Beauty salon for children creates a stink

"A beauty parlour has become the first in Britain to offer makeovers, fake tans and facials exclusively for children and toddlers, it has emerged," says everybody's favourite Conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph before going to list the services available at the salon, Trendy Monkeys of Brentwood, including "fruit smoothie facials, mini pedicures, manicures or make-up application, hair “up-dos” and haircuts." And all this in the same week as the Government's new proposals to combat the sexualisation of children! Keen eyes will note that brazilians and vajazzles do not appear.

Trendy Monkeys. Doesn't look all that sexual, does it? Unless monkeys in tutus do it for you. They probably do for some people, but we'd prefer not to Google anything like that just in case we see images.

Apparently, girls as young as one year old can be treated to ""Princess pamper parties", which costs several hundred pounds" which begin with them and up to five friends being "picked up in a pink limousine" and taken to the salon, where doting parents "can pay for extra services including spray tans while having a photographer follow them around."

Professor Judy Hutchings of the Centre for Evidence Based Early Intervention told the paper that the salon represents "not just the sexualisation but the commercialisation of children." We dislike the sexualisation of children as much as any other normal adult, but the commercialisation bit is stretching things a bit far. The same could be said about The Beano, Ladybird books, Dinky cars and all the other kiddies' products that were with us in that delightful bit of the 1950s with the rosy glow around it, when children were innocent creatures of joy and light and went around with scabby knees saying "brilliant!" and drinking lashings and lashings of ginger beer. Precisely the same thing is going on in the half-timbered cottages of the Black Forest where Geppetto hand carves toys for sale to tourists, in the Tridias shops that were so beloved among the upper middle classes for their traditional toys and lack of the latest kill-em-up videogames, and everywhere else that toys or anything else marketed at and for children has ever been sold.

Tellingly, the Toryrag points out early on in the story that the salon, which opened last weekend, "is located in an area featured in the ITV reality television show The Only Way Is Essex." Two members of the cast were in fact at the opening of the salon, as revealed by The Daily Mail which, predictably, takes a similar line to the broadsheet and has a picture of the celebs in question in Marbella ("Marbella? How vulgar!"). Which rather begs the question: what do we have here? A story which raises legitimate concerns over the way children are being raised in modern society or an opportunity for the newspaper's readers to enjoy a spot of "haw haw, look how tasteless the working classes like the ones in that dreadful programme (which none of us watched, of course, because we're much too highbrow) are, aren't we so much better than them?"-style upper middle class snobbish solidarity over their breakfast coffee this morning?

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.

"Democratic" BNP choose strange bedfellows

Despite their (sadly, slightly successful) attempts to persuade the British electorate that they are a legitimate, democratic, non-racist political party one does not need to delve far into the murky world of the British National Party to discover that they are friends with some very strange and unpleasant characters.

The BNP have long been seen as no more than neo-Nazi thugs

Party leader Nick Griffin loves to put on a sharp suit and appear on television, where he paints a pretty picture of the new image that the far-right neo-fascist party has been forced to adopt since finally realising that the British are - on the whole - a tolerant people who would never vote for a bunch of Nazi thugs. So power-hungry is he that under his leadership, the party has transformed itself into one that at first glance appears to be the only political group willing to tackle the public's fears over issues such as immigration. Meanwhile, the main parties are so obsessed with three minute soundbite politics and electioneering that they have entirely failed to take note of how widespread these misconceived fears are (to date, only Boris Johnson - G_d help us - has done anything to put these dangerous worries to rest), with the result that our peaceful, friendly, tolerant nation is now represented by a pair of fascists in the European Parliament. That's right - fascists. As in what Hitler, the same man many of our grandparents gave their lives to defeat when he threatened Britain and the British, was.

Under Nick Griffin's leadership, they have worked hard to give themselves a respectable image.

For all his faults (being a fascist and a racist with criminal convictions to match), Mr. Griffin is a clever politician. During his leadership, the BNP's image in the public eye has changed from that of booted skinhead hooligans to a party that can achieve a respectable share of the vote in elections.

However, you barely need to scratch the surface to discover that they're still the same racist yobs that they always were, and one of the most effective ways to demonstrate this is to look at those the BNP choose as their political friends. Mr. Griffin has faced problems in the past when photographs of him on stage looking distinctly pally with the Ku Klux Klan's Stephen "Don" Black were published. Not long after that, it emerged that James von Brunn - the gunman who opened fire in Washington's Holocaust Museum - had links to the party (Griffin calls the Holocaust the "Holohoax," incidentally). In 1995, William Pierce, founder and leader of the USA's National Alliance - a group which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Hitler's birth and referred to him as "the greatest man of our era" - spoke at the BNP's annual rally in London. Other members of the organisation have spoken on several occasions at BNP fund-raising events in the USA. And there are many others.

Yet another example comes to light in the wake of this year's Red, White and Blue festival. Red, White and Blue is an annual event organised by the BNP and held on land belonging to a supporter in Derbyshire; this year, it was attended by around 1500 people - worryingly, that's twice as many as last year. Highlights of the festival included talks by Mr. Griffin himself (including one on the subject of tracing your ancestors - and no doubt how to cover up the facts if you discover that dear old Granny was Jewish) and some no doubt hilarious comedy from Mad Frankie Waller (sadly, Mr. Waller seems to live in the same century his political leanings belong to - he doesn't have a website, so you'll have to do without a sample of his material).

Those festival-goers so inclined were given the opportunity to sit down and listen to speeches given by foreign guests - one of them in the shape of Roberto Fiore, the leader of Italy's far-right Forza Nuova and a man who once said that he is happy to be described as a neo-fascist, talking about the alleged threat Europe faces from what has become known as Islamic extremism (we say "what has become known as" because a five minute conversation on the subject with any well-informed, intelligent Muslim will reveal there is nothing Islamic whatsoever about attacks such as those carried out in London in 2005 and Madrid in 2004).

Roberto Fiore, leader of Italy's far-right Forza Nuova and a man who says he is happy to be called a neo-fascist, spoke at the BNP's Red, White and Blue festival last weekend.

Back in 1985, Mr. Fiore was sentenced to ten years in prison for being a member of the outlawed terrorist group Armed Revolutionary Nuclei who carried out the 1980 Bologna bombing which killed 85 people and wounded 200 (Fiore was tried in his absence, remaining out of Italy until the conviction was "timed out" under the country's statute of limitation laws, and returned home in 1999). The organisation also assassinated magistrate Mario Amato, who had been investigating far-right activities and groups and carried out another 33 murders during the four years that it was active.

You can tell a great deal about somebody according to the company they choose to keep, don't you think?

Bruno star Baron Cohen death threats

Continuing our expedition into the world of tabloid journalism we soon came upon the Daily Express, that once-great newspaper that is nowadays read only by those who collect china with pictures of the Royal family on it, which carries a story on Sacha Baron Cohen (pictured right) - the creator of Ali G, Borat and Bruno - and how he has apparently received death threats from a terrorist organisation called the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade.

The Express got the story via the Daily Star who, they report, say that the AAMB "has claimed responsibility for recent terrorist attacks." Interesting - and why on Earth would a man of Baron Cohen's undoubted intelligence choose to satirise a real terrorist group, since doing so would be tantamount to suicide? Maybe the Express were thinking along the same lines, because they contacted Baron Cohen's spokesperson who told them: "I don't know anything about this."

Hmm. Over to the Star's website for more information it is, then. Using the page's search function, we soon found the following:

(original here)

That looks like the one we're after, doesn't it? So we clicked and were rewarded with:

(original here)

That page had a picture of a very pretty lady without very many clothes on, so that bit was alright; but we do wonder if just maybe the Daily Star is using the time-honoured red-top journalistic technique known as "making stuff up" and had to take the story down a bit sharpish because Baron Cohen's lawyers got in touch? If so, they may well be forced to print an apology - however, we shall never know because one look at the filthy little rag every couple of months is about all we can handle.

Sacha Baron Cohen image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.