blimps over southport

The Good Year balloon. We all just accepted it back then in the 70s, as if it were normal and interesting. Looking back, it's utterly bizarre. A small blimp bobbing about promoting car tyres! Who the fuck thought of that?

There it would be, tethered to some event like the Southport Flower Show to which you were taken for the amusement visiting relatives. The balloon was not only seen as something semi-exciting in its own right, but as a mark of quality and proof of the worth of the Show, a denial of its actual mogadonesque experience.

Every year the Southport Flower Show got the same tired treatment from the Southport Visiter. Who knows, perhaps it still does. A headline with the word blooming, (Blooming Marvellous, A Blooming Good Day Out), and some comment about how it was probably as good or maybe even better than the Chelsea Flower Show.

Despite - and I thank a vast pantheon of gods for my good fortune - never having been to the Chelsea Flower Show, despite not even knowing by what measure one begins to judge the relative qualities of flower shows, I am certain the Southport one is worse. It wasn't just that Southport only got on Granada Reports whereas the Chelsea one got on national telly. Though that - fuck all your blimps - itself was a real mark of worth.

It's the desperation in the tone of Southport saying it was a match for Chelsea, the same tone you heard when Southport declared its rickety funfair was probably as good as Blackpool's.

It's like the way any popular band is going to be bigger than the Beatles. It tells us a lot about the Beatles and nothing about Slade, Kajagoogoo or Take That. (And it really was said about all of them).

It's like the parent of a pathetic underachieving child saying 'you're as good as anyone else' as a way to not only pointlessly encourage their useless offspring but also to avoid facing the awful truth themselves.

I never did understand why the newspaper was called the Southport Visiter. It's for locals rather than those just visiting, who in any case are visitors, not visiters.

Or is it the middle one of visit/visiter/visitest? In which case, what the fuck does it mean? Yet its name is as blindly accepted by a complacent public as the inexplicable Good Year blimp.

Of course, we call it 'the' Good Year blimp, but there must have been dozens of them if they could turn out at every country show and stuff.

Has it gone away? Or am I just liberated from tedious family days out now?

going for gold

One time in the mid 90s I was on the London Underground, heading north on the Jubilee Line in a carriage which was unfortunately full of England fans going to Wembley.

They were singing loyalist songs familiar to me from the vile Orange Day parades in Southport; lots of gleeful triumphalist stuff about killing Feinian bastards and gloating over the death of IRA hunger strikers.

Then they sang God Save the Queen. Like any other thinking person I've always disliked the song, but this was the first time I'd really thought about it. The title itself contains two concepts I despise. Then each individual line contained something despicable.

God save our gracious Queen

Stuff your god, and the idea she's ours, let alone the ludicrous idea that she's gracious.

Long live our noble Queen

No, die and rot like any other mortal; in what way noble?; and again with that belonging to us thing.

God save the Queen

Both of them can fuck right off.

Send her victorious

Over who? Haven't we done enough of that already?

Happy and glorious

What glory's that exactly? The glory of being vaguely descended from thieves and murderers?

Long to reign over us

No, rather against the wall as soon as poss

God save the Queen

No, no, and no.

Previously, and aside of the repulsive sentiment of the lyrics, I've talked about the inappropriateness of having God Save The Queen as the national anthem for the UK.

When we compete as one nation, the national anthem is God Save The Queen. When we compete as four nations, Wales and Scotland have their own anthems. Northern Ireland alternates between God Save The Queen and the Londonderry Air (the tune to Danny Boy). England, of course, uses God Save The Queen every time; the Englishness of the Union is reinforced to everyone concerned.

How can it be fair that the anthem of one of the four nations is the anthem of them all? How would it feel if the roles were reversed and English members of a UK team had to sing Flower of Scotland?

Next up after shedding the Union Jack should be England getting its own tune. (My vote would be Blake’s Jerusalem. It’s got the requisite striving, yearning and historical elements but without the galling arrogance and glorification of militarism so common in national anthems.)

However, others have a wiser plan.

I have been persuaded to change my mind by this excellent and stirring new petition on the 10 Downing Street website, which I urge you all to sign.

We, the people of Britain, feel that our current National Anthem has lost a bit of its sparkle.

When we are confronted by the rare occasion of us winning a medal at the Olympics, we all have to mumble through "God Save The Queen", well God help us in 2012!

We would thereby like to table the suggestion that we change the National Anthem to something more modern and appropriate and that will re-invigorate our pride.

What we specifically want to see, is that the National Anthem be changed in favour of "Gold" by Spandau Ballet.

Further, we would like our National Olympic Committee to decree that Tony Hadley is the only person permitted to handle medal ceremonies where the National Anthem is played.

We don't mind what he wears when he does this, but preference is given towards a a gold colured suit.

have faith in the market

Interesting place, the business pages of a newspaper.

Partly it's the real truth - the money people need to know what's really going on, so there's less spin and trivia than in the rest of the paper. GM crops, for example, were all over the business pages for months before the rest of the paper knew what to do with them (eventually plumping for 'another health scare' along the lines of salmonella, BSE, botulism and whatever).

But then there's the flipside; the economists' view of the world. These are, after all, people who believe that perpetual economic growth is possible and desirable. They are, therefore, completely insane.

They think economics is not the name for the study of certain sections of human behaviour, or even a model for understanding what goes on around humans. They think it's the whole story. If the market requires something then it will always be made available. It's blind faith.

The business pages of today's Independent features a piece on the new Barclay's Equity Gilt Study. Apparently we're going to avoid catastophic climate change and have an economic boom at the same time. Why? Because that's what'd be best for the economy.

Barclays Capital challenges the conventional wisdom that global warming will have a devastating impact on economic growth. It believes the need to increase energy capacity by 50 per cent by 2035, while simultaneously reducing dependence on hydrocarbons, will spark an "energy revolution" reminiscent of the technology revolution which led to the dot.com boom.

"If ever the time were ripe for such an energy revolution, it is now," said Tim Bond, global head of asset allocation at Barclays Capital, and author of the report. "And like all historical adoptions of general purpose technologies, the process should prove immensely stimulative to economic growth."

Mr Bond says that those who couch the climate change debate in terms of the cost to growth are underestimating the impact of an energy revolution. Last year's Stern Review concluded that if temperatures rise by five degrees celsius, up to 10 per cent of global output could be lost.

"All of the historical changes in energy supply - from dung to wood to coal to oil - were stimulative for the economy concerned...

"The impact of the replacement, restructuring and expansion of our energy infrastructure cannot be ignored," Mr Bond said. "Just as the personal computer cannot be un-invented, neither can the impending energy revolution."

I love the idea that you can't un-invent something that hasn't happened yet. It illustrates more eloquently than my analysis ever could just how utterly fucking deluded Mr Bond is.

There is a projected increase in energy consumption of 50% in 30 years. This is presumably based on the fact that we consume what we do now, and are going to get hungrier.

Climate change makes the need to cut fossil fuel use imperative.

These two things are not opposed in any way; they will surely be combined in some happy way as yet unforeseen.

The real issue that screams from the page goes completely unmentioned. He not only doesn't say how the new energy sources are to be economically viable and on-stream so fast. He neglects to say what the new energy sources might even be.

ending the war: shit or get off the pot

There's the philosophy subscribed to by certain hippy dreamers that if we don't address a war and instead think positive things that it will make it alright. By focussing on a Bad Thing we entangle ourselves with it and become it. As the saying goes, battle ye not with monsters lest ye become a monster.

This leaves the monsters free to get on with inflicting all the carnage they want while we, safely thousands of miles away living on the spoils of that war, stick out fingers in our ears and go lalala.

But the methods of those new-age ostriches aren't the only way to block out the war. The rest of us are helped by mass media who keep the story in the news, only just tinkling somewhere in the background so it never grabs our attention.

Occasionally there's a big splash and people are outraged. Why were people are shocked by Abu Ghraib or the massacre in Haditha. What do they think war is?

We somehow think that our side shouldn't do that or even don't do that. Even today people don't want to really give Allied atrocities of the Second World War the attention they deserve. The best admission you can find is, 'they were worth it though, stop whining'. And indeed, we do largely stop whining, as it wasn't our families being incinerated in Dresden or our own gran getting raped in Vienna.

War necessarily means dehumanising anyone we see as the enemy. As one American soldier from the Iraqi occupation put it, 'If you start looking at them as humans, and stuff like that, then how are you gonna kill them?'

George Monbiot observes the links between the British occupation of Ireland and the American - sorry, 'allied' - occupation of Iraq.

Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far from home, exercising power over people they don’t understand, knowing that the population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all “micks” or “gooks” or “hajjis”.

Once we dehumanise them, atrocities are inevitable. Atrocities are an intrinsic component of war. Wanting war without them is like wanting a sandwich but opposing the farming of wheat.

George Orwell asserted

So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity and an act of war is valid. An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does.

But the violent subjugation of a population and deepening your troops' dehumanised vision of their enemy does have a genuine military purpose. It makes your troops more capable of getting on with the business of killing. Moreover, as atrocities are invariably a feature of war, they aren't something separate, they do constitute an act of war.

Orwell goes on

a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.

By the same token, a world that is horrified by a squad of American soldiers shooting an Iraqi family yet stays unruffled by other American soldiers dropping bombs in the sure knowledge that there are families below is equally deranged.

There is a straightforward reason why we invaded Iraq. Noam Chomsky explained it thus

We're supposed to believe that the US would've invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were pickles and lettuce. This is what we're supposed to believe.

Now the truth of the matter, obvious to anyone not committed to the party line, is that Iraq has huge oil resources, maybe the second in the world, mostly untapped, that it's right in the middle of the main energy-producing region of the world and that taking control of Iraq will strengthen enormously the US's control over the major energy resources of the world.

It will, in fact, give the US critical leverage over its competitors, Europe and Asia, that's Zbigniew Brzezsinski's [President Carter's national Security Adviser] accurate observation.

That's the reason. The method is war, which necessarily means atrocities.

If the war gets temporarily unpopular in the wake of some scandal, they'll talk about leaving, but they'll never actually do it. Why else would a bill passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate have the clause removed that denies funding for permanent US military bases in Iraq?

We feel that there may be a withdrawal because our leaders don't have our support for the war. Over 99% of Iraqis feel the occupying troops did not bring greater security, over 80% of them want the troops to leave, it had the biggest demonstations ever in the UK, the majority of Americans think the war was a mistake and the majority of American troops want to come home pronto. That's surely enough, right?

Thing is, they don't need our support. They just need our acceptance. The best way of getting that is to subject us to a constant low-level feed of information. All we need is familiarisation - a feeling that this is how it always is and ever shall be - that it won't actually affect us personally and there's not much we can really do, and we're sold. We accept and stop even really noticing it.

Putting a ten second report of Iraqi carnage - one of those quick bits with footage and voiceover used to break up the longer stories on the TV news - doesn't inform, it dulls. It's only occasionally they make me reconsider what I've just heard and go 'hang on, that was a 7/7 in Baghdad today and it doesn't warrant anything more than that?'

It's been like this a long time. Jim Bliss pointed it out nearly two years ago.

A couple of nights ago I was watching the news on television. My flatmate came into the room... "anything happening in the world today?" he wondered. Without even thinking I responded "nothing important". In saying that, I was dismissively referring to the news of Labour backbenchers calling for Blair to resign, and to the tory shadow-cabinet reshuffle.

The thing is... the second item in the headlines was actually the news that another 60 random Iraqis had been blown to pieces in a Baghdad market. I hadn't meant to overlook it. In fact, as soon as I said "nothing important" I remembered the story and felt vaguely sick that I'd so quickly forgotten it.

...For anyone keeping a close eye on the geopolitical ramifications of resource depletion, the Iraq war was clearly about oil.

...Now. The trouble is, if you take that interpretation to it's logical conclusion, you end up saying some pretty nasty things about the people running the war. Things like how daily insurgency attacks killing scores of civilians is the perfect post-war environment for the US and Britain. It provides apparent justification for the continuing presence of huge numbers of western troops. It keeps the Iraqi government weak and unstable, and hence reliant upon those troops to maintain their position. And so long as a compliant media continue to report these bombings as second on the news, with an identical report to yesterday's bomb, and the one before that, and the ones last week and last month... and without any sense of genuine outrage that this shit is happening on our watch (self-appointed though that watch may be)... then it'll just fade into the background even for those of us who can be arsed to write pointless little rants about it.

The US administration bigged up al-Zaqarwi as the Big Bad behind the insurgency. He was the al-Qaida leader, the one who was the link between them and Saddam Hussain, the proof that the insurgency was a foreign incursion cos all the Iraqis love us.

The death of Zarqawi was a milestone in the war alright, but not for the stated reasons. It showed our governments no longer needed a bogieman. They were now confident that, whether we approve of it or not, we are resigned to ongoing Iraqi occupation.

One Baghdad resident said on the announcement of al-Zarqawi's death

How do I feel? To hell with Zarqawi (or Zayrkawi as Bush calls him). He was an American creation - he came along with them - they don't need him anymore, apparently. His influence was greatly exaggerated but he was the justification for every single family they killed through military strikes and troops. It was WMD at first, then it was Saddam, then it was Zarqawi. Who will it be now? Who will be the new excuse for killing and detaining Iraqis? Or is it that an excuse is no longer needed - they have freedom to do what they want. The slaughter in Haditha months ago proved that. "They don't need him anymore," our elderly neighbor waved the news away like he was shooing flies, "They have fifty Zarqawis in government."

So now that Zarqawi is dead, and because according to Bush and our Iraqi puppets he was behind so much of Iraq's misery - things should get better, right? The car bombs should lessen, the ethnic cleansing will come to a halt, military strikes and sieges will die down… That's what we were promised, wasn't it? That sounds good to me. Now - who do they have to kill to stop the Ministry of Interior death squads, and trigger-happy foreign troops?

Yet, of course, there's still 7/7 level carnage and worse going off in Baghdad day after day, and we don't even register the voice that tells us.

Why we are there and what it will entail have always been clear since we invaded. To be around the day by day details fed to us by the corporate and embedded media is to deliberately move into the trees in order to be unable to see the woods.

There are two suggested ways out of this desensitising, which can be roughly be categorised as 'shit or get off the pot'.

The 'get off the pot' option stems from an idea expressed in last May's issue of the superb Arthur magazine. Douglas Rushkoff talked about how his students are

...overwhelmed by the seeming futility of taking a stand. Just the other day, they were debating whether going to a protest or rally even matters - especially when it can be reframed by the mainstream media as almost anything... Besides, most young protestors' rally activities are betrayed by their real-life purchases and behaviors.

Is futile or unconsciously hypocritical protest really better than no protest at all?

...Mustn't we take a stand? A direct, informed, progressive and potentially courageous stand?

Perhaps. But... not without a cost to our ability to see, think and feel clearly.

For example, to 'learn' about the war in the Persian Gulf, we must wade through disinformation upon disinformation. Which news agency to trust, if any? How smart are the reporters at those 'good' papers like The Guardian, really? Smart enough to remember and remind us that America's real goal is permanent bases in Iraq, or that 9-11 was used as an excuse to establish those bases? And what is communicated to us by daily headlines of single-digit casualities in that war, with often no mention at all of the thousands who died that day in Africa?

In short, does 'staying informed' itself subject us to more propaganda and distorted values than it’s worth? Does it suck us into 'their' story so deeply that we are incapacitated rather than prepared to act? Is 'having an opinion' about a distant war or policy of any value, or is it an intellectual cocktail party substitute for caring about something in a realm where we can actually make a difference?

...There's something to be said for creating works of art or media that instead give people the tools and energy to disengage from the story being told to us on TV, and to feel optimistic about our own potential to rewrite reality on terms more consonant with our hopes.

This, though, places a high level of faith in our ability to stay detached from the 'information' sources yet not turn into the aforementioned 'will it away with nice thoughts' brigade.

The other, 'shit', approach starts with asking us to spot the crucial difference between opposition to Iraq compared with Vietnam. It's not about the proportion of the public opposed - that's greater for Iraq. It's about the urgency and priority it's accorded.

This time, the war's had Dick Cheney - one of several members of the Bush Administration who would find argument being had over which set of war crimes they should be tried for first - in a key command role.

As a member of Nixon's team, he remembers the Vietnam war and why it failed. Opposition to the war was stoked by the draft. Ordinary Americans couldn't become desensitised when it was their own children coming home in body bags. Teenagers had such a fire under them to protest cos it was their friends getting drafted and killed, and they might be next themselves.

This time it's a volunteer army from the American underclass alongside a staggering one quarter of American troops who aren't even American. They're foreigners who'll be given citizenship if they come back from Iraq alive.

So, Congressman Charlie Rangel is lobbying for a return of the draft. Johann Hari explained in The Independent

a draft would change the attitude towards war back home: we would need a lot more persuasion to allow a war to be launched, and we would follow its course much more carefully. Most of us place so little importance on the war because we don't know anybody who is fighting it. Speak to military mothers, and they know the map of Basra better than the Tube map; but how many of us can even picture it? It's hard to sympathise with abstract people, no matter how nice you are. The people fighting the war are overwhelmingly black, brown or poor. Most of us are not.

...Conscription would, paradoxically, reduce war... If a war is worth fighting, it is worth fighting with everybody's children. And if it's not worth fighting - like the barely supervised collapse in Iraq - then nobody's child should die in its futile name.

green electricity

I've just finished another in what appears to be a chain of articles.

Over a year ago I did a piece called Iceland: Dam Nation about the way the Icelandic government was planning to obliterate the largest pristine wilderness in Europe to build a dam to power an aluminium smelter.

In researching that, I found shocking collusion between Greenpeace and the Icelandic government on the issue, which became another article.

In researching that one, I found all manner of foul deeds done by Greenpeace, which in turn became an article in its own right. One of those misdeeds was Greenpeace's deal with Npower - the largest emitter of CO2 in European power production - to promote their 'green electricity tariff'.

This set me wondering; what other green tariffs are out there? What's the difference between them? Are any of them for real or are they all like Npower's?

It was a tangled thick jungle of a research job, but then that's precisely the sort of thing that should be made into an accessible article.

That's now done and dusted, and i'm rather pleased with it. It exposes the scandalous lies of Npower and Scottish & Southern Energy, how and why the green tariffs of the Big Six energy companies are greenwash scams and the various merits of the three genuinely green suppliers.

It's called How Green Is Green Electricity? and it's published here.

diabolical de burgh

OK, Jim Bliss - proud owner of a Chris De Burgh live album with Lady In Red on it - has been stuffing the ballot box of the poll in the sidebar. I reset the poll once before, but it's done no good.

So I've reset it and now each person only gets one vote, as opposed to Bliss' rabid this-is-the-most-important-thing-I-can-do-with-my-life repeat visits.

And people, let's be clear De Burgh is a fucking alien. He buys alien technology. He's even come out as some kind of mystic healer now. Yes, the hand that held the pen writing High On Emotion can be the hand that magically clears up your medical ailments.

Just like his attempt at distracting us by being nice to donkeys, now he offers miracle cures.

"A guy I met one time - he'd hurt his leg badly in a golfing accident," the 57-year-old, whose hits include Lady in Red, said.

"He was in serious pain, just below the knee, and I felt the area above had been traumatised.

"I started feeling and I'd say within 20 minutes, he was walking again. It took away the pain."

I wonder if he'd lay on his healing hands to cure your prolapsed piles. There's an image.

Not that I'd risk it anyway. Letting him near you would be all a bit too They Live crossed with Invasion of The Bodysnatchers if you ask me. He shuts down your sense of feeling so you can't resist or even perceive the lizardly takeover of all human institutions and minds.

Go vote in the sidebar and show that enough of us see the truth and will resist.

another place

Another Place is a peculiarly affecting piece of work.

Antony Gormley, best known for the colossal Angel of The North statue at Gateshead, made a hundred iron statues from a cast of his own body. They have been widely dispersed along Crosby beach in north Liverpool. The distance between them varies, some are close to shore, others up to a kilometre out in the shallow Mersey estuary.



It sounded imaginative and novel, but I hadn't been expecting the deeper levels at which it would hit me. The figures may be randomly distributed, but they all face out to sea. Humans love looking at big expanses. As I've said elsewhere, it's hardwired into us.

we are all — inexplicably in rationality — impressed by seeing big landscapes or the sea. Think about it — why should a mountain impress you?

...Wind moving through the grass and trees, the ripples across water, clouds across the sky; we are so rooted to these that just the words in that last sentence are soothing in themselves!

Seeing the figures chimes into something that humans have done for as long as there's been humans. The sea has not just an epic scale but a permanence that makes the human figures seem so small physically and chronologically. Yet at the same time, you're taking your place among all those who've ever stood like that.

Gormley's official explanation of Another Place implies that temporary individuals combine to make an enduring human character, and in making people see themselves in that context it challenges consumerism.

The seaside is a good place to do this. Here time is tested by tide, architecture by the elements and the prevalence of sky seems to question the earth's substance. In this work human life is tested against planetary time. This sculpture exposes to light and time the nakedness of a particular and peculiar body. It is no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet.

More than this, it's the most unstuffy piece of art imaginable. Away from any uptight gallery chinstrokery, it's just there, no admission fee, day and night, for all to see and interact with.

People make what they will of it. Some have been given football scarves and hats. It doesn't spoil it, it just underlines the unpretentious humanness of the concept.

Having been at Crosby for a year and a half, they've been a big hit. With Liverpool coming up to its year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, you'd have thought Another Place would be prized. You'd be reckoning without Debi Jones.

Crosby was a Tory constituency since neolithic times. When the Labour breakaway Social Democratic Party declared they'd 'broken the mould of British politics' in 1981 they parachuted in one of their stars, Shirley Williams, to win a Crosby by-election. By the time of the general election two years later the mould had seamlessly healed itself like Terminator 2 or the Mayor in season three of Buffy, and Crosby was Tory once more.

Having stayed up all night watching the Tories get trounced in 1997, I danced naked in the streets and then rang my Crosby-resident brother in the morning to gloat about Portillo, Hamilton and whatnot. It didn't even occur to me to check the Crosby result - it would surely always be Tory - but amazingly it had gone Labour. Claire Curtis-Thomas is apparently a fairly good constutency MP, and she has retained the seat since.

Imagine how this sticks in the craw of the local Tories; some Labour woman who doesn't even use her husband's surname taking their birthright. Last general election, Curtis-Thomas' Tory opponent was Debi Jones. Hilariously, Curtis-Thomas' husband was caught defacing Jones' campaign posters and fined £80.

Before all this Jones made a name for herself as a bigot pundit on local radio. She was then elected as a local councillor for a very posh dormitory village called Hightown, whilst simultaneously furthering the progress of humanity by doing some presenting on cable TV shopping channel Yes 655. She recently left that job, realising that she needs to assert her political integrity and credibility. Now she's a presenter on cable TV shopping chanel IBuy.

Her website is titled Debi Jones TV Presenter Celebrity Official Website.

She self-defines as a celebrity. This would mark someone out as a truly awful human being in itself. But consider how much worse it is when done by someone with the absolute minimum of anything that could be called celebrity. And I love that 'official' - just to differentiate between that and all the fansites, right?

So we come to Debi Jones and Another Place. Jones' boss, Sefton Council's Chief Executive Graham Haywood, says

There has been huge public support for the retention of the Gormley Statues which has clearly been reflected in the media coverage and direct contact with the council. “Another Place” has proved to be a very evocative project which has captured the imagination of many people and attracted substantial numbers of visitors.

But not everyone likes the statues. Debi Jones objects. She says they're a danger to people who look at them and to passing shipping. Really. It'd be quite funny if it weren't for the fact that she's on Sefton Council's Planning Committee and has got them to vote to remove the statues.

Classic fucking Tory puritanism. Just like the 1994 Criminal Justice Act outlawing free raves, there's this dread fear and outraged horror that people might be enjoying something. Worse still, enjoying something for free.

Gotta put a stop to that, otherwise where would it end? If people spend their time at Another Place contemplating the unity of humanity in its response to wide natural spaces, getting a deep understanding of our temporary place in the scheme of things and yet our simultaneous part in something endless and true, what use is that? Why aren't they at home squandering their money on shit they don't need off IBuy?

You've got to suspect a part of Jones' sour miserablism is also a grudge, as Claire Curtis-Thomas supports the retention of Another Place.

At the end of last year, Curtis-Thomas sent out an annual report to local Labour Party members. In reference to Debi Jones' anti-Gormley stance, it captioned a picture of Jones 'Gormless' and asked 'Is Debi Jones’s brain in another place?'.

Heavy handed and scarcely funny punning. In-house local political party leaflets are hardly going to be the collected scripts of Round The Horne.

Still, Jones has got up on her hind legs and complained that the offending leaflet didn't have permission to use a picture of her feeding Nestle chocolates to a bloke in a chair. She bemoans its 'unprofessional' approach.

While Curtis-Thomas is a New Labour schmuck, at least her and her poster subvertising husband are getting stuck into attacking the advocate of an ideology far more vicious than theirs.

Debi Jones is a Tory. As they work so hard to mask themselves and connect to a new powerbase, we need to be clear what that means. More than anyone else, she wants to take away things like hospital beds and give the money saved to the rich. She wants to reward those rich people because, well, they're rich. She wants to 'cut political correctness' (great euphemism for exacerbating disrespect towards disadvantaged minorities).

All that awards-ceremony style 'we're all playing the same game, let's be chummy' attitude in politics, I don't know the unit of measurement to tell you how far it can fuck off. Three fucking cheers for an unprofessional approach.

yawning baboon

politics, disrespect, hypocrisy, death, comedians

John Prescott got up on his hind legs for an extensive interview with the BBC, and Mark Steel's responded with a tremendously sarcy disrespectful piece in The Independent. He makes a big meal of Prescott's Bushesque use of language.

he wrong-footed us by insisting: "The core coalition of New Labour was New Labour and Old Labour." That's one for the philosophers, whether something can be a combination of itself and something else. With stuff like that, he could become a Buddhist monk, sitting in a robe, holding the hands of followers and telling them gently: "My friend, the apple is part apple and part lemon. Now use this knowledge wisely."

It's an apt area for Prescott to study, because he manages to be a classic blend of all that's sickly about New Labour, combined with all that was rotten with Old Labour.

I almost heard an audible 'ting' on reading that last comment, so squarely does it hit the nail on the head.

A different article explains

But, Mr Prescott insisted, the secret filming of Saddam's last minutes should be condemned "whatever your views about capital punishment".

"I think the manner was quite deplorable really," Mr Prescott told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "I don't think one can endorse in any way that, whatever your views about capital punishment. Frankly, to get the kind of recorded messages coming out is totally unacceptable and I think whoever is involved and responsible for it should be ashamed of themselves."

Mark Steel points out,

he wouldn't criticise the Iraqi government, just "whoever was responsible". Well who else could it have been taking pictures and shouting at Saddam as he's hanged? Does the execution room share an office with a minicab firm?

Witty, yes; shining a light on some typical politician weaselling; yes. All very good. But it misses the point a bit.

The execution was the act of an elected government. That is - bear with me while I talk in real abstract - the people of the land nominate some of their number to act as their servants to take care of running stuff. It's done according to the law which is - let's stretch the theory and ideals further - the people's ideas of how they should behave and run things.

Now, I know the Iraqi government is not a fair representation of the Iraqi people, indeed no government ever really acts as the servants of its people. As Bill Hicks said, all governments are liars and murderers. I'm under no illusions there.

But Prescott is an elected politician so he is supposed to believe that servant of the people stuff.

The hanging was carried out under Iraqi law. It was, in Prescottworld, the will of the people. Why on earth shouldn't they be allowed to see what they're doing? If I give you my wallet and send you to the shop to get me some groceries then I have a right to see what you've brought back.

An official of Iraq's Justice Ministry said... "The Iraqi government is going to have an investigation into what happened. This operation should be done with the highest standards of discipline and with respect for the condemned man..."

You're killing someone in cold blood. How much more disrespectful can you get?

A few taunts really aren't going to make any difference to the reading on a disrespectometer.

It reminds me of the Pro-Life Alliance (again with Bill Hicks; 'you're pro-life? What does that make me?'). They were a bunch of overfunded anti-abortionists who put up candidates in the 1997 general election. They were never serious about getting anyone elected, but if you stand in enough constituencies you get an automatic right to a Party Political Broadcast on TV.

At the eleventh hour the broadcast, full of footage of abortions, was censored. The Pro-Life Alliance made superb use of it and I'd argue they made an even more impactful film. The deleted scenes were replaced with a statement saying that they'd been removed for legal reasons as they 'would offend public taste and decency', and if it would offend us to see something then we shouldn't be permitting it and paying for it.

I think they're right. Not about banning abortion. If they want to do that they can fuck off and live with the Amish, or at least find happy homes for every unloved unwanted child first. But they were dead right about demolishing the hypocritical discrepancies between what we do and what we're prepared to feel responsible for.

The people of Iraq should be allowed to see the hanging of Saddam Hussain, and anyone else they kill. If we find it distasteful then maybe we should be opposing hangings rather than the filming.

Adolf Eichmann

A poem by Thomas Merton, as told by Lenny Bruce

My name is Adolf Eichmann
The jews came everyday to vat they thought would be fun in the showers
The mothers were quite ingenious,
they vould take the children and hide them in bundles of clothing

They vere quiet soon because ve sealed them in, battened down the hatches, looked through the portholes and they would drop to the floor

They vere quiet.

Then we’d walk in, take off their clean Jewish love rings, remove the teeth and hair for strategic defence.

I made soap out of them.

They hung me in full view of the prison yard.

And people vould say ‘Adolf Eichmann was a beast!’

Nein, I vas a soldier.

‘No no, there are soldiers and soldiers, this was a beast!’

But I did a conscientious day’s work, I vatched through the portholes, saw every jew burned and turned into soap.

Do you people think yourselves better
because you burned your enemies
at long distances with missiles?

Without ever seeing what you’d done to them?

Hiroshima
Auf wiedersehen

in defence of the long-term unemployed

The government have, once again, promised a crackdown on people who've been on the dole for a long time. Thing is, full employment's never going to happen again, there are more people than jobs now, so we might as well leave those who are happy on the dole alone.

Such an admission raises issues of what the welfare state's there for; it's not just an insurance scheme for when we have misfortune, it's about ensuring the best minimum standard of living for all.

I've done a post about it over at The Sharpener, called In Defence of The Long-Term Unemployed

[NB. No comments here: the place to leave them's over at The Sharpener]