An anti-Islamic protest organised by racist group Stop Islamisation Of Europe against the building of a new mosque in Harrow attracted just 15 supporters last Sunday.
Meanwhile, a counter-protest - made up of people from many different ethnic groups and backgrounds - achieved a turn out of over 200 people, many of them from Unite Against Fascism, who gathered to show their support for tolerance and religious freedom and their opposition to racism and racist groups
Seems there's hope for real British values after all.
23/12/2009
"Legal highs" banned in the UK
So-called legal highs - chemicals designed to reproduce the effects of illegal recreational drugs - have been banned in the United Kingdom following the tragic death of Brighton student Hester Stewart in April 2009. Hester, whose family were formerly members of the Brighton and Hove Orthodox Hebrew Congregation, died aged just 21 after taking a legal high known as GBL which is metabolised in the body into the already-banned drug GHB. GBL and a range of other substances including piperazines and certain anabolic steroids will now be classified as Class C illegal drugs, with possession potentially leading to two years in prison. Dealers could face up to 14 years.
Jugs of GBL siezed by police. What would you prefer in your body - chemicals produced by profit-hungry and unethical drug dealers or something that has been subject to clinical trials?
These substances are undoubtedly dangerous, as highlighted by the sad case of Hester. Some experts have warned that they can be even more dangerous than the already-illegal drugs to which they offer an alternative - so we should all be relieved to hear that they're now illegal.
After all, since heroin was made illegal in this country (it was once sold as an entirely legal remedy for coughs, believe it or not), there haven't been absolutely any heroin addicts at all, have there? Large sections of our cities are not blighted by heroin use, are they? Nobody has been mugged by an addict, so desperate for the drug they cannot live without that they're willing to risk a long spell in prison; and no homes have been broken into and ransacked by people quite literally dying for their next fix. There are no needles lying in the grass in the park or in the stairwells of flats. Same with cocaine - the prohibition on owning and selling it has been a hundred per cent successful in stamping out use. Millions of pounds do not have to be spent on detecting illegal imports and treating overdose victims. Cannabis too, and amphetamines, and ecstasy, and LSD.
Hester Stewart was just 21 when she died after taking GBL. But will probibition prevent more deaths?
Probition worked so well in the USA when it was decided to ban alcoholic drinks, too. Drunkeness vanished overnight and Al Capone and other gangsters made fortunes - what a perfect embodiment of the American Dream.
If the Government believe that banning "legal highs" is going to achieve anything then I'd like some of whatever they've been smoking in Parliament. British anti-drugs policy is failing dismally, and toughening up the law isn't going to work no matter how many more powers the police and customs agents are given. The only way to combat and reduce use is strictly controlled sales through authorised outlets, education on the dangers of drug use and a strong support network for those that have problems. Drug use is not going to go away - people have been deliberately ingesting all manner of substances for thousands of years in an attempt to get high and they will continue to do so.
If your child was ill, would you rather they took medicine supplied by your doctor, medicine that had been produced under clinical conditions by a regulated pharmaceutical company; or would you prefer them to take some unknown chemical brewed up in an East European bath tub, mixed with various other unknown chemicals and quite possibly bleach or rat poison, bought from some shady character in the toilets of a club? If you want to buy illegal drugs, you have to mix with some decidedly unpleasant characters; believe me, I know - I was a regular drug user for many years, and I bought drugs from people I'd prefer to have never met. If they suffered unpleasant side effects from that medicine, would you prefer it if they could see the doctor for advice and, if necessary, go to hospital for further treatment? Or would you prefer them to sit it out, hoping the symptoms will go away, for fear of being arrested and sent to prison?
Such sweeping changes in the law and the research necessary to provide this education would be a lot more expensive than simply saying: "Do not take drugs, otherwise we will punish you," of course. Obviously the Government do not believe Hester's life, even when combined with the lives of all the other people who die after taking little-studied chemicals every year, are worth that much.
Jugs of GBL siezed by police. What would you prefer in your body - chemicals produced by profit-hungry and unethical drug dealers or something that has been subject to clinical trials?Copyright-free image from Wikipedia.
These substances are undoubtedly dangerous, as highlighted by the sad case of Hester. Some experts have warned that they can be even more dangerous than the already-illegal drugs to which they offer an alternative - so we should all be relieved to hear that they're now illegal.
After all, since heroin was made illegal in this country (it was once sold as an entirely legal remedy for coughs, believe it or not), there haven't been absolutely any heroin addicts at all, have there? Large sections of our cities are not blighted by heroin use, are they? Nobody has been mugged by an addict, so desperate for the drug they cannot live without that they're willing to risk a long spell in prison; and no homes have been broken into and ransacked by people quite literally dying for their next fix. There are no needles lying in the grass in the park or in the stairwells of flats. Same with cocaine - the prohibition on owning and selling it has been a hundred per cent successful in stamping out use. Millions of pounds do not have to be spent on detecting illegal imports and treating overdose victims. Cannabis too, and amphetamines, and ecstasy, and LSD.
Hester Stewart was just 21 when she died after taking GBL. But will probibition prevent more deaths?Probition worked so well in the USA when it was decided to ban alcoholic drinks, too. Drunkeness vanished overnight and Al Capone and other gangsters made fortunes - what a perfect embodiment of the American Dream.
If the Government believe that banning "legal highs" is going to achieve anything then I'd like some of whatever they've been smoking in Parliament. British anti-drugs policy is failing dismally, and toughening up the law isn't going to work no matter how many more powers the police and customs agents are given. The only way to combat and reduce use is strictly controlled sales through authorised outlets, education on the dangers of drug use and a strong support network for those that have problems. Drug use is not going to go away - people have been deliberately ingesting all manner of substances for thousands of years in an attempt to get high and they will continue to do so.
If your child was ill, would you rather they took medicine supplied by your doctor, medicine that had been produced under clinical conditions by a regulated pharmaceutical company; or would you prefer them to take some unknown chemical brewed up in an East European bath tub, mixed with various other unknown chemicals and quite possibly bleach or rat poison, bought from some shady character in the toilets of a club? If you want to buy illegal drugs, you have to mix with some decidedly unpleasant characters; believe me, I know - I was a regular drug user for many years, and I bought drugs from people I'd prefer to have never met. If they suffered unpleasant side effects from that medicine, would you prefer it if they could see the doctor for advice and, if necessary, go to hospital for further treatment? Or would you prefer them to sit it out, hoping the symptoms will go away, for fear of being arrested and sent to prison?
Such sweeping changes in the law and the research necessary to provide this education would be a lot more expensive than simply saying: "Do not take drugs, otherwise we will punish you," of course. Obviously the Government do not believe Hester's life, even when combined with the lives of all the other people who die after taking little-studied chemicals every year, are worth that much.
11/12/2009
01/12/2009
BNP Griffin in landslide victory
Headline news out here in the shires - British National Party leader and allegedly-not-a-holocaust-denier-anymore Nick Griffin has achieved the sort of success he so craves in political elections. Unfortunately for him, the poll in question wasn't a political election. It was one among students at Cambridge University to find the worst Cantabrigian ever.
Cambridge University Students' Union don't like Nick Griffin. Thankfully, nor do the vast majority of British people.
University newspaper The Tab reports that Griffin, who studied law at Downing College and left with a Second Class Honours (Lower Division), attracted an impressive 1,097 votes - that's 44% of all votes cast, sufficient to curse Britain with a fascist government should it ever happen in a General Election.
Nasty Nazi Nick is typically quick to argue that the poll reveals nothing, as he is wont to do whenever any poll reveals the BNP do not enjoy the support he likes to claim they do. "This poll does not even reflect the opinions of students at Cambridge. Let's have a debate at the Union and see what students really think," he says - the fury with which Cambridge Union members protested a planned appearance by Griffin in 2002 rather suggests otherwise, however. Could it be that the students have, since then, been "swayed by the follies of the left-wing?" Erm - the left-wing (note: he can't blame the Worldwide Zionist Conspiracy, because he's rather keen on pretending not to be an anti-semite nowadays)? They vanished with the election of Tony Blair. The reason Cambridge students oppose the BNP is that Cambridge is very successful as a multicultural town - it enjoys a cosmopolitan atmosphere of the type that a flat, damp, mid-sized town would otherwise only dream of and some of the University's most luminous alumni were most definitely not the indigenous British people who, according to the BNP, should be the only people to inhabit these isles. All in all, Cambridge has long benefitted from immigrants who have come to Britain and contributed enormously both to the city itself and to Britain and the human race as a whole. What's more, if you fancy a curry there's about 30 places that serve a damn good one.
Jokes aside - what does this tell us? First of all, far right groups such as the BNP have never been popular in the UK. That's why, ever since the 1930s and Mosley's bad day out in Cable Street, British people have opposed them every step of the way and also why no far right organisation has ever achieved more than limited success on the national stage, certainly not enough to give them any sort of real power. Right now - as is so often the case during harsh economic times - they find higher than average support as people seek a scapegoat on whom to blame society's problems. It used to be the Jews, then it was blacks, then Indians and now it's Muslims. Thankfully, the majority of people value freedom and the true British ideals of acceptance, tolerance, the offering of asylum and equality; and it seems that the up-and-coming generation are no different.
Who knows where we'll be in 25 years' time - but one thing's certain: in the years between now and then, when those students currently at Cambridge (and Oxford and Manchester and all the other universities, each of which have strong anti-right wing organisations) take over the reins and run our nation, the BNP will not be getting the power for which they're so desperate.
Cambridge University Students' Union don't like Nick Griffin. Thankfully, nor do the vast majority of British people.University newspaper The Tab reports that Griffin, who studied law at Downing College and left with a Second Class Honours (Lower Division), attracted an impressive 1,097 votes - that's 44% of all votes cast, sufficient to curse Britain with a fascist government should it ever happen in a General Election.
Nasty Nazi Nick is typically quick to argue that the poll reveals nothing, as he is wont to do whenever any poll reveals the BNP do not enjoy the support he likes to claim they do. "This poll does not even reflect the opinions of students at Cambridge. Let's have a debate at the Union and see what students really think," he says - the fury with which Cambridge Union members protested a planned appearance by Griffin in 2002 rather suggests otherwise, however. Could it be that the students have, since then, been "swayed by the follies of the left-wing?" Erm - the left-wing (note: he can't blame the Worldwide Zionist Conspiracy, because he's rather keen on pretending not to be an anti-semite nowadays)? They vanished with the election of Tony Blair. The reason Cambridge students oppose the BNP is that Cambridge is very successful as a multicultural town - it enjoys a cosmopolitan atmosphere of the type that a flat, damp, mid-sized town would otherwise only dream of and some of the University's most luminous alumni were most definitely not the indigenous British people who, according to the BNP, should be the only people to inhabit these isles. All in all, Cambridge has long benefitted from immigrants who have come to Britain and contributed enormously both to the city itself and to Britain and the human race as a whole. What's more, if you fancy a curry there's about 30 places that serve a damn good one.
Jokes aside - what does this tell us? First of all, far right groups such as the BNP have never been popular in the UK. That's why, ever since the 1930s and Mosley's bad day out in Cable Street, British people have opposed them every step of the way and also why no far right organisation has ever achieved more than limited success on the national stage, certainly not enough to give them any sort of real power. Right now - as is so often the case during harsh economic times - they find higher than average support as people seek a scapegoat on whom to blame society's problems. It used to be the Jews, then it was blacks, then Indians and now it's Muslims. Thankfully, the majority of people value freedom and the true British ideals of acceptance, tolerance, the offering of asylum and equality; and it seems that the up-and-coming generation are no different.
Who knows where we'll be in 25 years' time - but one thing's certain: in the years between now and then, when those students currently at Cambridge (and Oxford and Manchester and all the other universities, each of which have strong anti-right wing organisations) take over the reins and run our nation, the BNP will not be getting the power for which they're so desperate.
05/11/2009
Anti-Israel bias at the BBC
I am, and have always been, a very great fan of the BBC. I watch many of their excellent dramas and documentaries, I love to watch films without finding myself becoming increasingly irritated by advert breaks every ten minutes and most of all I adore their excellent nature programmes. If they could wrestle The Simpsons back from Channel 4 (where every show is interrupted by adverts before the story even gets started) I'd be entirely happy with the service...well, if they replaced EastEnders with something not quite so mind-numbingly tedious, anyway - though since EastEnders is watched by millions I'll accept it has its place in the world and that I'm likely to be heavily out-voted on that one.
Since Operation Cast Lead there has been a notable rise in those voices accusing the Beeb of displaying anti-Israel bias, voices further fuelled by the decision to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time. However, I've never felt this to be the case: I've always thought that the BBC does an admirable job of keeping any form of bias out of its news programming, one from which other channels and certain newspapers could learn a lot. But I'm pained to say that, last night, I was presented with what to me seems undeniable evidence that what the BBC's accusers claim might just be true.
The Noughties...was that it? (9pm, BBC3) was a fun sort of programme otherwise - a vaguely cynical yet affectionate look at the years between 2000 and the present, the fads and crazes, the celebs and popular stories. The sections on chavs and hoodies even did a rather good job at directing humour not at the chavs and hoodies themselves but at those whose sole aim in life seems to be the demonisation of Britain's young people (take note, any newspapers that felt they might be the ones I meant when I said "certain newspapers" in the previous paragraph). But the section on flash mobs - that brief craze whereby a message is sent via SMS, e-mail and Bluetooth in an attempt to gather strangers in a public place who then do something en masse such as perform the YMCA dance or, as in The Noughties..., the Do Re Mi song from The Sound of Music (you may never have heard of it - businesses rapidly cottoned onto the fact that the phenomenon offered a fantastic and virtually cost-free way to generate free advertising and as a result it became deeply uncool immediately) - contained a worrying segment.
If you missed it (which seems unlikely, as there was absolutely nothing else worth any attention anywhere on British television last night), you can still see it on iPlayer at the time of writing. Fast forward to 0:09:08 for the exact bit in question.
Hundreds of young Israelis gather in the street and have a giant pillow fight. It looks like great fun, too. But listen to the narrator: "...and then, there was the time that Israelis decided to fight with each other instead of their neighbours..."
This, I really don't need to point out, suggests to the uniformed viewer that Israel is an aggressive and warlike nation that regularly decides to attack other countries for no apparent reason. In case you're not familiar with Israeli foreign policy and the conflicts with which she has been involved, let's have a brief look at some of those conflicts. We'll start with the Six Day War which began with Israel's pre-emptive strike against forces formed of Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian troops - but why did Israel launch this strike? Because those neighbouring nations had gathered their military close to Israel's borders and were blocking her access to the Red Sea. Conclusion - Israel was reacting to offensive action carried out by hostile forces.
On October the 6th, 1973, the Yom Kippur War began after Egypt and Syria lauched surprise attacks on Israel, which suffered heavy losses while repelling the attack. Conclusion: Israel was once again attacked by hostile forces, and in response took measures to defend itself.
In 1982, Israel became involved in the Lebanese Civil War when it destroyed military bases which had been used by the PLO to lauch missiles aimed at northern Israel. Conclusion: Israel had been under attack from hostile forces and defended herself.
Under Ariel Sharon, Israel withdrew troops from Gaza
- where their presence had attracted widespread condemnation from many quarters. Hezbollah later mounted an artillery attack on Israel and kidnapped two IDF soldiers, sparking the Second Lebanon War. Conclusion: Israel accedes to Palestinian demands, but is attacked so once again is forced to defend herself.
On December the 18th, 2008, Hamas declared its six-month ceasefire with Israel at an end and by the 24th had begun a sustained wave of rocket attacks on Israeli settlements, bringing terror to Israeli civilians, destroying their homes and only by the grace of G-d not causing widespread death. Israel launched airstrikes, attacking military bases, government buildings and police stations - civilian buildings were damaged during the attacks, but to date there is no evidence that they were intentionally targeted. Hamas then stepped up its attacks, with many Israeli civilian facilities hit. Israel responded with a ground invasion on January the 3rd and withdrew troops on the 21st. Conclusion: Israel and her citizens were under daily attack and Israel took steps to bring the threat to an end.
The UN Human Rights Council has decided that Israel is entirely to blame for the Palestinians killed during the recent Gaza War and makes no mention of reprimanding Hamas despite the recommendations made by the Goldstone Report. When it comes to popular opinion, the jury is still out - many people, both Jewish and otherwise, are still making up their minds over whether or not Israel acted fairly at all times during the war and if not, to which extent. Despite early anti-Israel sentiments, the general consensus seems to be heading in the direction of a feeling that whereas some of the methods employed were excessive, Israel sought only to defend its citizens from a very real and deadly threat. Those early anti-Israel sentiments took the form of widespread condemnation of not just Israel herself but also the Jews in other nations who in the popular mind are so closely associated with Israel; and as a result led to a massive increase in attacks on synagogues, Jewish graves, Jewish property and Jews themselves.
Thankfully, those attacks have tailed off and are now at the more normal levels which, sadly, surprise none of us. That is why neither Israel nor Jews in any other countries will benefit from instances where seemingly-inconsequential little bits of anti-Israel bias are allowed to slip through into the public sphere. Israel is not an agressive nation and Jews are not an agressive people, but there are still many people who would like to see both destroyed. The BBC is is a position to help in preventing this from happening and surely has a duty to do so.
Right, I'm off to make a complaint to the BBC. I hope that I won't be the only one - you can do the same by following this link. I hope you will do so - a throw-away comment such as this one might seem of little importance, but they serve to confirm the prejudices of those who believe that Israel and, by association, Jews, are dangerous and a threat to peace.
Since Operation Cast Lead there has been a notable rise in those voices accusing the Beeb of displaying anti-Israel bias, voices further fuelled by the decision to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time. However, I've never felt this to be the case: I've always thought that the BBC does an admirable job of keeping any form of bias out of its news programming, one from which other channels and certain newspapers could learn a lot. But I'm pained to say that, last night, I was presented with what to me seems undeniable evidence that what the BBC's accusers claim might just be true.
The Noughties...was that it? (9pm, BBC3) was a fun sort of programme otherwise - a vaguely cynical yet affectionate look at the years between 2000 and the present, the fads and crazes, the celebs and popular stories. The sections on chavs and hoodies even did a rather good job at directing humour not at the chavs and hoodies themselves but at those whose sole aim in life seems to be the demonisation of Britain's young people (take note, any newspapers that felt they might be the ones I meant when I said "certain newspapers" in the previous paragraph). But the section on flash mobs - that brief craze whereby a message is sent via SMS, e-mail and Bluetooth in an attempt to gather strangers in a public place who then do something en masse such as perform the YMCA dance or, as in The Noughties..., the Do Re Mi song from The Sound of Music (you may never have heard of it - businesses rapidly cottoned onto the fact that the phenomenon offered a fantastic and virtually cost-free way to generate free advertising and as a result it became deeply uncool immediately) - contained a worrying segment.
If you missed it (which seems unlikely, as there was absolutely nothing else worth any attention anywhere on British television last night), you can still see it on iPlayer at the time of writing. Fast forward to 0:09:08 for the exact bit in question.
Hundreds of young Israelis gather in the street and have a giant pillow fight. It looks like great fun, too. But listen to the narrator: "...and then, there was the time that Israelis decided to fight with each other instead of their neighbours..."
This, I really don't need to point out, suggests to the uniformed viewer that Israel is an aggressive and warlike nation that regularly decides to attack other countries for no apparent reason. In case you're not familiar with Israeli foreign policy and the conflicts with which she has been involved, let's have a brief look at some of those conflicts. We'll start with the Six Day War which began with Israel's pre-emptive strike against forces formed of Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian troops - but why did Israel launch this strike? Because those neighbouring nations had gathered their military close to Israel's borders and were blocking her access to the Red Sea. Conclusion - Israel was reacting to offensive action carried out by hostile forces.
On October the 6th, 1973, the Yom Kippur War began after Egypt and Syria lauched surprise attacks on Israel, which suffered heavy losses while repelling the attack. Conclusion: Israel was once again attacked by hostile forces, and in response took measures to defend itself.
In 1982, Israel became involved in the Lebanese Civil War when it destroyed military bases which had been used by the PLO to lauch missiles aimed at northern Israel. Conclusion: Israel had been under attack from hostile forces and defended herself.
Under Ariel Sharon, Israel withdrew troops from Gaza
- where their presence had attracted widespread condemnation from many quarters. Hezbollah later mounted an artillery attack on Israel and kidnapped two IDF soldiers, sparking the Second Lebanon War. Conclusion: Israel accedes to Palestinian demands, but is attacked so once again is forced to defend herself.
On December the 18th, 2008, Hamas declared its six-month ceasefire with Israel at an end and by the 24th had begun a sustained wave of rocket attacks on Israeli settlements, bringing terror to Israeli civilians, destroying their homes and only by the grace of G-d not causing widespread death. Israel launched airstrikes, attacking military bases, government buildings and police stations - civilian buildings were damaged during the attacks, but to date there is no evidence that they were intentionally targeted. Hamas then stepped up its attacks, with many Israeli civilian facilities hit. Israel responded with a ground invasion on January the 3rd and withdrew troops on the 21st. Conclusion: Israel and her citizens were under daily attack and Israel took steps to bring the threat to an end.
The UN Human Rights Council has decided that Israel is entirely to blame for the Palestinians killed during the recent Gaza War and makes no mention of reprimanding Hamas despite the recommendations made by the Goldstone Report. When it comes to popular opinion, the jury is still out - many people, both Jewish and otherwise, are still making up their minds over whether or not Israel acted fairly at all times during the war and if not, to which extent. Despite early anti-Israel sentiments, the general consensus seems to be heading in the direction of a feeling that whereas some of the methods employed were excessive, Israel sought only to defend its citizens from a very real and deadly threat. Those early anti-Israel sentiments took the form of widespread condemnation of not just Israel herself but also the Jews in other nations who in the popular mind are so closely associated with Israel; and as a result led to a massive increase in attacks on synagogues, Jewish graves, Jewish property and Jews themselves.
Thankfully, those attacks have tailed off and are now at the more normal levels which, sadly, surprise none of us. That is why neither Israel nor Jews in any other countries will benefit from instances where seemingly-inconsequential little bits of anti-Israel bias are allowed to slip through into the public sphere. Israel is not an agressive nation and Jews are not an agressive people, but there are still many people who would like to see both destroyed. The BBC is is a position to help in preventing this from happening and surely has a duty to do so.
Right, I'm off to make a complaint to the BBC. I hope that I won't be the only one - you can do the same by following this link. I hope you will do so - a throw-away comment such as this one might seem of little importance, but they serve to confirm the prejudices of those who believe that Israel and, by association, Jews, are dangerous and a threat to peace.
01/11/2009
Friend of Israel = Friend of Jews?
Members of the European Parliament Michal Kaminski, of Poland's Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, and Nick Griffin of the UK's British National Party have both faced accusations of anti-semitism in recent weeks. We can take some comfort in the fact that both have strenuously tried to refute such claims - it was, after all, within living memory that professing openly anti-semitic philosophies during an election campaign would guarantee plenty of votes and very little, if any, protest. Thankfully, in these times, even suspected fascists don't wish to be labelled Jew-haters because they perceive quite correctly that gaining such a tag amounts to political suicide in most countries. So Mr. Kaminski tries to deny he's an anti-semite (and the debate rages on) and Mr. Griffin tries to claim that although he was a Holocaust denier, he has moderated his views (come on - who does he think he's kidding?) and that he now thinks Jews are quite nice people, actually. Didn't he laugh matily when the rabbi's son spoke on Question Time, and how long before he turns up in Golders Green munching a lox bagel for the cameras?
Michal Kaminsky visited Israel with British Conservative friends. Does this mean he cannot be an anti-semite?
Both men have taken a similar approach - how can we be anti-semites, they ask us, when we are both supporters of Israel? Jewish Chronicle writer Miriam Shaviv points out, Mr. Kaminski has even visited our fair nation as a special guest of the Conservative Friends of Israel and he's even been to Israel itself with his Tory chums. The odious Mr. Griffin, meanwhile, claims that his equally unpleasant party are the only British political group to have "supported Israel's right to deal with Hamas terrorists." Surely we can't be both friends of Israel and enemies of the Jews, can we? they seem to be saying.
All around Britain and Europe, people both Jewish and otherwise listen and think, "Hmm. That's a point. Maybe they're really not anti-semites. I'm not a racist, but I am a bit worried about immigration - perhaps I should consider voting for these people?"
Here in Britain, it seems that most people can sniff out a fascist's lie from miles away. According to the 12 Marcheshvan JC, the vast majority of British people realise that the BNP are dangerous - a mere 9% of those polled expressed positive feelings about the party. 54% (64% in London) believe that Jews would have reason to be fearful if the BNP came into power. That is, thankfully, more than half. If we scale figures up to the same size as the entire UK electorate (approximately 40 million people) that's 1,600,000 more who believe the BNP is anti-semitic than do not - enough to make a lot of difference. But it does mean that 18,400,000 (46%) either think that the BNP is not anti-semitic or are unsure. That's a worrying amount.
So, back to the question in hand. Can an anti-semite support Israel? Are the two as mutually incompatible as they might at first seem? Let's have a look at the nation generally considered to have been Israel's greatest ally, the United States of America. Jewish Americans have long been afforded rights and freedoms kept from the Jewish populations in some other countries, but just as is the case almost everywhere else have also been used as a convenient scapegoat on many occasions - in the last century, Jews were popularly blamed for both the First World War and the Great Depression. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh - a man suspected of ideas both racist and sympathetic to the Nazis - stated his belief that a Jewish minority was pushing America into a war against its interests. There is no doubt that anti-semitism was rampant in the USA prior to the Second World War.
That war, of course, brought the Shoah. When the world discovered the full and almost unimaginable horror of what had taken place in Nazi-occupied Europe, there was widespread shock. Many people may not have liked Jews very much but nobody with even a trace of humanity ever wished for wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children. Anti-semitism and anti-semitic thought was widely considered utterly repugnant for the first time in history.
But deep-rooted beliefs and fears do not simply vanish overnight. People realised that anti-semitism needed to be held in check so that nothing like the Shoah would ever happen again, but they did not lose their own anti-semitic beliefs. Those beliefs have been a part of everyday life for so long that they are deeply ingrained in society, even within language, and it will take more than one or two generations until they are finally - if ever - eradicated.
The Zionists, who had long sought a homeland for Jews, found they suddenly had a huge increase in numbers of people supporting their aims (and let me point out here that not even for a second do I wish to claim that Zionists benefited from the Shoah - Jews lost more than will ever be regained and will continue to suffer the Shoah's legacy for as long as there are Jews). Millions of non-Jewish people agreed that Jews needed a homeland and that the establishment of such a place would ensure non-Jews never again have to endure the horror or not feel the guilt for what the Nazis did. So they supported Israel, even though many still held anti-semitic beliefs.
What a handy way to solve the Jewish problem! Imagine you're an anti-semite for a moment. You hate Jews, you hate their religion, you hate the ways that they live. You feel that they are to blame for many of your country's problems; after all, they control the banks, don't they - and whoever controls the money controls the nation. But if people know you hate the Jews, they're not going to think much of you; they might even agree with you in their hearts, but they won't admit it because nobody dares to these days and hey - nobody wants to be called a Nazi. You want to get rid of them, but you don't want them to be killed obviously. If only they'd all just disappear...wait a minute! How about if they all just moved somewhere else, some other country altogether? Not your problem anymore if that happened.
You can stop imagining you're an anti-semite now - I hope you didn't get too into the role and start doing anything embarrassing that might lead to some awkward questions from anybody around you. You could find yourself in as much trouble as I did when my bubbeh found out I'd pretended I was a German while playing The Great Escape with my schoolfriends 25 years ago.
Thank G-d that Israel does exist, and may it do so forever - even if the only reason you can think of for doing so is that it provides democracy with a foothold in the Middle East. But, if you will, please use your imagination again to picture a world in which the land promised by G-d to the Jewish Patriarch was not a thin strip of Mediterranean coastline wihout any oil and previously inhabited by a group of Arabs who had not exactly made their mark on the world stage over the last few centuries and imagine instead it was Florida, or East Anglia, or the Dordogne, or Schwarzwald, or some other sizable chunk of any Western nation. Do you think our governments would have been quite so keen on a Jewish homeland then? Many of these nations had expressed no particular support nor love towards Jews before the Second World War and as the old saying goes, a leopard cannot change its spots - at least, not that quickly. Could it be that the real reason Israel was allowed to exist was not because Western nations supported the Jewish need for a land of their own but because it presented an opportunity to get rid of Jews without resorting to the abhorrent methods of the past?
That's why it is entirely possible to be both a supporter of Israel and an anti-semite. Those who call themselves Friends of Israel are not necessarily friends to those Jews that choose to live in other nations.
Michal Kaminsky visited Israel with British Conservative friends. Does this mean he cannot be an anti-semite?Both men have taken a similar approach - how can we be anti-semites, they ask us, when we are both supporters of Israel? Jewish Chronicle writer Miriam Shaviv points out, Mr. Kaminski has even visited our fair nation as a special guest of the Conservative Friends of Israel and he's even been to Israel itself with his Tory chums. The odious Mr. Griffin, meanwhile, claims that his equally unpleasant party are the only British political group to have "supported Israel's right to deal with Hamas terrorists." Surely we can't be both friends of Israel and enemies of the Jews, can we? they seem to be saying.
All around Britain and Europe, people both Jewish and otherwise listen and think, "Hmm. That's a point. Maybe they're really not anti-semites. I'm not a racist, but I am a bit worried about immigration - perhaps I should consider voting for these people?"
Here in Britain, it seems that most people can sniff out a fascist's lie from miles away. According to the 12 Marcheshvan JC, the vast majority of British people realise that the BNP are dangerous - a mere 9% of those polled expressed positive feelings about the party. 54% (64% in London) believe that Jews would have reason to be fearful if the BNP came into power. That is, thankfully, more than half. If we scale figures up to the same size as the entire UK electorate (approximately 40 million people) that's 1,600,000 more who believe the BNP is anti-semitic than do not - enough to make a lot of difference. But it does mean that 18,400,000 (46%) either think that the BNP is not anti-semitic or are unsure. That's a worrying amount.
So, back to the question in hand. Can an anti-semite support Israel? Are the two as mutually incompatible as they might at first seem? Let's have a look at the nation generally considered to have been Israel's greatest ally, the United States of America. Jewish Americans have long been afforded rights and freedoms kept from the Jewish populations in some other countries, but just as is the case almost everywhere else have also been used as a convenient scapegoat on many occasions - in the last century, Jews were popularly blamed for both the First World War and the Great Depression. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh - a man suspected of ideas both racist and sympathetic to the Nazis - stated his belief that a Jewish minority was pushing America into a war against its interests. There is no doubt that anti-semitism was rampant in the USA prior to the Second World War.
That war, of course, brought the Shoah. When the world discovered the full and almost unimaginable horror of what had taken place in Nazi-occupied Europe, there was widespread shock. Many people may not have liked Jews very much but nobody with even a trace of humanity ever wished for wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children. Anti-semitism and anti-semitic thought was widely considered utterly repugnant for the first time in history.
But deep-rooted beliefs and fears do not simply vanish overnight. People realised that anti-semitism needed to be held in check so that nothing like the Shoah would ever happen again, but they did not lose their own anti-semitic beliefs. Those beliefs have been a part of everyday life for so long that they are deeply ingrained in society, even within language, and it will take more than one or two generations until they are finally - if ever - eradicated.
The Zionists, who had long sought a homeland for Jews, found they suddenly had a huge increase in numbers of people supporting their aims (and let me point out here that not even for a second do I wish to claim that Zionists benefited from the Shoah - Jews lost more than will ever be regained and will continue to suffer the Shoah's legacy for as long as there are Jews). Millions of non-Jewish people agreed that Jews needed a homeland and that the establishment of such a place would ensure non-Jews never again have to endure the horror or not feel the guilt for what the Nazis did. So they supported Israel, even though many still held anti-semitic beliefs.
What a handy way to solve the Jewish problem! Imagine you're an anti-semite for a moment. You hate Jews, you hate their religion, you hate the ways that they live. You feel that they are to blame for many of your country's problems; after all, they control the banks, don't they - and whoever controls the money controls the nation. But if people know you hate the Jews, they're not going to think much of you; they might even agree with you in their hearts, but they won't admit it because nobody dares to these days and hey - nobody wants to be called a Nazi. You want to get rid of them, but you don't want them to be killed obviously. If only they'd all just disappear...wait a minute! How about if they all just moved somewhere else, some other country altogether? Not your problem anymore if that happened.
You can stop imagining you're an anti-semite now - I hope you didn't get too into the role and start doing anything embarrassing that might lead to some awkward questions from anybody around you. You could find yourself in as much trouble as I did when my bubbeh found out I'd pretended I was a German while playing The Great Escape with my schoolfriends 25 years ago.
Thank G-d that Israel does exist, and may it do so forever - even if the only reason you can think of for doing so is that it provides democracy with a foothold in the Middle East. But, if you will, please use your imagination again to picture a world in which the land promised by G-d to the Jewish Patriarch was not a thin strip of Mediterranean coastline wihout any oil and previously inhabited by a group of Arabs who had not exactly made their mark on the world stage over the last few centuries and imagine instead it was Florida, or East Anglia, or the Dordogne, or Schwarzwald, or some other sizable chunk of any Western nation. Do you think our governments would have been quite so keen on a Jewish homeland then? Many of these nations had expressed no particular support nor love towards Jews before the Second World War and as the old saying goes, a leopard cannot change its spots - at least, not that quickly. Could it be that the real reason Israel was allowed to exist was not because Western nations supported the Jewish need for a land of their own but because it presented an opportunity to get rid of Jews without resorting to the abhorrent methods of the past?
That's why it is entirely possible to be both a supporter of Israel and an anti-semite. Those who call themselves Friends of Israel are not necessarily friends to those Jews that choose to live in other nations.
23/10/2009
Let's keep Griffin and the BNP where we can watch them
Well, well, well. Didn't Nick Griffin do well on Question Time last night? Of course, when I say "do well," I mean he did well for us rather than for him and his disgraceful little band of bigots - he revealed himself as the poisonous idiot that he is.
BNP leader Nick Griffin, probably not listening to the latest Wu Tang Clan album.
For those who didn't see it (like, where were you?! See it right after reading this by clicking the Question Time link in the paragraph above), a large part of the show went something like this: David Dimbleby: "Mr. Griffin, how do you explain your comments concerning X, in which you stated that X is evil/unBritish/etc.?" Griffin: "Oh no, no, no. I never said that. The newspapers and the BBC said I did, bit I didn't." Dimbleby: "But Mr. Griffin - it's on video. There is a record proving you said it." Griffin: "Er...oh yeah. I did say it. [ridiculous smirk, possibly intended to look charmingly boyish but actually looking more like the exagerrated facial expressions of a man who realises he's being made to look like a fool]."
Time and time again, Griffin vomited up the revolting rhetoric we expect of him and his ilk, and time and time again the main party guests used the most effective weapon that those of us who oppose the BNP's policies have - they simply replied with cold, hard, logical common sense and facts. It works like a charm - nothing the BNP say can survive this sort of attack. Every single one of their arguments withers and dies if there's even the merest whiff of intelligent, empirical reasoning in the air.
Acid Rabbi was pleased that the BBC allowed Griffin a platform last night, despite the widespread attempts to stop them so doing. Not because of the right to free speech; which, it seems to me, should apply only to those who support such a right (Griffin, like all fascists, does not - he would prefer to silence those with viewpoints different to his own, and in doing so forfeits his right to that freedom), but because we need to keep these people out in the open where we can keep an eye on them. Did the National Front conveniently vanish in the 1980s after the Anti-Nazi League and other groups responded in physical terms? Unfortunately not - they just retreated underground where they festered for a few years and - once they'd had time to recover up they popped like the weeds that take over your lawn every summer. Many of them had decided to change their name, adopting that of 1960s far-right movement the British National Party and remain with that title to this day but they were the same old racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and, despite their own claims, anti-British Nazis that they always had been. Keep them where we can see them - and, what's more, it's much easier to attack someone when they're where Mr. Griffin was last night - a person on a podium is a very easy target.
There were some worries that the show's audience would be taken over by BNP supporters, but this did not happen - rather surprisingly, because Griffin likes to have a few big men backing him up at all times. There were one or two, of course, but all in all it represented British society rather well. OK, a million people voted BNP in the last elections and that's a million too many. But there are 49,138,831 people in England alone. 11,132,847 of those are children. So assume there are around 38,005,984 adults able to vote - whether they do or not is a different matter - and we can see that far from being currently on the crest of a wave of popular support, only around 1 in every 40 people voted BNP (many of these people are probably not even racists - some will have voted BNP as a protest vote against the main parties and some may have fallen for the BNP's lies when it claims to be a democratic party that represents the nation's best interests). There is, after all, a big difference between voting BNP and being a member of the BNP - far more than is the case with the other parties (they have a total of members. If the BNP really spoke for the country's best interests, surely 11,560more than 0.02% of the population would scrape up the £30 a year it costs to join?). The audience at the very least approximately reflected this, and it shows that Griffin's attempts today to write off Question Time as no more than a "Let's all bash Nick Griffin" event is rubbish. It was not a carefully-planned exercise aimed at discrediting him - simply yet more evidence that if you take a random cross section of British society, the majority will have passionately anti-racist views.
The BNP have around 50 councillors at the moment, but it's interesting that those areas which elect BNP representatives very rarely do so twice. Perhaps it only takes a bit of apathy, one election with a low turn-out, for the BNP to get in - but once they are, the local electorate get rid of them again as soon as they have the chance. Maybe sometimes a sufficient number of people get fed up with the main parties' failings that they decide to vote BNP - but again, once they've had some experience of what life is like when the BNP get any power, they soon turf the fascists out again. This is reflected in the party's membership lists, which were once again laid bare for all to inspect this week following the appearance of a leaked one online (that's right - another one): of the twenty constituencies with BNP members, only four recorded an increase in member figure between the end of 2007 and April 2009 . With these facts in mind, it seems obvious that the BNP have very little real support, far less than Mr. Griffin tries to convince both himself and the world in general, and the only chance they ever have of getting into power is when people who are not BNP supporters vote for them. I'll bet a fiver that both Griffin himself and Andrew Brons lose their European Parliament seats in the 2014 EU election.
Let's keep Mr. Griffin right where we can see him so we all know what he really stands for. That way, his nasty gang of racist thugs will have to rely on the very limited numbers of true supporters they have. They won't get the message that they're not wanted and go away, unfortunately, but we will at least know that here in Britain, with its liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural, welcoming and above all decent society, they will never get the power they crave.
BNP leader Nick Griffin, probably not listening to the latest Wu Tang Clan album.For those who didn't see it (like, where were you?! See it right after reading this by clicking the Question Time link in the paragraph above), a large part of the show went something like this: David Dimbleby: "Mr. Griffin, how do you explain your comments concerning X, in which you stated that X is evil/unBritish/etc.?" Griffin: "Oh no, no, no. I never said that. The newspapers and the BBC said I did, bit I didn't." Dimbleby: "But Mr. Griffin - it's on video. There is a record proving you said it." Griffin: "Er...oh yeah. I did say it. [ridiculous smirk, possibly intended to look charmingly boyish but actually looking more like the exagerrated facial expressions of a man who realises he's being made to look like a fool]."
Time and time again, Griffin vomited up the revolting rhetoric we expect of him and his ilk, and time and time again the main party guests used the most effective weapon that those of us who oppose the BNP's policies have - they simply replied with cold, hard, logical common sense and facts. It works like a charm - nothing the BNP say can survive this sort of attack. Every single one of their arguments withers and dies if there's even the merest whiff of intelligent, empirical reasoning in the air.
Acid Rabbi was pleased that the BBC allowed Griffin a platform last night, despite the widespread attempts to stop them so doing. Not because of the right to free speech; which, it seems to me, should apply only to those who support such a right (Griffin, like all fascists, does not - he would prefer to silence those with viewpoints different to his own, and in doing so forfeits his right to that freedom), but because we need to keep these people out in the open where we can keep an eye on them. Did the National Front conveniently vanish in the 1980s after the Anti-Nazi League and other groups responded in physical terms? Unfortunately not - they just retreated underground where they festered for a few years and - once they'd had time to recover up they popped like the weeds that take over your lawn every summer. Many of them had decided to change their name, adopting that of 1960s far-right movement the British National Party and remain with that title to this day but they were the same old racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and, despite their own claims, anti-British Nazis that they always had been. Keep them where we can see them - and, what's more, it's much easier to attack someone when they're where Mr. Griffin was last night - a person on a podium is a very easy target.
There were some worries that the show's audience would be taken over by BNP supporters, but this did not happen - rather surprisingly, because Griffin likes to have a few big men backing him up at all times. There were one or two, of course, but all in all it represented British society rather well. OK, a million people voted BNP in the last elections and that's a million too many. But there are 49,138,831 people in England alone. 11,132,847 of those are children. So assume there are around 38,005,984 adults able to vote - whether they do or not is a different matter - and we can see that far from being currently on the crest of a wave of popular support, only around 1 in every 40 people voted BNP (many of these people are probably not even racists - some will have voted BNP as a protest vote against the main parties and some may have fallen for the BNP's lies when it claims to be a democratic party that represents the nation's best interests). There is, after all, a big difference between voting BNP and being a member of the BNP - far more than is the case with the other parties (they have a total of members. If the BNP really spoke for the country's best interests, surely 11,560more than 0.02% of the population would scrape up the £30 a year it costs to join?). The audience at the very least approximately reflected this, and it shows that Griffin's attempts today to write off Question Time as no more than a "Let's all bash Nick Griffin" event is rubbish. It was not a carefully-planned exercise aimed at discrediting him - simply yet more evidence that if you take a random cross section of British society, the majority will have passionately anti-racist views.
The BNP have around 50 councillors at the moment, but it's interesting that those areas which elect BNP representatives very rarely do so twice. Perhaps it only takes a bit of apathy, one election with a low turn-out, for the BNP to get in - but once they are, the local electorate get rid of them again as soon as they have the chance. Maybe sometimes a sufficient number of people get fed up with the main parties' failings that they decide to vote BNP - but again, once they've had some experience of what life is like when the BNP get any power, they soon turf the fascists out again. This is reflected in the party's membership lists, which were once again laid bare for all to inspect this week following the appearance of a leaked one online (that's right - another one): of the twenty constituencies with BNP members, only four recorded an increase in member figure between the end of 2007 and April 2009 . With these facts in mind, it seems obvious that the BNP have very little real support, far less than Mr. Griffin tries to convince both himself and the world in general, and the only chance they ever have of getting into power is when people who are not BNP supporters vote for them. I'll bet a fiver that both Griffin himself and Andrew Brons lose their European Parliament seats in the 2014 EU election.
Let's keep Mr. Griffin right where we can see him so we all know what he really stands for. That way, his nasty gang of racist thugs will have to rely on the very limited numbers of true supporters they have. They won't get the message that they're not wanted and go away, unfortunately, but we will at least know that here in Britain, with its liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural, welcoming and above all decent society, they will never get the power they crave.
22/10/2009
Scottish fatties' kids taken into care
Scotland, a country known for the unhealthy ways and diets of many of its inhabitants, is once again in the news following reports that social workers removed seven children from the home of morbidly obese parents Jim and Nicola McFryup. Concerns were raised about the children after the owners of neighbouring houses experienced subsidence problems in their properties - structural engineers called in to trace the roots of the problem were unable to discover traces of typical causes, such as abandoned mine shafts in the area, and later realised that the McFryup family's combined weight was causing fissures to open up in Dundee's granite bedrock.
Mum Nicola McFryup agreed t speak to Acid Rabbi after we promised to buy her breakfast in local restaurant Cholesterol Joe's.
An offical working for Dundee City Council, who cannot be named, confirmed that the children had been removed. "Myself and other officials, accompanied by police officers, visited a home in Dundee last night and removed seven children who are now being housed at a secret location,'' she told Acid Rabbi.
Unusually, the parents are happy to discuss their situation with reporters. "The fact that these Guardian-reading, lentil-munching loonie lefty do-gooders can tell me what to feed my own bloody kids in my own bloody house beggars belief," says father Jim, who weighs in at 798lb (362kg), "It's political correctness gone made and just goes to show what this country's coming to. Why the hell should I have to feed my kids on salad - whatever the fuck that is - when my wife can go down to the supermarket and get a packet of 20 beefburgers for 99p? Anyway, we already give 'em vegetables - they always have tomato ketchup on their chips at breakfast time."
Mum Nicola (nee McChipbutty), who at a mere 560lb (254kg) looks diminutively svelte next to her husband, agrees. "How can we feed them vegetables and stuff with the pittance we get in unemployment benefit payments? For the price of a few carrots I can get 3kg frozen chips and a bag of sausage rolls. We have to get our fags and booze out of that money too, you know. That's if vegetables and all that other green shit really is good for you, which I doubt. My Uncle Bob ate nothing but fried haggis every day of his life and he lived to be 43 which is a bloody good age if you ask me."
It is understood that the seven children range in age from a 13-year-old boy believed to weigh 252lb (114kg) to a newly-born baby girl of unknown weight. However, neighbour Ethel Ramsay, aged 57, has seen the baby and informed our reporter that it is "fucking massive." The other five children are also said to be morbidly obese, as confirmed by local schoolboy Hamish Banks who asked if Acid Rabbi was in Dundee "to report on those wee fat fuckers the McFryup bairns?"
Our source at Dundee Council is quick to point out that decisions to remove children from the family home are not taken lightly. "We don't want to take children away from their parents," she says, "especially not in cases like this. We have a tight budget as it is - can you even begin to imagine what it'll cost the department to feed these kids? The decision to remove them came after in-depth studies into and discussions of the case and which course of action would be the best to take."
"We decided eventually that their safety was at risk," she continues. "Not so much due to their obesity, because they're young enough that once we've got them to do a bit of exercise and educate them on the importance of a healthy diet they'll be fine for a few years until they start getting into heroin; but due to physical risk from their parents. People who don't have to regularly go into the homes of families like the McFryups won't be aware of what goes on in these places - they have industrial size deep fat fryers like you see in fairground fast food stalls in their kitchens and, well, all I'm saying is that when Mum or Dad wake up at 3 in the morning wanting a snack or ten, a young kiddie fits easily into a fryer. You get a fatty needing a food fix and they'll stop at nothing - even a three-year-old with a nappy bulging with the results of the irritable bowel syndrome it suffers from because of all the battered sausages and pork pies it gets fed on.'' The children will be kept in care until their parents are able to demonstrate that they have made alterations to their lifestyles likely to improve the health of their children, such as only feeding them three meals a day and weaning the baby off her 40-a-day smoking habit.
Meanwhile, Nicola says she spoke to her children by telephone this morning. "My two lassies were crying their eyes out," she says, "complaining that they'd been given cornflakes for their breakfast. "We fucking hate cornflakes, Mum, they taste of shite," they were saying, "when can we come home and have sugared lard for breakfast again?"
"It's not all bad, though," says Jim, suddenly turning optimistic. "When we go to McDonald's for lunch today we don't have to buy them anything so we can spend all today's food money on Big Macs for us."
"That's a good point," says Nicola. "To be honest, I was getting bored of the little bastards anyway. Social services can keep 'em."
Mum Nicola McFryup agreed t speak to Acid Rabbi after we promised to buy her breakfast in local restaurant Cholesterol Joe's.An offical working for Dundee City Council, who cannot be named, confirmed that the children had been removed. "Myself and other officials, accompanied by police officers, visited a home in Dundee last night and removed seven children who are now being housed at a secret location,'' she told Acid Rabbi.
Unusually, the parents are happy to discuss their situation with reporters. "The fact that these Guardian-reading, lentil-munching loonie lefty do-gooders can tell me what to feed my own bloody kids in my own bloody house beggars belief," says father Jim, who weighs in at 798lb (362kg), "It's political correctness gone made and just goes to show what this country's coming to. Why the hell should I have to feed my kids on salad - whatever the fuck that is - when my wife can go down to the supermarket and get a packet of 20 beefburgers for 99p? Anyway, we already give 'em vegetables - they always have tomato ketchup on their chips at breakfast time."
Mum Nicola (nee McChipbutty), who at a mere 560lb (254kg) looks diminutively svelte next to her husband, agrees. "How can we feed them vegetables and stuff with the pittance we get in unemployment benefit payments? For the price of a few carrots I can get 3kg frozen chips and a bag of sausage rolls. We have to get our fags and booze out of that money too, you know. That's if vegetables and all that other green shit really is good for you, which I doubt. My Uncle Bob ate nothing but fried haggis every day of his life and he lived to be 43 which is a bloody good age if you ask me."
It is understood that the seven children range in age from a 13-year-old boy believed to weigh 252lb (114kg) to a newly-born baby girl of unknown weight. However, neighbour Ethel Ramsay, aged 57, has seen the baby and informed our reporter that it is "fucking massive." The other five children are also said to be morbidly obese, as confirmed by local schoolboy Hamish Banks who asked if Acid Rabbi was in Dundee "to report on those wee fat fuckers the McFryup bairns?"
Our source at Dundee Council is quick to point out that decisions to remove children from the family home are not taken lightly. "We don't want to take children away from their parents," she says, "especially not in cases like this. We have a tight budget as it is - can you even begin to imagine what it'll cost the department to feed these kids? The decision to remove them came after in-depth studies into and discussions of the case and which course of action would be the best to take."
"We decided eventually that their safety was at risk," she continues. "Not so much due to their obesity, because they're young enough that once we've got them to do a bit of exercise and educate them on the importance of a healthy diet they'll be fine for a few years until they start getting into heroin; but due to physical risk from their parents. People who don't have to regularly go into the homes of families like the McFryups won't be aware of what goes on in these places - they have industrial size deep fat fryers like you see in fairground fast food stalls in their kitchens and, well, all I'm saying is that when Mum or Dad wake up at 3 in the morning wanting a snack or ten, a young kiddie fits easily into a fryer. You get a fatty needing a food fix and they'll stop at nothing - even a three-year-old with a nappy bulging with the results of the irritable bowel syndrome it suffers from because of all the battered sausages and pork pies it gets fed on.'' The children will be kept in care until their parents are able to demonstrate that they have made alterations to their lifestyles likely to improve the health of their children, such as only feeding them three meals a day and weaning the baby off her 40-a-day smoking habit.
Meanwhile, Nicola says she spoke to her children by telephone this morning. "My two lassies were crying their eyes out," she says, "complaining that they'd been given cornflakes for their breakfast. "We fucking hate cornflakes, Mum, they taste of shite," they were saying, "when can we come home and have sugared lard for breakfast again?"
"It's not all bad, though," says Jim, suddenly turning optimistic. "When we go to McDonald's for lunch today we don't have to buy them anything so we can spend all today's food money on Big Macs for us."
"That's a good point," says Nicola. "To be honest, I was getting bored of the little bastards anyway. Social services can keep 'em."
01/10/2009
Harman appeals to Arnie to shut down prostitute-ratings website
Punternet is a website which allows users to rate prostitutes - including some from London - which has got Minister for Women and Equality Harriet Harman all hot under the collar.
OK, so it's a bit on the tasteless side, but hasn't Harriet realised yet that however much she dislikes the concept of prostitution it's been around for a lot longer than she has and isn't going to go away? Has she been talking to Jacqui Smith, whose Policing and Crime Bill sought to transfer blame from prostitutes onto clients and as such was widely attacked by feminists, women's rights groups and prostitutes (the latter surely being the experts in these matters) who believed it would lead to an increase in violence towards prostitutes as punters took more aggressive and violent steps to hide their activities, while at the same time making it harder to establish and run lapdancing clubs so that women with no alternative way of making a living would be forced to turn to prostitution instead?
Harriet Harman - has appealed to the Terminator for help in getting rid of website Punternet.
Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 licence.
Harriet, who in also being able to call herself Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, Deputy Labour Leader, Party Chair of the Labour Party and MP for Camberwell and Peckham has almost as many titles as Count Mandelson of Transylvania, told the Labour Conference that the website is "degrading." Of course, it's not really any different to a site which allows people with faulty cars to look at user ratings for various repair firms - somebody supplies a service for a price, people want to know they're going to get a good deal. It's seedy, but not especially degrading - certainly far less so than being forced to sell yourself, putting yourself at high risk of contracting any number of diseases, risking violence and murder every day just to be able to support yourself and feed your children or your drug habit. Perhaps it might be better to have a long, hard look at society and see if there are any ways that we can help the women and men who are forced to live like this? Like, maybe, free childcare so women with young children can get jobs, benefits that pay enough money to actually live on or drugs made freely available on the NHS for users who agree to attend programmes designed to help them kick the habit?
Oh, maybe not - that'd be expensive, wouldn't it? Plus we'd run the risk of being forced to stop pretending that our society has opportunities for all, or perhaps we'd discover some very big and costly-to-repair holes in the welfare net, holes that allow thousands of people to fall through, vanishing from society forever in some cases? Or maybe there'd be no choice but to increase the rights that immigrants - such as those thousands of illegal immigrants who have to sell sex because they're nor permitted to get proper jobs and enjoy the sort of protection that mere, simple humanity seems to suggest we ought to offer them; and that's going to really stir up the Daily Nazi/Scum-reading hordes that Harriet's failing, falling government so desperately needs if they're to survive the coming General Election intact (which appears to be all they can hope for - they've long lost all hope of winning it). There's even a chance that the population might cotton on to the belief that our current system of Government and partisan politics has made a bit of a hash of things and dear old Blighty is looking a bit, well, shit as a result - and we can't have that, can we? We might have to change. Perhaps it's best to just throw a blanket over the whole sordid thing instead and pretend something has been done about it - that's a far cheaper way to try to scrape back a few votes.
Punternet is registered in California, which is a bit of a problem for Harriet because the United Kingdom Government has no say in what goes on in the USA (unlike the other way round - the US Government can demand all sorts of things, such as the extradition of naive UFO buffs suffering from acute learning difficulties). So she can't do a lot about it.
But she knows a man who can, or might at the very least - Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and has contacted him asking for the site to be shut down. "It won't be too difficult for the Terminator to terminate Punternet," says Harman. "If he doesn't, I'll be back."
You what? Harriet, please - just shut up and fuck off.
Note: We're not back yet. We just couldn't resist an opportunity to tell Harriet Harman to shut up and fuck off.
OK, so it's a bit on the tasteless side, but hasn't Harriet realised yet that however much she dislikes the concept of prostitution it's been around for a lot longer than she has and isn't going to go away? Has she been talking to Jacqui Smith, whose Policing and Crime Bill sought to transfer blame from prostitutes onto clients and as such was widely attacked by feminists, women's rights groups and prostitutes (the latter surely being the experts in these matters) who believed it would lead to an increase in violence towards prostitutes as punters took more aggressive and violent steps to hide their activities, while at the same time making it harder to establish and run lapdancing clubs so that women with no alternative way of making a living would be forced to turn to prostitution instead?
Harriet Harman - has appealed to the Terminator for help in getting rid of website Punternet.Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 licence.
Harriet, who in also being able to call herself Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, Deputy Labour Leader, Party Chair of the Labour Party and MP for Camberwell and Peckham has almost as many titles as Count Mandelson of Transylvania, told the Labour Conference that the website is "degrading." Of course, it's not really any different to a site which allows people with faulty cars to look at user ratings for various repair firms - somebody supplies a service for a price, people want to know they're going to get a good deal. It's seedy, but not especially degrading - certainly far less so than being forced to sell yourself, putting yourself at high risk of contracting any number of diseases, risking violence and murder every day just to be able to support yourself and feed your children or your drug habit. Perhaps it might be better to have a long, hard look at society and see if there are any ways that we can help the women and men who are forced to live like this? Like, maybe, free childcare so women with young children can get jobs, benefits that pay enough money to actually live on or drugs made freely available on the NHS for users who agree to attend programmes designed to help them kick the habit?
Oh, maybe not - that'd be expensive, wouldn't it? Plus we'd run the risk of being forced to stop pretending that our society has opportunities for all, or perhaps we'd discover some very big and costly-to-repair holes in the welfare net, holes that allow thousands of people to fall through, vanishing from society forever in some cases? Or maybe there'd be no choice but to increase the rights that immigrants - such as those thousands of illegal immigrants who have to sell sex because they're nor permitted to get proper jobs and enjoy the sort of protection that mere, simple humanity seems to suggest we ought to offer them; and that's going to really stir up the Daily Nazi/Scum-reading hordes that Harriet's failing, falling government so desperately needs if they're to survive the coming General Election intact (which appears to be all they can hope for - they've long lost all hope of winning it). There's even a chance that the population might cotton on to the belief that our current system of Government and partisan politics has made a bit of a hash of things and dear old Blighty is looking a bit, well, shit as a result - and we can't have that, can we? We might have to change. Perhaps it's best to just throw a blanket over the whole sordid thing instead and pretend something has been done about it - that's a far cheaper way to try to scrape back a few votes.
Punternet is registered in California, which is a bit of a problem for Harriet because the United Kingdom Government has no say in what goes on in the USA (unlike the other way round - the US Government can demand all sorts of things, such as the extradition of naive UFO buffs suffering from acute learning difficulties). So she can't do a lot about it.
But she knows a man who can, or might at the very least - Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and has contacted him asking for the site to be shut down. "It won't be too difficult for the Terminator to terminate Punternet," says Harman. "If he doesn't, I'll be back."
You what? Harriet, please - just shut up and fuck off.
Note: We're not back yet. We just couldn't resist an opportunity to tell Harriet Harman to shut up and fuck off.
25/09/2009
12/09/2009
I met a bloke down the pub last night...
...who had some paintings for sale. This one caught my eye so I bought it.
Do you reckon it might be worth anything?
Do you reckon it might be worth anything?
09/09/2009
Turkeys up for the craic
Turkeyologists around the world have long been puzzling over the purpose of those disgusting dangling growths that hang from the beaks of male turkeys, looking distinctly similar to an enlongated scrotum after the testes have been removed and which would seemingly be a hindrance to the birds during feeding. World-renowned turkeyologist Professor Gomez San Miguel of Lima University explains: "Turkeyologists, including myself, have long been puzzling over the purpose of those disgusting dangling growths that hang from the beaks of male turkeys, looking distinctly similar to an enlongated scrotum after the testes have been removed and which would seemingly be a hindrance to the birds during feeding," he says. "What evolutionary advantage could they possibly offer? Indeed, they would seem to be more of a disadvantage as far as mating is concerned, too - female turkeys aren't exactly the avian equivalent of Greta Garbo, but even they couldn't possibly want to get it on with anything as hideous as a male turkey. They're ugly-ass mothers, alright."
The Turkey - proof that not everything in Nature is beautiful, despite what hippies might tell you.
However, proof that hippies lie is yet another excuse to hate hippies - so turkeys do have their uses.
However, it seems that the mystery may have been finally solved after two turkeys were arrested following a search conducted by customs and immigration officials at Lima's Jorge Chávez International Airport last week. "Our officers are trained to keep a very watchful eye on passengers boarding flights to the USA," says the airport's press officer Francisca Carreras. "Unfortunately, Jorge Chávez International Airport is commonly used by people involved in the drugs trade - importers frequently travel overland to here from Bogota in Colombia in an attempt to disguise their movements and reduce suspicion over their activities. Officers noticed a pair of turkeys acting strangely among the other passengers and called them over for questioning."
It seems that the turkeys were unable to satisfy the officers' queries, because they were then arrested and subjected to a full body cavity search. "Yeah, OK - I had to fist a turkey," says one officer who wishes to remain anonymous, "I'm not proud but sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do and it's all part of the job - and anyway, the way I look at it is it's no different to stuffing a Christmas turkey. Look at it that way and just about every housewife in Britain's a turkey-fister."
No drugs were found, either concealed within the turkeys' luggage nor about their bodies. "It was just so obvious that these guys were into drugs though, they were really wired," the officer contines. "Neither of them could sit still, they were twitching and sweating all over the place and they had eyes like dinner plates. I've never seen anyone so obviously on drugs since Lindsay Lohan's Hollywood Film Award acceptance speech in 2006, so there was no way we were going to let them get on the 'plane - the more drug pushers we catch, the less likely it is that the CIA'll start interfering and those guys even give us the creeps."
Blood samples were taken from the birds, who had now been transferred to a secure facility where they could be "interrogated" by Peruvian police away from prying eyes before their lawyers arrived. It is reported that - by an unlikely coincidence and in two entirely unconnected incidents - both turkeys accidentally fell head-first down some stairs onto an unattended police boot during this period, resulting in extensive facial bruising. Shortly after this time, the turkeys confessed to possession of cocaine, possession of cocaine with intent to supply, plotting to assassinate the President of Peru and a number of other unsolved crimes that Lima Police had been hoping to pin on someone or other sooner or later.
Police say that they have received a greater number of reports of cocaine abuse among turkeys in 2009 than in the ten years previously out together.
It is well-known that habitual cocaine use can cause all sorts of disfiguring effects to the human nose as experienced in 2000 by British television star Daniella Westbrook, the actress who played loud-mouthed slag Samantha Mitchell in the inexplicably popular ''EastEnders'' show, when her septum rotted away. Scientists now believe that it is this effect which gives turkeys their sickeningly revolting nasal features.
Results of the blood tests revealed that one turkey had an incredible 6.4lb (2.9kg) of cocaine in its bloodstream, which is about enough to power a Saturn 5 rocket all the way from here to Betelgeuse. The other had taken 4.2lb (1.9kg) which he explained was because he was trying to keep his "head together ready for the flight, man." According to police, this amount of cocaine has a street value in the UK of £110,000 - Acid Rabbi would like to inform them that they are getting well and truly ripped off and, if they're interested, is sure he knows a bloke in London who could get the same amount for 90k.
Back to Francisca Carreras: "I can confirm that we successfully detected and apprehended two turkeys, later proved to have been using large amounts of the drug cocaine which they admitted while in police custody. The Government of the USA can rest assured that we are taking an active role in preventing drugs reaching their nation, and there's absolutely no need for them to send any CIA or DEA officers down here, thank you very much."
Meanwhile, Kenny Harris - manager of The Pines Nursing Home, Houston, Texas - isn't so pleased. "Goddamn customs! In a recession, nursing homes like ours soon feel the financial pinch and we have to operate on a tight budget so we import a lot of cheap food from places like Peru. We got a frozen Peruvian turkey with just 2lb of cocaine in it last Thanksgiving and our residents reckoned it was the best Thanksgiving they've ever had - you should have seen them partying afterwards. Imagine how happy they'd have been if one of the turkeys in this story had ended up on the Thanksgiving table."
The Turkey - proof that not everything in Nature is beautiful, despite what hippies might tell you.However, proof that hippies lie is yet another excuse to hate hippies - so turkeys do have their uses.
However, it seems that the mystery may have been finally solved after two turkeys were arrested following a search conducted by customs and immigration officials at Lima's Jorge Chávez International Airport last week. "Our officers are trained to keep a very watchful eye on passengers boarding flights to the USA," says the airport's press officer Francisca Carreras. "Unfortunately, Jorge Chávez International Airport is commonly used by people involved in the drugs trade - importers frequently travel overland to here from Bogota in Colombia in an attempt to disguise their movements and reduce suspicion over their activities. Officers noticed a pair of turkeys acting strangely among the other passengers and called them over for questioning."
It seems that the turkeys were unable to satisfy the officers' queries, because they were then arrested and subjected to a full body cavity search. "Yeah, OK - I had to fist a turkey," says one officer who wishes to remain anonymous, "I'm not proud but sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do and it's all part of the job - and anyway, the way I look at it is it's no different to stuffing a Christmas turkey. Look at it that way and just about every housewife in Britain's a turkey-fister."
No drugs were found, either concealed within the turkeys' luggage nor about their bodies. "It was just so obvious that these guys were into drugs though, they were really wired," the officer contines. "Neither of them could sit still, they were twitching and sweating all over the place and they had eyes like dinner plates. I've never seen anyone so obviously on drugs since Lindsay Lohan's Hollywood Film Award acceptance speech in 2006, so there was no way we were going to let them get on the 'plane - the more drug pushers we catch, the less likely it is that the CIA'll start interfering and those guys even give us the creeps."
Blood samples were taken from the birds, who had now been transferred to a secure facility where they could be "interrogated" by Peruvian police away from prying eyes before their lawyers arrived. It is reported that - by an unlikely coincidence and in two entirely unconnected incidents - both turkeys accidentally fell head-first down some stairs onto an unattended police boot during this period, resulting in extensive facial bruising. Shortly after this time, the turkeys confessed to possession of cocaine, possession of cocaine with intent to supply, plotting to assassinate the President of Peru and a number of other unsolved crimes that Lima Police had been hoping to pin on someone or other sooner or later.
Police say that they have received a greater number of reports of cocaine abuse among turkeys in 2009 than in the ten years previously out together.It is well-known that habitual cocaine use can cause all sorts of disfiguring effects to the human nose as experienced in 2000 by British television star Daniella Westbrook, the actress who played loud-mouthed slag Samantha Mitchell in the inexplicably popular ''EastEnders'' show, when her septum rotted away. Scientists now believe that it is this effect which gives turkeys their sickeningly revolting nasal features.
Results of the blood tests revealed that one turkey had an incredible 6.4lb (2.9kg) of cocaine in its bloodstream, which is about enough to power a Saturn 5 rocket all the way from here to Betelgeuse. The other had taken 4.2lb (1.9kg) which he explained was because he was trying to keep his "head together ready for the flight, man." According to police, this amount of cocaine has a street value in the UK of £110,000 - Acid Rabbi would like to inform them that they are getting well and truly ripped off and, if they're interested, is sure he knows a bloke in London who could get the same amount for 90k.
Back to Francisca Carreras: "I can confirm that we successfully detected and apprehended two turkeys, later proved to have been using large amounts of the drug cocaine which they admitted while in police custody. The Government of the USA can rest assured that we are taking an active role in preventing drugs reaching their nation, and there's absolutely no need for them to send any CIA or DEA officers down here, thank you very much."
Meanwhile, Kenny Harris - manager of The Pines Nursing Home, Houston, Texas - isn't so pleased. "Goddamn customs! In a recession, nursing homes like ours soon feel the financial pinch and we have to operate on a tight budget so we import a lot of cheap food from places like Peru. We got a frozen Peruvian turkey with just 2lb of cocaine in it last Thanksgiving and our residents reckoned it was the best Thanksgiving they've ever had - you should have seen them partying afterwards. Imagine how happy they'd have been if one of the turkeys in this story had ended up on the Thanksgiving table."
04/09/2009
Every bride hopes that her big day will be a perfect, fairytale occasion without any mishaps and that she will be treated as a princess from the moment she awakes to the moment she blushingly accompanies her new husband to bed - after all, the rest of rest of married life for most women is one of drudgery and servitude, so she's got to have at least one decent day to remember until her husband eventually dies and she can enjoy widowhood. 42-stone (588lb or 263.7kg, depending on preference) Emma Kent must feel like the luckiest bride in the world after friends created a giant pork pie wedding cake for her recent marriage to long-term partner John, who weighs in at an impressive 51 stone.
"We had no idea that the cake was being made," says Mr. Kent. "My wife and I are big fans of pork pies and other tasty, porky treats so you can imagine how delighted we were when it was unveiled. Emma was overjoyed - what more could a corpulent bride ever wish for?"
"We had no idea that the cake was being made," says Mr. Kent. "My wife and I are big fans of pork pies and other tasty, porky treats so you can imagine how delighted we were when it was unveiled. Emma was overjoyed - what more could a corpulent bride ever wish for?"
The cake, which featured three tiers and weighed 10kg (22lb), cost just £150 to produce, compared with £650 or more for conventional wedding cakes. Harry Smith, who has known Mr. Kent for ten years, told how he and a group of people made up of friends and family of the couple took eight hours to make it. "It was a lot of hard work, but it was worth it. You should have seen the look of sheer happiness on their fat faces during then ten minutes it took them to scoff the lot, the lardy gits."
29/08/2009
CCTV is rubbish, say criminals
Criminals of most persuasions are, understandably, not very keen on closed circuit television cameras - but they don't let a little matter like that stand in the way of them going about their business.
Professor Martin Gill of Leicester University asked 101 offenders (probably students forced to shoplift and burgle in order to pay of their student debt) to rate 13 different crime prevention methods in order of effectiveness. SmartWater - a liquid substance which can be used to invisibly mark both property and thieves came out on top. Bars on windows, locks and police patrols were all rated more highly than CCTV, which came sixth.
Image from Schnews - used without permission (so please click the link and go and have a look at their site - believe me, you won't regret it).
Some sources claim there are around 4.2 million public cameras (ie; not those in shops, private homes etc.) in the UK, with half a million in London alone - roughly one for every 14 people. Yet there is very little evidence of their being an effective crime-fighting tool - according to research carried out by Justin Davenport, writing for the London Evening Standard says that 80% of crimes go unsolved and that "police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any." In fact, of the five London boroughs with the most cameras, four have below average solved crimes. Even the Metropolitan Police admit that, in 2008, just one crime per 1,000 cameras was solved.
Liberal Democrat policing spokeswoman Dee Doocey says that her party estimates 10,000 CCTV cameras in London "have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200 million in the last 10 years." Sounds like a lot of money, doesn't it? Could it not have been better spent on new police officers, seeing as how they're known to be a very effective method in both preventing and solving crimes?
The basic rate of pay for a Metropolitan officer is £22,104 per annum during the 31 week training period, then £24,675 per annum when initial training is complete; so we can assume that a copper costs £23,142 for the first year and £24,675 each year thereafter - £245,217 for ten years. Therefore, £200 million would pay for just 815.6 coppers...and 0.6 of a copper is no use to anyone.
That's why CCTV is such good value, you see. It might be fairly useless as far as crime prevention/detection/solving goes, but the public are so worried about crime they're willing to vote for any party which promises to be tough on criminals. All those CCTV cameras are highly noticeable - especially now that the civil liberties people have unintentionally helped the cause by drawing attention to them - so the Government get to look as though they're doing something while in actual fact they're sitting back and doing what they always do - a combination of worrying about how they can get enough votes to win General Elections instead of trying to improves the lives of British people and bugger all.
Professor Martin Gill of Leicester University asked 101 offenders (probably students forced to shoplift and burgle in order to pay of their student debt) to rate 13 different crime prevention methods in order of effectiveness. SmartWater - a liquid substance which can be used to invisibly mark both property and thieves came out on top. Bars on windows, locks and police patrols were all rated more highly than CCTV, which came sixth.
Image from Schnews - used without permission (so please click the link and go and have a look at their site - believe me, you won't regret it).Some sources claim there are around 4.2 million public cameras (ie; not those in shops, private homes etc.) in the UK, with half a million in London alone - roughly one for every 14 people. Yet there is very little evidence of their being an effective crime-fighting tool - according to research carried out by Justin Davenport, writing for the London Evening Standard says that 80% of crimes go unsolved and that "police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any." In fact, of the five London boroughs with the most cameras, four have below average solved crimes. Even the Metropolitan Police admit that, in 2008, just one crime per 1,000 cameras was solved.
Liberal Democrat policing spokeswoman Dee Doocey says that her party estimates 10,000 CCTV cameras in London "have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200 million in the last 10 years." Sounds like a lot of money, doesn't it? Could it not have been better spent on new police officers, seeing as how they're known to be a very effective method in both preventing and solving crimes?
The basic rate of pay for a Metropolitan officer is £22,104 per annum during the 31 week training period, then £24,675 per annum when initial training is complete; so we can assume that a copper costs £23,142 for the first year and £24,675 each year thereafter - £245,217 for ten years. Therefore, £200 million would pay for just 815.6 coppers...and 0.6 of a copper is no use to anyone.
That's why CCTV is such good value, you see. It might be fairly useless as far as crime prevention/detection/solving goes, but the public are so worried about crime they're willing to vote for any party which promises to be tough on criminals. All those CCTV cameras are highly noticeable - especially now that the civil liberties people have unintentionally helped the cause by drawing attention to them - so the Government get to look as though they're doing something while in actual fact they're sitting back and doing what they always do - a combination of worrying about how they can get enough votes to win General Elections instead of trying to improves the lives of British people and bugger all.
27/08/2009
Straw repels Evil
It's no secret that Justice Secretary Jack Straw and Secretary Of Whatever He Tales A Fancy To Peter Mandelson don't get on, and now the gloves are well and truly off.
Mandelson, who not long ago got involved in a bit of a spat with the eminently dislikable Tory George Osborne (it never came to much, but served very well at taking a bit of the flak being directed at parliament by the media after the expenses scandal) and who has been forced to resign from the House of Commons on two separate occasions, is a bit of a mixed blessing as far as Labour's top brass are concerned - he's an extremely clever politician (he was largely responsible for Labour's election win back in 1997) and always gets what he wants, so if he wants what you want and he's on your side you're onto a winner. Unfortunately, he has one very slight drawback - he's the spawn of Lucifer, the public loathe him (except those in Hartlepool, for some odd reason - they kept voting for him as their MP) and he gives the impression that sooner or later he's going to stab the entire Cabinet in the back and annex the party as his own personal kingdom.
"Argh! What fools we have been!" Jack Straw wards off The Evil One.
Now, if you're a Cabinet minister, you get paid a very tasty £144,520 per year along with all sorts of perks such as the notorious second homes allowance and, in some cases, even grace-and-favour (translation: free) accomodation; so it's no wonder that those lucky MPs who have found their way into the Cabinet are pretty damn keen to stay right where they are (though to be fair, there's an never-proven rumour that some of them want to keep their positions so they can use them in Britain's best interests). Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, while more than happy to let Mandelson prowl the Commons' corridors provided he only drank the blood of those they sought to dispose of, have both given unitentional indications that they consider him a man of whom one should be wary - which could be why Mandelson got a Life Peerage thrust upon him and was shuffled off to the House of Lords, which is the nearest British politics comes to hammering a stake through the heart and burying the body in a welded-up coffin, because unlike Hereditary Peers - who have been able to resign and contest by-elections since 1963 when Tony Benn changed the law and gave up his Viscount title so that he could stand as a socialist (becoming one of the most popular MPs in history) - Life Peers are, or have been, quite literally stuck in the position for life. This was not the first time that a figure considered dangerous by the Government has been quietly got rid of in this way.
However, as we blogged last month, the Government changed all that. In their efforts to revamp the House of Lords, which hasn't been viewed in a very good light by the electorate - who see it as an out-dated and unfair institution - for many years, they brought in new legislation which was very much the equivalent of digging the coffin up, pulling out the stake and saying "Here's my jugular, Vlad - it's party-time!"
The Devil - though he stayed put for the moment - was free to ride out anytime he chose.
Jack Straw seems to be the most worried about the nature of what Labour has unleashed upon the world, because he's just shipped in several tons of industrial strength garlic and is about to hang it from every rafter, wall, ceiling, hook and anything else in the Commons that a bulb of garlic could ever be hung on by announcing he's creating a new law that will force any Life Peer who does choose to resign to go into quarantine for five years during which they will be unable to stand for any elected position. This means that Mandelson would be in his early 60s by the time he once became eligible, close to retirement age and - since the general trend seems be for younger MPs and party leaders in particular (Menzies Campbell, ex-Liberal Democrat leader, was commonly thought to be too old even though he was just 66 when he left the position) - this could well end any chances he has of leading the party.
Mandelson, who not long ago got involved in a bit of a spat with the eminently dislikable Tory George Osborne (it never came to much, but served very well at taking a bit of the flak being directed at parliament by the media after the expenses scandal) and who has been forced to resign from the House of Commons on two separate occasions, is a bit of a mixed blessing as far as Labour's top brass are concerned - he's an extremely clever politician (he was largely responsible for Labour's election win back in 1997) and always gets what he wants, so if he wants what you want and he's on your side you're onto a winner. Unfortunately, he has one very slight drawback - he's the spawn of Lucifer, the public loathe him (except those in Hartlepool, for some odd reason - they kept voting for him as their MP) and he gives the impression that sooner or later he's going to stab the entire Cabinet in the back and annex the party as his own personal kingdom.
"Argh! What fools we have been!" Jack Straw wards off The Evil One.Now, if you're a Cabinet minister, you get paid a very tasty £144,520 per year along with all sorts of perks such as the notorious second homes allowance and, in some cases, even grace-and-favour (translation: free) accomodation; so it's no wonder that those lucky MPs who have found their way into the Cabinet are pretty damn keen to stay right where they are (though to be fair, there's an never-proven rumour that some of them want to keep their positions so they can use them in Britain's best interests). Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, while more than happy to let Mandelson prowl the Commons' corridors provided he only drank the blood of those they sought to dispose of, have both given unitentional indications that they consider him a man of whom one should be wary - which could be why Mandelson got a Life Peerage thrust upon him and was shuffled off to the House of Lords, which is the nearest British politics comes to hammering a stake through the heart and burying the body in a welded-up coffin, because unlike Hereditary Peers - who have been able to resign and contest by-elections since 1963 when Tony Benn changed the law and gave up his Viscount title so that he could stand as a socialist (becoming one of the most popular MPs in history) - Life Peers are, or have been, quite literally stuck in the position for life. This was not the first time that a figure considered dangerous by the Government has been quietly got rid of in this way.
However, as we blogged last month, the Government changed all that. In their efforts to revamp the House of Lords, which hasn't been viewed in a very good light by the electorate - who see it as an out-dated and unfair institution - for many years, they brought in new legislation which was very much the equivalent of digging the coffin up, pulling out the stake and saying "Here's my jugular, Vlad - it's party-time!"
The Devil - though he stayed put for the moment - was free to ride out anytime he chose.
Jack Straw seems to be the most worried about the nature of what Labour has unleashed upon the world, because he's just shipped in several tons of industrial strength garlic and is about to hang it from every rafter, wall, ceiling, hook and anything else in the Commons that a bulb of garlic could ever be hung on by announcing he's creating a new law that will force any Life Peer who does choose to resign to go into quarantine for five years during which they will be unable to stand for any elected position. This means that Mandelson would be in his early 60s by the time he once became eligible, close to retirement age and - since the general trend seems be for younger MPs and party leaders in particular (Menzies Campbell, ex-Liberal Democrat leader, was commonly thought to be too old even though he was just 66 when he left the position) - this could well end any chances he has of leading the party.
21/08/2009
Megrahi welcomed home
Despite what we wrote yesterday, when we were favourable concerning the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, we were as disturbed as anyone else to see him receive a hero's welcome when he arrived back in his homeland of Libya.
Megrahi received a hero's welcome upon his return to Libya. In the bottom right can be seen one of the many Scottish flags waved by those who greeted him - where the hell do you buy Scottish flags in Libya?
Right now, many Muslims unfortunate enough to live in those nations where the population must depend of state-controlled media for their news and information will view anything that appears to show Muslims "getting one over the Yanks" in a good light - many of those who greeted him on the tarmac yesterday would not claim to support Megrahi's actions which resulted in 270 deaths.
Do they even realise this is what he has done? Or could it be the case that Gaddafi's regime - which in recent years has decided to pretend it's friendly towards the west (and being the oil-whores we are, we believe them) - has not been entirely truthful when saying how many people died that night in 1988? Could it be that Megrahi's case has been subject to political spin, calculated to make the Libyan people see him as a political prisoner and a hero in Islam's struggle against the Great and Little Satans? After all, if you as a leader can get the population so riled up about something they become obsessed with it, they'll ignore whatever injustices are being committed closer to home (hmm - could that be why the main parties have chosen to neglect British concerns over immigration, perhaps? Maybe immigrants provide a convenient scapegoat for the public to blame everything on, rather than starting to realise the reason our country is in such a state is because of the gross negligance and incompetance of its leaders). For a man like Gaddafi, with the shocking human rights abuses that go on in his country, there'd be definite advantages in that. Is he really our friend? The UK and US governments would be wise to be very wary indeed in their dealings with Gaddafi.
Either way, we're just happy to see that the Scottish Government has the balls to run Scotland in the way that they see fit, rather than bending over backwards to do whatever Uncle Sam demands, like the UK Government show such willingness to do.
One thing though - it was noticeable that quite a few people amongst the crowd that turned out to welcome Megrahi home were flying the Saltire, the national flag of Scotland. What we want to know is, where the hell did they get them from? These were not flags made out a stick, a sheet of A4 and the kids' felt-tip pens; they were proper, professionally-made, correctly-hued cloth ones. Were they imported from Uganda, once Idi Amin lost his presidency in 1979 and his collection of Scottish stuff was sold off, then stored until the right moment? Is there a compnay that keeps a careful eye on the news and fills a fast container ship with whichever flags are about to be in the news and heads for the relevant nation at a high rate of knots - and if so, were they behind the inexplicably large numbers of Danish flags that were burned in the Middle East following the publication of satirical cartoons depicting Allah by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper? Or is there, bizarrely, a shop down some backstreet in Tripoli that sells Saltires? In the latter case, some businessman who has previously suffered what must be among the lowest sales figures ever recorded by any company is going to retire as a very rich man fairly soon.
Megrahi received a hero's welcome upon his return to Libya. In the bottom right can be seen one of the many Scottish flags waved by those who greeted him - where the hell do you buy Scottish flags in Libya?Right now, many Muslims unfortunate enough to live in those nations where the population must depend of state-controlled media for their news and information will view anything that appears to show Muslims "getting one over the Yanks" in a good light - many of those who greeted him on the tarmac yesterday would not claim to support Megrahi's actions which resulted in 270 deaths.
Do they even realise this is what he has done? Or could it be the case that Gaddafi's regime - which in recent years has decided to pretend it's friendly towards the west (and being the oil-whores we are, we believe them) - has not been entirely truthful when saying how many people died that night in 1988? Could it be that Megrahi's case has been subject to political spin, calculated to make the Libyan people see him as a political prisoner and a hero in Islam's struggle against the Great and Little Satans? After all, if you as a leader can get the population so riled up about something they become obsessed with it, they'll ignore whatever injustices are being committed closer to home (hmm - could that be why the main parties have chosen to neglect British concerns over immigration, perhaps? Maybe immigrants provide a convenient scapegoat for the public to blame everything on, rather than starting to realise the reason our country is in such a state is because of the gross negligance and incompetance of its leaders). For a man like Gaddafi, with the shocking human rights abuses that go on in his country, there'd be definite advantages in that. Is he really our friend? The UK and US governments would be wise to be very wary indeed in their dealings with Gaddafi.
Either way, we're just happy to see that the Scottish Government has the balls to run Scotland in the way that they see fit, rather than bending over backwards to do whatever Uncle Sam demands, like the UK Government show such willingness to do.
One thing though - it was noticeable that quite a few people amongst the crowd that turned out to welcome Megrahi home were flying the Saltire, the national flag of Scotland. What we want to know is, where the hell did they get them from? These were not flags made out a stick, a sheet of A4 and the kids' felt-tip pens; they were proper, professionally-made, correctly-hued cloth ones. Were they imported from Uganda, once Idi Amin lost his presidency in 1979 and his collection of Scottish stuff was sold off, then stored until the right moment? Is there a compnay that keeps a careful eye on the news and fills a fast container ship with whichever flags are about to be in the news and heads for the relevant nation at a high rate of knots - and if so, were they behind the inexplicably large numbers of Danish flags that were burned in the Middle East following the publication of satirical cartoons depicting Allah by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper? Or is there, bizarrely, a shop down some backstreet in Tripoli that sells Saltires? In the latter case, some businessman who has previously suffered what must be among the lowest sales figures ever recorded by any company is going to retire as a very rich man fairly soon.
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