Jail for corrupt Lobbyist

Not alas the UK, whose pin-striped crims are immune from any action by Cameron's crookedly complicit administration, but little Austria again. Political lobbyist Peter Hochenegger was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, ex BZÖ party deputy Klaus Wittnauer to 24 months plus 4 suspended, recruiter Kurt S. got five months in prison, plus 25 months probation, and the former spokesman of Gastinger, Christoph Pöchinger, will serve eight months plus 16 month suspended.

At the heart of the scandal was EU funding paid to Bulgaria; Hochegger and his crew helped Bulgarian politicians from both the Bulgarian Socialist Party BSP and the centre-right ruling GERB party cream off some €1.5m of EU funds in contracts, €960k of which was then paid in bribes to the Austrian BZÖ.

The Bulgarians have yet to put their politicians on trial. 

Hochegger will be in good company in Austria's grim prison system; the place is filling up with bent bankers and members of the political class. In UK prisons, the lags learn new ways to break into cars; perhaps in Austria the equivalent skill will be off-shore money laundering.

NO to 'State' funding

With the party conferences kicking off, surely only the BBC will be devoting more than a mobile cam crew and a local correspondent on their doings (mobile in case a better story involving a donkey or an amusing cat breaks while they're in the area). The Speccie comments "The website ConservativeHome (which now stages its own conferences) last month surveyed Conservative constituency associations which do return membership figures. It ads up to just under 60,000 paid-up members. This suggests total membership is unlikely to exceed 100,000 — less than half of the 253,600 when Cameron was elected leader."

If this is the case the total membership of the big three may not be the 1% of the electorate of 45m that I have been quoting - but a devastatingly irrelevant 0.5%. 

But of course the BBC and the other channels will continue to give these non-events of the most minority of small-membership organisations in the country undue coverage. Their future depends on the continuance of a central metropolitan political class divorced from the people they govern. And now it really won't be long before we have to subsidise them even further from our taxes as their membership flatlines - unless, as with me, this is one line that I draw in the sand. The answer remains NO.

A history lesson for Snr. Barroso

So Mr Barroso thinks that a Europe of sovereign, independent nations is a continent poised on the brink of repeating the Great War. Only the Empire, the EU, the European Federation can guarantee peace it seems. Perhaps it's a perspective distorted by the growing hostility towards the EU from the peoples of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary. Increasingly, the nations of Europe are interested in training their artillery on only a single target - the Berlaymont in Brussels. 

Ninety-nine years and eleven months ago the unwilling subject of a land held within an unwieldy Federation of nation states with different languages, cultures and peoples protested against the European Union (an alliance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany) by shooting one of its bosses. The 1914 EU was headed by the equivalent of Mr Barroso and Mr Rumpoy, a German emperor whose ignorance was hidden by bluff and bluster and a weak Austrian emperor who dithered. The 1914 EU, like the 2013 one, saw the domination of the European land-mass as a legitimate objective 'to secure peace and prosperity', even if it meant suffocating a historic diversity of national and cultural identities. And in 2013 just as in 1914 the evil of the European Empire has the potential to be a cause of war - not its preventative. If Serbia had been free and independent, Franz Ferdinand would not have had a reason to be in Sarajevo and Gavrilo Princip would not have shot him. 

Snr Barroso                                       Kaiser Wilhelm II

 

Self-serving gobshites get kicking

Yesterday was quite a good day to see some of the most loathsome self-serving gobshites in public life getting a kicking. First off was 45684 Huhne, fresh from 'B' Wing, who had sold the Guardian a story that he was wholly innocent and all his crimes are the fault of others. Although the Guardian believed it (it is always characteristic of congenital liars that they are praeternaturally gullible) Huhne was torn to shreds by both the Telegraph and the Mail for 'a self-serving and often self-pitying 900-word article'.

The best however was the Commons PAC under the formidable chairmanship of Comrade Margaret Hoxha. Lined up in front of her like delinquent schoolboys before the head, or a row of billiard balls ready for potting, were the smuggest and fattest of the BBC's Golden Triangle. Patten demonstrated how a man of his experience avoids a three-year stretch by gentle patrician condescension; he barely managed to avoid congratulating Hoxha for doing quite a good job for a young woman. For the rest, it was a public spectacle of Itchy and Scratchy mutual denunciation and veiled recrimination as claws slashed and fur flew, encouraged from time to time by Hoxha's Senate members. The Leader's own particular spite was reserved for Lucy Adams, erstwhile head of 'HR', sporting an attitude and a silver thumb-ring more suited to an argumentative teen than a public executive. Last time Adams had denied knowledge of a document that she actually helped author; at the first hint of a repetition the Leader snapped 'I'm not having any more lies this afternoon'

But Lucy Adams hadn't quite done with lying; perhaps it was her BBC training. 'Did you refer to these excessive payments as 'sweeteners'? asked the Senate. 'I have absolutely no recollection of that at all; it's not a word I would use' lied the egregious Ms Adams fluently. Unfortunately, it turned out a Senate member had a leaked email from an Adams subordinate in which she had employed precisely that word. Chairman Hoxha commented to the effect that Adams was only distantly acquainted with the concept of truthfulness to which I swear I heard a teenage girl respond ' That is sooooo unfair!' 

Overall, job done. The BBC's bosses came across as fat, greasy, manipulative squanderers and spendthrifts grown sclerotic on long lunches and unaccountability; their purple faces, bluster, finger jabbing and insincerities condemned them just as certainly as confessions from water-boarding.    

Germany's UKIP hopes tactics will win votes

Germany's version of UKIP, the AfD or Alternative for Germany party, has reached the same understanding as our domestic party as to the best way to electoral success. Former members of the right-wing parties are banned; former National Democrats absolutely, former Republican Party members subject to a test of their xenophobia. The policy of keeping party images free of skinheads with face-tattoos is allied to the party showing off its academics; Der Spiegel reports that the party is able to find resonance in liberal, middle-class and conservative circles. "Sympathizing with the AfD isn't frowned upon." 

Der Spiegel reports the campaign ads 'are as threatening as a commercial for the local optician. It features outraged, but pleasant-seeming citizens -- a father and his daughter, a newspaper-reading businesswoman and a cyclist -- looking thoughful while asking questions. "Why is all our money going to Greece, instead of being invested in damaged streets and bridges?", one person asks. "Why are pensioners left with an ever-smaller amount of money in their wallets? Who is paying for the debt that our politicians are accruing?", asks another.'

Coming from nowhere, the party now has 10,000 members - and the outside chance of a seat in the Bundestag by the end of the month. 

BBC bosses must do jail time

Chris Patten lied to Parliament, says former BBC boss Mark Thompson, who has given the members of Parliament's Public Accounts Committee a detailed dossier of Pattens lies when last he gave evidence before the committee. The BBC Trust has responded that Patten may well have lied but he didn't make the payments - a big boy did. All the illegal overpayments were made during the chairmanship of Sir Michael Lyons, who claims he knows nothing about anything and no-one even told him what the letters 'BBC' stood for or what the organisation did. Lyons claims he took the job for the good lunches and short hours and says he just had to sign stuff and was only hired because he owned his own fountain pen and had an Alpha-plus signature with swirls. 

MPs will have to try to get both sense and truth out of a series of BBC ex-and current bosses next week - concepts largely unfamiliar to anyone who works at senior level at the State propaganda ministry. BBC bosses will lie through their pants to Parliament basically because they think they're better than MPs and have the moral right to do so.

In return, Parliament must ensure that some of them do jail time. Three years each for Chris Patten and Michael Lyons should do the trick, with eighteen months for Thompson and Entwistle (Who he?).

Why not?

The Silence of the Damned

What have crack-whore abuser Hugh Grant, mendacious rag The Guardian and TV-tax thieves the BBC got in common? Apart from a mutual loathing of Rupert Murdoch, all will keep absolutely silent this week as Parliament has forced SOCA to release the identities of the banks, city law firms and big corporates who have used criminal methods of phone hacking, burglary, theft and criminal trespass to gain competitive advantage. Stephen Glover in the Mail has the full story.

The stinking injustice of jailing journalists for phone hacking but letting lawyers and bankers go free cloys the nostrils with the putrescent ordure of establishment cover up and self interest. Even little Austria can manage to jail bent bankers, but this mother of democracies, with an electoral system now so corrupt and so far beyond civilised standards that Michael Pinto-Duschinsky has described it as third-world, can't put a single pin-striped miscreant behind bars.   

We should hang our heads in shame before the world.

Lobbying Bill; Raedwald unscathed

It seems that the Raedwald blog will not have to register as a political party after all, and can continue to lecture the miscreants of the Political Class without further interference from the Electoral Commission.

Which is a pity, really. I was rather looking forward to encouraging 44,600,000 voters (the UK electorate less the 400,000 who are members of the big 3) each to start their own party with one member and all register with the Electoral Commission and submit the wad of forms and returns required ....

Actually, the poor Electoral Commission have already said they won't even be able to cope with the limited restrictions already made. That's a shame.

Nazis

The silly season is never complete without a few Nazi stories and this Summer has been no different. Apart from the revelatory sort of stories carried by the redtops - that the Archbishop of Canterbury's uncle was an SS Colonel for example, or that Kate Middleton's great aunt was Himmler's mistress* - are those more serious stories that continue to pose moral questions. 

The first is what Germany should do about the crumbling Nuremberg stadium, background to Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 'Triumph of the Will', a film still banned in Germany, by the way, though presumably Germans may watch it as freely as we can on Youtube. Stripped of its swastikas after the war, the stadium continues to serve as a useful large public space, but no-one has been brave enough to maintain the Nazi-era stonework. Now they're agonising over whether government money should be spent to preserve it.

Secondly is the row around a German pulp magazine entitled Der Landser, or roughly 'The Squaddie'. Published since 1957, the mag carries stories of Wehrmacht battles, fights and general soldiering from the ranks, showing the rough humour, kameraderie and essential humanity of members of the Heer, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine as members of the international brotherhood of coarse soldiery, but without overtly glorifying Nazism or risking a breach of Germany's draconian anti-Nazi laws. The mag's owner, the Bauer Media Group, which also publishes Kerrang!, Bella and Take a Break, is in the process of taking over Absolute radio - formerly Virgin radio - but an appeal has been made to Ofcom from Bruce Fireman (and unidentified backers?) to halt the takeover whilst Der Landser is published.  

Thirdly is a row about this September's 'Homecoming' remembrance ceremony held by Austrian former Wehrmacht members in a ruined church on the Ulrichsberg in Kärnten. The site is isolated, the roads are poor and the old boys aren't quite as quick on their feet as they were in '39 - '45, and so in years past the Austrian Army has laid on transport and assistance, provided a band and some uniformed senior officers, whilst the local Councils have provided grant funding to the organisers, the Ulrichsberggemeinschaft. In 2012 the organisers invited a former Waffen-SS member to speak, the first time the ceremony had been opened to this organisation banned as 'criminal' by the Nuremberg court. As a result, this year the funding has been withdrawn and the Bundesheer instructed not to assist. The blow falls hardest on those old Landser, much diminished in number, who don't have that many more remembrance days left. From 1957 Germany allowed the wearing of '39 - '45 military gallantry and bravery awards as long as the swastikas were removed, and these old chaps wear their iron crosses, combat infantry clasps and wound badges with pride.   

Not easy, is it?
* Neither true, as far as I know

KFC heir attacks Brits

Kentucky Fried Chicken heir and New York resident Andrew Roberts has taken time out from his busy schedule to lambast the UK in a piece for the Mail. Roberts, a Blair adorer who said "for Churchill, apotheosis came in 1940; for Tony Blair, it will come when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam's henchmen", displays an equivalent quality of judgement on Syria.

"And nothing qualifies as worse oppression than having at least 1,429 innocents slaughtered – 400 of those children" writes Roberts, perhaps unaware that this is about the monthly total of innocent civilians killed by sectarian car bombs in Iraq for each month since Blair's invasion, but perhaps Roberts doesn't count dead Iraqis. 

Roberts rather disingenuously continues "The only people to have used this monstrous weapon since then have been Benito Mussolini against the Ethiopians in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler in his war against the Jews in the 1940s, and Saddam Hussein in his massacre of the Kurds in the 1980s. In each case Britain was in the van of nations that led to their downfall", suggesting that in each case the use of poison gas played some part in  Britain's motivation for war. It did not. In any of the three cases. Roberts goes on, after declaring the British to be a nation of moral relativists, to write "I seriously doubt whether, if the Argentinians invaded the Falklands tomorrow or Spain invaded Gibraltar, the British people would clamour for the military action needed to liberate either of those places." demonstrating an ignorance of British public opinion so profound and so complete as to be worthy of a New York cab driver. 

All in all, Roberts' piece is an embarrassing, cringe-making and simply bad piece of writing that aspires to polemic but lacks the Viagra needed to rise from the dull and prone. Perhaps he should have consulted a historian before submitting it.

The coming storm

I am struck by the similarity between two maps reproduced below. The first shows the divisions between the various authorities and sects of Christianty in the Thirty Years War and the second those between the various authorities and sects of Islam today. 

 

Of course our proclivity to either lay down our lives or have them taken unwillingly from us in the name of either Catholicism or Protestantism has gone, even in those parts of Ulster where faith is now just a proxy for power. The Thirty Years War left Europe devastated, with populations decimated, diseased and starving, infrastructure laid waste and the lands plundered by brigands while law and justice were ridden under the hooves of warhorses. Out of the mess came, after time, the second enlightenment and the changes that would make Europe dominant in the world. In the year 1600 the Christian and Islamic worlds were just about neck-and-neck in medicine, science, art, literature and technology. By 1700 we had left them as far behind as savages poking in the dirt with sticks. 

The Islamic world is packed full of young men of prime fighting age who have no jobs, no land and no futures. Median age in Europe is well over 40; in the Islamic world it's about 27. The Sunni - Shia civil wars have already started, and like the European battles of the 1600s the war will roll back and forth across the middle east, this year in Syria, next in Yemen, then the Gulf, then Lebanon again until even Turkey is engulfed in war and the battles reach Europe's borders. Millions are going to die. Whether it's better to be shot, blown up by a missile, gassed, decapitated by bread-knife or dismembered by rusty Panga I don't know but that's the fate of millions of Muslims in the coming years, until they reach an endogenous realisation that the nuances in dogma that separate the sects aren't worth the life of a single Muslim. 

Already the refugees are seeking Europe's peace and shelter. De Spiegel leads with the German reaction against the Afghanis, Iraqis, Egyptians, Libyans, Malinese. And now no doubt the Syrians are already on their way. The defence and foreign policy issues that face this government are far far greater than either Cameron or Miliband give any hint of understanding.

The Right Result

Yesterday's parliamentary vote, and the Prime Minister's response, was exactly the right result. 

1. The JIC report was not convincing
2. Even the extract of the legal opinion was too equivocal; it's the law officer's job to set out exactly what the criteria are, not jump to judgement on whether they've been fulfilled
3. Cameron has gained from this, Miliband the 'copper bottomed shit' has lost
4. This is not a surprise to the US as some asinine journos claim; exactly the same doubts prevail in the US - but Obama can ignore them
5. This is not about Syrian dead, it's about Obama's credibility, having told Assad 'Use chemical weapons one more time and we'll give you a smacking'
6. If the UK and US really wanted to hurt Assad personally, they'd hack his and his family's bank accounts and remove the billions he's stolen. Firing cruise missiles at his chemical dumps isn't going to do much.

My unlikely star from yesterday's debate was Egregious George - who spoke with real passion and eloquence. I may not agree with Galloway's content but by God can he make a speech.

Syria - What Parliament is for

Blair may drag his putrescent fly-blown corpse away from the millionaires' plastic palaces for long enough to pronounce that of course the UK should launch an illegal war against Syria, and Hague may convolut such weasel words to suggest that we can ignore the UN Security Council if they don't agree with us (so long as the government's legal officers give him a written sick note) and Cameron may make comforting ear-licky arse-sniffing poodle noises at Obama, but the fact remains that it shouldn't be their decision. Especially Blair - he's dead, and equality for Zombies is a step too far even for this government.

MPs are right in claiming this as an issue for Parliamentary debate - and not just the Commons. I'm in at least 650 minds over Syria, as many shades of grey as there are around the issues. If anyone thinks the matter is monochrome they're deluded. So it's time for one of those once-in-a-decade moments when R4 broadcasts a live debate from the Commons from mid afternoon until late at night and I can sit in an armchair and listen. 

It's not that MPs are wiser, more gifted or better informed than any 600 citizens picked at random. And having that idiot narcissist dwarf in the Chair is a drawback. But it's one of our most ancient methods of resolving a knotty issue and it's stood the test of time for precisely one reason - it works.   

Merkel's plan to steal UK cash for Greece

The poor German voter, though likely to vote Angela back into power next month, is becoming increasingly unwilling to bear the brunt of Greece's next bailout - likely, when it comes to it, to be significantly larger than the figure now being 'leaked' by the Commission. And since German investors also have the most to lose from a 'haircut' on the Greek banks this is not too popular an option either. The latest wheeze is to increase an EU handout of structural funds - ERDF as we know it in the UK - by the value of the bailout, allowing Greece to use existing domestic funds for the bailout. Except of course that non-Euro nations such as the UK pay for ERDF. 

ERDF has traditionally been the mechanism by which tax funds from northern Europe are transferred by the EU to the Mafia and other criminal organisations and to bent and corrupt politicians across the Olive belt. The remainder is used to build motorways going nowhere and unused airports. Greece is a nation notoriously infested with bent and corrupt politicians, who no doubt have recently been feeling the pinch in the proceeds of theft, fraud and peculation. The latest bail out will be designed to buy-back their loyalty to the Commission. Getting the UK to contribute to this is the icing on the cake for Merkel.  

Bank bosses to start jail terms

The top managers of troubled bank Hypo Alpe Adria, which had to be nationalised by the Austrian government to save it from collapse, have exhausted the appeal process and are now due to start their jail sentences. Ex-CEO Wolfgang Kulterer will serve three and a half years, his assistants Günther Striedinger and Gerhard Kucher four years and tax advisor Hermann Gabriel will serve four and a half years. 

The former high-flying fat-cats could do their time in either the grim Stadlau jail, or the delightful renaissance Karlau in Graz, where the Nazis guillotined hundreds during the war, and the British hanged a few dozen war criminals after it. It seems the Austrians don't have cosy open prisons for the Ernest Saunders class.

And if the Austrians are jailing their delinquent bankers, why the hell aren't we? Fred Goodwin should be in Barlinnie. Why is Cameron protecting the guilty men?

The information generation

I can still be astonished by the internet's capacity for storing and sharing information; I've just found a film clip of my father commanding a parade, sometime between returning to Europe from Palestine and leaving again for Korea. Previously, all I'd seen was a 10" x 8" still photo, now clearly taken from a film frame. There's no sound, but it's still astonishing. And curious that it should be in the public realm and I just another anonymous viewer. But that's the net. 

This new generation cannot imagine how we coped before the net, when searching for information was physical, often involving travel. I remember too clearly my hours spent in the PRO at Kew and in the Newspaper archive at Colindale, fighting for a desk at the BL or amongst the great unread book stacks kept at Imperial as part of the National Science collection, in the IWM's annex driving one of the huge old Steenbeck editing desks or with county archivists in run-down records centres and always, always, with voluminous paper 'finding aids' a single volume of which could weigh a stone. Those days weren't better - just slower, more frustrating and harder. Just so long as they don't throw away the original material, digitisation is fine with me. 

I realise now it's been over a week - more like ten days - since I've had the TV on. I see that BBC bosses face theft and fraud charges after being caught fiddling their payoffs. As the Telegraph reminds us that 10% of criminal prosecutions are for not paying the TV tax, and the Mail reviews the £30 Chrome dongle. Surely it can't be long before even this wet and dim government realises that the licence fee is unsustainable? I'm not hopeful, though - even a wet and dim culture minister can introduce a new 'information levy' on ISP charges.

GCHQ: Why we need Murdoch

So the Guardian, that great defender of common liberty, that doughty defender of press freedom, that powerful champion of the voiceless, caved in like a little crybaby girl the minute the secret police came knocking at the door. Yes, of course, Mr Secret Policemen, the Editor cried - watch us smash up all our own computers! See! Look, I'll smash my iPhone too, and my wristwatch! 

The paper that loves Leveson, the tax-fiddling rag that wants to keep the lid on Hugh Grant's encounters with crack-whores, home to the certifiably lunatic Lady Toynbee, is no more than a fully compliant member of the big-State establishment. If there was a competition to become the Pravda and Isvestia of Britain's political class the Guardian would win it by miles. A paper so socialist-liberal that its balls have been re-absorbed and regrown as Cameronesque man-tits, a tittle-tattle newsrag with all the temerity of a goose, a chiselling, crooked, distorted little dungheap of second rate writers and fourth rate intellects and not even fit for use as arse-wipe. 

Dear God - and they wonder why we need Murdoch.

Seminal World Literature

There is a device used by Guardian journalists that goes something like: "Poets of international renown, including Robert Browning, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Onku Okwame and Lord Byron ...". Lola Okolosie gives it an outing this morning, as in "...authors such as Anita Desai, Chinua Achebe, and Harper Lee".

The issue is over the inclusion of  "seminal world literature written in English", of which I am greatly in favour. However, this is not an exercise to demonstrate that those from the ex-colonies have mastered the mother-language, but one to demonstrate that literature of fine quality can originate from outside England. From North America has come a canon of literature principally in the form of fiction that has transformed the genre; and then Alan Paton from South Africa, Marcus Clarke and Thomas Keneally from Australia, Canada's Michael Ondaatje and Ireland's Samuel Beckett have all give us works that belong on the shelves of every Englishman aspiring to erudition. And there are many, many others. Including Anita Desai and Harper Lee.

The key to inclusion is in the word 'seminal'. To be seminal a work of literature must be not only original in style, form or content but must be influential in the subsequent development of the genre. Any other criteria indicate only that the term has been applied in the context of its alternative Onanistic meaning. 

HS2 Madness

The more I look at HS2 the more I'm convinced it's an utter mistake. For Keynsians looking at the proverbial helicopter dropping fivers at random it's a failure - the spending will come too late and be too uncontrolled. For Brummies hoping to attract more visitors or customers it will be a failure - the line will work in reverse, drawing even more trade, money and employment to London and the South East. The government's travel-time / cost figures are fatuous and close to the point where even the most mendacious of ministers can't defend them. Saving seven minutes on time spent in the train but spending ten extra minutes navigating the new concourses laid out like retail game-traps isn't a good deal. Then of course there's the noise, mess, destruction and upheaval, and by far the greatest cost - that of lost opportunities.

Forget Edinburgh's incompetent stupidity; light rail has been a success when it's built by the English. The DLR, Croydon's trams ad the new rail lines linking south and east London have been spectacularly successful. It doesn't have to be fast or expensive - using disused track routes and linking with portions of mainline trackspace, these bendy little routes weaving in and out of later development are heaving with happy passengers. 

An Ipswich to Colchester light rail route via Hadleigh, Bentley and Capel would end the misery for thousands; the extension in north Norfolk of lines closed by Beeching and similar elsewhere are all schemes for which there are no shortage of private operators in the wings; all they need is a bit of encouragement, a spot of cash and a little bit of Parliamentary time for enabling legislation. 

But creating small, successful, independent light rail companies is simply not on the agenda of a government obsessed by the big corporates, obsessed by the sexiness of anything measured in tens of billions (and the prospect of some of that funding, er, 'sticking' later on) and obsessed by the stupidities of Stalinist grossism.

A greeting from Bucharest

Vă mulțumim tovarășul Dave!
Suntem bogat, bogat, bogat!
 ( Thank you Comrade Dave! We are Rich, Rich, Rich!)

 

UKIP and the Bloggers

If you've been following Richard North's last couple of posts on EU Referendum, or those of Autonomous Mind, both Blogs the editorial position of which is not so distant from this, the pain is almost palpable. Their disappointment at what they think UKIP should have been and the reality is intense. 

And yes, I've no illusions about either Nigel Farage or Godfrey Bloom. 

The point, though, is this. Richard and AM are formidable intellects who understand clearly the law and process around any modification of our EU membership. The rest of us aren't, and are mostly looking to give Cameron a massive kicking in 2014 for all the lies, the reversals and the disappointments. And the bigger the kicking he gets in 2014, the more chance that many of us will return to vote Cameron in 2015.

That's the reality, simple and unsophisticated. And it really wouldn't matter if Farage started wearing Lederhosen and an Onion seller's beret, became gay and played a descant recorder - he'd still be the vehicle, the mechanism, for delivering the kicking. Until 2014, he's teflon coated.

Underpants man self-destructs

Underpants Man Chris Bryant, who it turns was not only an MP but some sort of opposition official, self-destructed on 'Today' yesterday when he denied everything he'd previously said on immigration. It turns out it was all his fault after all; he and his underpants party chums firstly made Welfare too attractive, then opened the floodgates to millions of foreigners to make up for it. Mr Underpants tried at first to blame W.H. Smiths for the crisis, then admitted it was all down to him and Gordon Brown after all.

Rowson in the Guardian captures it nicely ....

Cameron's 'Localism Lite' will cost him 2015

Cameron had the opportunity in 2010 to push big-bang Localism right to the top of the government's agenda; it had a fair wind from the LibDems and there was little that Labour could argue against without arguing against democracy, choice, freedom of local communities and the like. Instead, he bottled it. He chose big government and Whitehall centralism, and his 'Localism Lite' Act wasn't worth its weight in bum-wipe. That poor judgement is now set to cost him the 2015 election. 

The Guardian sets out explicitly this morning how the ethnic minority vote boosted by Labour's floodgate immigration policy now determines the result in 168 marginals. Ethnic minorities want to vote on race lines - for their own caste, faith or tribe, but lacking a party to reflect that first choice will vote for Labour instead. At the ratio of 68% to 16% who vote Conservative. And this is indicative of the potential future fragmentation of British politics if we allow the political class and their allies the big corporates to continue to govern under a Whitehall, centralist command and control model. 

Any UKIP supporters who think PR is better than FPTP should think again. PR will give us a Muslim Party, a Sikh Party, a Sri Lankan Freedom Party, a Gay Political Alliance and so on; every ethnic, racial and religious interest group in the country will form a party to catch the vote drop from the dying old parties. Politics will become an exercise to see which group can grab the most loot for their supporters and PR will be the vehicle and the mechanism for gross peculation. 

The only way to counter the breakup of our country on tribal lines is to devolve real decision making, including decisions over most taxes and most spending, to the local level. Very, very few lowest tier authorities in the country will fall straight into the corruption and nepotism typical of Pakistani or Bangladeshi politics and those that do will self-correct. 

Had Cameron done so in 2010 he may now be looking at a cautious victory in 2015 rather than the humiliating wipe-out that the Tories now face.    

Party memberships

Douglas Carswell's guess that Tory party membership is now 'south' of 100,000 is probably a tad too pessimistic; ConHome's guess of 100k - 130k is probably near the truth. Labour's membership will be marginally higher, the LibDems probably now down to 40,000 or fewer. UKIP's membership is up to about 30,000.

With an electorate in the UK of 45m, that's a combined political membership of less than 1%. Fewer than 450,000 people see any advantage in joining a political party, compared to over 4m who happily pay the National Trust's membership fee every year. Perhaps the Tories could open Michael Heseltine to the public, or host cream teas in Mr Pickles. 

That little prat Bercow thinks low numbers are down to 'arrogant ministers' rather than to dickhead Speakers, but he would say that, wouldn't he?

Be scared of these numbers. The lower they go, the greater the chance of our taxes being stolen to fund these dying private clubs. The party funding issue is still bubbling along.

Godfrey Bloom graduates to 'Character'

With his remarks about Bongo-Bongo land, UKIP's Godfrey Bloom has just made the transition from I'm -not-sure-about-that-bloke to 'Character', with a licence to voice the most outrageous truths to the apoplectic fury of the liberal left. You see, just about everyone in the UK knows the problem with foreign aid is that it's stolen by foreign politicians; Bloom's image of a grinning African minister in Ray Bans and and an ill-fitting Armani suit with a wife as fat as butter spending Guardian-readers donations with a Platinum card in Antibes' chic Street of Bling is as familiar to us as, well, a dishrag foreign aid minister pretending that aid is for humanitarian purposes. 

Likewise, to a nation seeing its Afghanistan veterans now getting redundancy notices Bloom's comment "F18s for Pakistan. We need a new squadron of F18s. Who's got the squadrons? Pakistan, where we send the money." strikes a common-sense chord.

Ministers and shadow ministers should be wary of labelling Bloom a bigot; as Brown found, to do so when the 'bigoted' views are nothing but the widely recognised truth can be dangerously self-destructive.

Al Qaeda to complain to Leveson?

It is understood that top Al Qaeda bosses are set to submit a complaint to Lord Leveson in relation to the 'hacking' of their phone conversations, which has led to the closure of British and US embassies across the Middle East. 

'Hacked Off' spokesman Hugh Grant said yesterday "These international terrorists have a perfect right to plot mass destruction and global murder without the Murdoch press repeating every word of what are essentially private conversations. (flick hair, look winsome)"

Gibraltar: The sign of an economy close to collapse

The more Spain ramps-up measures to blockade Gibraltar, the more you can be sure that the crippled Spanish economy is closer to another existential crisis. The play-acting and sabre-rattling by the desperate Spanish government is just empty puff and display behaviour. You have to remember that this is a nation whose national sport is goading a large, powerful animal and then running away.

Meanwhile I shall indulge my favourite Spanish treat for a Sunday afternoon in the garden; a well-chilled 50cl bottle of La Gitana. Not only should we keep Gibraltar, but if we bail-out this stricken little country again, we should certainly make a bid for Sanlucar de Barrameda. 

Pushback

A couple of stories in the news that show that the fat cat troughers aren't getting it all their own way must at least send a frisson of warning to all those still robbing public funds. In Caerphilly the then Chief Executive Andrew O'Sullivan and his mate were arrested for awarding both themselves and another score of top-troughers a gut-busting pay increase in the face of a three year pay freeze for the rest of the Council. Plod is not pursuing charges, the unlawful pay increases have been reversed and they've brought back the old CE rather than shoeing-in O'Sullivan's bent mate Nigel Barnett. 

And top-trougher Phillippa Williamson, who featured here as the work-at-home former SFO boss who paid herself a near half-million pound pension top up is today considering whether to pay the money back in an effort to avoid prosecution. New SFO boss David Green has written to three former senior managers  inviting them to return the money, but you can be sure it is more than a polite request. The move to find broken laws and thus get Plod involved is a smart one - and ex-SFO boss Phillippa will no doubt be considering the possibility of being arrested by grinning plods in a dawn raid on that idyllic Lake District hideaway of hers.

One problem remains; who will arrest the many top cops who have awarded themselves and their chums gut-busting pay and bonus deals that make the PM's wedge look like an office trainee's salary?

And now the news in Slavic ...

Take a look at the war memorial below. It's pretty typical of many I have seen in Germany and Austria but a little different to those found in our English towns and villages. Typically, ours will have a substantial list of Great War dead and a shorter list, perhaps a third the length, of those that died in World War II. German memorials are reversed, the ratios of 2m military dead in WWI to 7m military dead in WWII shown by the red and green outlines. Many like this one will also have an auxiliary panel listing victims of civil war, Nazism, bombing or other. 

Reich losses in WWII were tremendous - and largely incurred in the East, in the great battles in Russia and in final defence of Germany. Even when the shooting stopped, the deaths didn't; half a million German soldiers died in Soviet POW camps, their names here amongst those in the block in the bottom right with no date of death. Germany is still building new war cemeteries in Russia, the current one to hold 400,000 dead - half the UK's war dead total for WWI. Of course the cost in Soviet and Russian lives was even more horrendous, costing whole generations. 

Now I'm certainly no historical revisionist and hold David Irving in academic contempt, but one can't help but pose the question to what extent Western Europe has gained from the German losses in WWII in emasculating the Soviet Union to a point from which it never recovered; and is the victory in 1989 that we ascribe to Thatcher and Reagan really due to Albert Speer and Wilhelm Keitel? 

Without those 7m German war dead, would we be hearing the news in Slavic? 

When did a Fire Engine last pass you on blues?

The banshee wail of emergency vehicle sirens is a daily occurrence here in London traffic, but when a colleague asked me yesterday of the last time a fire engine on 'blues and twos' had shouldered its way through the queued traffic, I couldn't remember. Police vehicles and ambulance vans and increasingly cars are common; a fire engine as rare as hens teeth. 

Of course it may be we just don't spontaneously combust any more, or set fire to chip pans, or chimneys, or use Naptha instead of charcoal on the BBQ. In which case Boris' planned closure of fire stations in London has some justification. Or it might be that they're quietly and discreetly attending the homes of Guardian readers in order to remove domestic appliances from their penises ... 

UKIP poll share holding

The latest Comres poll for the Indie gives:-

Labour - 37% (+1%)
Conservative - 34% (+4%)
UKIP - 12% (-2%)
Libdem - 10% (-)
Other - 8% (-1%)

With UKIP still pushing the LibDems out of third place, and the combined Conservative / UKIP vote share pushing Labour into irrelevance, the figures show strong and enduring support for the centre-right. Without an electoral pact between the parties this will not result in a government; we'll still get Miliband's Labour.

With Farage the party's one-trick pony petulantly opposed to potato-head rich boy Dave in a seemingly irreconcilable dispute, and barring the possibility of a fatal Boden shorts accident in Portugal, it's far from clear how people will mark their papers in papers in 2015. 

However, so long as UKIP keep hold of that third place, there will be sleepless nights on the Treasury benches.  

Banks' greed feeds fraud

Hey ho. Your chances of being mugged on the way home from the station are now lower than ever, but the odds of someone hacking your bank account have never been greater. MPs may criticise banks for keeping quiet about the level of small-number frauds, but the banks have their reasons - and must make from increased sales more than they lose from this type of fraud. Let me explain.

It recently took a summons to the small claims court issued by me to my bank to finally sort their recalcitrance about taking the hit on a fraudulent transaction. For over a year they'd wriggled and twisted in blatant defiance of FSA rules. All quite deliberately. All the while the amount was in dispute it wasn't a liability - allowing banks to keep in suspense for up to a year the value of frauds they must write-off. And yes, in case you'd forgotten, a fraudulent transaction on your account is a crime against the bank, not against you; it's not your money once it's deposited, you're merely a creditor of the bank. So only the bank can report a fraud to the police - which, because they don't actually want a police investigation in many cases, they don't do. 

If you want to pay for an easyjet  flight online directly with your plastic, you'll need your 3-digit CVC. However, book the flight through one of the many 'B-to-B' agencies and just the card numbers and your address will do. And book a hire car through a nationally-known online agent in Paris and they won't even do an address check. Banks have left these doors open quite deliberately to make card transactions easier - but also making their money easier to steal. Never mind. First they'll try to charge it to you anyway, and perhaps a third of small scale fraudulent transactions aren't even noticed by people who don't check their statements. Then they try to impose unreasonable time limits for reclaim, or make up humpty-dumpty rules that won't stand up in court to wriggle out of responsibility. 

The truth is, if these frauds were really hurting banks they could tighten up the way they work overnight. In fact, they manage to pass most of the pain onto customers and retain the gain from increased business; in other words, it's sheer naked greed on the part of the banks that's fuelling the fraud boom.     

Still Swamped

It's damned easy to be laid back about immigration in small Suffolk market towns. The gentle burr of the regional dialect on the streets is never broken by barbaric Yoruba invective, and brownish and yellowish faces appear in just perfect proportions, as in a colouring-book on diversity produced by the Ministry of Migration. Here in South-East London we're still swamped. 'Swamped' used to be a no-no expression, but not any more. Here it's Nigerians; elsewhere it's Pakistanis, Chinese or Eastern Europeans. No-one knows quite how many, but they're filling the maternity wards, blocking transport with their buggies, needing dozens of new primary schools. About half of them (according to a Channel 4 / ippr study) work, pay taxes and contribute to GDP. And about half just consume housing, benefits and health care, adding nothing. Overall, GDP is increased - but per-capita GDP remains just the same. There's no real benefit.

Rather than start counting them, the government has hired a transit van with a sign on the back inviting them to go home. It's really not the answer. It's a tacky, clumsy suggestion that immigration is the fault of the immigrants, whom we should blame rather than the political class who are actually responsible. And of the politicians, Labour in particular - the party that betrayed this nation, trashed its people and trampled on its voters when it used open-door immigration as a clumsy, treasonous political tool. For that it must forfeit our votes forever. 

Hell near for Hoogstraten

The Mail runs a piece this morning on one of the most loathsome pieces of ordure ever spawned on these islands - the thug Hoogstraten. I have nothing to add to the fine demolition job done by the paper except to observe that, at 68, all the pains of Hell are nearing for this monstrous man, whom I hope is kept awake at night by the knowledge of his own foulness.

Banks, Big Pharma and Corporates are crims shock

It seems that the revelation that banks, big pharma and the international corporates all indulge in deeply criminal activity is news to our MPs. SOCA, in a rare and unusual effort by Parliament to exercise control over these semi-detached part of the State, has been compelled to reveal evidence that the big corporates employed criminals and criminal methods thinly disguised as 'private investigators' to carry out a plethora of criminal acts against individuals.

The banks, pharma companies and corporates who used the criminal 'investigators' were not alone; SOCA's interest came from the fact that organised crime used the same criminal methods and the same criminal operators as your bank. "I can do your phone tap later today, mate; as it happens I've got a burglary to do in W11 for a bank"

One of the key reasons that parts of our secret State are so reluctant to expose the activities of this criminal mileau to the light is that our intelligence services are also undoubtedly dependent on them to carry out a host of 'black' operations with deniability and no links to the official spooks. Cops on specialist squads who are wannabee spooks have also undoubtedly sought to use the same methods. And not a few of the criminal 'investigators' will be ex-cops - retired or forced out for disciplinary reasons. So it's actually "I can do your phone tap later today, mate; as it happens I've got a burglary to do in W11 for a bank and a spycam to plant up that way for the Vauxhall boys"

Even if I'm prepared to temporarily overlook the needs of the intelligence organisations, as a special case, the police and it's weird and wonderful offshoots, organised criminals and the big corporates should be treated no differently from offending journalists if they use such methods - that means dawn raids, lengthy questioning, widespread arrests and criminal charges.

HRH the Marquis of Coton

Not even the republican Indie can refrain from running the only story in the news today on its front page. The birth of a child (well what did you expect? A piglet?) to their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge is even the Guardian's lead story, with a thousand comments already, some of them chuckle-aloud amusing. The red-tops speculate widely on the young man's name, or rather speculate narrowly, veering between James, George and Charles, with never a Wayne, Darryl or Tyrone even considered. His first names are quire irrelevant, of course; he will be given about a dozen, as is normal. No, it's his title that will be critical. As the son of a duke he will be a marquis of course, but taking his title from where exactly in his father's honour? Rupert Brooke may help;

For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.

And there you have it. For a United Kingdom with such a plethora of laws that not even the Police can keep track of them, with crimes so foul that not even the Prime Minister can name them publicly, there can be only one choice:- let's welcome his Royal Highness the Marquis of Coton to court.  

Cameron the porn crusader

The walls of Herculaneum are covered with vile pornography depicting sexual acts of amazing and imaginative depravity, painted into wet plaster with rare care and skill some 2,000 years ago. And the camera hadn't been invented for five minutes in the 1850's before it was being used to capture unfortunate young women who had forgotten to put any clothes on. Muybridge had hardly let the silver nitrate dry on his stop-action galloping horse pics before an assistant was using the technique to capture a creature with two backs; the polaroid Land camera's popularity owed little to instant photos of family birthday parties, VHS won over Betamax becsuse of Californian pornography and indeed it is estimated that one minute in three spent on the interweb is spent watching porn.

Cameron wants to draw a distinction between 'good' porn and 'bad' porn, in other words to regulate international porn on the internet in conformity with UK laws on sexual behaviour. Never mind that sex with a Turbot is legal in Kazakhstan, or miffling is permitted after dark in Tashkent. Oh well, good luck to him.

Italian collapse rapidly approaching?

Italian voters have long been fed up with their corrupt parties pigging-out on public money; in 1993 a referendum motion to end party funding was passed, only to have been completely ignored by the politicians. Recent events prompted the shaky Italian Cabinet (desperate for some populist legitimacy if lacking any such democratic authority) - to propose an actual phasing-out of funding by 2017, starting with a reduction in this July's instalment. Unsurprisingly, yesterday only Beppe Grillo's 5-Star party and Bossi's Lega Nord voted for the measure - it was defeated by all the other parties voting together. It won't, however, last for long. 

Anyone following Hatfield Girl's painful accounts of the failure of the Italian economy - and the virtual bread rationing was for me one of the most telling indicators - will realise that the crisis is deep and real. A recent piece from the LSE puts the contraction as worse on just about every measure than the 1929 - 1934 collapse, and predicts 'The collapse of the Italian state finances is rapidly approaching. It will have an enormous impact on the Eurozone and the European Union'. Ambrose in the Telegraph has been saying so now for months.

Even my nephew, a studious mediaevalist spending the Summer in Chiantishire with no desire to notice anything after the fourteenth century, has been unable to neglect the malfeasances of bankers, panderers, frauds and politicians in Italian life today for those confined to the bolgia. (in translation only for me, but my valued 1976 edition with the translation by Dorothy L Sayers remains the best)

Timing-wise, an Italian collapse around October would suit me, with the € back to 1.25 or so.

'Working at Home'

Reaching a certain level of seniority in employed work is marked by one's ability to announce breezily from time to time that 'I'll be working from home tomorrow'. Sometimes it's really beneficial, such as sorting a complex final construction account that needs quantities of ciggies and coffee only available at home. Most of the time it means a visit from the plumber or waiting for a parcel for which we senior types aren't willing to take a day's holiday. Whichever, it's a valuable privilege to be used carefully, not exploited. Except if your name is Phillippa Williamson and you work in the public sector.

Phillippa decided she wanted it all - a top London public sector job-for-the-girls, a fab home in the Lake District, a child and a family life. Her first grab was at HM Revenue and Customs, where she persuaded them to let her do a five day job in four, permanently 'working from home' for the fifth. Then she took the job as Serious Fraud Office chief where (so ironically) she not only decided that she only needed to work three days a week in London, but that the taxpayer should pay for her travel and accommodation when she did so; she changed her job into permanently working at home, with additional payments if she had to come into the office. And all for the wholly selfish and self-interested reasons - to spend time with her teenage son at her beautiful home.  ‘Now I have a Black-Berry, a webcam, I can teleconference – it’s amazing how it’s all changed. Part of my job is to think about where we are going to take the organisation and I do that more contemplative side better in my home environment.’ said Phillippa to the Mail in 2009, when the direction she was taking the SFO was straight down the shitter. With an absent boss who had already decried that the SFO shouldn't tackle any cases that were 'too expensive' to investigate - those against large global corporations - Phillippa could chillax by the Lakes at the taxpayer's expense.

The Commons PAC yesterday published a damning report on what to many eyes amounts to a serious moral fraud. The Chair of the PAC said;

“Mr Alderman provided the SFO’s Chief Executive Officer Phillippa Williamson with a contract specifying that her place of work was her home address in the Lake District. She worked there two days a week. When Ms Williamson worked at the SFO’s London offices three days a week, taxpayers paid for her travel and hotel costs to London, at a cost of nearly £100,000 between 2008 and 2012. For the CEO of an important public body such as the Serious Fraud Office to be granted such arrangements is quite astounding.

“Furthermore, a payment of over £400,000 was made to enhance her pension, even though the necessary approval from Cabinet Office to do so was not in place. The Cabinet Office should explain how this payment was allowed to go ahead without being approved."

And exactly why is no-one going to prison for this?

Labour can't be trusted with the NHS

Voters in the North East are learning painfully that Labour is best when it's, er, Tory. Having failed dismally to manage any sort of economic resurgence in the old Northern heartlands, Labour actually managed to widen the gap between rich and poor in the UK, had more young people out of work than any other post-war government, destroyed working-class communities with reckless immigration and so criminally maladministered the nation's finances that the great-grandchildren of all voters will still be paying for it. But it's with the NHS that Labour betrayed its own voter base most grievously. 

After throwing a tsunami of cash at an organisation unable to make good use of it Labour managed to double GPs' salaries to over £100k but cut their work to M -F 9 - 5, managed to pay NHS executives salaries and bonuses many times the Prime Minister's own salary, and fostered a culture of carelessness and irresponsibility that was ultimately responsible for over 13,000 needless pointless deaths in just 14 hospitals from poor care, medical errors and inadequate management. As the Telegraph points out, for Andrew Burnham, one of the Labour politicians responsible, to defend indignantly his own reputation whilst 13,000 families have lost so much more is behaviour of the most revolting self-interest. But what would you expect from a professional politician?

As with the banking and financial debacle, people should be in prison for what happened in the NHS under Labour - perhaps including Andrew Burnham. Why aren't they?

The Wisdom of Crowds - 47

The poor old Indie runs a piece this morning following research by the Royal Statistical Society and KCL that 'proves' that the public is 'wrong' on a whole range of social issues; for instance "Benefit fraud: the public think that £24 of every £100 of benefits is fraudulently claimed. Official estimates are that just 70 pence in every £100 is fraudulent - so the public conception is out by a factor of 34."

To a point, Lord Copper. It depends how you define 'fraudulently' - the researchers interpreting it in the strictest sense, whilst the public no doubt including 'undeservingly' in their definition. And the public's view that one-in-four on the dole needn't be is probably more accurate. Nil points, KCL. 

Likewise 'Teen pregnancy' - the public figure almost certainly includes single mums in their early twenties who may have been older than 19 when they gave birth but are included in the generic cohort . And immigration. And crime. 

In fact, all that Hetan Shah's little exercise proves is that on a sensible definition of social issues the crowd one again has the wisdom whilst the officious office-holder is exposed as a nitpicking disingenuist. No doubt there is research that 'proves' that only 0.87% of them actually are ....

I'd love to see Plumbers in Parliament

Supporters of the Trade Unions have only got it partially right in their condemnation of Miliband's metropolitan elite party; they're not opposed to having working-class union members in Parliament; like their chums in the Conservative and LibDem parties, they're opposed to having anyone in Parliament who is not a dedicated member of Oborne's Political Class. Chair of the sixth-form debating society, Vice-President of the SU at Uni, internship at the UN then a 'job' as a researcher for an MP is the perfect resume for today's ambitious politician - just so long as it doesn't show a real job anywhere. 

And the system delivers to Mr Ed wholly inexperienced blow-ins like Luciana Berger (above) who can be parachuted into any convenient constituency in the country. 

Frankly, I'd love to see more plumbers in Parliament. And bus drivers, surveyors, army officers, farmers, WI Chairladies, small businessmen, nurses and merchant seamen. In fact anyone who has ever lived a real working life, whether a member of a Trade Union or of the Chamber of Commerce. I'd love to hear a Parliamentary debate thick with regional voices and local expressions, rather than dull Oxford English politicospeak. I'd love to see independent MPs balancing the gains to Anglia against the risks to Wessex when considering legislation.  

What I'll never agree to is an unjust impost that robs ordinary people to keep those like Berger in Schmuck and Schmutter.

Back to State party funding

The three dying private political parties would just love to be State funded in line with Christopher Kelly's and Hayden Phillips' proposals. They would become permanent Parties of State and assume a constitutional position and legitimacy that they completely lack under current arrangements - yes, any of the three can still be reduced to nothingness merely by the British people casting fewer votes for it. So far the Tories have prevented them all signing up to it - even with LibDem partners gagging for cash and on the verge of bankruptcy. Now the pressure is on from Labour, making the point that the party belongs to the professional metropolitan political class that staffs it and not to the Trade Unions and Co-operative Societies that fund it. 

The fraud and corruption inherent in Kelly and Phillips' proposals are likely to become nakedly apparent in 2015. UKIP are forecast to win a large and substantial share of the popular vote - but if they fail to get two MPs in the house, they get zero funding. The Lib Dems, even if they score a third of the popular vote that UKIP gets, would get £5 a vote so long as they had the minimum two members. And as the funding will always be based on the results of the last election, the incumbent parties will never lose their advantage. 

Both Kelly and Phillips realise their proposals are hugely unpopular with the British people, and for that reason both have denied any choice to the voter on whether parties are funded in their name. If you vote, they fund. And if five million of us choose not to vote in protest, they simply increase the funding per vote by 25%. Under their squalid, third world banana republic crooked little scam of a deal, the three big parties would never lose. 

Party funding is the most important item on our domestic political agenda - and the thieving class are just waiting for the right time to introduce it.  

New Australians eat sashimi

For me, the archetypal Australian is a small, pale, mincing management accountant or HR professional living in London with an expensive gym membership who likes to get back annually for the gay festival, or a humourless fat-arsed administrator married to an Aussie vet also working over here ("Darryl doesn't do small animals") with fantasies of über-feminist superiority. Today, Australia is a gay-friendly, social-democratic part of south-east Asia with traces of European culture, a sort of Sweden of the southern hemisphere. As with cannibals with bones in their hair and steaming cooking pots, the beer-swilling Aussie lad in shorts and cut-sleeved shirt is a historic stereotype, no longer recognisable as a parody of the actuality. Except of course to some Twat called Guy Rundle who for some unknown reason the Guardian has permitted to pen a column.  

Guy, sweetie, your 2,000 word winge is thirty years too late. Those Fosters lager blokes are ironic anti-parodies, dear, not stereotypes. Today's Australian has a lisp and likes sashimi for lunch.

Why I support the Qat ban

From the Guardian;

"They are always talking about a ban," said one Somali man in his 20s, who chewed qat from a blue plastic bag while sitting on a table where paperwork recorded the day's deliveries. "But if they ban it, I will go back to my home country," he said.

All your vinyl belong us

I've still got a shelf-full of fine vinyl; all the Floyd's early albums, everything by Bowie pre-1990, all the old standards and a good selection of embarrassments (Shakatak?). There's no question in my mind that it's all mine - subject to fair restrictions, of course. It's fair to digitise it so I can listen to it on different machines. It's not fair to sell copies on the interweb, or even to give copies away anonomously. 

I'd be pretty miffed if the record companies wrote to me to say that Oh no, I didn't actually own that music at all; and that to continue to hold onto my vinyl, I must pay an annual license fee or give the records back.

But this is exactly the pricing model that the information industry is now working towards. The first step is 'cloud' computing - moving both programmes and data from your own magnetic memories to their server farms. Then instead of buying a programme you'll pay an annual fee instead to use the latest version - Microsoft has already gone over to this for new Windows versions. When sufficient people have signed up they'll implement a no pay - no access policy - guaranteeing them an enhanced and secure revenue stream.

And they're all at it. Google Chrome's thuggish and crooked efforts to install itself covertly on my machine every time I updated some other programme, or the efforts of some positively repugnant search engine called 'Babylon' to replace Google as my default did neither any favours in my mind. I have become more committed than ever to open-source software running from my own hard drives. You can't trust any of the buggers.

Cull the gluttonous scum

The reckless abandon with which the BBC threw around the TV tax in a series of pay-offs and golden handshakes, with faceless and pointless executives troughing hundreds of thousands each, unearned, unjustified, is really just the tip of the iceberg of feckless gluttony from those who have their grubby little fists on our public funds. For an organisation that so pompously sets itself up as a guardian of the public morals and a model of rectitude, the reality is a grubby, chiselling crooked peculation of public funds by managers for whom probity and stewardship are moral concepts as alien as modesty and humility. 

This latest episode must surely now convince everyone that the BBC simply deserves no place as a tax funded body in its current form. Only when those gluttonous scum are taking the money from the pockets of their shareholders rather than from the helpless British public will there be a chance that their greed can be curbed. 

Public Sector 1% - MPs 32%

Yep; at a time when, quite rightly, we're holding the public sector down to a 1% pay rise MPS have told the IPSA that they're grossly underpaid and deserve at least £86,000 - a whopping pay increase outstripping any corporate current pay deal anywhere.

Let's allow them to do it. In fact, let's encourage the purblind, snuffling shit-faced toads to go for £100k after the 2015 election, with increased subsidies for their bars and restaurants. But let's also demand from each candidate standing in those elections a statement on whether they'd support or oppose the proposal - and cast our votes accordingly.

You'd need a heart of stone ...

Beekeeping has traditionally been considered the preserve of harmless old buffers, retired clergy and the like - a gentle, peaceful occupation, tending the hives in veil and gloves, wielding the smoke-puffer with gentle care. So one can only speculate at the arguments, militancy, schism and heartbreak that has split the world of beekeeping in Austria; the Austrian government now recognises not one but two bodies authorised to licence the movement of hives to high Summer pastures; 

The Landesverband für Bienenzucht (National Association for Beekeeping) I'd guess is the older association, for the Landesverband für zukunfts- und erwerbsorientierte Imkerei (National Association for forward-looking and profit-making beekeeping) rather gives it away in the title. No doubt the ideological differences are passionately debated in the tavernen and schenken ...

The Gloomy Trousers of Uncle Vanya

Terry Pratchett coined the phrase to describe a canon of literature so utterly negative that no redeeming virtue could be salvaged; such is the interview by Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl in Der Spiegel.

All life is misery. There is no joy. We have too much freedom, and too great a choice. There is no happiness. There is no alternative. Capitalism is neurosis.

Yep; what we all need is a big, responsible State to make all those awkward consumer decisions for us; Can't choose between ten brands of washing machine? Let the State allocate you a place in the two-year queue for a single government brand instead. Don't shop - just receive a ration that the State decides for you. Don't think - the State will do all the thinking that's needed. 

It's a lesson I suppose that some people - clearly poor Renata included - are just pathologically incapable of benefiting from freedom. Of course, Communist nations used to keep tame philosophers on the payroll. These days the buggers have to earn a living. No wonder some of them aren't happy.

UK's Stasi upsets Fritz and Michael Eavis

A glance at the following images will explain why the Germans are so miffed at GCHQ copying all the traffic that passes through the UK's big IP pipes;

Practically all of Europe's IP traffic either passes through the UK or through undersea cables close to our shores - and which the Navy have long practice at accessing to attach 'hoovering' kit. It's really no good William Hague telling the Germans that we're stealing their data for their own good - they had that from the Stasi for a number of years and are no longer inclined to give it credence.

What they do with it once they get it is also questionable; as the Guardian reports today (and as reported here yesterday), shady police units maintain secret police records on law-abiding individuals; 

"Another activist, Guy Taylor, 46, who campaigns against capitalism, discovered that he was spied on while attending Glastonbury festival – which is known to have been frequented by a number of police spies in recent decades. He and Catt are among the thousands of activists who have been categorised as domestic extremists on the unit's files. The Met previously used the term "subversives" to describe citizens with radical political views whom it was spying on."

Poor Fritz, whose every search for images of "bauernmädchen mit oven gloves" is now recorded at Cheltenham, isn't happy. And for once, this is a good thing. 

ACPO's poisonous convenience

I have no doubt that the appalling revelations about the 'Special Demonstrations Squad' have their origin in the mindset that made use of ACPO as an alternative to democratic policing. ACPO offered Home Secretaries and Chief Constables an easy and unaccountable way in which to do all sort of dodgy and questionable policing that wouldn't stand the scrutiny of democracy in the light of day; the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (which infiltrated environmental groups with agents provacateur) the Confidential Intelligence Unit (which created threats from innocent political activists) and the national Extremism Tactical Co-Ordination Unit (taken away from ACPO by the Met Commissioner from 2011) are all examples of the type of unregulated, uncontrolled semi-detached policing that the 'Special Demonstrations Squad' appears to have been. 

The one lesson in this is that the public can never, ever trust the police to govern themselves. At senior officer level they're profoundly corrupt, seduced by power and purblind from ambition. Not one single Chief Constable in the land can be trusted to run his own force without effective public and civilian oversight and governance. Let this lesson never be forgotten. 

Will cyclists face ban from London offices?

You may have noticed that the anti-smoking bigots have now moved onto the fantasy dangers of what they are terming 'third hand smoke' - meaning the smoke smell that adheres to the clothing of smokers. Smokers, they declare, are covered in nasty PMs and carcinogenic PAHs and BaPs and they should wear disposable plastic onesies every time they have a fag.

No one, ever, has died from second hand or third hand cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, 5,000 Londoners a year are actually dying prematurely from the effects of vehicle air pollution. This blog has pointed out before (HERE  HERE and HERE ) that London's roadsides actually expose one to many times the levels of harmful particulates, chemicals and benzene derivatives than being locked in a closed car with a chain-smoker. London's worst roads have eight times the concentration of harmful substances than a smoky car, according to Aberdeen University. 

Now a lobby group called Clean Air in London has squeezed a full set of London air quality data out of Boris and the real situation is worse than anyone imagined; the worst roads for PM 2.5s are actually as follows;

Now you have to feel sorry for cyclists - I mean those who commute to the office by bike. They're actually exposing themselves to the very worst levels of air pollution, far worse than making the same journey sealed inside a car with a smoker. And when they get to the office ... yep, they're covered in nasty PMs and carcinogenic PAHs and BaPs and all the things the third-hand-smoke faddists rant against. So will cyclists who don't shower and change clothes when they arrive at work be banned from the workplace along with smokers?