The Impossibility Of Israeli Wrongdoing In The Minds Of The Friends Of Zion
December 25: Channel 4 broadcasts a short address from the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmood Ahmadinejad.
Number of deaths reported as a consequence of the broadcast: 0 (approx.)
Response from British Foreign Office:
"...[T]his invitation will cause offence and bemusement not just at home but amongst friendly countries abroad."
Response from Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, chairwoman of the Jewish Labour Movement and vice-chair of Labour Friends Of Israel:
"I condemn Channel 4's decision to give an unchallenged platform to a dangerous fanatic who denies the Holocaust, while preparing for another..."
December 27: The Israeli military once again bombs civilian areas of Gaza from the safety of their American-supplied bombers, claiming to be targeting 'militants' (code for "people who voted the wrong way").
Number of deaths reported as a consequence of the attacks: 200 and rising.
Response from US State Department:
"The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel"
Response from British Prime Minister and prominent member of Labour Friends Of Israel Gordon Brown:
"I call on Gazan militants to cease all rocket attacks on Israel immediately...I understand the Israeli government's sense of obligation to its population."
Response from Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside, chairwoman of the Jewish Labour Movement and vice-chair of Labour Friends Of Israel:
".........."
Even more so than their equivalents in the South Africa of Apartheid, the Zionists and their supporters are sowing the most bitter harvest. I don't want that to happen, but they seem hell-bent on making it so.
Update (31/12/08):Ellman and some other Zionists have finally responded in a letter in today's Guardian.
Guess what? Whilst they are "...horrified by the bloodletting and destruction in Gaza...", they "...cannot ignore that it was Hamas that called an end to the ceasefire..." (they can't ignore something which is an outright lie - Hamas merely said they didn't see the point of renewing a 'ceasefire' that Israel had already broken on November 4, when the rest of the world was watching the US elections).
James Mark Dakin Purnell, Secretary Of Stoat for the DWP (Doing Wrong to the Poor), has been at it again. This time, his people have floated the idea (that's 'floated' as in 'smelly one that no-one will own up to') that recipients of loans from the Department's Social Fund should be required to pay interest on the loan.
A brief summary for those who don't know: the 'Social Fund' was introduced by the Thatcher-being in the 1980s to replace the grants which had previously been available to enable people on very low incomes to buy emergency items, e.g. a new cooker to replace the one which had been condemned as liable to poison the whole household to death, a new coat for your five-year-old to wear in bed at night because your flat's heating system didn't work due to the Council not having the money to repair it (or losing the job-card behind the clock), etc. The replacement of grants with loans which had to be repaid (from the same benefit payments which had left you unable to pay for the item in the first place) was, of course, touted as encouraging 'thrift', 'self-reliance', and all the other clichés of that régime's vicious economic Darwinism. The loans were from a total 'pot' for your area the size of which was set at the beginning of the financial year, so that if you needed a loan from the Social Fund anytime after mid-November you had no chance because the year's funding had already run out.
Funnily enough, rail against the Social Fund as the Labour Party did whilst in opposition, they have never reversed the policy and reinstituted grants instead. Which is why we had the sight of a man who has never known poverty in his life coming out with the idea that the loans should now attract interest and should be administered by credit unions (whose typical APRs range from about 12% upwards).
When the sewage farm hit the windmill (as it did in very short order), Purnell shoved his disconcertingly androgynous-looking gofer Kitty Ussher out to deny everything. It was, the Depratment claimed, the result of a 'misunderstanding' whereby a 'consultation document' had been signed by Purnell without him having read it first.
Which raises two questions: firstly, is that true? It could be, and would explain a lot about how this government operates. Secondly, if it is true, what else has the prick signed without having read? The slow extermination of anyone whose annual income is less than £10000 a year, perhaps?
Actually, I don't think it's true. I think that this is another exercise in kite-flying, because say what you like about the current régime's incompetence when it comes to, say, sending young men to illegal wars without adequate equipment, stamping on the freedom to dissent or squelching attempts to uncover the criminality of arms-dealing companies and Saudi autocrats, one thing they are clever at is spin. We have seen it before from them: an idea gets 'leaked' that is so extreme that everyone (including the less comatose Labour backbenchers) raises a stink over it, and then the executive claim that they had no intention of ever doing such a dastardly thing before implementing a policy which is basically similar to the one they denied having but not quite so appalling - which, of course, is what they were going to do all along. It's known in committee circles as the '3-By-4 Ploy': Say you want something called '3', but the majority of the committee wants something called '4'. You hold your fire until the vote is about to be taken, and then say that you can see the merits of '4', but at the same time something called '2' (which has hitherto scarcely been mentioned) has its attractions too, and that - in the spirit of compromise - you'd like to suggest '3' as a good solution. You'd be surprised how often this works.
So I don't actually think that Purnell's Panzers ever intended to do precisely what the report said. What I think they will try to do is to make the destitute pay back the loans but at a lower rate of interest than that charged by credit unions. It won't make any difference to the poor saps who end up having to pay it back out of benefits they can't survive on anyway, but it makes it look as if you are moderate and have listened to public concern. And as we know to our cost, looks are everything nowadays.
But what happens when those who default on the debt - or indeed any other debt, be it to banks, other creditors or to the courts - simply cannot pay? Ah, that's when you send in the bailiffs and the debt collection agencies. And this is where it turns sinister again. Because the government is proposing to give extensive new powers to bailiffs and similar thugs. For the first time, the operatives of private bailiff and debt collection companies would be given the legislative go-ahead to force their way into people's homes and use what is euphemistically described as 'reasonable force' to subdue the occupants. So with personal debt at record levels, unemployment rising back towards 1980s levels and the cost of basic services and utilities going through the roof, the régime's answer is to sanction psychopathic yobs to smash your door down and put you in a chokehold?
Never fear, however! Although a workable definition of 'reasonable force' is something the courts have been wrestling with for decades, we are assured that the new powers would be overseen by some mythical creature called 'a robust industry watchdog'. So, let me see, the people who would in effect define the extent of the use of 'reasonable force' would be the representatives of the companies which employ the people who will be allowed to use 'reasonable force'? Ah, that cure for all ills, self-regulation! We all know how well that has worked in the financial services industry, don't we? Apart from the fact that the debt-collection biz is populated almost entirely from the ranks of those who are unemployable in any civilised capacity due to their penchant for unrestrained violence and is owned and controlled by crooks and chancers.
We know that the current unmandated régime is obsessed with giving itself and its agencies the power to interfere and intrude in every aspect of our lives. Now we won't just have to worry about actual criminals smashing down our door, it'll be state and commerical organisation which can do it as well. But don't worry, they'll be subject to 'guidelines' (translation: something which can't be enforced by law and when not adhered to will not result in anyone being held responsible) which will include the advice that "...it might be reasonable to break open the door, but probably not to smash a hole in the wall.", and that 'reasonable grounds' include "movement of a curtain" or someone being seen inside the property who "may be the offender".
How long will it be before there is a fatality under these new powers? Because there sure as hell will be one. And it might not necessarily be some welfare claimant whose death would count for nothing in the eyes of our corporate media: so many nice, white, middle-class people have now fallen into unsustainable debt that it could be one of them instead. One can imagine the shock-horror coverage in the Daily Mail or the Express; the pictures of the grieving widow and the photogenic kids, the screaming headlines that "Something Must Be Done!!!"
If Something Must Be Done, then it Must Be Done Now. I therefore state that any attempt to enter my home under the auspices of these regulations will be met with 'reasonable force' (under my definition of same) which may involve - amongst other things - my late father's cricket bat (1930s vintage, but still with a few lusty cover drives left in it). You Have Been Warned. And that's not a 'guideline'...
This piece was originally intended to have two parts. Today's events have added a third, which I'll put at the start because it refers back to a previous item (see the first part of "Blame - How To..." on 03/12/08).
The jury in the hamstrung inquest into the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes delivered its verdict today. Given that the only truly accurate verdict they could deliver had been prohibited by coroner Wright, it stands to the credit of these fellow citizens that they reached the only verdict left to them which would not exonerate the police; an open verdict.
Moreover, the jury stated that they did not believe the Met's version of events. The lawyers for the organisation which must now surely be re-named The Assassination Bureau claimed that:
The officers shouted that they were armed police before grabbing hold of their quarry, forcing him back into his seat and killing him
Mr de Menezes made a move towards the officers
His behaviour caused the officers to become more suspicious of him, and
His death came because the police had difficulty identifying who they were tracking.
To all of these attempts at excusing the officers' conduct, the jury has now returned a resounding cry of "Liars!".
Not, of course, that it will make any difference. Justice has been - and will continue to be - denied. Consider the comments from those in authority after the verdict was announced. The Acting Commissioner of the Met said that he "deeply regretted" what had happened, but that it was just a "most terrible mistake". The chairman of that ongoing restricive practice known as the Police Federation claimed that, "The officers...believed their actions were proportionate and necessary...". The president of the Association of Chief Police Officers said that the killers, "...did what they sincerely believed to be right to protect us." (though who the 'us' are in this case is not clear). The chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (which used to be called just the Police Complaints Commission until someone had the bright idea of sticking the word 'Independent' at the beginning in case we'd have not realised it otherwise - rather like the People's Democratic Republic of Korea) said that the slaying was "deeply shocking" and said that the Met needed to make "operational changes", but ruled out investigating the officers who testified at the inquest for possible perjury. Then the Home Secretary "Wacky Jacqui" Smith herself said that the killing of an unarmed man by a bunch of wannabee SAS men merely, "...reminds us all of the extremely demanding circumstances under which the police work to protect us..." (again, the 'us' bit remains undefined).
No doubt 'lessons will be learned'. In fact, they have already been. Not only has the State obstructed the course of this inquest, it has - as I mentioned previously - put in place legislation which will make it a cinch for the government to order secret inquests run by hand-picked coroners whenever it suits their purpose (or 'national security', which amounts to much the same thing). In fact, this hearing could almost have been a trial run for the future.
Because what has also emerged today is further evidence of the unfitness of Michael Wright to chair the inquest in the first place. Not only did he forbid the jury to consider all options it should have had available to it, he also refused to allow the jury to be told that Mr de Menezes' family and their legal team had withdrawn their co-operation and presence from the hearing. This was at the behest of the Met's barrister, no less. "The less said the better", said the brief. The reason for their withdrawal was that Wright had ordered the media and the general public out of the court during his summing up, because he claimed he had reached a "sensitive point". We are not vouchsafed which of His Dishonour's points was sensitive (though I hope the ointment doesn't work and he has to have it cut off), and chances are we'll never be permitted to know. Clarification was asked for, but Wright refused to give any, and refused to come out of his room until all those nasty people had gone away.
Moreover, Wright issued a gagging order preventing any reporting of his shenanigans until after the conclusion of the case, when of course it would be to late to have the clown removed and a proper inquest convened.
Perhaps I'm being naïve, as the powerful have always sought to protect the powerful in preference to fulfilling their supposed duty to the rest of us, but I don't remember so many cases of official corruption and arrogance coming along at once in the way that we have seen them in the last two or three years. Unfortunately, we are not a society given to standing up for ourselves when it really matters (unlike the people of Greece at the moment), so they can go on quite comfortably without having to worry.
Speaking of corruption and arrogance brings me back to what I had intended to talk about today. Two stories have appeared which sum up the ethical decay which invariably attends those in pursuit of immense wealth and those who then seek to use it to try to exercise power to which they are not entitled.
Jim Beresford is a solicitor in Yorkshire. Or, rather, he was until yesterday, when the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal struck him off. This is why:
Some years ago, the government of the day set up a scheme to compensate coal miners for illnesses and injuries caused by their work. They had to do this because the mine operators (a state body at that time) was woefully lacking in the safety standards department, and this had left ex-miners suffering from a variety of disabilities relating to coal dust inhalation and the crippling effects of using vibrating equipment.
Beresfords in Doncaster was one of the firms who acted on behalf of miners (and their families) who were seeking recompense. However, they deliberately misled claimants, and tricked them into signing agreements which would in effect mean that most of the compensation would end up in the pockets of Beresford and his business partner Douglas Smith. One miner's widow received just £217 after Beresfords deducted a 'success fee' from the final payout. All this in direct contravention of the rules of the compensation scheme.
As a result, the joint earnings of these two shysters went from less than £200 000 a year to over £23 million a year in the six years to 2006. The company made millions whilst the people they were supposed to be acting for received sums which averaged just £2000. The two men lived in the lap of luxury on the proceeds of their scam.
Despite the fact that Beresford has now been debarred from practising as a lawyer, it seems that it won't matter too much to him: for one thing, he described himself as an 'entrepreneur' rather than a solictor, so he will no doubt find it easy to find another way of ripping people off for his own benefit in due course; and for another, no attempt has been made to confiscate the illegally-gained wealth of these two scum-suckers, and it's unlikely that any attempt ever will be made (the Seriously Fraudulent Office says that it is investigating in collaboration with those true friends of the miners, South Yorkshire Police, so Beresford and Smith have nothing to fear there, then).
The island of Sark off the coast of Normandy had its first genuinely democratic elections this week. This marked the formal end of what had been termed 'the last feudal state in Europe'.
The electorate (which numbers just under 500 voters) had, basically, two main groups of candidates to choose from. One supported the former feudal lord of Sark, Michael Beaumont, the other represented the interests of the shadowy Barclay brothers.
The Barclays, 'Sir' Frederick and 'Sir' David are the owners of the right-wing Daily Telegraph newspaper in London (amongst other interests). The septuagenarian twins have a combined wealth estimated at £1.8 billion, and have a mock-Gothic castle on the island of Brecqhou which lies just off the coast of Sark (although they give their domicile address as Monaco for tax-dodging reasons). Since they arrived on Brecqhou fifteen years ago, they have repeatedly clashed with the population and rulers of Sark, and claimed that their campaign was motivated by their desire to bring democracy to the island.
This week, they got their way. Or, rather, they didn't.
Yes, there was a democratic election. Yes, the Barclay brothers fielded a slate of candidates which supported their views. But out of the twenty-eight seats in the Chief Pleas (Sark's parliament), the twins' favourites gained only two.
Democracy in action, then, and something which people with the democratic instincts of a couple of multi-billionaire incomers would no doubt accept, yes?
Well, no actually. Scarcely were the results in than the Barclays announced that they were closing down all their operations on Sark, throwing an estimated 140 people on the dole - except that there is no dole on Sark; no welfare system of any description, in fact. Two hotels, numerous shops and a restaurant have already been shuttered.
So, in short, these two arrogant twats lost, and decided to pick up the ball and take it home with them. That's a true commitment to democracy for you. It reminds me of the behaviour of the US and Europe with regard to the Palestinians: "Oh good! The Palestinians are holding an election. What? They've elected a government we don't approve of? Blockade them!"
Witness the firm attachment to principle exhibited in this remark from the Barclays' shyster, one Gordon Dawes: "They [i.e., the Barclays] feel they cannot work in a place where there is such an anti feeling against them."; and this from their estate manager Kevin Delaney (who failed to win a seat in the Chief Pleas): "There's a very real price that is going to be paid for this". He might have added, "We'll make sure of that!".
The pro-Barclay campaign issued a newsletter during the campaign in which those veiled threats were made, and which attacked one of their opponents as being a 'feudal talibanist', and another as having a 'socialist streak'. This yah-boo-ism obviously didn't go over well with the rather traditionally-minded Sarkees, and resulted in the humiliating defeat of the pro-money slate.
So, to the Barclays and their ilk, 'democracy' merely means "the sort of feudalism we control".
Let us hope that the people of Sark weather the coming storm and send an even bigger FU to these twaddling thugs.
In the meantime, I have no hesitation in declaring Judge Michael Wright, Jim Beresford, Douglas Smith and the Barclay brothers joint winners of The Judge's Cunt Of The Week award.
As I've remarked before, there are two main problems with censorship:
Who gets to do it
How you get them to stop
The first of these presents us with a dilemma: do we want a government-appointed group to do it, in which case whilst such groups may be accountable in some general sense, there is always the danger (becoming more and more prevalent today) that decisions will be taken for reasons which are political (using the word in its widest sense) or which pander to mere populism; or do we want some 'voluntary' group to do it, in which case how are they to be held accountable for their decisions?
The second problem is that such bodies - however established - have a strong tendency to overstep their original stated remit, from either political or financial motives.
We now seem to have an example which presents us with the worst of all these scenarios in combination.
Over the past weekend, subscribers to six major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the UK found that they were unable to edit articles on Wikipedia. Moreover, they found that access to one particular page was either partially or totally blocked.
The page in question relates to the album Virgin Killer by the German heavy metal band The Scorpions, which was released in 1976. Now, this is not another case of loopy mentalfundyists claiming that, if you play the second track on side one backwards it contains a message encouraging people to go out and stab the vicar. No, the issue (such as it is) concerns the original sleeve of the album, which is reproduced on the Wikipedia page in question.
Now, at this point, I'm presented with a certain practical and/or ethical difficulty. You see, in order to talk about this issue, it might be worth your actually seeing what all the fuss is about. However, I do not intend putting a copy of the image here. This is for two main reasons: firstly, my own ISP is one of those which is blocking the image (although not really - see below), and I'm not sure quite what the upshot would be of putting the image on a site which they host; and secondly, I don't want to force anything on you: I like to think I treat the readers of this site as intelligent adults, and you can make up your own minds in the light of what I'm about to say about the image in question.
OK, so what is this dangerous picture? Well, it's of a girl. The girl is about ten or eleven years of age. She is naked. The pose she is in is not, to my mind at least, indicative of a sexual context, and in any case, the most...erm...sensitive part of her anatomy is completely obscured by a 'shattered-glass' effect. In addition to which, the image isn't large enough to show any real detail.
(At this point, I am giving you your opportunity - as a rational human being - to see for yourself and make up your own mind. I accept no responsibility for it - it's always going to be your choice, as it damn well should be. The image is here - the link is to the 'secure' version of Wikipedia, which seems to be unaffected by the censorship - so far).
All right, the image could justifiably be described as being lacking in taste, and its original intention was almost certainly to provoke a response (which it did: a number of countries refused to allow the LP to be released with this cover at the time); but there are wider issues here, and 'taste' (however you wish to define it) is not really one of them.
What seems to have happened is this: someone (we don't know who, and are never likely to know) made a complaint about the image, claiming it constituted 'child sexual abuse'. Well, we're all entitled to our views.
The complaint was made to a group calling itself the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). This is an organisation based in Cambridge, England, whose raison d'être is:
"...to report potentially illegal online content within our remit...[and]...minimise the availability of this content, specifically, child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world..."
So far, so good. The IWF in its current form was set up by a number of (but by no means all) UK ISPs following a threat by the Brown régime that, if the ISPs didn't 'volunteer' to do something about all the filth which is out there on teh interwebs then they (the government) would legislate to enforce censorship at the state level. Unsurprisingly in the light of this threat (and the recognition that any such legislation would inevitably be badly drafted and would be used way beyond its stated remit in the same way that the so-called 'anti-terrorism' laws of the past decade have been), some ISPs (VirginMedia, BT and Tiscali to name but a few) joined on and agreed to abide by its decisions. Other ISPs seem to have had the balls to call the government's bluff.
But who are the IWF? I mean, really?
Well, all you'll get from their website is a list of the organisations which are signed up to it. No individuals are identified, even on its 'Contacts' page. They do say this, however:
"We are an independent self-regulatory body..."
So, they have no standing in law beyond that which might be held by, say, Barnardos or Comic Relief. They are a non-statutory body with no legislative or law-enforcement power, their decisions have no legal force, and no-one is obliged to take any notice of them.
And yet they can block the access of the vast majority of UK internet users to anything which, in their view and their view alone, constitutes 'child sexual abuse content' (a definition of which they don't seem to be able to provide - the attitude seems to be, "It is whatever we say it is")
This is where our first problem (the "Who" bit) meshes in with the second one. In this case, judging by the press release here, the IWF decided - on its own analysis alone - that the image constituted "...a potentially illegal indecent image...". Note two things here: the use of the word "potentially" (which is like the Private Eye use of the word "allegedly" - it serves as a get-out clause); and the use of the word "indecent" - a word which, even in its legal sense, has changed with the years and will no doubt go on doing so.
In the view of the IWF, then, nudity is 'indecent' and any display of nudity - especially of a child - is 'abuse'. This is where it gets a bit silly. The 'nudity = indecency' formula is, of course, an old one - it has its roots in the institutionalised mass self-loathing of the Abrahamic religions and their selected texts - and has been used as the underpinning of blue-nosed laws since time was (the Victorian era saw a particular explosion of them). That doesn't mean to say that they were or are right. I think you would have to be a bit warped to find nudity 'indecent' in and of itself; it's what we all are - our clothing (when not necessitated by climate) is largely a social convention and its presence or absence should carry no 'moral' baggage at all.
(One can push it too far, of course: one of Carla Lane's characters says something like, "The naked human body when still can be beautiful. It's only when it starts moving about that it looks bloody daft!")
And then there's that word 'abuse'. Along with 'reform' and 'modernise', this must be the most abused (sorry) word in the current lexicon of cant. It can be employed to mean anything, and often is used to describe things a long way beyond its proper definition, and in this manner is used largely depending on the ideological position of the person deploying it. It's a subset of what the great Tom Lehrer meant when he stated:
"When correctly viewed, everything is lewd."
It is this deliberate misapplication of the word which has led us into a situation whereby - amongst other things - a television newsreader may be arrested and interrogated by the police because someone in Boots The Chemist objected to a few happy snaps of the newsreader's toddler in the bath. Or where any male over the age of about thirty is made to feel uneasy about talking to any child not his own in public, for fear of being labelled a perv. Or where anyone (especially in that same social category) who has photography for a hobby can be rendered suspect simply by taking a photograph anywhere where there happen to be children (when they're not being done on the grounds of 'national security', of course).
In other words, it's fear and hysteria, whipped up into a heady concoction by tabloid scum and political androids alike for the primary purpose of channelling that sense of general diffuse public unease about 'things in general' which is always present in modern society in a useful (to them) direction (i.e. away from what they themselves may be up to).
I have, of course, seen the usual posts on the usual forums by the usual sorts of suspects who are applauding the IWF and either implying or even stating explicitly that those opposed to its actions are just 'peados' (sic) and support the availability of child pornography. This is the level to which the argument is always reduced; the "All men over the age of thirty should be castrated and have a large 'P' tattooed on their foreheads. After all, it's worth it if it saves one kiddy's life...". Quite frankly, the idea that paedophiles get their kicks by swapping heavy rock album sleeves is a difficult one to take seriously, and trying to imply that that is what happens merely poisons the well of discourse on the subject, which doesn't help the real victims of actual child pornography.
And so, it becomes effectively impossible to have a rational debate on what constitutes 'indecency' and what does not.
If you find nudity 'indecent' in all contexts and circumstances then, yes, I can see that you would have a problem with the image in question. Even if you don't, then you may well still find the image offensive in the context in which it was used - as being tacky or generally exploitative. But 'child abuse'? Really?
It's worth making the point here that the girl in the photograph was asked many years later about it, and she said that she wasn't remotely troubled by it. Can it be abuse when the 'victim' doesn't regard it as such? Or is this another case where - like the people who didn't know they lived in a slum until some sociologist told them that they did - the views of the 'victim' don't matter if it gives the opportunity for the self-important and self-righteous to vent some of their neuroses or subconscious guilt, or to come across as philanthropic? Of course, some people will see offence in anything. They're entitled to, but they are most definitely not entitled to force anyone else to take the same view if they are really of a different opinion.
Anyway, having therefore made up its own mind, the IWF then told the bizzies (sorry, I mean that they alerted their "law enforcement partner agency" - got to get the Bollocksese absolutely right) and added the URL of the 'offending' page to its blacklist. A blacklist which it refuses to allow anyone to see, I might add. Apparently, just viewing the list itself constitutes a criminal offence in the UK (although I assume someone from the IWF can, otherwise...<sigh>...we've come a long way, haven't we?)
This is where it all takes off. Those ISPs which subscribe to the IWF filter their traffic through proxy servers which incorporate the blacklist. This means that subscribers to those ISPs have their net access censored, usually without them being at all aware of the fact - until something like this comes along, that is. Because of the filtering via the proxy servers, the target website (Wikipedia in this case) sees only incoming IP addresses from those proxy servers rather than the originating IP of the ISP or the subscriber.
This matters because, in order to prevent troublemakers from knackering up the entries, Wikipedia has a list of blocked IP addresses from which edits may not be made. However, if the connections made by most users in the UK are coming from a range of only a half a dozen or so IP addresses, then such blocking of vandals becomes impossible. In the light of this, Wikipedia's response to block the proxy servers' IP addresses en masse is a reasonable protetction mechanism. And so, a large proportion of internet users in the UK cannot make anonymous edits to any Wikipedia articles, not just the one at issue.
So we have an unidentified individual, complaining to an unaccountable private organisation, who then make their decision without consultation with anything other than a government wish-list, who then in turn impose that decision upon the companies who are subscribed to it, who are then somehow obliged to submit to that decision, however arguable, and this leads to a major international website being rendered effectively out-of-bounds to the customers of those companies. And there seems to be nothing - other than moving to one of the ISPs which is not signed up to the IWF - we can do about it.
It is, of course, a well-established fact that the Brown régime and other governments of nominally 'free' countries want to take effective control of the internet. We can't have people being able to communicate with each other without the mediation of 'responsible' people such as politicians, journalists and ideologically-motivated busybodies, can we now? The Australian government (of a very similar ideological stamp to its London counterpart) is even now trying to implement a system of State-controlled censorship of the internet (on not dissimilar lines to the infamous Great Firewall Of China), a policy supported by the fundy bigot of a minister who's in charge of it, but opposed by just about anyone who knows anything about the way these things work (or don't).
That's why it's an unalloyed pleasure when organisations - be they integral parts of the State or mere proxies for it - get it so exactly wrong. Because got it wrong they most certainly have, and in two ways. Firstly, they seemed to have assumed that people would simply accept the knowledge that any organisation was censoring their access. This is based on the 'people-as-sheep' philosophy which seems to inform everything done by those in brief authority over us nowadays. However, this stance ignores the wonderful, insurmountable cussedness of people in general. This is what censors always face: the determination of people to make up their own minds. This is why Mary Whitehouse (and her successors in the also-very-formal-sounding-but utterly-nutty-and-unofficial 'MediaWatch') have been such abject failures, and have in fact had the opposite effect to that which they intended. By drawing attention to what they want us not to be able to see, hear, read, say and think, they merely ensure that whatever it is gets even more attention and increases its attraction to those who would not have known about it had these blathering idiots kept their mouths shut in the first place.
(In the age of the internet, this has become known as the 'Streisand Effect').
The second way in which they have kneed themselves in the groin is that censoring access to one source of the information does not remove that information, and does not prevent access to it somewhere else. In this instance, there are enough copies of the image all over the internet (including, for example, the websites of companies which sell the album) that finding it is the easiest thing in the world. In fact, to take the whole thing to a whole new level of ludicrousness, if you do a Google Image search with the phrase "virgin killer", you will immediately see nine copies of the image even with Strict SafeSearch switched on!
Besides which, have you ever seen the cover of the 1970 LP by the 'supergroup' Blind Faith? I mean, that is far more difficult an image: the girl's got tits for one thing. And what is that she's holding?
Google for it if you like. I won't stop you, because it's none of my business.
There are other, more technical, ways around the censorship. The Wikipedia links in this article demonstrate one way; there are others - many others.
Perhaps we should be glad that those who would make decisions on our behalf as to what we may be 'permitted' to see, hear, etc. without our consent are so inept at it and are so lacking in the knowledge required to do it effectively, but we should still not be complacent about the ways in which those in power seek to remove ever-increasing amounts of our self-determination.
Update: An Australian man has lost his appeal against child pornography charges for possessing images of the Simpsons characters having sex. Full story here.
Fuck me to heaven in a bath of champagne! Will no-one rid us of these legislating loonies?
Update Update (09/12/08): It seems that the IWF - apparently for the first time in its twelve-year history, has backed down. Good on them (no, seriously), and possibly they'll be a little less prone to jumping in with their size nines in future. We should still keep a close watch on the buggers, though.
Just on three and a half years ago, a young man was 'mistaken' by the Metropolitan Police for an Arab terrorist (you know - the sort of mistake anyone could make), tailed across a large part of London, followed into a Tube station by a phalanx (or should that be 'Phalange'?) of armed coppers, forced back into his seat in a carriage and fatally shot seven or eight times in the head at point-blank range in front of dozens of witnesses.
Immediately, the Über-plods start crowing about how they've foiled another terrorist attack on London's transport infrastructure, saying that of course the man was an Muzzy terrorist - he had a padded jacket on in the middle of summer, said jacket had wires sticking out of it, he ran from the police when challenged, and had to have most of his skull ballistically removed to prevent him from the detonating the bomb he had in his rucksack and killing and maiming all those Daily Mail readers.
Except that none of this was true. Jean Charles de Menezes was not a Muslim, or even an A-rab. He didn't have a padded jacket on, and even if he did there were no wires which could be seen. He didn't run from the bizzies and he had no bomb, except in the distorted perceptions of a bunch of out-of-control testosterone junkies who thought they were in a movie - and their commanders.
When all this soon became apparent, the senior officers involved tried 'news management', i.e. they lied. De Menezes looked like the alleged Muslim ne'er-do-well they had supposedly been following; his body showed traces of cocaine; he was an illegal immigrant. All this, too, was bollocks. For once, the public and the tame media showed a proper degree of scepticism, and the whole cover-up unravelled quicker than a ball of wool which has been attacked by a hyperactive kitten.
None of this, however, prevented the officer in charge of the slaying - the unfortunately-named Cressida Dick (yes, I know, I mean Cressida?) from being promoted further beyond her limited competence, and her boss - the lamentable Ian Blair - from being able to stay in the top job in the Met for another two years or more.
Nor did it prevent the relevant authorities' attempts to obstruct justice. Firstly, the Crown Prosecution Service - after much prayer and fasting, and no doubt a great deal of being leant upon - decided that, despite the facts already being in the public domain and despite the killing taking place in front of dozens of witnesses, there was not sufficient evidence to proceed even with manslaughter charges against the trigger-pullers. However, in a rare burst of courage, they decreed that the Met should be charged with offences under Health & Safety legislation.
Secondly, every possible obstruction was placed in the way of there being a proper inquest into Mr. De Menezes' death; the 'health & safety' trial was used as the main excuse, and the timing of this was delayed and delayed again to put as much distance as possible between the events at Stockwell Grove and any credible hearing into them.
After all this dragging of judicial and political feet, however, the inquest has finally taken place. At the time of writing, the jury is considering its verdict.
Or, rather, it isn't. Because it can't. Because in his summing up the coroner, 'Sir' Michael Wright, has told the jury that they are not permitted ('permitted', if you please) to return any verdict other than one of 'lawful killing' or the totally inconclusive outcomes of an 'open' or a 'narrative' verdict. So, in other words, the jury - even if they firmly believe from the evidence placed before them that De Menezes was a victim of a wrongful act - cannot say so in their verdict. This is part of what Wright said:
"Many people tell lies for a variety of reasons...[including] to mitigate the impact of what might be a...tragic mistake"
So, in Wright's eyes, even if the tooled-up rozzers had told porkies six ways from the origin, this was quite understandable and they shouldn't be condemned for it. And that was why they couldn't be blamed for killing an innocent, unarmed man - even if they lied to a court of law its very self about what they knew and what they did.
(Incidentally, am I alone in being reminded by all this of this classic Peter Cook sketch? Would that he were still with us - there's enough going on to have supplied him with material for a hundred years).
Apart from confirming that - when it comes to the actions of the police and the so-called 'security services' - there is a deep-seated corruption in the administration of justice (or what passes for same) in this country, it raises another question: what the hell is the point of having juries when they can be ordered to reach a certain verdict by a judge or coroner who, at least in theory, is there only to offer guidance on points of law and procedure rather than present his/her view of the evidence as being the only way of viewing it? Why not get rid of juries altogether?
But then, that is what the current régime wants most fervently to do. It has sought to expand the numbers and types of cases which are heard without juries, either on the thoroughly patronising and insulting grounds that the cases would be 'too complicated' for their tiny, TV-addled button brains to understand; or on the basis of that ever-cynical and sinister catch-all excuse, 'national security'. Moreover (and most germane to what we're discussing in this case), the régime has managed to pass a law (in the name of countering 'terrorism', natch) which enables the Secretary of State (i.e. a government politician) to arbitrarily declare that a coroner's hearing in a particular case must only be held in secret and with a 'specially-appointed' coroner (i.e. a 'trusty').
Gradually but inexorably, our fundamental liberties and all the meaningful protections for them are being removed by this wretched régime. And, as with previous occasions when this has happened elsewhere, the general population will not move against it until it affects them or someone they know. By which time it will be too late, far too late.
Which is where it helps for those plotting such an outcome if they have a convenient distraction. Usually, television and the scum press fulfil this purpose admirably (compare the proportion of conversations you hear or overhear on real subjects with that regarding the previous night's episode of Desert Island Has-Been Saddoes or about what "they say" in the Sun, Mail or Express), but sometimes other methods must be deployed and finding a group within our society that no 'right-thinking person' should be expected to have any sympathy for is usually a winner. In my lifetime I can recall the targeting of gays, trade unionists, black and Asian people, travellers (of both the 'traditional' and the more recent sort, whose only 'crimes' were to wish to escape from the drug-ridden inner cities, reject selfish consumerism and not have to wear designer clothes) and, of course, that perennial sure-fire winner, nasty foreigners in general.
Another ready standby, of course, is the unemployed. One of the surest possible signs of an economic recession is the increasingly strident yapping of the political classes and 'right-thinking people' against those who are not in work but who (according to those who have never been in that situation) jolly well ought to be, even if it means taking a shit job for shit wages working for a shit of a boss. "That's the way to build self-respect and self-reliance! Working 72 hours a week diving into cess-pits for a living with nothing but a botulism-contaminated drinking straw to breathe through never did me any harm!".
I first saw this in about 1977, when Callaghan and Healey's cowardice had handed us over to the tender mercies of the IMF and the scum press were full of screaming headlines about 'benefit scroungers'.
(Incidentally, at that time I saw a Socialist Worker poster which had the headline "Spot The Scrounger", with a picture of "Elizabeth Queen" who was scrounging millions out of the system. To see this on a bus shelter (and in Silver Jubilee year, too!) was they call a 'consciousness raiser' - I knew that they were right, and I've been a convinced republican from that day forth).
I saw it again in the early eighties, when the wretched Thatcher's deliberately-contrived slash-and-burn assault on our society put four million or more on the dole. So, I suffer from what might be termed déja déja vu when I read of this crooked cabal's latest plans for 'reform' of the welfare system, particularly vis-à-vis the unemployed.
(And while I'm at it, this is just another example of the way in which the innately harmless word 'reform' has been hijacked and prostituted out of all innocent meaning. It now means nothing more than 'fuck about with solely for ideological purposes' or, more specifically, 'cut wherever you can get away with it, and either overburden what's left or 'outsource' it to the companies on whose boards you hope to be once you get rumbled and kicked out of office').
Under the 'reforms', the unemployed will be subject to yet another raft of provocation and harassment. They will be obliged to sign 'contracts' (and isn't it noticeable how the language of business has been allowed to creep into areas of our society where it has no bloody business being?) with either the State or the private companies of varying levels of disrepute who are angling for the public's dosh, compelling them to go on 'training courses' (which seldom lead to anything other than a sense of wasted time), or even attending 'parenting classes', on pain of losing 40% or more of their benefit payments for refusal (benefit levels are - and have been for years - a national scandal, standing at about half of what one might reasonably need even to subsist upon).
Not content with that, nor with their desire to further humiliate the disabled by tightening still further the largely arbitrary Incapacity Benefits system (partly by renaming it - the 'Sellafield Syndrome' in effect once again), the scum who rule us also now want to subject claimants to lie-detector tests (although, as you'd expect, this is given the Bollocksese title of 'voice risk analysis technology'), and to being left destitute for at least a month at a time if found to have cheated the system - 'found', of course, by the same agency which has accused them in the first place - and even for a first 'offence'. No doubt the modern adminstrative obsession with 'targets' will mean that thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - will be left penniless because some petty official has a performance level to attain.
(It is, again, interesting to note this as an example of 'joined-up government'. The use of 'voice risk analysis technology' combines a number of central elements of this government's way of doing things: it gives enormous, arbitrary and unaccountable power to petty officials; it is used primarily against vulnerable and unpopular groups; and it uses technology which has no proven reliability. Don't think for one moment that the ID Card/National Identity system is an isolated anomaly).
The person pushing all this is called James Mark Dakin Purnell, the greasy little twunt who is currently Secretary of State at the Depratment for Menial Work and Miserly Pensions. Purnell obviously knows a lot about the life of the unemployed. Presumably from what others have told him, as he has had no experience of it himself: born in the City of London, educated in France, at a private grammar school and Bailliol College, Oxford, he worked as a researcher for Tony Blair, for the IPPR thick twonk (sorry, I meant 'think tank'), as Head of Corporate Planning at the BBC and as one of Blair's 'special advisors', before being parachuted into a safe Labour seat in 2001. In short, he is the archetypal Nu Labour pol. - able to expound at great length about things he knows fuck-all about.
He is also typical NuLab in another sense. Whereas ministers in departments dealing with business (or, as we are obliged to call it, 'Enterprise' - as in 'wobbly sets, strange clothing and technology which doesn't work') are obliged to take a crash course in Corporate Fellatio before being sent out to service Saudi psychopaths and Uzbek crooks for a living, the primary prerequisite for someone who has to administer services for the undeserving poor is to come across like a Doberman which has caught its nuts on a barbed-wire fence - all snarl and bile.
"But", I hear you say, "Shouldn't the unemployed be looking for a job?" By and large, yes. If there is a job there, and if that job pays a living wage (not the same as the Minimum Wage, which is merely a way of subsidising cheap labour with cheap labour's own money), if that job is suitable for the prospective applicant (we have enough square pegs in round holes as it is), if that job is with an employer who will treat his/her employees as sentient and intelligent human beings (with all that that entails about basic dignity), and if (the biggest 'if' of all) there are actually jobs there in the first place. We're at the beginning of a recession, remember? The beginning. Who knows how bad it will get?
"Anyway", as you no doubt continue, "Why should my tax money be spent on keeping the workshy in luxury? I meantersay, satellite TV, carting cases of Black Label home from the 'offy' every evening? And they breed like rabbits!"
Well, Mr, Mrs and Ms Taxpayer, rather than feed off the prejudices of someone you got talking to down the pub or in the 'fitness centre', consider what else your tax money has been, is being and will be spent on: the replacement of a pointless nuclear missile system with yet another even more expensive one, when we have no-one against whom it could be practically deployed even if you can countenance it being used at all; two illegal, pointless and counterproductive wars on South West Asia (with the prospect of a third - what will probably be called "The War On Teheran", with Saint Barack of Chicago and Madame Hilary de Bombe in charge); the handing over of a large part of the properties and functions of our public services to private corporations and those sham shamans called 'management consultants'; and, latest and greatest of all, the pouring of billions of pounds into the pockets of the banks and bankers who profited mightily from the boom and bubble in order to protect them from any of the major consequences of their own greed and dishonesty.
In the light of this, wouldn't you prefer to pay a far smaller amount, but know that at least it is being used to put food on the table and roofs over the heads of individuals and families not all that dissimilar to yourself and your own? I can't say that I begrudge them, particularly at the demoralisingly low level of welfare payments in this country. You see, I have been unemployed (more than once), and I confidently expect to be again, due to a combination of the increasing fuckwittery of the people running my place of employment and my increasing reluctance to keep my mouth shut about it, and I know what it means in practice both in a material and a psychological sense. I don't want to go back to it, to the real poverty, the bureaucratic indifference and incompetence (which will be far worse with private corporations seeking to profit from it), the difficulty in understanding what it is that employers may be looking for (and in trying to puzzle out from their vacancy advertisements whether they really know what they want). No, on the whole I think I'd rather eat my own foot without benefit of condiments. That's why I don't object to some of my tax money being spent on keeping them alive (if barely), and why you shouldn't really object, either. I mean, look at it in a selfish light: if they're all forced into jobs that they don't particularly want to do, there won't be any for you to take when The Credit finally Crunches you, will there? There are those who are wedded to that pernicious invention the 'work ethic', there are those who are in a stable but unsatisfying live-in relationship with it, and there are those who prefer to stay free and single and who regard employment in this day and age as - at the very least - over-rated. I would like to think that our society is not so far down the toilet of rampant me-me-me-ism that we cannot allow all these groups to exist to a minimum standard of decency.
That is not a popular (as in the sense of 'widely-held') view, however. When, yesterday, Polly 'Nosepeg' Toynbee wrote an opinion piece on the Comment Is Free section of The Guardian's website castigating the obsessive complusiveness of Purnell's proposals, the response was overwhelmingly negative, of the sort that one would traditionally associate with the Sun, the Mail or (in the case of the more erudite replies) the Telegraph. All unemployed were scroungers, they were all living in luxury flats with plasma-screen TVs, they were all having each other's children with wild abandon; and the answer to the problem was to get rid of the welfare system altogether and let the scum sink or swim. And these are readers of The Guardian, remember.
We all know, of course, that the current economic ordure/windmill co-location is the fault of the unemployed, the poor and the disabled, don't we? How dare they not be efficient units of production and consumption? How can they live with themselves knowing that they are letting down that vast majority of 'right-thinking' people who have spent the last decade or so spending their money (or, more frequently, someone else's) like water? Don't they know what it's like to have to sell one of your buy-to-let tax dodges to keep young Kyra in private schooling? Or have to trade in the Beemer for a (gulp!) Ford Galaxy? For the love of Mammon, have they no empathy?
Any stigma will do to beat a dogma, of course, and there's evidence here that Pernicious Purnell's attempt to demonise the jobless will reap its desired result (i.e. the backing of the Murdoch/Associated/Barclay Brothers press) and, heedless of the consequences for the individuals at the sharp end of the policy, the outcome will be a fourth term in office in order to secure the blue-nosed snoop state and the corporate welfare agenda of the neo-liberal economists who have brought us to where we are.
So, if you're unemployed and reading this, be very afraid; but don't entirely despair. This arrogant brutality has been tried before and it doesn't last. I have faith that common decency and humanity has not yet been so totally expunged from our society that it will tolerate another round of blaming the victim for the crime.
At least, for the sake of all of us, I bloody well hope so.
So, the US of A is now a land of hope and love, eh?
Then why did so many - on the same day which saw the canonisation of St Barack - vote for ballot propositions which will make it illegal for gay people to marry? Even if they have already married? The usual unholy alliance of pig-ignorant redneckery, neo-Con opportunism and priest-promoted superstitious fear combined to tell gay citizens of the United States that are now, and must forever be, inferior citizens simply on the grounds of their sexuality. As if that were important.
Sort yourselves out, Americans, before telling us how we should be doing things.
Here's Keith Olbermann getting into his stride on the topic (bit of a drama queen sometimes, our Keith, but as so often, he's right):
And here's one of my heroes, Roy Zimmermann, putting it into song:
(Tip of my wig to my old chum Alex for the first link)
Got home just now to find a letter waiting for me, with the franking mark of the organisation I recently applied to work for.
I should have known by the fact that it was a standard-sized envelope that I hadn't got through even the first stage of the application process. And so it has proved.
(I won't name the organisation concerned, except to say that I have to Advise them that, however Conciliatory the tone of their rejection, I find their decision to be quite Arbitrary).
I also should have known that I wouldn't get through because of that 'competence-based' application form balls. It seems that employers (particularly in the public sector) now only want an easy way of rejecting people, followed by eventually employing people who may end up being crap at the job, but who know how to feed them bullshit.
I still have one possible way forward out of the mindfuck that my current job entails, and I'll be pondering my next move this week.
I sometimes find it difficult to write pieces like this one.
Some things which happen are just so manifestly wrong that I struggle to find a way to express my opinions in anything other than a howl of rage. This is so in spades when I see the powerful conniving against the powerless (which happens all the time, of course) and getting away with it (which happens in the vast majority of instances). The anger affects my ability to type as well, which will account for any typos in what follows - that's my excuse, anyhow.
The case of the Chagos Islanders is a case in point.
The Chagos Islands are part of the 'British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)', a convenient fiction manufactured by the British in the 1960s. The islanders got on with their lives more than adequately, until...
At the end of 1966, the government of Harold Wilson made a secret agreement with the US which made the whole of BIOT available for American military use for a minimum of fifty years, with the possibility of a twenty-year extension thereafter.
(There are those in the cohorts of the deluded collectively called 'The British Left' who still praise Wilson for keeping UK troops out of America's criminal enterprises in South East Asia. There are few of their number who care to recall that Wilson was a schemer and chancer who wasn't averse to being Washington's bitch when it suited him.)
The US wanted the island of Diego Garcia for an air base, seeing it as a prime location in their attempts to prevent the 'wrong sort' of self-determination being practised by the countries of south Asia. There was a teensy lickle problem - Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands in the archipelago were inhabited by people who had been there for generations. What to do?
Clearly the situation was desperate - after all, the 'friendly' superpower could not be denied support by Wilson, otherwise Washington might think they were dealing with a bunch of red-lovin' pussies. How could the problem be resolved?
By the Spring of 1969, Wilson's Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart had come up with an elegant answer. Despite the fact that he knew that the Chagossians were indigenous to their islands, he proposed in a secret memo to Wilson that the entire population of two thousand men, women and children be 'reclassified' as 'contract workers', and that the forced deportation of the islanders therefore be presented to the United Nations and other concerned bodies as merely a 'change of employment'. Five days after receiving Stewart's memo, Wilson agreed the plan.
The first part of the plan involved mere trickery: any Chagossians requiring urgent medical care in Mauritius (hundreds of miles away) were prevented from returning home afterwards.
Then the policy became more sinister and brutal.
In the early part of 1971, the plantations which provided employment for the islanders were closed as the US military moved in. Then between July of that same year and May 1973, the entire population of the archipelago was forcibly removed. In order to 'encourage' them, the British governor of the Seychelles (who was in charge of the operation) ordered the islanders' pet dogs to be rounded up and killed by the exhaust fumes of US military vehicles in an industrial furnace. If that were not enough, American military officials warned that anyone who refused to leave the islands would be bombed.
The islanders were forced onto small boats, being allowed to take no more that a suitcase of clothes each, and were transported to the Seychelles. There they were imprisoned until they could be deported a second time - to Mauritius. There, without homes, work or land, the Chagossians congregated in slums which had no water or electricity. At a time of high poverty and unemployment rates amongst the native population of Mauritius, these victims of what is now known euphemistically as 'ethnic cleansing' were prime targets for discriminatory and hateful behaviour from the Mauritian government and population alike.
In 1972, the British government agreed to compensate the government of Mauritius to the tune of a mere £650 000. The Mauritian government held on to the money for some five years before doling it out - by which time inflation had severely curtailed its already meagre value.
In the meantime, the US was expanding the Diego Garcia base, claiming all the while that the islands had been 'uninhabited' except by 'contract workers' - which suggests that Michael Stewart's barefaced lie of some years before had been accepted as the policy gospel in Washington as well.
In 1983, the Thatcher government in London agreed to pay the deported Chagossians a total of £4 million in settlement. However, in order to receive a single penny of it, the Chagossians had to sign (or thumbprint) a renunciation of all claims on their homeland. Moreover, the forms which required this of them were in English and were not translated into the Chagossian's native creole.
The silence of the British media in the face of all of this was, of course, deafening. With very rare exceptions (John Pilger being prominent amongst them), the Chagossians were ignored or, when their plight (which included not only poverty but numerous suicides) was brought to any degree of public attention, they were dismissed as primitive ingrates.
Their fight continued, however, and in November 2000 the British High Court deemed that the deportation of the islanders had been unlawful. However, the government insisted that, although the islanders might be permitted to return to some of the islands, Diego Garcia itself (where most of the Chagossians had lived) was totally out of bounds because the US was leasing it. A few weeks later, the US stated that not only could the Chagossians not return to Diego Garcia, they wouldn't even be allowed to use the airstrip there to bring people and materials to the islands to assist in reconstruction.
In addition, the Blair régime blocked any possibility of return for the islanders until a 'feasability study' had been completed into whether the other islands could be resettled. Curiously, this 'study' claimed that the islands were sinking (although they did not state whether the weight of US military personnel, their weaponry and their leisure facilities might be a possible cause); and so the Chagossians were blocked again.
In October 2003, the same High Court which had ruled that the removal of the Chagossians was illegal nevertheless denied the islanders the right to return home, and denied them the right to adequate compensation. The government still maintained not only that their predecessors had acted in good faith, but augmented the obscenity by claiming that the islanders had not opposed what had been done to them.
Then, in perhaps the most tawdry and immoral act in this whole imbroglio of unethical actions, in June 2004 the British government issued an Order in Council under the Royal Prerogative which, with the stroke of an official's pen and without any resort to Parliament or the courts, unilaterally overturned the High Court decision of November 2000, thus prohibiting the Chagossians from returning home.
Still the Chagossians and their supporters fought on, and in May 2006, the High Court ruled that the Order in Council was unlawful, stating that:
"The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an order in council, exile a whole population from a British overseas territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant."
The Foreign Office appealed the decision, but lost the case again in May 2007.
(In the meantime, the US uses Diego Garcia as one its 'black holes' for detaining people it has (or has had) kidnapped in the so-called 'War on Terror'. The Pentagon sees the base as crucial to its war on the nations of south west Asia, and claims that allowing the Chagossians back home would present a risk of terrorism to them. No, really, that's what they've said).
The government again appealed, this time to the House of Lords.
Which is where we now find ourselves, because today five 'Law Lords' decided by a vote of three to two that the government appeal should be upheld, and the Chagossians - having been violated, deported, brutalised and made destitute and homeless - can never go home.
In a judgement which I am sure will echo down the future years as a mark of shame on England's judiciary, Hoffmann, Rodger and Carswell stated that the government had every right to remove the right of abode of the Chagossians in their own country, adding cynically:
"The law gives it and the law may take it away."
During the hearing, Jonathan Crow, chief brief for the government, sneered:
"The Chagossians do not own any territory...they have no property rights on the island at all."
Of course they don't, you cunt! They were evicted under threat of being starved or bombed to death! For fuck sake!
Crow then added:
"What is being asserted is the right of mass trespass."
'Mass trespass'. On your own country's land. Really?
The man giving Crow his orders is the current Foreign Secretary, David Milliband. Even just reading his response to the judgement would make anyone with any sense of ethical propriety want to look for the nearest ice-pick in order to bring it into intimate contact with this over-promoted oily twat's cerebellum. One can so easily see in one's mind's eye Mulligrub's not-altogether-successful attempt to keep the smirk off his eminently-punchable face and the unction out of his voice as he said:
"We do not seek to excuse the conduct of an earlier generation."
No, you shit, but you're quite willing to ride on the back of it, aren't you? Despite the fact that the conduct of the British (and US) governments in this whole sordid affair quite clearly meets the post-Nuremburg criteria of a crime against humanity? Besides which, isn't something which is repugnant and appallingly wrong still repugnant and appallingly wrong even after the passage of four decades?
"This required us to take into account issues of [...] security of the archipelago..."
And the two thousand plus US goons on Diego Garcia are going to be given the willies by the possible return of fewer than one thousand people to the outlying islands of the archipelago? Rah-rah! Go US!!
"...and the fact that an independent study had come down heavily against [...] lasting resettlement of the outer islands..."
You mean the 'independent' study which was produced by your own department, you arsehole?
So this is, once again, what we find: that a government in a supposed democracy can lie, deliberately mislead international organisations, forcibly expel two thousand people from their own country, leave them destitute in another land with which they had no connection, fight every attempt at a just solution through the courts and other nasty devices, and still get away with it.
I have a suggestion for you: the next time you hear some pompous get from a British government (of whatever party, because they're all the same at the politico-genetic level) pronouncing on the supposed misbehaviour of another country in relation to whatever it may be, shout "What about the Chagossians, you smug bastard?" at them. For this has been Britain's smallpox-impregnated blankets, showing that so-called 'liberal humanitarianism' is almost always a cover for atrocity of some sort or another.
(For a timeline of the whole story, see History Commons, and for a fuller picture of what I've only been able to outline, see this 2004 piece by the aforementioned John Pilger.)
Too many Rants about trivia here lately. Here's something more important than cotton buds.
There has been justified satisfaction with the recent defeat of the Régime's plans to imprison people without charge for six weeks. There was no justification for such a move - no other state which could call itself 'democratic' without being laughed at has anything similar on the books. Even the USA in its current state of belligerent paranoia refuses to go that far.
This didn't stop 'Wacky' Jacqui Smith - the latest in a long line of grandstanding thugs to hold the office of Home Secretary (see under Reid, John and Blunkett, David) - from claiming that those who succesfully opposed the measure were "...prepared to ignore the terrorist threat for fear of taking a tough [...] decision". This in a statement to Parliament which, even by modern standards, appears to have been a pinnacle of teddy-bear-ejecting petulance.
Nor has it stopped another serial nonentity from claiming that those who stand up for fundamental liberties are allied with 'the enemy'. Geoff Hoon (for it is he), yet another serial failure, having been the man who helped send UK forces into illegal invasions and occupations without even adequate equipment, went on TV the other night to defend the State's latest Big Idea in "The War On Turrrr" - the compilation and maintenance of a database which would monitor everyone's telephone, e-mail and internet contacts. Quite apart from the sheer impracticality of such a system (given the volume of traffic involved, the certainty of overload meaning that the spooks wouldn't be able to see the digital woods for the binary trees, and the simple fact that the implementation of private encryption and proxy servers would negate the whole thing anyway, not to mention the fact that any terrorist worth his 72 virgins would avoid any obvious form of communicating his plans), the idea that the State should be allowed as a matter of daily routine to stick its nose in to our private communications is a very worrying one. It's all very well for the naïve, the innocent and the stupid to say things like, "If you've nothing to hide, then you've nothing to fear", but that statement should always, but always, be countered by saying, "If I've nothing to hide, then what frigging business does the State have knowing it?"
No, this is just another example of the datamania of our current rulers (as shown by the National Identity Database, the 'ContactPoint' database of every child in England, the DNA database which contains samples forcibly taken from tens of thousands of innocent people, and many another). They want power, they want control, and they believe that just about any method may be used to provide them with their indefinite continuation. Their paranoia leads them to assume as a matter of course that everyone is saying nasty things about them (which, for once, might not be far wide of the mark), and that such malcontents need to be neutralised.
It's not as if they could be trusted with the information anyway. Apart from incidents which could reasonably be ascribed to mere incompetence (and there now seems to be a competition amongst departments and agencies of the State and their outsourced outliers to see who can lose confidential data in the most ludicrous fashion), every single piece of legislation which has been passed in the last decade supposedly to combat 'terrorism' has gone on to be used for something else. Thus we have had the sight of an octogenarian heckler at a party conference being ejected from the hall and detained under the terms of such laws; someone reading out the names of the (known) dead of Bush/Blair/Brown's wars at The Cenotaph being arrested and convicted under those statutes; and, in the latest and most barmy twist, the use of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001) to freeze the UK-held assets of an Icelandic bank.
It is superfluous to fear what a future régime might do with such extreme and wide-ranging powers when we can see the results of their use by those currently in office. The danger is not hypothetical: it is already here.
The régime, perhaps sensing this, and knowing that whatever they come up with as a justification for claiming such powers for themselves is not willingly believed by an increasing proportion of the population, believes that it has to go a little further to 'persuade' the public of the necessity.
Which brings me back to Looney Hoon. When tackled on BBC's Question Time about the new super communications database, the wretched oaf went off on one, claiming that those opposing the draconian interference in our private communications it would involve would be "...giving a licence to terrorists to kill people". Perhaps Hooney was feeling a bit pissed off that he hasn't been able to go off and replace Peter Mendacious as European Commissioner because Labour doesn't want to lose yet another by-election in a hitherto safe seat.
If you who are reading this are of the American persuasion, you will be more than familiar with the tactic here. All that needs to be done (in the view of those doing it) is to claim that those who oppose your policies - however extreme, however loopy those policies may, in cold light of fact, be - are 'disloyal', 'unpatriotic' or even 'on the side of the turrrrists'. "You're either with us or your with the terrorists" was a particularly egregious and stupid thing to say even by the standards of George Walker Bush, but it has been accepted as an article of faith by the governments in Washington and London and - alas - by a goodly proportion of the populations of those lands as well, although - mercifully - less so as time goes on.
Such a method has a history stretching back far further than our current concerns, however. It was remarked upon by another devotee of unlimited state power three generations or more ago:
"Of course people don't want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
That man's name was Hermann Goering.
It is, however, the tactic of those who know that they have either lost the reasoned argument, or who never had a reasoned argument to make in the first place. Such signs of desperation give me some hope that we may soon see the back of such attitudes and those who seek to use them to spread unnecessary fear as a means of enabling them to get their way.
The temporary setback given by Parliament to the State's plans to invade our private communications (and the vicious plan to give the Home Secretary the power to force an inquest to be held in secret without a jury should he/she deem it to be a matter of 'national security' - i.e. potentially embarrassing to the government) are, of course, to be welcomed. A loud note of caution, however. The Counter Terrorism Bill (there's the 't' word again, folks!) still contains much that is highly dangerous to not only our own liberties and sense of what is fair, but to the whole idea that no punishment should be exacted against anyone without the matter being properly tested in a court of law.
I won't detain you (without charge for 42 days) any further here, just suggest that you read David Mery's post on the subject.
I've long had problems with the Turkish Republic's pretensions to be part of Europe. Just because it once ruled most of the Balkans and still has that little blob around Istanbul doesn't mean it is European. Although the Republic itself is supposedly secular, the population it governs is overwhelmingly Muslim and one of its main political parties is avowedly Islamist.
However, just as UEFA believes that Israel and Kazakhstan are European (the former because no-one in their own region of the world will play them, and the latter despite the fact that it borders China), Turkey's position is a legal and geographical fiction which some find convenient.
To be fair, England's own laws on defamation are so widely-drawn and potty that rich crooks from around the world find reasons to use them to silence their critics (see The Usmanov Affair for an example).
That notwithstanding, the idea that a state which a) routinely jails people for referring to the Ottoman massacre of the Armenians, b) denies the Kurdish nation any degree of cultural or political autonomy, c) maintains and supports an illegal occupation of half of another sovereign country (i.e. Cyprus), and d) has a constitutional system which means that the military can prevent a democratically-elected government from taking office; and then adds e) whereby a prominent scientist's website can be blocked by a complaint from a fundamentalist oaf; the idea, as I say, that such a state could be considered eligible for membership of the European Union is quite frankly as barmy as Oktar/Yahya's writings.
Oh, and for the benefit of any free-thinking Turkish visitors who might be passing through, the lecture is also available on YouTube (which presumably religious nutjobs like Oktar/Yahya haven't got around to whining about yet) (*).
Perhaps Dawkins' webmasters would like to follow the example of Monty Python. When "Life Of Brian" was banned in one Scandinavian country, they promoted in Sweden under the slogan, "The movie so funny it was banned in Norway!"
(*) Update: It seems that YouTube is already banned in Turkey, apparently for allowing (Shock! Horror! How dare they!) clips critical of Atatürk. Hint: He's been dead for eighty years, guys - I don't think he cares anymore.
To Telford for a team meeting. As my regular chauffeur was on holiday, I had to make the trip by train. Afterwards, I had a chat with my manager about what the Depratment was trying to do to me (see Hate Of Eight (below)). I had decided over the Bank Holiday weekend not to go quietly and to fight the decision, and I've tried every which way to appeal to reason.
I was told today that it has all been in vain. This, I hasten to add, is not my manager's doing. He wants me to stay on the team, but has been over-ruled from a higher level. So from September 29, I will be in a job where I will have to switch my brain into neutral for six hours a day just to be able to cope with the tedium.
I'm looking around trying to find something, anything, more rewarding to do for a living. Or even a mundane job in an organisation which doesn't treat its staff with ill-disguised contempt. I'm also applying for a job in another public-sector body, only I'm being frustrated by yet another of those management-guru curses on our lives - the 'competence-based application form'. Why the hell these have become popular I don't know, except that their use explains why so many people end up in jobs to which they are singularly unsuited. "Describe a time when you delivered a challenging task under tight timescales" was one question. And then they only give you about a hundred words to do so. Sheesh! I've got a feeling I'm not going to get that job.
Back to today, and I walked from the office we'd held our meeting in back to Telford Central station during a blustery downpour which nearly knackered my new umbrella - one of those automatic ones with a recoil on it like an old shotgun - to arrive and just miss a train back towards Chester (it was about to pull away just as I was crossing the footbridge). Now, for a town the size of Telford, its railway station is pretty basic - the place was clearly designed for the car culture - and it provides only very limited shelter from the elements. The next train back homewards was due at 1443. It was delayed by about seven minutes due to signalling problems, and it was about 1520 when I got into Shrewsbury. I ran across to another platform to catch the next train north - only for that to be held back for about eight minutes because we were waiting for another late train to arrive which connected with it.
This meant that I got back into Wrexham just too late for the bus I'd hoped to catch. The next one wasn't for another twenty-five minutes, so I walked into town through the same fucking drench-fest which had caught me earlier on! I know it was the same one - it had shadowed my whole journey back.
I got home and found that one of the two hospital appointments I had a week on Monday had been cancelled, so now I'll have to make two journeys instead of one.
And I failed in my bid for a reel-to-reel tape recorder (which I need to digitise a lot of old tapes) on eBay - by 99p.
I don't remember treading on a nick in the pavement whilst walking under a ladder and simultaneously beating a black cat to death with a broken mirror, but that's how things feel just now.
Washed my hair just now, and while the bath was running I went to put a towel at the top of the bath so that I could rest my head on it.
Bringing my hand up, I brushed it against a box of cotton buds which was on top of the cabinet...
...A recently-opened box of cotton buds...
...A recently-opened box of two hundred cotton buds.
The whole frigging lot fell in the bath.
Any spy camera in there would then have been treated to the sight of me - without my glasses on because of the steam, of course - playing an unwished-for game of indoor Poohsticks as the buds floated under the bath rack looking like a bonsai albino version of a Canadian river during the logging season.
I think I'll pretend it's September for the next week.
Back when I was a kid, it was always a month which tended to be too hot. It was after we'd come back from our holiday. And it was too near to the time when I had to go back to school.
It's seldom been a happy month in my family anyway. My sister was born in August - she died from leukaemia when she was two. My mother and my brother's mother-in-law died in August, one year apart. It was the occasion of a wedding for a marriage which lasted scarcely a year more.
I balance that out slightly by saying that I have a very pretty great-niece who was born in August, so there's some recompense.
This August, however, is one I can't wait to see the end of.
For one thing, there's the weather. It may be unfair to blame August, because we've scarcely had a period of unalloyed good weather since early June, but I think one has the right to expect better of August than what we've had. It has meant that I haven't been able to go anywhere or even do anything much - not even the gardening (and the cats are still crapping on my lawn, I'll have you know).
There's a big hole at the front corner of the house, which I came home to on Tuesday. They're renewing the gas pipes along our road, apparently. No advance warning of this was given. They've uncovered part of the pipe which leads into the house, and I'm worried about whether the rest of it is going to run right under the flower bed in which I have my recently-sown cornflowers and calendulas.
Another annoyance: I downloaded a torrent file of an animation series which was a particular favourite of mine in my late teens so that I could see what it was like in the original Japanese rather than the sanitised and infantilised American version I saw back then. When the download had finished - it took a number of nights to do this because I don't have a fast broadband connection and because if I do it at night it doesn't count towards my usage figures - I found that out of sixty-odd video files only a handful or so worked. So I've had to start from scratch.
And then there's work.
I try not to mention my work here. This is partly because I can't imagine anyone in their right mind finding it particularly interesting. It's also partly self-preservation. I doubt if the Depratment has an actual policy on its minions blogging (other than whatever they can make up when it suits them), so there are few if any indications of what I may or may not say.
Right now, however, I just don't give a fuck. This is why:
In 1998, I was just a newly-promoted Assistant Officer (AO), and I did the sort of work that AOs in the Depratment do: processing documents, dealing with enquiries and requests from the public, that sort of thing.
By a sequence of uninteresting events, I got involved in helping keep the Depratment's varyingly-decrepit IT systems function at a local level - hence the job title of 'Local Administrator' (LA).
This job had previously been the reserve of the Officer (O) grade - the one above mine, but by that stage they were asking anyone who was interested to do the job. I was interested; it was far more interesting than what I'd been doing up to then (although I did both jobs side-by-side for a couple of years).
It rankled a bit that some of us were doing the job at a lower grade than had previously been the case - indeed, the clerical grade below ours were allowed to do it as well. So we looked on with hope when the Depratment announced in the summer of 2000 that they were going to do a grading review on the job. At last, we thought, here's our chance to get advancement.
After about seven months, the review was complete and was published. We discovered to our dismay that, in their view, there was not one LA job, but two: yes, one at O grade and another at AO grade. So we were stuck in the lower grade.
I didn't mind all that much, because I enjoyed doing the job and it was a considerable improvement on what else I could be doing there.
Wind forward to 2006. I'm still there, doing the same job as the higher grade LAs but for a lower salary and status. At this point, the technical aspects of the job were outsourced to the usual bunch of chancers, leaving only service allocation and general administrative functions behind with the Civil Service. I could have transferred over to the contractor like some of my colleagues did, but it wouldn't have suited me and I wasn't going to take the risk (see here and here for the background).
In the light of the change in the nature of the job, they then decided to carry out another grading review. After a few weeks, they reported...
...And had come to the conclusion that, although the job was far less technical than before, it was now appropriate only to the O grade. The reasons given for this, when I asked a senior manager for them, were hardly convincing; they were so thin that you could see right the way out the other side.
So what was to become of those of us who were still doing the job at the lower grade? Were we to be given the grade appropriate to the job we'd been doing all this time?
Were we bollocks! We were told that, over a period of a few months we would be removed from our jobs and 'placed' in one of the other dozens of business streams that the Depratment had broken (and I mean broken) into following the stupid merger of the two previously separate departments earlier that year.
To speed this process up, we were placed in what is termed 'pre-surplus' status. Put simply, if any job came up at our grade, we were to be forced to apply for it irrespective of our desire (or ability) to do it, with the only protection being that it had to be within what the Depratment deemed to be reasonable daily travelling distance.
For nearly two years I've soldiered on, doing my job to the best of my ability, and gaining the support, praise and appreciation of my managers and colleagues alike. The amount of work has not diminished - especially since a couple of reorganisations of team boundaries - and the job itself was not deemed to be surplus to requirements; indeed, the only reason why our office was not considered a 'strategic site' for this work was because I was suddenly the 'wrong' grade.
And then came last week. They were looking for more AOs to do processing work (i.e. the sort of work I'd been doing nine years before). Under the rules of being 'pre-surplus', I was forced to apply for one of the positions. I stated on my application that I wasn't remotely interested in it and, as there were a number of other people applying who had far more recent relevant experience than me I though I might still have dodged the bullet.
On Wednesday morning, a senior processing manager came over to me and asked me to what degree I was interested in these posts. I reminded him that I had stated 'minimal', simply because that was the most polite way of putting it. He said to me that he envisaged I would be of great benefit to his business stream because of my IT skills, and would be advising managers on how to make service requests for their staff and generally holding their hands. I replied that he was seriously mistaken; the moment I was forced out of my current job would be the moment when any involvement I had with administering the IT system or requests for change would totally cease. He said that he understood my position, and there the conversation ended. He went off to (as I thought) ponder whether, as I had advised him, I would be of more use to his business stream staying where I was.
I say 'as I thought' because scarcely more than an hour later, I received a letter from his manager (who was the 'jobholder') congratulating me - congratulating me, if you bloody well please! - on being given one of the jobs on offer.
Apart from the suspicion that the conversation I had had shortly beforehand was, in the light of this, completely superfluous in that the decision had clearly already been taken by that point, what I found particularly out of order was that they had made this decision (and identical ones affecting two other people) over a week before the closure date for applications. The number of jobs remaining for others to apply for had therefore been reduced by three even before the process was supposed to have concluded. This is not the way to make me think that decisions are made in an ethical and fair fashion.
I can't refuse the job, however. Well, I can, in theory, but if I do they will order me to take it anyway, with disciplinary procedures to follow if I still refuse (for 'insubordination', which makes it sound like we're in the fucking military. We are: Fred Karno's bloody Army).
So five weeks from now, despite everything, I will move from a job that I not only enjoyed doing but was bloody well good at, to a job where I'm going to need to be completely retrained from scratch and which I am going to find extremely boring and not commensurate with my skill level - after all, it's the same job as I was doing in 1999. Career progression? Oh sure....
So there I am - totally shafted. After years of commitment and enthusiasm, I'm to lose the job simply in order to make a bunch of beancounters' numbers match up and so that senior managers can claim in their next cosy chat with the Minister that they're succeeding in bringing down the numbers of all those backroom staff whom absolutely everybody knows aren't needed - until they're no longer there, of course. When that happens, instead of all business streams having just one set of support services to go to, every business stream will have to (and indeed have already started to) create its own mini-support sector. This is what our whelk-stall failures of 'leaders' call 'streamlining' and 'efficiency'. I'll leave you to guess what I call it - otherwise the 'F' key on this computer is going to wear out.
To say I'm not looking forward to September 29 is an understatement. I know that attempts will be made to make me backtrack on my promise that I will have nothing to do with IT after the move, and I'm going to have to be determined to resist this, come what may.
On top of which, the work I'm moving to is subject to the glorious idiocies of 'LEAN' (see here for what that leads to). I have an extremely low tolerance threshold for bullshit, especially when it comes from those quack doctors of our age called 'management consultants', and the first time I am told that I can't put my coat on the back of my chair - or even that my banana is not allowed to be inactive - is the moment that the sewage farm will start to hit the windmill.
Colleagues have expressed their shock at the cavalier way in which I've been treated, and managers in other business streams are wondering who is going to advise or assist them now (because I've made it plain that I won't do it anymore). They're also going to find out the hard way how much I actually did for the office, much of it beyond my official remit.
In the light of all I've just said, it probably won't come as a surprise to you that I am now actively looking for work elsewhere. The Depratment is sinking, the senior officers of the ship are all stoned out of their mind on Château Merde-de-taureau and the crew is drowning in the bilges. I want out.
(It could even be that posting this Rant will bring them down upon my neck and force the issue. So be it).
The trouble is, to where? Anywhere where I'm appreciated, obviously, and where I'm treated as if I and my skills really matter. The problem is, all of my skills have been gained by experience rather than by pieces of paper, and are not easily expressible in CVs and formal applications.
I tried Jobcentre Plus' Job Search feature. I found that it doesn't work with Firefox despite the head of that organisation saying two years ago that the problem was about to be fixed. Something similar happened when I tried the equivalent on Sainsbury's website (there's a branch near our office, I have a nephew working there, and they owe me one after all the money I've spent there down the years). I'm just looking, looking, looking. And I won't stop until I find something that will get me out of a Department I long ago stopped feeling proud of working in. The plague of managerialism has alighted upon the beast, and quality and commitment count for nothing if the bloody statistics can't be massaged.
Does anyone in the Wrexham area want to employ an opinionated fortysomething who wants an interesting job that he can commit himself to without being undermined by arse-covering placemen (and women) who don't care for quality or enthusiasm, only for their own position? If so, please get in touch by e-mailing webmaster(at)judgemental.plus.com. All genuine offers appreciated.
It's bad enough that we are governed by officious control freaks - at least we can (in theory) vote those bastards out from time to time.
But what if your grocers decide that they too must don the uniform of Enforcer and hide behind the gold braid of the cretinous 'rules is rules' mentality which is now the prevailing mode amongst those who have (or believe themselves to have) power over our lives (whilst being forever "responsive to their customers", of course)?
This was posted on the No2ID forums yesterday. Our correspondent goes by the nom de clavier of 'hatless'. I reproduce his post in full:
"Just to add to the 'guilt by association' stories of excessive shop policy on demanding proof of age "ID" when buying alcohol...
"I was in Tesco yesterday evening in an unnamed-town-on-Thames and we were stuck in the queue behind someone who was daring to try and purchase a couple of bottles of wine with the rest of his shopping.
"He was clearly old enough but had made the mistake of shopping whilst being accompanied by his daughter. The checkout girl refused to sell him the wine on the grounds that his daughter was under-age.
"He rightly objected, the manager was duly summoned...
"The Accused was mightily unimpressed, and had sent his daughter to go and sit in the car while he made the purchase, but they were having none of it. It sounded like they were demanding ID to prove that she was his daughter and not some random under-age binge-drinking lout.
"The manager told The Accused that this was the law. He asked where was the notice that you can't go shopping with your family, the manager said "we can't pin up copies of the law". At which point I joined in with "it's not the law" but she insisted that they could not sell him the wine because of it and it was their rules/policy etc. Not much to be done beyond that point as it's their shop and I was still waiting in the queue...
"At this point The Accused said sod this I'm not shopping here ever again and walked out. Shopping left, unpurchased, likewise the two bottles of wine.
"The checkout girl said if the man's daughter had been e.g. a five-year-old there wouldn't have been a problem, so it's not as if there's no flexibility there.
"So the 'need ID for proof of age' argument is meaningless because they can refuse to serve just because you are within 100 feet of a young person, never mind anything like 'probable cause' or 'have reason to believe'.
"Give someone a rule to apply and they will apply it as much as they possibly can, reasonableness and personal judgement be damned. The government doesn't need to 'market' ID cards - just hand out rules to all those jobsworths out there.
"Oh, and the really good bit?
"The checkout girl was having to wave all alcohol purchases at the supervisor... because she was under-age."
I've hardly ever shopped at Tesco. I don't intend to again whilst it is being run by a cadre of fuckwits (the managers, that is, not the checkout staff - zey haff to obey orderz). As I have no economic leverage against those pricks, therefore, I can only express my opinion graphically:
Sometimes you don't know whether the proper response to something is a guffaw of glee or a scream of frustrated rage.
A colleague had a problem with his workstation monitor this morning. The mains cable was loose.
In the olden times, back when we were so terribly inefficient that we carried our own IT support staff on the strength, he would just have phoned me or a colleague and one of us would have gone across the building to sort it out.
But that's not cost-effective, efficient or dynamic enough for a modern, thrusting (*) Depratment in a State, so now he had to phone our handy-dandy, outsourced Service Centre. The following conversation between my colleague and one of their 'agents' ensued:
Colleague: "I've got a problem with the connection between my base unit and the VDU."
'Agent': "How are you spelling that?"
Colleague: "Pardon?"
'Agent': "How are you spelling that?"
Colleague: "Is this some sort of wind-up?"
'Agent': "No."
Colleague (slowly and deliberately): "V....D....U"
(pause)
'Agent': "I've only just started working here...."
Yes, ladies and gentlemen! These are your tax pounds at work! Who needs knowledgeable backroom staff when you can pay a large foreign-owned corporation to drag people off the street to read from a script!
(And in case you were wondering: no, the call centre isn't in India. It's in Birmingham)
(And in case you were wondering again: no, I like Birmingham. In fact, I was there only yesterday)
(* Think of another context in which the word "thrusting" is often used and you'll see the similarity)
Cats shit anywhere, any patch of earth that's bare.
On your lawn (right to the edge!), on the path, beneath the hedge.
Underneath your oak tree, too - everywhere's a kitty-loo.
Despite your threats, despite your orders, still they'll crap in all your borders.
They drive me spare! They don't care! Cats shit anywhere!
A little while since we had one of these, but having stood waiting for over half an hour just now before giving up in disgust and going back in the house, I think it's time for...
This Week's Non-ARRIVAls!
(And it's only halfway through Monday)
Day
Date
Service
Direction
Time
Monday
23/06/08
13
Brymbo-Wrexham
1208
No
show
Monday
23/06/08
12
Brymbo-Wrexham
1218
No
show
Friday
23/06/08
12
Brymbo-Wrexham
1228
No
show
Yes, that's right - three buses in a frigging row!
Perhaps, dear Arriva, you could try spending a bit more of the money you get from us by raising (sorry, I meant "revising") your fares every six months on employing enough drivers to cover for absences, or on buying new vehicles, or on not constantly palming us off with vehicles which are clapped out from having been run into the ground in Liverpool and Manchester for the better part of a decade beforehand. Apart from the prestigious X94 express route to Barmouth (got to keep up appearances), there's hardly a bus running out of the Wrexham depot which is less than ten years old.
Better still, why not "revise" your timetable to reflect reality and stop taking us for a ride in the other sense of the term?
Update: some of the problems have actually been caused by an emergency road closure at the bottom end of Brymbo, which is causing an alternative timetable to be operated. But this has not been communicated adequately to passengers. My other criticisms of Arriva still stand.
I don't comment as much as I used to about current events.
The main reasons for this are that it's not going to change anything, and that there are people who are far better at it than I am. People, moreover, who seem to have the time and energy to spare to make a habit out of it.
Sometimes, however, things come together to make a pretty pattern which I find I have to remark upon.
Consider:
Item: Not content with wanting to bar-code the entire population with its ID card scheme (a large chunk of which they now want to hand over to their friends in the private sector), this régime of thugs now wants to collate and store details of all of our phone calls (mobile and land-line), our e-mails and our internet browsing.
Excuse me? From the people who brought you that grand farce, "Whoops! There Go Your Bank Account Details!"? Who have now resorted to the completely pointless arse-covering exercise of forcing all members of staff in the Department concerned to attend 'Data Security Workshops' (which are the equivalent of teaching an entire postofficeful of grannies how to suck eggs) just so that Top Shop can tick a box when they next report to their political masters? Even when the data was lost by a private company owned by King Rupert The Tax Dodger? The jerks who claim that they have to do it because of the European Data Retention Directive when it was Chuckie Clarke who pushed that Directive through in the first place?
The only consolation (but not much of one) is that they are 100% certain to make a complete pig's ear of it.
Item: Last week, two students at Nottingham University were arrested in the customarily melodramatic fashion. The alleged crime? The possession of 'radical material'.
Leave aside for now the inconvenient truth that the material is widely available on the internet, and that its subject matter was within the students' field of legitimate academic research. Forget also for the moment that ten minutes' investigation could have shown this to be the case. None of this stopped the police, the media and (to their eternal discredit) the administrators of the University itself from crowing about their success in combatting yet another potential lethal threat to our way of shopping.
Having been held and interrogated for a full week, the students were released without charge yesterday. Or, at least, one of them was: the other was immediately re-arrested on the grounds of alleged 'immigration offences' (well, Chief Inspector Knacker has to have something to show for it).
Response from the media? Silence.
This is the umpteenth occasion in recent times when the bizzies have gone charging in to round up naughty terrorists, only to have to release them a few days later when it turns out there was no evidence of any sort. Similarly, the media have been completely uninterested in the story once it turns out that there was no story. Conveniently, however, the good names of the victims have become sufficiently tainted by the operation as to make it easier to justify doing something else to them later on: like holding them for 'immigration offences', for instance.
Just think: if this ever more venal and cloddish government gets its way, any such future victims could - and almost certainly would - be held for six weeks, with all that that would imply for destroying their lives or careers. How convenient for neutralising dissent.
Item: A government-commissioned report has recommended that there should be a public holiday to celebrate 'our' armed forces, that members of said forces should be encouraged to wear their uniforms when off-duty, that it should be a criminal offence to discriminate against people in military uniform, and that state schools should be 'encouraged' to form military cadet forces and teach 'military awareness' as part of the national curriculum.
The report was produced by Quentin Davies, a former senior member of the Parliamentary Conservative Party who, finding that his party was no longer sufficiently right-wing for him, defected to the only possible alternative - New Labour. Davies is not the first example of a rat joining a sinking ship, but is perhaps the most extraordinary example in recent times.
I really don't know where to start with this. For a start, this government is the one who sent 'our' armed forces into harm's way in two illegal invasions and occupations. That may be the reason for the disconnect between the military and the general public. Moreover, it sent them there hideously under-equipped, wants to know as little as possible about 'our brave boys' when they come home dead or injured and expects their families to live in appallingly sub-standard housing. But never mind, we can all show our appreciation of their sacrifices by giving a public holiday in their honour!
The rest of it is the sort of thing you'd expect from a tin-pot dictatorship: turning state schools (where the pupils are nowadays largely from poor backgrounds and with fewer prospects because the pushy and aspirant have moved their little darlings into the private sector) into recruiting stations for the military, so that the potential chavs and neds can end up bombing and shooting foreigners rather than their neighbours or, with any luck, just killing each other. Culls the herd, don'tchaknow?
As for the thing about uniforms, will it extend to making it a criminal offence to not allow a pissed-up squaddie into a pub in Aldershot or Colchester on a Friday night? Or will their garb allow them to get away with anything up to (and possibly including) murder?
The militarisation of our society in the ways envisaged by this report (which, worryingly, has drawn admiring remarks from even the LibDems) brings to mind memories of Red Square or the juntas of Latin America rather than anything to do with peace, freedom or democracy.
(A brief footnote on my use of inverted commas around the word 'our': the armed forces are not ours, no matter what the Sun might say. On joining up, they take an oath of allegiance not to the country but to the monarch and his/her 'heirs and successors'. So, given that the government behaves increasingly with quasi-regal powers, if the forces were brought in to quell unrest against the government, they would have to do the government's bidding or be in breach of their oath - even if that meant shooting unarmed civilians in the streets. Think on...)
Item: And finally, Esther...On May 10 this year, a peaceful demonstration was held outside the London headquarters of that grand confidence trick called the Church of Scientology. One of the protestors was a 15-year-old lad, who was holding a placard which read: "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.".
He was approached by a police officer who told him that he wasn't allowed to use the word 'cult' to describe the cult. After a few minutes, a policewoman read him section five of the Public Order Act and "strongly advised" the boy to remove the sign.
(Section Five prohibits signs which contain images or words which are 'threatening, abusive or insulting')
This stout young fellow rightly stood his ground, quoting from a 1984 High Court ruling which described Hubbardism as a cult which was, moreover, "corrupt, sinister and dangerous".
The plodette then handed him a court summons and confiscated his placard.
So much for freedom of speech if you cannot legitimately quote the opinion of a High Court judge that a cult is a cult is a cult. But perhaps the action of City of London Police (a different body to the Metropolitan force) makes some sort of sense in the light of the fact that a score or more of their officers have accepted gifts from these dangerous loonies in recent years, and that the force's chief superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised the cultists for efforts in "raising the spiritual wealth of society" when making a guest speech at the opening of that same headquarters building two years ago.
I was sitting here just a few moments ago, contemplating the imminence of teatime and wondering how the hell I'd managed to forget buying salad cream last week, when there was a confident-sounding knock on the front door.
Opening it, I found a smartly-dressed young man with a neat haircut and a lopsided grin. He showed me his badge. He needn't have done so, since the ribbon it was dangling from was emblazoned with the logo of a well-known brand of ether-borne anaesthetic/emetic (clue: it's up there above us, and - mathematically speaking at least - it isn't negative).
He launched into his script, only for me to tell him that I wasn't interested since I didn't have a television set.
He didn't quite manage to mask his astonishment as he asked, "What? Not at all?"
"Not for nearly eighteen months", I replied. (See here for the truth of it)
"What happened? Did it break?"
"No. My licence was running out, and I decided to see if I could live without it."
He gave me an angular look. "Strange", he murmured. Cheeky sod.
"Do you have any children?", he asked.
I said that I hadn't, that there was just me.
"Ah!", he said, with the air of one who had just decrypted a riddle. I could almost hear the cogs whirring: middle-aged man, no kids, rather long hair (I've been meaning to get it cut), lives alone and doesn't have a television! Must be some kind of weirdo (I am, but not that kind - you're free to dig up my back garden anytime: in fact, I wish somebody would). Better retreat.
And, with his smile still glinting at a slight angle to the rest of him, but now just beginning to be overlaid with a cloud-cover of uncertainty, he made his excuses and left.
I've long ago got used to the idea that people think it odd I don't have a television set, so I'm not bothered by that. However, one interesting speculation did occur to me. The TV Licensing people wrote to me a few months ago to say they were going to send someone around to see if was still telling the truth. Strangely, no-one has called. Unless...was this one of their dastardly plans? It doesn't matter because it didn't work, but if you're in the same situation as me, be wary.
What this update is really about, however, is the following, part of a statement issued by Lin Homer, chief executive of the Border and Immigration Agency.
"This is a sad case, and all of us feel sympathy for her family at this time."
Don't bullshit us, you hypocritical cow! Your thuggish organisation couldn't give a flying fuck at the Moon, otherwise you'd have exercised some compassion in the first place.
However large, however small. However seemingly all-powerful the occupying power may be. However much money the occupying power may have.
And yet, this simple fact seems to be lost on those who rule us and the commercial interests who own them. That is why we will no doubt see senior representatives of our governing cliques in Beijing this summer supporting the most tarnished Olympic games since the notorious "Master Race" Olympics of 1936. For all their self-righteous prattling about "freedom" and "human rights", money and the chance to be seen will quell what little remains of their consciences.
I'd only be surprised if anyone was surprised by this. After all, these are the people who - whilst lecturing countries such as Iran and Zimbabwe for their obvious failings - will say nothing, but nothing about the massive abuses of human rights and negation of democracy seen in, for example, the theocratic brutality of Saudi Arabia, the dissident-murdering thuggery of Uzbekistan, and - natch - the expansionist imperialists of the so-called "People's Republic of China".
Of course, the Saudis have the oil, the Uzbeks have a strategic importance in helping the West's corporate states surround the Islamic (and - completely coincidentally, of course - resource-rich) world with a ring of military power, and the Chinese effectively own the United States' nosediving economy (and - by extension - our own). So, no boat-rocking please.
As with South Africa a generation ago, it will be up to the citizens of the self-styled "free democracies" to put the pressure on the venal retards who claim to represent us in order that some semblance of an ethical result can be achieved. Not just for Tibet, but for the increasingly threatened Taiwanese, and for the population of China itself.
Yes, it's time for the unwelcome return of an old favourite. It's...
This Week's Non-ARRIVAls!
Day
Date
Service
Direction
Time
Thursday
13/03/08
12
Wrexham-Brymbo
1555
No
show
Friday
14/03/08
12
Wrexham-Brymbo
1555
No
show
Friday
14/03/08
12
Wrexham-Brymbo
1605
No
show
A big cheer for D Jones & Sons. But for their 16A service (Wrexham - Brymbo via Tanyfron & Lodge) at 1613, I'd still have been standing at the bastard bus stop!
My lengthy, Pinteresque pauses have been remarked upon.
Well, I'm trying to get on with my project to digitise my old audio cassettes, and I'm in the middle of writing another article for Transdiffusion, so that's mostly the reason.
The rest of it is down to not really knowing what to say about some current events, and the sickening knowledge that - whatever I say - nothing, but nothing will be changed by it. What is the point?
Since I'm sitting here, however, let's take a brief look at one or two news items of recent weeks:
Item: The "Harry in Afghanistan" story. Well, I suppose it makes economic sense for him to get nearer to his drugs suppliers (and with the restoration of 'democracy' in Afghanistan, the opium supply is flourishing - perhaps due to the soil having had a rest during the years when those evil, mediaeval Taliban banned poppy growing), but the true outrage is this: that the Windsorian (or Hewittian - see here) spare part was only there (fulfulling both his own whim and the desire of his family to get him out of the way for a bit) because our glorious, independent and free media - print and broadcasting - connived with the government to keep the story under wraps. Their reward was to be granted carefully stage-managed 'interviews' and 'photo-opportunities' with the Gilded One. It took an Australian supermarket magazine and an American gossip website to make the whole thing unravel.
As with the Usmanov case last year, our tiger-like fighters for the truth have been exposed yet again as mere mewing pussies with blancmange where their spinal columns are supposed to be.
That there are still people who believe that you can trust the corporate media in this country to tell us what is going on, and to tell us the truth about why it is going on is something which fills me with despair and disgust.
I can only respond by quoting the estimable Justin McKeating at Chicken Yoghurt:
"Sure, we can't send them to war properly equipped and we can't look after them properly when they're injured and maimed. We can't run the inquests or look after their families properly when their sons are killed. But let's have a day to cheer them all up."
Apparently they already have them in Russia (to celebrate the mass murders of Ukrainians, Latvians and Chechens), Italy (to celebrate those who emasculated Abyssinian men and boys whilst - according to fable - keeping the tanks idling in reverse gear), and the good ol' U S of A.
And there, my dears, is the rub. The Cult of the Military is deeply entrenched on the other side of the water. Have a uniform or a medal and you are the object of veneration. Unless, of course, you come back from your corporate government's latest military adventures dead or maimed in body and mind: in which case you'd better be kept out of sight lest you remind the stay-at-home citizenry what war really involves.
The passion for military parades is invariably the sign of a political system which has darkness in its soul, and which needs a circus to distract the masses. And what better circus than one which comprises a group of people you are not allowed to criticise for fear of being labelled 'unpatriotic'? Hence the other brouhaha which has come to light this week, namely the allegation that members of the R.A.F. are being verbally abused in Peterborough when they walk through the town in uniform..
It turns out that there had been one incident. That's right, just one case of someone being shouted at.
Not that this stopped the Tory party's current flying gobshite Liam Fox from fulminating to the media about 'no-go areas', despite the local MP - another Tory - saying that he doesn't think there's a major problem. Nor did it prevent Our Glorious Unelected Leader from spouting crap about how he wants the erks to wear their clobber with pride.
Abusing individual members of the forces (even though they all volunteered for the job) isn't really right: it's a bit rude, it doesn't achieve anything, and it diverts attention away from the real criminals (see below). But in a country where any form of peaceful protest is deemed dangerous (even if - like the Aldermaston marches - there has been no incident of violence in fifty years), it's scarcely to be wondered at if some people pick a high-visibility target. Especially as the military seem to have no idea about how to behave properly in a civilian environment. Anyone who has ever spent time in a garrison town (I had an aunt who lived in Aldershot who told many a story) could tell you that they bring it upon themselves much of the time.
(I'll break off here for a moment to report that some twerp has just parked his jangling ice-cream van outside my house. It's the ninth of March, ferchrisakes! All I can say is that if he goes down to the woods today, he'll get a bigger surprise than he bargained for! Aaaarghhh!!)
That's right: our children are to be 'encouraged' (i.e. if you don't do it you'll be frowned at) to swear an oath of allegiance to Lizzie-poos and her ridiculous heirs and successors. It could, says Lord Goldsmith, "strengthen children's understanding of what it means to be British".
Oh, don't worry dear boy, it will, it will.
It could bring them face-to-face with the reality that they are without any constiutional protection from a state apparatus based on a thin crust of semi-democracy over an open sewer of late-model feudal deference, financial, instiutional and ethical corruption, and all but untrammelled executive power. Useful to know when you're lining up to be compulsorily fingerprinted and scanned for the government's latest database.
And look who's behind this great idea! Lord Goldsmith. That's as in Lord "I'm-A-Lord-Because -I-Crawled-Up-Blair's-Arse" Goldsmith. That's as in Lord "This-Is-My-Impartial-Legal-Advice- Prime-Minister-But-If-You-Don't-Agree-With-It-I'll-Change-It" Goldsmith. That's as in Lord "I'm-Terminating-This-Investigation-Into-Massive-Corruption-Because-It's-Pissing-Off-The-Saudis" Goldsmith.
I don't think you need to be paranoid any more to belive that we are being lined up for a form of Fascism. If it starts with indoctrination in schools - some of which are already run by fundamentalist nutters of one stamp or another - and continues into glorifying the military and tracking and bar-coding the population in general, then one can only conclude that if it looks like totalitarianism, walks like totalitariasm and quacks like totalitarianism, then it bloody well is totalitarianism, and we'd better wake up from our artificial-colourings-induced stupor pretty damn quick.
Item: Tom Lehrer proclaimed thirty-five years or more ago that satire was dead. It's certainly true that some events in the world make it completely superfluous. Like this:
I would have thought that Yale would have kept its collective head down, having been the alma mater of George W Bush, but it appears that that institution no longer has any sense of embarrassment, let alone shame.
To allow a war-criminal-designate, a despoiler of fundamental rights and liberties, a serial liar, a man whose moral compass is so confused that you could use the needle to cool a dual-core CPU and a Messianically self-deluded extremist to give lectures on any subject remotely associated with ethics to students at what likes to think of itself as one of the world's premier educational establishments is to invite scorn, derision and calumny - all of it richly deserved. One can only hope that some of Yale's alumni will blush as crimson as its banner with embarrassment at this, even if the College itself seems to be incapable of doing so.
For those of us who are not associated with Yale (at least, not that one, although I did pass through the gates of this one many moons ago when it was something - and somewhere - else), one's only valid response can be a heartfelt cry of "Fuck me to heaven in a bath of champagne!"
This is even worse than those packets of biscuits where they put the words "Pull here to open" just at the part of the packaging that they've reinforced with tungsten carbide steel.
"A Ghanaian woman who came to the UK five years ago and became a student is being flown back to the African country, despite being terminally ill."
That's right: a woman dying of cancer is forcibly deported to a third-world country where the health-care system is totally private. Because she doesn't have the right paperwork.
"Ms Sumani was tearful but calm when she left hospital in a wheelchair with five immigration officials, one carrying her suitcase, and she was driven away."
Yep. This woman is such a threat to the well-being of the good old UK that it takes five immigration officials to remove her (presumably they were there to make sure she didn't try to take the wheelchair with her at Heathrow).
"A spokesman for the Border and Immigration agency said said it would not remove from the UK anyone who they believe is at risk on their return."
Presumably imminent death isn't deemed a 'risk' by these fuckers.
""Removals are always carried out in the most sensitive way possible, treating those being removed with courtesy and dignity.""
It is at this point, my dear friends, that words actually fail me. This is like a crane with a wrecking ball trying to pass itself off as The Sugar Plum Fairy. One would laugh if one were not already weeping with rage.
"The Home Office said it examined each case "with care"."
Of course it does.
"Right, gentlemen, let's examine this case with care, shall we? Is she poor?"
"Check"
"Is she a drain on our much-put-upon Health Service (whom PFI preserve)?"
"Check"
"And finally, gentlemen, is she...you know...not white?"
"Check, chief. And she doesn't come from a country full of rich businessmen who want to come here to buy up our business and politicians."
"Well, I think we've examined this case with care, don't you? Huggins, go and fetch the van. Muxloe, phone the media to tip them off, will you?"
And this what we've come to. A woman who is dying is thrown out of the country because of administrative officiousness. No sense of decency, no twinge of simple, common humanity can be entertained, especially if it might risk the wrath of that pack of slavering shit-hounds which calls itself "The press".
It beats me why anyone should want to come to a country ruled by grandstanding thugs and with a population so dumbed down and sedated that all it needs is a 'nasty, sponging foreigners' story to get them lighting torches and scrabbling around for the nearest pitchfork.
Rants Archive 2008
