nervously, tentatively and almost coquettishly beginning to strip themselves of the socialist and welfare trappings that have so burdened them with debt, so Obama’s America is beginning to pick up Europe’s discarded robes and begin the process of making the United States the biggest socialist harlot on the block.

22 June 2010

MUZZLING, TAMING AND RESHAPING THE RIGHT

It is interesting that, as the US’s grass roots Tea Party movement begins to exert real influence over the Republican Party and its choice of candidates for November’s Senate elections, so the mainstream right wing media is turning on them, both in the US and in the UK. The reason? The Tea Party and similar fringe or unofficial right wing movements often espouse ideas and thoughts that go against the grain and the soft media-friendly right doesn’t like it. Hence a succession of doom and gloom articles in everything from the Telegraph to the cover of the Economist all attacking the Tea Party, its supporters and its ideologies.

According to the Economist Leader's column, the American right should emulate David Cameron’s ghastly, touchy-feely, hug-a-hoodie, love your enemy approach if they want to reconnect with mainstream America and help the Republicans win the 2012 election, conveniently ignoring the fact that ‘Dave’ lost the UK’s election and was forced to cosy up to the Liberal Democrats in order to form a government. The Economist thinks that the Tea Party is too angry and too white, a terrible crime in the eyes of the multiculturally obsessed, and too far away from the centrist mainstream right ideology so favoured by the Economist. Good.

Good because the radical right is now hamstrung and gagged at every opportunity by a mainstream obsessed with keeping politics in the middle ground and if it’s beginning to get to the point where it can begin to ruffle a few harmonious middle ground feathers then so much to the good. Politics needs extremes and it needs anger otherwise it vegetates and eventually produces inertia in the electorate and leaders like Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Extremes get watered down, they get changed and altered but politics needs new ideas and they need anger to drive them and the people have every right to be angry.

Our leaders and governments have created and encouraged a spend now, pay later environment for years both at national levels and personal levels. They did this for a mixture of reasons, some altruistic, some nationalistic and some egotistic but the net result is the same, the West is in debt and struggling with welfare systems it cannot afford and populations, swollen by unchecked immigration, that it cannot support. Yet few political parties will give vent to the anger and the fear that people so clearly feel.

This is rage with a small ‘r’, the reasonable revolution. So far we have had a soft recession with a soft landing and mild discomfort. For most people it's business as usual, we might be told its tough ‘out there’ but in here the birds are still singing (unless an Eastern European migrant has eaten them) and the sun is still shining and those clouds on the horizon are still a long way away. But others are hurting and for them the Tea Party is giving them a voice but still the government and the media won’t listen because what people are saying goes against current norms.

It was interesting that, aside from attacking the Tea Party and its followers, The Economist's other key target was the “hysterical blogosphere”,  whose writers ravings are apparently threatening the mainstream moderate Republican party and damaging its chances of winning the 2012 elections. Of course, what the Economist was really saying was 'stop the Tea Party movement now or we risk seeing a Sarah Palin / Mike Huckabee double act running for the White House', something that is an anathema to many.

Now every thing is pastel grey, a big bland in the centre with the right pushed to the loony sidelines, its followers dismissed as extremists who, according to the Economist are intolerant, gun-toting, immigrant-bashing and worse according to the Telegraph they harbour members who have “aligned themselves with an array of wild positions”. These “wild” positions often cover tax, immigration, crime and punishment and abortion, the great totems of the left and soft right and our new multicultural diverse society and as such are not only untouchable but now unmentionable.

Our Western multicultural democracies have contracted and reduced the political spectrum to a mid range of political ideas that drift slightly to the right and slightly to the left but effectively encourage Big government, maintain the key socialist totems of welfare and the multicultural society. That dissent will not be tolerated has become more and more evident as the new establishment, that unholy kabal between the mainstream political classes, the media and many in the public sector, exerts pressure to crush or rubbish any dissenters that dares to threaten the current status quo.

Regardless of what one thinks of the Tea Party, its agenda or those politicians like Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle, who are so aligned and associated with it, the Tea Party is a grass roots movement that has risen quickly to encompass hundreds of thousands of followers in less than two years. This movement, like other right wing dissent in Europe and the online blogosphere, is constantly dismissed as irrelevant and as the wailings of lunatics, yet it is growing in strength and anger and cannot be ignored any longer. The fact that British publications feel the need to weigh in and dangle the spectacle of David Cameron in front of Americans as something to aspire to only shows just how out of touch the mainstream right has become.

By the way, mine's white with no sugar.

Thank you.

21 June 2010

Paying homage to the ‘Twat-in-a-hat’

The death of the artist, writer and self-styled ‘dandy’, Sebastian Horsley, from a heroin overdose on the 17th June upset me much more than I would have expected it to have, had I ever considered it, which I hadn’t. Sebastian was a likeable, frail, witty, beautiful and tragic-comic figure who had started life as an artist and ended it as writer and self-styled Dandy. A kind of modern Beau Brummell, veiled in a veneer of Bryronic excess, fueled as much by his love of publicity as it was by debauchery.

I met Sebastian, not in Soho, where he will be forever associated with, but in Mayfair, in the late 1990s where he lived next door to a brothel in Shepherds Market and only yards away from Brummell’s former home in Chesterfield Street. I also lived in Mayfair then and had a house around the corner in Hays Mews where, as it happened, I was having an afternoon drinks party. A mutual friend brought Sebastian along because she thought that we’d like each other and we also both had a human skull collection which she reckoned made some sort of friendship a given. 

Back then, Sebastian was still the Dandy he would become, but less so, as the artist and crack addict vied for his attention, only morphing into the fully formed Dandy a few years later. Sometimes he’d disappear for weeks, locked away in his flat while his dealers would deliver his longed-for poison by pushing envelopes of it through his letter box. At other times he’s emerge, clean, bright-eyed, witty and rearing to get on with his work. He’d even, on occasions, appear covered in paint, though with a dapper edge of course.

Some time in 2000/1 he came around to Redemption Films' Soho offices with a copy of a film by the artist Sarah Lucas, that had been made of his crucifixion in the Philippines, which he wanted me to watch with a view to releasing it. I remember sitting down in the Groucho Club watching the process of Sebastian being prepared and finally nailed and crucified and feeling incredibly disturbed by it. I can’t say why, perhaps it was my own track record with religion and blasphemy, or the fact that I was in therapy and feeling pretty emotional, but whatever the reason I found it very difficult to watch and very unsettling. In the end Sebastian decided to have a more art gallery-friendly style release rather than the more unrestrained 'shock’ release that Redemption would have brought to it.

By 2002/3, I had moved out of Mayfair and back to Soho and Sebastian, in turn, had also left Mayfair and bought a small flat in Meard Street (a paved street that runs between Wardour Street and Dean Street and which used to be home to Gossips Club, the Bat Cave and a brothel, but which now has the Soho House Hotel and a theme pub). He was still pursuing his art and came to see me about working in porn as a performer, with a view to theming his next collection on pornography. “I am very well endowed” he smirked. I linked him up with Jane Hamilton (the ex-pornstar Veronica Hart with a new name) and then producer of Michael Ninn’s award-winning films Latex and Shock, who seemed highly amused and interested in this english artist who wanted to fuck for his art.

Sadly though, it never happened, or maybe gladly it didn’t, for around this time Sebastian started to write for the Erotic Review and the middle class creatures that liked to peep through their net curtains at all the naughty goings-on but never did anything themselves. He used to moan about it, but obviously enjoyed his new found infamy that the PR savvy Rowan Pelling, the Erotic Reviews breathy editor, brought to his work. A column in the Observer followed though Sebastian’s graphic sexual anecdotes and non-politically correct views ruffled too many liberal feathers and his column was soon cancelled. But all the while the writer and the Dandy’s star was rising, yet, there was another darker star lurking, always threatening to eclipse the others.

Living, again literally around the corner from Sebastian, I would often see him from my window wrapped in a long black coat, pale and haggard, hurrying to the street crack dealers that hang around lower Berwick Street and Brewer Street night after night. These are the pits of the drug world, vicious and amoral and selling butchered crack and smack to desperate street life. Yet, day after day, I’d see Sebastian going to these creatures. Sometimes I’d bump into him, and he’d be nervous, anxious, his eyes on storks looking startled and frightened, keen to get home. This was the flipside of Sebastian, the sad, bad side, the Mr Hyde to his Dandy Jekyll.

Other times he’s be clean, off drugs, off drink and working, working for months on end. We would meet for occasional drinks and he’d be enthusing and/ or derogatory about his book at the same time and, yet, he was changing. The artist and painter was fading and a new creature, a living creation was emerging, one that was the same, only louder and with bigger hats. When Sebastian’s book was published there was a massive opening launch party and I was surprised at how his fame had spread, and the hordes of glitterati in attendance. Sebastian and Rachel No 3 (all his core girlfriends were bizarrely called Rachel and numbered accordingly) arrived in matching red outfits. They were adored and adorable. Stardom, it seemed, beckoned.

And stardom for Sebastian did seem imminent and justifiably so. His book Dandy in the Underworld had been made into a play and Stephen Fry had bought the film rights. I think, in fact, up until the 17th June, Sebastian had the world at his slippered feet. He could have been another Evelyn Waugh or whatever he wanted to be, instead he’s dead. Killed by a stupid drug and soon people will transform and mellow the real you into their you, a witty Soho bon-viveur of course, but a starry, larger-than-life character and that frightened figure in black will be forgotten as they pay homage to the ‘twat-in-the-hat-who-lived-in-a-flat’. The trouble was, like Jekyll and Hyde, one couldn’t exist without the other.

One day we’ll get around to having that drink.

Rest in Peace.

10th May 2010

AS YOU SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP

28th April 2010

It says something about the state of the UK when over ten million of its adult population choose to spend an hour of their time watching three virtually identikit politicians regurgitate three almost interchangeable responses to a series of preset questions and go wild with excitement. The media claimed the next day that the American-style format ‘leaders debate’ had ‘electrified’ voters and galvanised a previously lacklustre campaign and made the previously unelectable Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg the viewers’ favourite, a bit like the X-Factor, though with Peter Mandelson taking Simon Cowell’s role, Brown playing Subo and Clegg and David Cameron doubling up as Jedward. So far there’s all to play for, though, whoever wins, the loser will be the UK and its people.

Since the ousting of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative party in 1990, British politics began the process of morphing from nasty to nice and from nice to bland and from bland to banal. Firstly, the inability of the Labour Party to mount a credible campaign against the Conservatives kept them out of office for over eighteen years, necessitating the creation of New Labour and the election of a media-savvy leader in the form of Tony Blair. Secondly, Blair transformed Labour’s fortunes to such an extent that the Conservatives in turn became unelectable and ensured that New Labour has had thirteen years in office, a feat almost unimaginable a decade ago.

Blair’s triumph was that he was able to tap into the psyche of New Britain in a way that no one else, except perhaps Simon Cowell, could and, in doing so, stymied the opposition to such an extent that it was effectively dead. So dead, in fact, that the Conservatives have, rather than reinvent themselves as a credible alternative to New Labour, sought to become New Labour, Right. The Liberal Democrats in turn, have slowly moved from a party of ban the bomb, lentil-eating greenies to a slightly fadish and more socialist version of their previous selves and become, in effect, New Labour, Left. Blair, ironically, had admired Thatcher and her strength in sticking to her beliefs, something Blair, to his credit, did over Iraq but, to their shame, our opposition have no sense of. To them, belief is what they think voters want or what their focus groups tell them we want or, worse, is a watered down, or beefed-up version of an existing Blair or New Labour policy. If it worked for Blair then it will work for us. Radical ideas, like radical politics, are out. British politics is now lite and trite. 

Now Blair’s Dauphin, Gordon Brown, the anointed one and his chosen successor is seeking to carve out his own niche and to wear the crown of elected office, something that has so far eluded him in his sham role as unelected Prime Minister and saviour of the world. Likewise, Clegg and Cameron are seeking the voters’ approval so that they too might savour elected office and yet they offer nothing. No new ideas, no new initiatives, no nothing. We have weak men, appealing to a weak electorate with neither able or willing to accept or utter the truth that our country is teetering on the abyss; financially, socially and morally.

Now, our would-be leaders feed and nurture belief that the worst is behind us that by some clever trickery and word manipulation, printing money became quantitative easing for instance, that they have all but conquered the recession. That we can avoid any hurt by cost cutting ‘savings’, by making our public services more efficient. This is against a national debt that is increasing by half a billion a day, which currently stands at £776bn and which, according to the governments own figures, is due to reach £1,406bn by 2014/15. Further, if government spending continues at current levels then as a percentage of GDP it will rise from 70pc now to 500pc of GDP by 2040 with the interest alone equaling 27pc of GDP. These figures are from the Bank of International Settlements the body for the world’s central banks and are contained within a report called The Future of Public Debt: prospects and implications. What they mean is that the UK is bankrupt and borrowing like a man possessed, with the report showing that, aside from Japan, which has higher savings, UK public spending is the highest in the world, totally out of control and heading for disaster.

Yet, our three main political parties are now virtually interchangeable, sub-Blair clones, scared of offending, scared of losing and scared of being different. Not for these men the hard choices and true cost cutting that hurts, that will bring protest and pain yet ultimately might go some way to averting disaster. No, what we have instead is inaction and inertia, the politics of fudging and prevarication, of sound bites and friendly chats on TV sofas, all driven by the politics of needing to be liked. Gone is the genuine passion of the convicted politician whose ideal’s drive him and in has come the need me, like me, fay politicians of today, the X-Factoresque Tweedle Dee’s and Tweedle Dum’s who will dance to almost any tune provided enough of us can hum it. Men and women whose message is vote for me because I’m nice and leave the nasty stuff to someone else.

Leaving the nasty to someone else is fine of course, provided that whatever bogey man is
lurking in the wings stays away. We all like the nice and calm but, by and large, we don’t elect politicians to be nice and, more to the point, it’s usually the nasties that we ultimately remember and respect. Churchill’s demands to rearm and resist Nazi Germany weren’t exactly popular at the time as most of the electorate dismissed his dire warnings as warmongering. Thatcher was almost universally loathed when she tackled the Trade Unions and government overspending. In the US, Reagan was shot and mocked for his stand against communist Russian but all three politicians had stood up for what they believed to be right and more importantly had done what they knew had to be done at a time what doing so made them reviled by many.

Are Brown, Clegg or Cameron prepared to be reviled for tackling this countries spiraling debt? No, though they may well be reviled later for being nice and delaying the pain. But right now, they want to be liked so much that they’re not even admitting the extent of the problem. They’re lying, in fact; lying because they’re still spending and promising to do what we can’t afford; lying by printing money; lying by hoping that inflation will magically reduce the debt and, most of all, they’re lying because they all refuse to address our debt honestly and by doing so they cheapen and discredit our democracy, devaluing it to the point that one day soon someone might just kill it off and put it out of its misery ...

8th April 2010

THE SILENCE OF THE SWANS

Nothing symbolises England more than the swan, the beautiful, graceful white bird that has been protected in law for over 400 years; a law that has, barring the odd violation, been upheld and respected by UK citizens without question. Equally, nothing symbolises England’s decline and its current pitiful state more than the news that stateless migrants, who have been illegally camping in fields and woods alongside the river Nene in Cambridgeshire, have taken to killing and slaughtering the birds to eat around their camp fires.

In the nearby Cambridgeshire town of Peterborough, people have also had to deal with migrants setting up camps in their gardens, sleeping in their sheds and defecating on their lawns. These charming garden visitors have, in some cases, been in residence for over five months and counting, with the house owners being told by members of our useless politically-driven police force that migrants are a civil matter and consequently not something that they can deal with. The police did however warn house owners against hurting the garden squatters or forcing them off their land as this would infringe the migrants ‘human rights’, in which case the police would intervene against the house holders. The swans too, it seems, are also to be sacrificed on the alter of human rights and political correctness, as left-leaning officials are dismissing reports of swan-eating as ‘incitements’ to racism. England 2010. A country in transition, its people cowed, its symbols mocked, its countryside bulldozed and its rulers too weak to do anything but connive in its ongoing demise. Forget too any nonsense that the English can only be pushed so far and that, like the symbolic lions that guard Nelson’s statue at Trafalgar and which decorate so many of our nation's other emblems, we will eventually rise up and roar. Now, all we are likely to see and hear is the bleating of a nurtured and beaten creature that is not so much ready to lay down its life for its country but rather one whose life has already been taken by its country.

For nearly twenty years the parties that govern the UK have allowed a poisonous cocktail of politically driven, Marxist-inspired doctrine and human rights dogma to allow immigration on a scale that will either destabilize or radically alter communities, cities and eventually the UK as a whole. Yet, still the powers that be shirk the issues its polices create, dismissing criticisms of their utopian plans as ‘racist’, or ignorant or, as is often the case now, enacting and evoking new ‘gagging’ laws that criminalize and deter criticism altogether. The truth is that the UK is being subjugated and colonized, not so much by outsiders intend on conquest, but by insiders intent on change. This is not immigration as invasion or attack as some would see it, but rather immigration as manipulation and exploitation. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, immigration was primarily driven by our need for labour, in the seventies and eighties it was driven by our old colonies and by refugees fleeing crises in places like Uganda and Bangladesh. In the nineties, the relaxation of border controls and war in the Balkans began to change the dynamics of immigration, though it wasn't until the early noughties that UK politicians actively began to change the actuality of immigration itself to suit their own agenda and to see and exploit the movement of peoples for their own political ends. For the last decade, immigration has accelerated with peoples moving to the UK, not for colonial reasons or fleeing conflict, but other reasons often at the behest or with the tacit connivance of UK ministers. The main reason, though, being that they could. They could, and our politicians acquiesced in the process, lowering regulations and raising expectations in terms of housing, schooling, health, and work and thereby making the UK the choicest option to move to.

Our politicians played the race card inversely because with the new century came a new vision, as was admitted recently by the former government adviser Jack Nather, 'that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural'. And that from 2001 onwards the Labour Party 'set about a deliberate policy of encouraging mass third world immigration, to socially engineer a multicultural society. With the alleged principle political aim of undermining the base of their opponents, the Conservative Party and to get rid of traditional conservative British culture'. To effectively swamp the country in diversity, whether we like it or not.

At the route of this are our leaders who see immigration as a means to an end, the end being the creation of a multicultural socialist utopia that, once in place, will be unassailable and unquestionable. Their reasoning a mixture of benevolence and malevolence as they seek to change society, as they see it, for the better, whilst rendering all opposition to their vision either powerless, usurped, or destroyed and, in that, they have been incredibly effective, though at a price.

Immigrants and, in particular, immigration that is visible and which brings with it new religions, new ideas and new votes, will naturally gravitate to the political party most likely to benefit it and its people and so in this Labour has done well. Furthermore, if the numbers of immigrants reaches a high enough level then at some stage their influence will be such that no political party will be able to ignore their wishes if they want their vote.

Yet our politicians are playing with fire as, on the one hand they exploit immigrants for their own ends using them as a kind of human chattel in their quest for votes and to cement their multi-cultural nirvana while, on the other hand, many immigrants exploit them and actively work against the planned diversity dream. Many would seek to create a society that is not only at odds with our politicians' utopian plans but which would in fact destroy it. Yet talk of Caliphates, of extremism, and intolerance is dismissed as the words of a few extremists, which will be overcome by further embracing Islamic or foreign culture and diversity. Dissing difference is not on the agenda. Likewise, rises in gang culture, inter-ethnic violence, honour killings and other less desirable aspects of immigration are masked by being absorbed into our wider crime statistics, leaving any direct criticism free to be dismissed as racist or discriminatory.

Race and Racist. The new taboo words. The words that have launched a thousand laws and as many lawsuits. Yet, how can one discuss immigration without mentioning race? You can't. Yet this is what our Machiavellian leaders would have us do and to make sure they have created a whole plethora of new 'race' laws to help enforce their racial state. No matter that the cracks in their scheme are beginning to show, that our services from housing to health are overloaded and that there is a simmering anger among many communities. For the government, to speak ill of multi-culturalism is racial blasphemy, and as such the language of the heretic.

If people cannot speak or voice their fears without fear of prosecution then what are they to do? It's all very well for the government to parade their multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, culturally diverse, non-discriminatory utopia but, if it's so good, why does it need so many laws to protect it?

The government have begun the process of transforming this nation, of reshaping its religious and racial balance without consultation, without debate and with all redress denied. They have, in effect, set up a sort of racial dictatorship where all dissent is crushed. Yet, the government should remember that most dictatorships, revolutions or social movements are driven by the motivation of the people, good or bad, not clandestine government initiatives enforced by Civil Servants. As such they really are playing with fire, in which case our swans won't be the only creatures sacrificed in the name of racial diversity.

15th March 2010

OOGLE ME

The last few months have seen a growing clamour regarding the sexualizing of children by parents, by the media, by retailers, by the music industry and by children themselves. This 'clamour' has been evoked by journalists, by books like Natasha Walter’s Living Doll, Pamela Paul’s Pornified and most recently by the Home Office's commissioned review into the ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ by Dr Linda Papadopoulos, the very media savvy Canadian psychologist who has appeared on TV programmes such as ‘My Big Breasts and Me’, ‘Celebrity Fit Club’ and ‘Big Brother’.

However, it wasn't until David 'call me Dave' Cameron jumped onto this august bandwagon and announced that he was, hand on heart, gravitas on face, 'very concerned that strap-ons and dungeonized Wendy-Houses were now being offered to five year olds' that things got really serious. Cameron’s carefully thought out response was that the Conservatives were going to rush through legislation that would ban ‘manipulative marketing techniques aimed at young people’, ‘strengthen the regulatory framework and give people the power to make complaints’, oh and ‘make Britain the most family-friendly country in the world’. So no pie-in-the-sky, knee-jerk policies there then.

Meanwhile, back on earth, the Home Office’s breathy new sexpert Dr Papadopoulos was appearing on countless TV shows, breasts heaving, lampooning lads mags and Beyonce videos for being too sexual. In actuality though Papadopoulos’s Home Office’s report covers a wide variety of topics, everything from the Internet, to sexual imagery’s impact on boys and girls, to relationships, to sexual violence and coercion, to pornography, computer games, fashion, music videos and body image. It is also full of sympathetic buzz words and phrases, of isms and concern. It talks of bullying - the new minority grouping, if you haven’t been bullied yet you soon will be - and partner violence.

The report is, in fact, a whole new layer of child protection, censorship, bullying and new words in the making, yet at its core are some very relevant concerns that should be addressed. The question is whether the media and, more importantly, the government, is capable of looking at anything that mentions children, sex, adults and the internet in the same breath, without immediately being consumed by apoplexy or, as David Cameron was, being compelled to adopt ‘concerned’ facial expressions and concoct legislative ideas out of thin air.

The reality is that children and adults now have access to hardcore pornography at the click of a button. Never in history has the human race had such a wealth of information, communication, imagery and graphic sexual material available, whether wished for or not. None of us know the long terms effects that such exposure will have on us or more particularly on young people growing up from birth in the age of the Net.

Already, theorists and psychologists and behaviorists have expressed concern at the inability of some children and teenagers to converse and fraternize with other people in a face-to-face situation. Though I tend to think that this is just using extreme examples to make a point rather than a comment on the young generally. However, without doubt, technology is changing our lives and none more so than the lives of the young and it is their unfettered ability to access ‘anything’ that is so alarming because it has no precedent, ever.

From head-hacking Taliban nasties, to gross-out anal gape videos to standard pornography to car crashes and celebrity sex tapes the whole lexicon of mans vileness and crassness is there for all to see at the click of a button. So as adults we can, if we chose to watch, deal with seeing anal gang bangs and watching Britney Spears chomping on her boyfriends penis, but can and should a ten year old? The answer is no.

As pre-Internet children, our journey to sexual awakening was varied and in many cases difficult. Some of us, no doubt depending on our age, saw adult magazines, TV programmes, films or videos, or whatever but in most cases these exposures would have been limited and for most of us seeing strong sexual content or pornography would have been rare. For many teenagers or children it would just have never happened. Now, given Internet access via mobiles, peer pressure and availability, I suspect that most teenagers and some children have looked at pornography a lot.

It may well be that exposure to strong sexual material will just be part of the rich tapestry of life in the 21st Century and maybe it will be. Certainly censorship isn’t the answer though education and sensible parenting is, though without an hysterical ‘something must be done’ approach from politicians and the media to drive our sensibilities. In fact far more invasive than pornography is the drip, drip of sexed-up imagery aimed at impressionable prepubescents,and child/adult crossovers that appear more and more in the media. Like Katie Price’s pictures of her three year old daughter heavily made up and looking like some bizarre hooker that she posted on Twitter or the sight of five and six years being dressed in sexually styled clothes by their parents who see it as cool. Yet in many ways these are the effects of the bombardment of imagery we all see and perhaps childhood is changing or adapting to the new technology as it must. Dr Linda Papadopoulos”s report and books like Living Doll are just some of the early manifestations of what will be an ongoing debate as people come to terms with the pornographization of the world and that the sexual act is now never more that a click away.

Porn is always the driver of new technology. Photography, film, video, DVD and the Internet have all been exploited commercially by the sex industry and now technology has made porn mainstream. Female pubic hair has all but vanished, breast augmentation and labia enhancement have been driven by women’s ability to see other women’s bodies in ways once unimaginable and equally perceive men’s responses to them. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is another argument and one that Dr Papadopoulos touched upon with her comments on body image but the fact is we are changing, our relationships, our sexual expectations, our emotions and how we respond to one another are all in transition and it is inevitable that we should be concerned. After all if Adam and Eve had had access to the internet its a sure bet that they would have posted and Twittered the first sex tape minutes after Eve bit into that Apple...