Wednesday, April 20, 2005

sack the puppy killer

I'm not that into the tiny details about particular marginal constituencies and all that, but the possibilities for Dorset have caught my eye for several reasons.

They concern a superb standard of inept Tory lying; they may well humiliate a senior front bench puppy-shooting Tory; and it's being co-ordinated by Billy Bragg.

Now I know Bragg is an exceptionally well informed and articulate political thinker, but it still always amuses me that the man who gave popular music not one but two of its finest masturbation references can ever get taken seriously.

They were, incidentally;

With my own hands
When I make love to your memory
It's not the same
I miss the thunder, I miss the rain
- St Swithins Day

and this one that only rhymes when 'trousers' is said in an Essex accent;

All my friends from school
Introduce me to their spouses
While I'm left standing here
With my hands down the front of my trousers
- The Short Answer

That one especially tickles because of the regionality. It's like the kick I get from the name of a Liverpool hair salon. You know the weird tradition of hairdressers names being bad puns ('Curl Up and Dye', etc)? There's a Liverpool one that only works with a scouse accent; Ben Hair.

Still gets me every time, that.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, taking on the tories in Dorset with Billy Bragg, hopefully with his hands outside of his 'trousis'.

Although the three Dorset seats are traditionally all Tory, in 2001 Bragg launched votedorset.net which got people to exchange 'voter valentines'.

The idea is that if you're a Labour voter in a place where the LibDems could beat the tories, the site will pair you with a LibDem in a place where Labour can win. You promise to vote for each other's parties, thus not betraying your principles and still kicking the tories the fuck out.

It worked in two out of the three. In Mid-Dorset the LibDems beat the Tories, in South Dorset Labour scraped in by 153 votes.

This time out, with Bragg's proven (and arguably illegal) device working they're hoping for all three.

That last Tory they're up for unseating is West Dorset's MP and the shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin, a man who shoots puppies for personal pleasure.

As my favourite commentator on the election, Jim Bliss, says

[Letwin] was a bigwig at NM Rothschild financial megaglomerate. But he didn't have a Road to Damascus experience and decide to dedicate his skills to public service. Like fuck did he! In fact, it's only a year and a half ago that the tories were able to convince him to resign his position. Eventually he got the message, it might be a conflict of interest to be running the nation's budget, setting taxation policy, regulating the financial sector, and what have you, whilst still a director of NM Rothschild. Just might be a conflict of interest.

And this is something that more people should be talking about. Most of these tory spending plans that are being bandied about at the moment are the work of a man who was working for NM Rothschild whilst formulating them. It is safe to assume therefore, knowing as I do the workings of corporations at high levels, that these plans are first and foremost the plans of a Rothschild director, and second the plans of a public servant. You just don't exist at that level of a corporation if you're playing for any team but the home one. Feel free to deny this if you choose. You will be wrong though.

A tory vote, therefore, should be cast full in the knowledge that your hopes and dreams need to coincide with those of NM Rothschild if you expect your MP to address them.

Over in South Dorset that 153 Labour majority may look shaky, but they will be helped not only by Bragg's valentines but also because the Tory candidate, Ed Matts, is a classic bumbling lying tory twat.

He has previously campaigned for a Malawian asylum seeker, publicly holding a placard saying 'let them stay'.

But as his party are fighting on an anti asylum and immigration platform, he released a picture of himself next to Anne Widdecombe holding placards saying immigration should be reduced.

Thing is, the anti-immigration picture was Photoshopped out of the 'let them stay' one, changing the words and swapping the asylum seeker for Widdecombe.

Although Howard Flight telling the truth about Tory spending plans was a sacking offence, for some reason this dickhead's Stalinesque changing of a picture to its effective opposite doesn't incur the wrath of Michael Howard.

Howard's avowed determination for consistency and truth in his underlings isn't an issue if they're joining his psychotic revulsion for immigrants. This is, of course, the same Michael Howard who, as Home Secretary, devised the racist Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 which introduced a tactfully named 'white list' of countries, places deemed so safe that any asylum claim from there was assumed to be groundless.

I was at a demonstration in London's Hyde Park against the act, and Jack Straw, then shadow home secretary, passionately declared that no government is infallible so any claim of persecution should be investigated. Each asylum claim must be taken on its merits regardless of the country being fled, and a Labour government would ignore the 'white list', he said.

A few months later Straw was Home Secretary. As is traditional, on becoming Home Secretary he suddenly became a paranoid authoritarian maniac bent on exceeding the repressive achievments of his predecesor.

In 2002 his successor, David Blunkett, continued the tradition in many ways. Among them was the introduction of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill. Blunkett stoutly defended one of the main pillars of the Bill, the addition of new countries - including several central and eastern European nations with well-documented violent persecution of Roma people - to the white list.

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