Wheels come off Magic Grandpa live on air

They take Holocaust Denial quite seriously here in Austria. Back in 2017 one of Jeremy Corbyn's party members, as Andrew Neil pointed out to him, did the unthinkable -

Then let me give you the case of Lesley Perrin. She was a Labour Party member. She posted a video denying the Holocaust and questioned whether the six million figure was accurate. And what did the Labour Party do? It gave her a written warning. No expulsion, no zero tolerance, just a written warning.

The Austrians have a law, the 1947 Verbotgesetz, under which idiots are still being imprisoned for giving the raised arm or being as utterly crass as Lesley Perrin. In fact Holocaust Denial here will earn you from between one and twenty years in prison. And the law, under §3h, specifically has all the bases covered - "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media". David Irving got three years for it. Lesley got a written warning from Jeremy. I wonder just how long the European Arrest Warrant, of which Lesley undoubtedly approves, will remain in force?

Corbyn's humiliation last night was an absolute classic. I watched it twice; the first time I really couldn't quite believe it was happening. It flayed the pretence and camouflage off him like the skin from a petulant saint leaving him utterly naked in the glare of the studio lights. Michael Deacon in the Telegraph has the best of the adjectives this morning - "waffly, defensive, confused, crabby, and clueless ... So tetchy, so sullen, so huffy. So sniffily passive-aggressive.... pitiful, and self-pitying" - and the best of it

He was behaving like the world’s oldest teenager: the smouldering victimhood, the muttering martyrdom. At any moment, I half-expected him to flounce out of his chair, stalk out of the studio, and stomp upstairs to his bedroom.

There will be some nervousness I expect at CCHQ at Boris' turn, which will be on 3rd/4th December if it happens - and it's likely that it must. Nigel must be conflicted, both relieved that BrexitCorp™'s polling means he's unlikely to be asked and miffed that, erm, he's unlikely to be asked. 

I was going to do a piece on Localist measures in the Conservative manifesto this morning but it would be as insipid as Earl Grey against Corby's live, on-air self-destruction.

CorbynNet - just wrong on so many levels

I pay about £17 a month for unlimited interweb at a consistent speed of 30MB - plenty for me, with Netflix, a couple of internet radios on all day and normal browsing. And neither a strand of copper nor a whisper of fibre optic in sight - it's all LTE 4G mobile, my router having a SIM card slot rather than an RJ11 socket. I don't need 5G, and as I don't own any sort of huge screen I don't need faster speeds. I don't even watch Netflix that much - last night, with the fire playing in the stove, I sank into the comfort of  a Portillo rail journeys DVD, an early one, before he started to camp it up for his considerable gay fan club. I don't think I'm untypical of the older internet user.

Clearly I think Labour's £100bn nationalised internet offer was aimed at the young, but to my mind it's mistaken on at least three levels. Firstly, is the UK seriously proposing to dig up all those streets and roads again to lay fibre into dwellings, rather than just into junction boxes which use copper for the final connection? Isn't this a bit, erm, steampunk, when the entire sparsely populated alpine region of Europe gets 4G using mobile?

Secondly, an anyone who has ever compared internet tariffs will ask, what does 'free' and 'fast' mean? Is it 10MB speeds for up to 2GB a month? Or 67MB for unlimited use? You see, Mr Corbyn clearly doesn't quite understand that demand for something free is pretty well infinite - which is why we have to ration free stuff like the NHS. And St Greta will not be pleased - the interweb already takes more than 10% of our power consumption.

Thirdly and most importantly, what sort of morons would vote to voluntarily hand control of their internet access to an overweening nanny government department? One journalist asked at Labour's press conference yesterday whether national CorbynNet would ban porn - and got a weaselly answer about controls to prevent harm to users. That means censorship. Now the young generation I know uses stuff like Tor, bitstreaming, online gaming, the greyer bits of the web where we olduns never venture and, I am pretty sure, lots of porn. Everything in fact that Labour's authoritarian illiberal nannies would want to ban. They'd have us all watching documentary films about cheese-making co-operatives.