...to the anti-social twat driving the white, open-backed van who deliberately splattered me with slush as I waited for the bus on Rhyd Broughton Lane just after 14:30 this afternoon:
The next time you try to get your end away with your tart, I hope your balls spontaneously combust, roll down the bed and get eaten by the cat.
There are times when the words "brazen" and "effrontery" seem hopelessly inadequate.
That's the thought which occurred to me when I read this.
Read it. And weep.
Weep with the thought that, not only are there people in this land who quite clearly have the same sense of self-awareness which was once found in the French monarchy shortly before it was 'rationalised' in the proper manner, but that they have been allowed to breed as well; and - worse still - pass on their ludicrous sense of self-entitlement to their offspring.
I had thought of going through the whole wretched screed paragraph by paragraph, pointing out the madness of this appalling woman (who, it seems, has what the cops call 'form' on the subject, although I can't bring myself to read the earlier piece she refers to), but I would only have been pointing out what is blindingly obvious to ninety-nine per cent of you; namely, that this inane bint (and her husband, whose income is not stated in the piece, although this would be salient to the matter in hand) indulged in property speculation, got her fingers burned when the bubble deflated slightly, and is now having to make do with less than before, which is still an awful lot more than most of us.
Reading it reminded me of that tale of the little rich girl who was asked at school to write a story about a poor family. It began:
"There was once a poor family.
"Everyone was poor. Mummy and Daddy were poor. The children were poor. The cook was poor. The gardener was poor. The butler was poor..."
This is a rare moment in which I can indulge in those clichés usually thrown at those of us in the public sector when we say we want to protect what little we currently have. So, dear Charlotte, might I invite you to:
"Get real!"
"Wake up and smell the coffee!"
"Welcome to the real world!"
The only thing which is slightly encouraging is the ginormous kicking the hackette is getting in the comments appended to this waste of electrons. From readers of the Daily Mail!
For the umpteenth time in the last couple of weeks, I have had the peace of my evening interrupted (and on this occasion my listening to Terry Riley's wonderful A Rainbow In Curved Air ruined) by one of those telephone calls where you pick it up and there's silence, prior to some recorded message kicking in to tell you about something you aren't interested in.
I'm registered with the Telephone Preference Service, but they can do nothing about these calls because, a) they usually originate from a foreign jurisdiction, and b) you can't figure out who's calling you because they block identification.
In a last, desperate attempt to prevent them, a short, poignant message:
I AM NOT REMOTELY INTERESTED IN ANYTHING YOU HAVE TO TRY TO SELL ME, AND EVEN IF I WERE I WOULD BE EXTREMELY DISINCLINED TO BUY IT FROM YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE ENTERING MY LIFE COMPLETELY UNINVITED AND DISTURBING THE EVEN TENOR OF MY EVENINGS!
NOW PISS OFF AND FIND SOMETHING MORE ETHICALLY ELEVATED TO DO, LIKE ROUNDING UP STRAY DOGS FOR THE VIVISECTIONISTS!
This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the closure of Brymbo Steelworks, with the direct loss of over a thousand jobs and the indirect loss of hundreds more in the area.
It is difficult to express to those who have not grown up in such an environment how great a part a steelworks (or a coal mine, or a shipyard) can play in the lives of those who live cheek-by-jowl with it, even if they themselves have no direct connection to that industry. Because such an industry creates more industry around it, provides jobs (and therefore some hope for continuity) and forges (if you'll excuse the pun) a sense of community solidarity which no amount of half-arsed 'initiatives' from local or central government can ever hope to replicate or create out of the deserts of despair that so many such areas have become during my lifetime.
In my own case, and in the case of my parents', grandparents' and great-grandparents' generations, the steelworks had always been there. Sometimes prospering, sometimes less so (and during The Great Depression, closing altogether for a time), but at all times a symbol of some core of our identity.
It had been founded by the mad Iron King himself, John Wilkinson, in the late eighteenth century, and located to make the best use of the local coal and limestone deposits. It had gradually expanded until, in my boyhood, it had taken over a substantial area of land on the south-eastern edge of Brymbo.
My paternal great-grandfather, Alfred Stapley, had come up from the Hastings area at the tail end of the nineteenth century to work there, and had brought most of his large brood with him. One of the sons, Harry, had joined his father at the steelworks by the time he was about fourteen. In turn, a number of his sons went on to work there, including my father, although economic circumstances forced him to work elsewhere for periods in the thirties through to the mid-fifties. By the time he retired in 1975, my old man had spent thirty five of his fifty working years in 'the works'.
Although I never continued the tradition, in that I was foolish enough to get myself over-educated and therefore useless for any real work, because of the family connections and because of its dominant position the works nevertheless played a huge part in my life from its very beginning.
When I say that the works had a dominant position, I don't necessarily mean in the sense that it towered - or even loomed - over our homes in the way that, say, the shipyards of the Tyne and the Clyde did. In fact, quite the opposite, because the steelworks stood below our homes up here on the Penygraig estate; an estate which had been built in stages between the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-sixties largely to house people who worked in and around the works.
The council house in which I was born, and where I lived until I was nearly twenty-two, had two bedrooms. Mine, the smaller of the two, was at the back of the house facing slightly north of east. Within the field of vision from the window was the larger part of the steelworks complex prior to its expansion southwards in the late seventies. This meant that in all weathers other than the thickest fog the works could be seen - and heard. On summer nights in particular - in the times when we used to have summers where this was necessary - the open window would bring the sounds of heavy industry into my bedroom; the clanking of the shunting wagons, the hissing of steam escaping, the sonic background radiation of our lives.
(Such was their dire condition that the same windows when closed would still admit the same noises all the year round with little diminution of volume).
This might sound like some sort of sonic dystopia (I remember the great John Peel describing trying to sleep in the spare room of his mother's house - which stood next to railway sidings - as "trying to sleep through a concert by Einstürzende Neubauten"), but it didn't seem in any way intruding; or perhaps it was simply that we were used to it, and only the annual maintenance shutdown in late July/early August each year seemed eerie as all normal noise ceased.
I've sometimes had cause to wonder whether this subliminal soundtrack to my childhood conditioned me for a partiality to certain types of music later in my life, rather in the same way as the somewhat sinister hum from the electricity substation by Pinfold may have led me to a taste for electronic music. We are all influenced by our upbringings in ways which - if they ever become clear at all - only become discernible with hindsight.
It wasn't just the sounds, however. A steelworks - especially in the days before a stronger degree of environmental awareness became prevalent - also produces other things; smoke and dust and the general tang of hot metal in the air. The smoke itself wasn't too much of a problem for us up on Penygraig, as the prevailing winds seldom blew it our way, but the dust was a different matter. Being heavier, it had a tendency to seep across and up from the valley in which the works stood, and windows when cleaned didn't tend to stay clean for long. The effects of the dust - and of the fact that most houses in the village at that time still had coal fires - could be most clearly seen on the sandstone buildings in the bottom half of the village, directly due north of the steelworks. The village primary school, some of the chapels, many of the houses; all had been turned black by the dust and soot.
Much of the dust was so fine as to render it invisible in normal conditions, but it nonetheless lent a certain faint haziness to the air, particularly in warm weather. It's odd the things one can be nostalgic for; I have a particular view in my mind (perhaps a composite recollection of all the times I did this) of standing on the old bridge on Railway Road on a still July afternoon, looking across at the tree-covered slope on the Brynmalley side of the valley with the very slightest haze like a very fine gauze hanging in the air.
Of course, what this was all doing to our health could only be imagined, although I don't remember any widespread incidence of respiratory conditions amongst my schoolmates at that time.
There were other ways in which the steelworks' existence impinged on every aspect of our lives. The work which it created meant that this village - with a population of some two and a half thousand at that time - had six pubs (The Miners' Arms, The Furnace, The Railway, The Black Lion, The George And Dragon, The Mount Hotel), a Conservative Club and a thriving British Legion branch; shops (Sooty's on Offa Street; Bloor's on Penygraig Road; Pryce Davies' (Gwalia Stores), Bert Evans' paper shop and a large and diverse Co-op (all on High Street); Sims' paper shop on Coedyfelin Road; Colenso's on Railway Road; Vera's on Harwd Road. This in addition to a chemist's and the Post Office (also on High Street), two butchers' shops (one on Harwd Road, one on Ael Y Bryn), at least three hairdressers/barbers, and two chippies.
There were other things, too. The sight of the diesel locomotives shunting up and down the line past the school, and the old-style, heavy-wooden-gate level crossings at Brymbo East, Middle and West, complete with their signal boxes. Similarly, seeing the yellow shunting engines going up and down the line which ran alongside Blast Road.
The steelworks was also, of course, one of the hubs of our social lives, along with the British Legion, the chapels and churches and the pubs (if you were of an age). The steelworks had its own Social and Sports Club, although this was located on the farther side of the works from us; practically in Tanyfron in fact, and reachable from Brymbo only by means of a winding country lane (up which unsuspecting lorry drivers were sent - or sent themselves - from time to time with (as they say on television) hilarious consequences). If you had the authority - or the cheek - you could of course just cut straight through the works itself and save yourself a mile.
The Club had its clubhouse and a variety of sporting sections; darts, snooker, tennis, bowls, cricket. And of course football. Brymbo Steelworks Football Club - although founded as late as 1946 - had developed an enormous reputation as one of the top amateur clubs in the whole of Wales. My father had been an early stalwart of the club, a connection which continued for the rest of his life, and which passed down to me and my brother as we spent several years in the eighties helping to run the club. It was inevitable, then, that he should start dragging me along with him on a Saturday afternoon to The Cricket Field ('The Crick'). I can't say that at the age of four or five I was at all interested in the game; it was just a way of getting me out of my mother's hair for a couple of hours. At least we seldom had to walk the long way round; everyone knew Bill Stapley, and no-one would have questioned his presence walking his small son alongside the shunting lines and past the stacked billets and ingots.
Following the football brought its adventures to me even at that age. I well remember one trip - either for a pre-season friendly or for a Welsh Cup game, I forget which - to Ellesmere Port, which might as well have been Samarkand such was the distance to my four-year-old mind. After the game (which we won 5-0, my father winding up a home fan by telling him that, next time, we were going to bring the first team) we headed off to some sort of club, which may have been in Chester. Wherever it was, it was deemed out of bounds to me and so Dad and me went back and sat in the bus for about three hours until everybody else returned, piling me with chocolate as recompense. On the way home, we came back up through the road tunnel which ran from The Lodge under the main part of the works and which brought us to High Street, from which we walked the remaining couple of hundred of yards home. We arrived back at about half past midnight, and Mam didn't half give my old man Down The Banks. No harm done, though, as he himself patiently pointed out, though it didn't stop her from referring to me jokingly as a "dirty stopout" for weeks afterwards.
As far as the viability of the steelworks itself was concerned, apart from that period in the nineteen thirties when it had been mothballed (a policy which was quickly reversed as war loomed; indeed my mother worked in the smithy there during hostilities) the place had never run at a loss. This is all the more remarkable given what happened in the post-war years when, depending on the policies adopted by the government of the day, the works moved from private ownership to nationalised status and back again two or three times. This didn't seem seriously to affect the prospects for the place; indeed, the mid to late nineteen seventies saw a major expansion southwards, with a new rolling mill and its attendant railway sidings wiping out the old Crick.
The works was back in private ownership by this time, with GKN having once more taken over from British Steel. Public or private, however, we sensed that tougher times were ahead with the coming of a government in London determined to pursue a hard-line ideology which held that large-scale unemployment was a price worth paying for what they termed 'efficiency', and which believed that, whatever the costs to those who were not of their class, the heavy industries of the UK and the sense of solidarity and collective power which went with them had to be crushed in order to usher the land into the neo-Golden Age where high finance and the 'service economy' was to dominate our lives.
Nonetheless, despite frequent alarums and excursions, Brymbo Steelworks survived pretty well in the first half of the eighties, albeit with falling numbers of staff. But the graffiti was on the wall, in the form of a new company set up as a joint venture between GKN and British Steel, to be called United Engineering Steels (UES). This new company would have control over the output of Brymbo and of a number of other steel plants - mostly in Yorkshire - which were concerned with the production of high-quality steel for specialised use in the automotive and other industries. The company's headquarters would be in Rotherham, which should have given us a fair warning of what was likely to await us.
The signs were not good when UES claimed that it couldn't afford to install new technology to reduce emissions from the works. This had come in the wake of people on a new housing estate across the valley in Pentre Broughton complaining about the dust which would drift across to them. They - many of whom were not from the immediate area - were agitated about the pollution reducing their ability to cash in at the height of the next property bubble.
UES invested virtually nothing in Brymbo in the next four years, concentrating instead on their Yorkshire plants which used the 'continuous casting' method which - in tune with the spirit of the age - produced far higher quantities of steel, but at a lower overall quality.
Perhaps, then, we shouldn't have been surprised to be told one morning in May 1990 that UES had decided to close Brymbo, with the loss of over twelve hundred jobs in the works itself, and doubtless many hundreds beyond her gates. The announcement had been made to a press conference by the chairman of UES, one John Pennington, before Brymbo's workers had been told, such was the regard in which the workers - who had been optimistic and confident about the plant's future - were held by the company's senior management.
All hell broke loose: Wales' TV cameras and the radio reporters - who had thought the whole area scarcely worthy of note during the previous decade, concentrating instead on the daily disasters of de-industrialisation in the southern valleys - descended; workers and residents were importuned for their opinions; the politicians had their shout.
After the initial shock, a campaign began to grow. The local MP, John Marek, secured an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons. Neighbouring Labour MPs joined on. The local councils at County, Borough and Community level came together to try to bring pressure on the Secretary of State, David Hunt, to get UES either to reconsider the closure plan or to allow the sale of the works as a going concern. After all, it was pointed out, if Brymbo was not competitive (as UES claimed), then what harm could come to UES by allowing another company to take it over? And, if they actually feared competition from it, what excuse could they have for closing it?
Public meetings were held, politicians were lobbied, leaflets, badges and special newsletters were distributed. Even in an area justifiably renowned as Europe's Permanent Capital of Apathy, actions and emotions were stirred.
As could have been predicted by anyone with any degree of connection with reality however, there was to be no reversal of UES' actions. After all, it had got all that it had wanted; the order books, which were duly dispatched to Rotherham to be fulfilled by continuous casting. The bitter irony that the first batches of steel made by that process after Brymbo closed were returned by the shipload by customers unhappy at the drop in quality was scarcely any consolation to us.
The people and the politicians had once again proved impotent in the face of the power of big business to arrange the world for its own convenience and no-one else's. David Hunt proved as powerless as all the rest of us; reduced to bleating that he had tried his best, but that you couldn't buck the market.
The last steel was made in September 1990 and by early November it was all over, and the gates closed on two centuries of quality steel making.
A cold, malignant gloom settled on the site and, equally, on those of us who lived around it. UES sold off the furnaces, the burning hearts of the steel business, to China. There was to be no going back.
Nor was there to be any going forward.
For if anyone was sufficiently starry-eyed to believe that we could clamber back to our feet, regroup and move on to new success with some other use for the site, they had reckoned without the cupidity of developers, the hand-wringing incompetence of the local council, the scarcely-feigned indifference of the Welsh Development Agency and similar quangos, and the powerlessness of our Members of Parliament.
For this was the time of one of the numerous economic recessions deliberately engineered by those who held high political and economic power; recessions which were explicitly designed to enable the financial sector to get what it wanted, irrespective of the damage such policies would do - and had already done - to the lives and prospects of millions. In the Wrexham area over the previous decade or so, we had seen the end of the coal industry, the brewing industry was being 'consolidated' into larger (or perhaps that should be 'lager') corporations with their interests a long, long way away, and now the last heavy industry in the area was being wiped out in the name of 'the bottom line'.
The site of Brymbo Steelworks lay idle and unregarded. The fate of those left behind quickly slipped off the media and political radar. The next time that the site made the news was when an abortive attempt was made to demolish Electric Melting Shop (EMS) No. 2 (the place where my father had worked during the years leading up to his retirement). Despite having being told that geligniting the structure was not a good idea, the contractors went ahead and did it anyway, presumably because one of them had a piece of paper tellling him how clever he was. The only result was to blow the metal panels off the sides, twist the metal supports (thus rendering the whole edifice unsafe) and send a huge cloud of metal dust into the air where, five hours after the explosion, you could still taste it.
The aftermath of the failed attempt to demolish EMS 2 in 1993
The next step was the announced intention to shift large amounts of toxic waste from the site, supposedly to enable redevelopment. Friends Of The Earth research showed that the waste contained high levels of heavy metal contaminants, dioxins and PCB and was therefore not safe to be disturbed.
Year after year, nothing was done. Virtually uniquely in the British Isles, Brymbo remained (and remains) the only former steelworking site not to have been completely redeveloped.
The redevelopment of the site was placed in the hands of a company called Brymbo Developments. However, despite its local name, the company was a newly-established front for a firm completely owned by three businessmen from south-east Shropshire. They were given almost total control over the site and what was left on it.
After the EMS fiasco and the plans to move lethal substances through one or more densely populated villages came the real meat of the plans as far as the developers were concerned. For this was the age of the Property Bubble™, and housing was a huge area for profit. And so Brymbo Developments - after a few years' further delay - finally stated their intentions. They wished to build a large number of houses and blocks of flats - sorry, 'apartments' - on the southern end of the site. By means of this, they claimed, they could raise the money for their rest of their plans (which were probably called "exciting" and "ambitious", as is customary on such occasions); the parade of shops, the small industrial units, the new road which would link the new development with the old village (the only existing roads going all around the houses - literally - to get there).
The number of houses/'apartments' varied from time to time. Was it three hundred or five hundred? Or six hundred and fifty? Whatever the number, there was yet more delay. It wasn't until 2005 - a full decade and a half after the steelworks closed - that any serious work was done to prepare the site for its new purpose.
There was a lot of work to be done, and the developers went to it to clear the southern end of the site for their much-vaunted housing project. There was much more to do to the site than that, such as major landscaping work to lower or remove the huge banks upon which the steelworks expansion had been built. Not that the developers had to worry too much about such a large-scale enterprise eating into their profits; by one of those nice little arrangements, most of the landscaping at the eastern edge of the site was done with public money.
New houses being built on the site of the old rolling mill, 2005
Landscaping work on the old steelworks bank, 2007
It might be considered a misfortune that all the new properties at the Tanyfron end of the site became available for sale just as the hyper-inflated property boom of the early years of this century went "Pffftt!". If so, then that misfortune was not shared out very equitably (it may have been a dry run for The Big Society). While the money from selling the properties - which, we were told, was to be used to provide all the other amenities and segments of the development - failed to materialise, the developers paid their shareholders nearly £15million in dividends in just one year. And then had the nerve to demand that public money be used to pay for the so-called 'Spine Road' to the old village, even to the point of refusing to sign an agreement stating that no more housing was to be built on the site before the road was in place. And that is in addition to wanting (and getting) planning permission to put even more houses on a playing field on the edge of the Penygraig estate.
The local politicians have, with notably few exceptions, done everything they can to accomodate the developers, even if that meant acting against the longer-term interests of the people they were supposed to be representing. The 'national' politicians, at Westminster and, latterly, in Cardiff Bay, have done little other than to drag themselves up here from time to time to do a bit of tut-tutting for the media and then piddled off back to their cosy little bubble. The development agencies have been comatose, although this has not stopped them from pulling out all the stops to redevelop other sites of heavy industry; when Ebbw Vale steelworks was closed a few years later, the site was revamped and up-and-running within about three years. And CADW, the public body which is charged with protecting our heritage and monuments, and whom - one would like to think - would be concerned with preserving the oldest buildings on the site which stretch back to the nineteenth century, has shown such a foot-dragging lack of zeal that those historical structures are now literally falling down by the day.
The old carpenters' shop, Brymbo Steelworks, early 2010. The roof has since collapsed completely.
What do we have to show for it all after twenty years, then?
A site which is still largely derelict, with even the historic buildings at the northern end of the site left to fall apart through the apathy of the quango which is supposed to be concerned with such things;
a few hundred houses and 'apartments' which the developers can't get shot of;
no small industrial units;
no shops;
no road linking the site with the existing villages.
And no jobs. Not a one. Once the residential properties had gone up, that was it on the employment front.
No jobs. With all that that entails for the communities which had been founded on - and sustained by - skilled labour. We have seen the inevitable social consequences of the slash-and-burn approach to industry and the economy, an approach which benefits asset-strippers such as UES and property speculators such as Brymbo Developments, but which is willing to discard human beings and the communities in which they have their being.
The knock-on effects of the closure for local business have been equally devastating. Since 1990, three pubs, the Legion and all bar one of the general stores have closed. A village of some three thousand people has been left with little more than the Post Office (currently up for sale) and the chemist. Efforts to attract small businesses in - or to encourage the development of them from scratch - have failed. The building of a so-called 'Enterprise Centre' on the Blast Road (to replace a Community Centre which was forced to close because the county council couldn't be bothered to maintain it) has created nothing more than an internet café and a crèche.
We are now into the second generation of families which have never known steady, reasonably-paid employment and - whilst I wouldn't claim that we have become Dodge City, especially as there are villages nearby which far more credibly fit the description - alcohol and drug use amongst the young - and anti-social behaviour from them and from those who in other circumstances would be deemed old enough to know better - has increased markedly. A sort of numbness settled over a place which already relied heavily on a sort of dumb apathy for its modus operandi.
**********
I've spent four or five days writing this piece, and I'm still not sure what it is I want to say. Except perhaps this: when a country is so arranged that the people become subservient to the needs of The Economy, rather than the economy arranged so as to put people and their needs first, you will end up with a society (if such it can still be called) which is riven by lumpen hopelessness, split by unnecessary inequalities, mutual suspicion and even open hatred, and is, indeed, Broken.
And that that state of affairs is deemed to be not only the norm, but even desirable by those who own and control our world, is a symptom of a coarsening and deadening of our common humanity.
I suppose I'm still just plain fucking angry at what was done to us twenty years ago this week. And I hope I always will be.
I get up quite early to go to work. My alarms are timed for 0630 (the quiet one which I nearly always sleep through) and 0633 (the loud one). The idea behind this has been for me to catch the 0740 bus which - at least in theory - gets me to work for 0800.
I am having to revise this practice. Let me tell you about The Demon Child.
In the next village along on the road to town, the bus regularly picks up this woman in her thirties and her two daughters. The elder daughter, who is about nine or ten years old, is quiet but bears a disturbing resemblance to the result of a one-night stand between Minnie Mouse and Goofy. She, however, is the acceptable one.
Her kid sister (hereinafter referred to as The Demon Child) looks comparatively normal. Her behaviour, however, is anything but. Scarcely has she got on the bus than she is screaming, sobbing, stamping and kicking. Sometimes this performance begins even before the wretched creature has got on the bus.
This might be (barely) excusable in a toddler going through the 'terrible twos', but this item must about six or seven years old. Nearly every morning on the 0740 there she is, skriking because she wants to sit where her mother is sitting, then howling the place down because she is sitting where her mother is sitting, the whole while keeping up a constant percussion with her feet on the floor and the seat. Even with them sitting at the back, the noise of the engine and transmission of an elderly Dennis Dart is powerless to supervene and drown out her weapons-grade petulance.
And this is every morning.
And what does the whey-faced oafette who squirted this Abomination out into our dimension in the early part of the last decade do about it? Sod all. Just murmurs to her hellish spawn, "Don't do that, you'll injure yourself" (a little hint, dearie; if she doesn't, someone else most certainly will); or be heard uttering a self-pitying whine of, "I don't know what I've done to deserve this" (little hint Number Two; it involves knickers, and the inadvisability of shedding them in certain circumstances).
The mother (and that may be an abbreviation - you decide) appears to be taking them to a childminder or a relative or even to school (it can't be to the vet's; the bus passes the surgery and I've never seen them get off there) prior, no doubt, to going on to a job which she may not actually need (there may even be a father for this devilish troll-child somewhere). But what it means is that - at a time of day when, to be frank, all most people want is a bit of quiet before the hurly-burly shitfest of the daily grind - we are forced to endure the lousy behaviour of a totally undisciplined bratette in a very confined space travelling at up to thirty-five miles per hour.
I suppose if someone were to ask, the mother would probably proudly claim that her appalling offspring was suffering from 'ADHD', that handy-dandy, all-purpose diagnosis of our age, miraculously absolving all useless parents of any responsibility for their inability to do the job properly. We didn't have 'ADHD' in my day; you were a naughty little sod, and were dealt with accordingly, and I can't see that it caused any great harm to anyone.
But, as a result of this, I have now set my alarms forwards fifteen minutes to ensure that I can catch the 0720 and so miss any future performances of The Child From Hades. I shouldn't have to, but I have my sanity, my blood pressure and perhaps even my liberty to think of.
So the new leader of the Labour Party's first public statement is to tell everyone (for the bankers and the media dons to hear) that, under him, the party won't "lurch to the left" or be "in thrall to the unions".
So that another Labour leader who's going to be no fucking use to us, then.
(Yes, I know that - technically - the image above isn't very good. I don't have the skill level for it to be otherwise, and it has taken me all afternoon just to get it like that)
On BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday morning, there was an interview with a colleague in the Depratment - who was anonymous for obvious reasons - about what had gone wrong and what is still going wrong in it.
The audio is here at the moment, but I don't know for how long, so here's a transcript. Needless to say, everything she says is absolutely correct.
Presenter: A serving tax officer at HMRC has been speaking to our reporter Andrew Hosken. The officer, who has more than a decade's experience as a tax collector, spoke to us on the grounds that we do not disclose her identity, so we've disguised her voice. So what, in her opinion, is the extent of the crisis facing the Revenue?
Tax Officer: It's massive, it's absolutely huge. HMRC hasn't been fit for purpose for a very long time. It's now at melting point. We don't have the staff we need, we don't have the resources we need, and the computer systems we use are atrocious.
Andrew Hosken: The blame is being put on this new computer system. Now, is that the case, and if so why is that the case?
TO: It is indeed the case, and it's the case because it wasn't written by tax people or anyone who had any idea about tax...
AH: What, the computer software?
TO: The computer software. The initial identifier is in fact the employee number and not the National Insurance number, which is a unique number, so we have all sorts of problems. It doesn't do what it was supposed to do in the first place. We're, I think, on the fourth release now of the update to the software, and it's still not working properly. And because we don't have the staff to check individual cases, all of these mistakes are happening and all of this post is going out to our customers, the taxpayer.
AH: Was this pointed out to the Government at the time?
TO: It's always been pointed out to the Government.
AH: What does it mean in terms of collecting tax?
TO: It means we're not collecting tax, but neither are we repaying tax to people who should have their tax repaid. It means that the country doesn't have the money it needs to run, because we're not resourced properly enough to collect those taxes in. Every department has had cuts. We talk about Debt Management and Banking, who actually go out and collect the money, and they're so short-staffed that when we could see a problem elsewhere, there's nobody to follow up on that.
AH: So how much money do you think is going uncollected as a result of this crisis in the tax office?
TO: There are varying amounts. I think by the Department's own admission it's at least thirty to forty billion, and there is evidence - especially in the Richard Murphy Tax Justice report - which suggest that the figure is much higher, up to three, four times higher than that.
AH: What about the public, in terms of how you interact with the public? There'll be a lot of worried people coming to see you, whether they've paid too much tax or they have to pay tax back.
TO: Well, good luck for them to get in and see us. There's so many Enquiry Centres up and down the country that have had their days reduced, that if they manage to turn up on a day when the Enquiry Centre is actually open, the chance of them getting an appointment to see an advisor is slim to none. What will happen - as much as staff at Revenue & Customs hate it - is they'll be put on the telephone to a Contact Centre where they're understaffed and there's not enough people to answer the phones, or they'll be told to write in, that's exacerbating the problem of the million pieces of post we have on hand already.
AH: A million pieces?
TO: A million pieces of unanswered post at the moment are on the system.
AH: So where do you keep these letters?
TO: All over the country in different offices. Where they squirrel them away I'm not sure, but there are a million pieces of post unanswered at the moment.
AH: So, how long did it used to take to answer a query that came in by post, and how long does it take now?
TO: Well, when I first started with the Department, if we went over seven days we got hauled over the coals, but now we're looking at three months.
AH: If you look at The Independent, for example, the front page: "Errors possible in 23.7 million cases"; "15 000 demands for repayment already sent out in a bid to recover two billion pounds"; "One and a half million people owe an average of £1 400 each"; "An extra £3bn in missed payments identified in addition to £3.8bn already reported". I mean, is this sensationalism?
TO: Not really, no. For those of us who work for HMRC. "Errors possible in 23.7 million cases" - I'm surprised the number's that low. "Fifteen thousand demands for repayment already sent out" - again, surprised it's that low...
AH: ...Forty-four million telephone calls to HMRC went unanswered...
TO: Oh, I can absolutely believe that. Absolutely believe that. They are so under-resourced in the Contact Centres, and the poor people who work in there are working under terrible conditions, they are monitored every second of the day, even so far as if they take more than the five minutes on a toilet break they're asked why.
AH: What about the management in the HMRC? Are they coping with this problem?
TO: Senior management are sticking their heads in the sands over this problem. They seem to think that the next new idea will be the one that solves everything, no matter how many times we tell them it won't.
AH: What is the morale like among the staff in HMRC?
TO: Low. It's lower than I've ever known it since I've been with the Department. People are just desperate to get out. They wonder why they come in to work in the morning. It's not a fun place to work, and you could argue perhaps that it shouldn't be a fun place to work because we do a serious job. It doesn't mean that we have to be miserable doing it, and that's how we are now.
AH: Is there any way out of this crisis in the short term?
TO:In the short term, yes, and in the long term. I would say, resource HMRC properly, staff it properly and we will go out there and we will collect the money we need to run the country.
"Whereof We May Not Speak, Thereof We Must Remain Silent"
Thus spake Ludwig Wittgenstein. Context notwithstanding, he could have spake it about my situation at the moment.
I wouldn't want anyone to think that the fact that all of the updates on this site in the last three weeks have been in the Raves section is indicative of my life being on the up at the moment. Because it isn't, particularly.
The problem is that much of what is causing me grief at the moment - creating stress and a mild-to-moderate depression, both of which I could easily manage without - is to do with work.
Or rather, it is to do with the attitude to be found prominently amongst that sub-species known as homo non habilis cretinosa or, to give it its more common name, 'management'.
The Depratment is now run from top to bottom by people to whom such things as courtesy, humanity and even legality itself are merely terms to be found in a dictionary (although they would probably have difficulty finding anything in a dictionary, being no doubt bamboozled by the absence of an index).
So it is that I find myself in a situation whereby everything I tell management about myself and my circumstances is automatically and immediately challenged as if it were a lie; whereby I am made to feel as if I am to blame for things which are beyond my responsibility or power to control; and where even my basic legal rights are being casually disregarded. And each layer of management backs up the layer immediately below it, preventing any satisfactory solution without resorting to a lot of hard work.
And the trouble is that I can tell you nothing specific about all this. This is partly down to strategic considerations, in that I don't want to pre-empt actions which I may be forced to take shortly to rectify matters; but it's also down to my certain knowledge that some of the sub-species referred to above know about this site's existence, and wouldn't hesitate to use any identifiable references here in order to bring further intimidatory actions against me.
There may (I hope) come a point in the not-too-distant future when I can reveal a lot more about all this. In the meantime, I'm just going to have to take Ludwig's advice.
Due to a managerial screw-up, I found myself in the office yesterday unable to do any of the work that I'm being underpaid for doing, so all that was left for me to do was to go through some of the Depratment's online training courses.
The first one I did was Diversity Awareness. This is standard fare, much of which is common sense to anyone who was properly brought up: don't stereotype, don't make assumptions about people based on their race, ethnicity (and what the hell is the difference between 'race' and 'ethnicity', anyway?), gender, sexual proclivities or physical/mental impairments.
So far, so fluffy.
Then I got to one page where the illustrative photograph seemed...strange. Bizarre, even. I can't reproduce it here, but I can describe it. Two men, aged in their late twenties or early thirties, are sitting at a table, possibly in a domestic environment (although the décor leaves a lot to be desired from that aspect). The one facing us has close-cropped hair (failing to hide the fact that he's losing it from the sides) and a grey sports shirt; the one sitting square-on to his right has shortish dark hair with one of those upturned fringes. He is wearing a turquoise sweatshirt. There is a laptop in front of the first man, who is pointing a pen at a sheet of paper in front of the second and...
...they are holding hands.
Putting the mouse cursor over the image reveals the 'title' tag:
"A gay couple doing their home accounts"
There were two thoughts which occurred to me on seeing this, and the combination brought me to such a state of hysterical hilarity that I had to leave my desk and walk around the building for a few minutes.
Firstly, does anyone know of any couple - gay, straight or any combination thereof - who hold hands while doing the household accounts? Unless it's to conduct a séance to find out where Auntie Freda left the old tin box containing the deeds to a large tract of Worcestershire?
Secondly, after all the rabbitting on about not stereotyping, making assumptions, blah, blah, blah, why did the twerps who put that picture there not realise that in one moment they had destroyed the credibility of the whole package? Because one finds it difficult to take seriously the po-faced claims to respecting diversity from an organisation which shows Van Gogh's ear for the music of proper social procedure.
Asking around, it was pointed out to me that they may have been in something of a bind as to exactly how they could illustrate the fact that the couple portrayed were gay. I suggested that the glass of water on the table next to the one in the turquoise shirt could have had 'amyl nitrate' written on it; or that the glass could have been replaced altogether by a small tube of KY Jelly - but discreetly, mind.
The path to good intentions is paved with hells, isn't it?
Update: I've found the picture online now. Go to the Rant entitled Brought To Account on 27/09/10 to see it.
As a service to you, my reader, I thought it would be an idea to do something to make it easier for you to print stuff off of this here website. So I went to it last weekend to design an extra set of stylesheets. These would mean that you wouldn't use up all of your black ink cartridge just printing one piece. It would make the print black on white, and would also mean you could print off the main body of the page without the navigation sidebar.
In the process of trying to implement this, I discovered that something was screwed up in the way that Internet Explorer was displaying some of the pages. I then found out that I had made a mistake in the coding of the exception which means that IE displays pages properly by referring it to a different stylesheet to the one used by all other browsers.
The mistake was tiny - a missing '!'. Unfortunately, I had made that mistake in the very first instance of the code, and had merrily copy-and-pasted the error to every single page on the site. '!', indeed; in fact, '!!!!'!.
Having finally sorted that out, I tested the new print stylesheets. Firefox? A small tweak, but apart from that, fine. Internet Explorer 7 (which uses a slightly different stylesheet)? Same there. I then went to my old Windows 98 machine across the room to try the browsers I have on that. Internet Explorer 6? OK. Seamonkey? Oh, arse! Print Preview won't show more than the first page, a problem I'd also had (and had resolved) with Firefox on the XP rig. Opera? Ditto, plus you need to disable the setting which prints background colours.
I'm still working on this, so printing from the site might be a bit iffy until such time as I can work out a fix.
A man is walking home from work when he is approached by a group of men carrying weapons, acting in a menacing manner.
The gang order the man to get out of their way. When he refuses to be cowed by their aggressive manner, one of the gang strikes him from behind with a large stick, and then pushes him, causing him to fall to the ground. The blow is witnessed by a number of people, some of whom take video footage.
Having picked himself up and managed to struggle out of the way of the thugs, the man collapses and dies on the pavement shortly afterwards.
The gang claim publicly that it was an unfortunate incident, that it was the man's own fault for not showing them the respect that they felt due to them, that no blow was struck (and if there was, their homey didn't mean it), and that a friend of theirs said that the man was bound to die sometime anyway.
In the full run of events, the 'authorities' decide that - despite all the available evidence - the assailant is not to be charged with any criminal offence.
A strange decision? Not a bit of it; it is completely in line with modern-day standard operating procedure.
Because the man was a newspaper seller called Ian Tomlinson.
The menacing gang were all members of the police, tooled up to smash some protestors' heads during the G20 in London in 2009.
The friend was a serially-incompetent police medic called Freddy Patel who carried out a botched post-mortem examination on Mr Tomlinson which was later completely contradicted by not one but two such examinations carried out by independent doctors.
That, despite over one thousand people having been killed by the police in the last forty years, not one single cop has ever been convicted of homicide in relation to any of them.
Which is why today, nearly sixteen months after Mr Tomlinson was killed, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) announced that the officer who struck Mr Tomlinson - now finally named publicly as one PC Simon Harwood - will not face any criminal charges in connection with the matter.
The pretzeloid reasoning given seems to run as follows:
One post-mortem carried out by a surgeon under investigation for incompetence disagreed with two carried out by reputable pathologists. This is described by the DPP as a "sharp disagreement between the medical experts". Because of this apparent inconclusiveness, Harwood can't be tried for manslaughter, presumably because it would only confuse a jury to have to make a decision between evidence provided by a bungler and that provided by people whose bona fides are not in question, and who agreed that Mr Tomlinson had died as a result of blunt-force trauma.
Assault charges could not be brought against Harwood because the CPS (I actually accidentally typed CoPS there first; silly me!) had taken the view that there was no evidence that the push which followed the attack with a truncheon caused Mr Tomlinson "substantial harm", despite the fact that the 'push' caused him to fall face-first to the pavement.
Harwood couldn't be charged with Common Assault either, because such a charge must be brought within six months of the alleged offence and the CPS and the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission had taken much longer than that to investigate the matter. Which I'm sure was a heartbreaking disappointment to them. I'm sure they tried their best.
So this is where we find ourselves once again. The police cause someone' death. Their first calculated response is to spread a barrage of lies about the victim and the circumstances of his death, aided by a rogue pathologist. When this starts to fall apart - in the face of evidence seen around the world - and the inevitable investigation takes place, the investigators take so long over their work as to preclude the most likely charge against the assailant. The prosecutors then claim that their hands are tied, and that the version of events provided by a dodgy doctor would not be outweighed by that of two clinicians of repute who - independently of one another - reached a very different diagnosis...
...and that the CPS' decision to do nothing at all is announced on the fifth anniversary of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by the same police force, when his killers also escaped without prosecution (although their employers were done for breaches of health and safety legislation).
The ramifications of all this are far deeper than just this one case. It shows not only that the police in general - and the Met in particular - are utterly out of control, but it shows once again that the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission is anything but (the word 'independent' serving as what one might call a 'Sellafield attributive', rather like those dictatorships which called themselves 'Socialist Republics' because it couldn't otherwise be guessed that they were), and that the Crown Prosecution Service - ever willing to bring ludicrous charges against anyone else if the poltical and media climate might warrant it - turn into a posse of pussies whenever faced by the possibility that some police officers on some occasions are little more than sociopathic and psychopathic thugs.
We are in the deepest trouble when those who are supposed to uphold the law - be it in enforcement or administration - connive between them to put themselves above that law.
I have said little about the so-called New Politics in recent weeks. Part of the reason is that I would merely be repeating myself. The rest is down to my inability to think coherently and type legibly when my jaw and fists are clenched in rage.
The only thing that surprises me about the savagery of the new régime is that anyone is surprised by it. After all, we are talking about a Tory government here. Tories do what Tories do; and - since the Conservative Party was taken over by the disciples of Hayek and Friedman in the mid-seventies - what they do is to enact policies of unmitigated economic and social brutality against those who are considered to be in no position to fight back: the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and all other marginalised groups. Not only that, but the sheer casualness of their disdain for those groups isn't scarcely even hidden. They simply don't see the need.
In their latest assaults on the values of a civilised society, they have the willing support of the upper echelons of the Liberal Democrats. Again, I was never going to be astonished by the alacrity with which Clegg, Cable, et al turned themselves into Cameron's bitches; I knew that - based on long observation of their conduct in local government - is what LibDems do. The pre-election posturing that they were somehow a left-of-centre party was always ludicrous given the control over the party exercised by the authors of the notorious Orange Book, the central tenets of which could be summed up as Thatcherism redux.
And so we faced Gormless George's 'austerity budget', in which we were presented once again with the socio-economic equivalents of the neutron bomb; policies which harm people but leave institutions such as the banks and The City almost completely unscathed.
Someone has to pay for our economic woes, of course. So why not throw the burden on those who were least responsible for it, and who have the least means to pay? So VAT will go up to 20% and public services will be subject to spending cuts of twenty-five per cent (or is it forty percent this week?). The welfare system will be further degraded to the point where the holes in the safety net will be so big that even Eric Pickles would be able to fall through them.
(And can someone explain to me how it is that, when a Labour Party member suggests it might be a good idea to vote for the candidate of another party in an obscure council by-election they face certain expulsion, but ex-ministers such as John Hutton and Frank Field can accept invitations to join panels on how to 'reform' (i.e. cut) welfare and pensions with no disciplinary action taken? But of course, this is all undertaken in the spirit of "We're all in this together" and gives the political class and its tame hangers-on in the media another chance to mis-use the word 'reform' to mean "cut what we can get away with cutting, and hand over the rest to our donors in The Private Sector").
New school buildings will not be erected, unless they are intended for the quaintly-named free schools; schools set up by businessmen, pushy parents or religious nutters but funded largely with money from the public who will have absolutely no input into how those schools are run.
It seems that this Tory government, with its convenient fig-leaf of LibDem glove puppets, is aiming to be even more extreme that that of Thatcher at her high-sewage-mark in the mid- to late-eighties. The knives are being sharpened, and the guns of propaganda are being re-bored, cleaned and loaded ready to fire at the intended targets from a variety of angles, all apparently different, but all sharing the same passionate intensity.
At this point, I should declare an interest. I am a worker in the public sector (if you didn't know already), and I'm beginning to wonder how long it will be before it will only be safe to make such an announcement whilst I am shown in profile and back-lit.
For we are - and have been for some little time, even well before the election - facing a barrage of statements, calumny and spin all designed to cast the whole of the public sector in a bad light. For although the barrow-boys of The City may have - as the Americans so cutely put it - 'taken a bath', and the bankers may have been more interested in speculating with non-existent assets, and the so-called 'regulators' may have seen little or nothing wrong with this large-scale dereliction of what any civilised society would consider ethical standards; nonetheless, all the failures of the economic system which has ruled this land since 1979 are to be laid at the door of workers in the public sector. They (we) and they (we) only are to be scapegoated, to have ourselves made redundant by the tens of thousands, to have our pay held even further back, to have our pensions and our redundancy packages slashed to ribbons. We, who administer systems which keep the country running, who keep your roads clear, who tend you when you are ill, who clear up your rubbish; we are the ones who must pay the price.
The ground for such a campaign is already fertile and, as with fertile ground in general, has got that way by a steady application of shit, flung widely and frequently. For those who still don't believe the truth of what Goebbels said about 'the big lie', try looking at the newspaper websites whenever the subject of public sector workers comes up. From the readers of the Daily Heil, the Torygraph, yea even unto the devotees of the Interdependent and the Grauniad, come torrents of green bile which might be a useful weapon against BP's latest little difficulty in the Gulf Of Mexico.
All public sector workers need to "get real!" and to "Wake up and smell the coffee!", and other similar phrases betokening the blithering idiocy which has overtaken public discourse in recent times; phrases used by people who think that they sound clever because they once heard an American on television use them.
So all we hear is how we are merely 'pen-pushers' (erm, we have reached the computer age now, y'know? All provided and administered via the dynamic, thrusting, lean, mean private sector; which means they cost about ten times as much and work about one twentieth as well) who sit on our arses drinking tea all day, piss off home at three o'clock, and have as our sole raison d'être the discombobulation and frustration of the good old Brutish Pubic. We are constantly told that our pay is far better than for equivalent work in The Private Sector (to which we are required to genuflect thrice daily for its munificence), that our pensions are 'gold-plated' and thereby unaffordable, and that our redundancy scheme is similarly far too good for the likes of us, being suitable only for cushioning the blow to those few senior executives in The Private Sector ("Hosanna! Hosanna!" (*)) who get the push, not forgetting those of their number who have in recent times been dropped on us like the famous 'Elsan Raids' on the Germans in World War Two (†) - and with much the same effect.
The corporate media, true to their unerring ability to know on which side their preferments are greased, have parroted the same line, whether it comes from politicians, leaders of 'the business community' or from the desocialised trolls of the newspaper websites.
On to such fruitful territory stamp the politicians - all of like mind (i.e. concrete: thoroughly mixed and permanently set). The last government attempted unilaterally to worsen our redundancy provisions but - in an all-too-rare victory - this was blocked by the courts. The new régime, however, has made it perfectly clear that it intends to pass legislation amending the 1972 statute under which our entitlement falls in order to slash payments to just about everyone by very substantial amounts. Similarly, a 'report' published today recommends the emasculating of our pensions, as well as making us pay more to get much less of them.
But who is calling for such public-spirited sacrifice here? Well, an organisation calling itself the Public Sector Pensions Commission (PSPC). Sounds very official, doesn't it? The truth, however, is that the PSPC is a body set up by such independent spirits as....the Institute of Directors (IoD), the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Policy Exchange and other such usual suspects. None of the people involved in the production of today's 'report' came from the public sector, no-one who actually works in the public sector was consulted. This did not stop the BBC (amongst others) from calling the 'report' and the malignant body which excreted it "independent", of course; although the news story which I read on the Broadcorping Castration's website this morning in which they were so described seems to have disappeared by eventide.
All of the people involved have 'form' on the subject, and they have produced a document which merely states what they've always thought. And so you have Philip Booth of the IEA uttering thusly:
"Public sector workers are being promised gold plated pensions whilst workers in the private sector...struggle to make sufficient provision for themselves."
Malcolm Small of the IoD came out with this last year:
"Public sector pension schemes are not sustainable."
Similar bollocks litters the report, in which the whole litany of the loony libertarians is seen in extenso. Let's just look at the two claims above for a start, shall we?
I would hardly call my prospective pension 'gold-plated', unless you habitually use the term to describe the almost see-through foil they wrap up the Easter eggs in at your local pound store. My latest forecast is on its way to me any week now, but I doubt if it will contain any pleasant uplift from the last one, which suggests that the most I can expect is a pension somewhat less than what the State Pension is now. Not a lot for thirty-one years' efforts, I think, even if you throw in the lump sum.
And, if workers in the private sector are having difficulties getting a decent pension, could that possibly be something to do with the fact that many of them work for a bunch of freeloading shits? You know, the ones who took full advantage of their pension funds' performance to take a 'contributions holiday' (which they weren't keen to extend to their employees for some unfathomable reason) and then, when the market tanked, started closing their employees' pension schemes or watering them down to uselessness; and were allowed to do so because Government was 'business friendly', the 'regulators' were rank cowards and the employees weren't in trade unions because they had swallowed the libertarian crap about the undesirability of collective protection for workers?
Even if the above were not true, and the failure of The Private Sector ("We Are Not Worthy! We Are Not Worthy!") to provide a prospect of a secure old age for its workers is all down to the fecklessness of said workers; even, as I say, if the previous paragraph were false, why should it follow that those of us who have managed to protect ourselves from the weaknesses of private provision should deliberately be impoverished in our retirement, unless as a spectacular act of revenge cheered on by those who are motiviated by their own sense of grievance and a nagging feeling that they've been had and have to have someone to lash out at?
As for the public sector pension schemes not being 'sustainable' or 'affordable', well what the hell is 'sustainable' about, say, a new generation of nuclear-tipped penis extensions to enable the scions of Eton, Harrow and Oxbridge to "punch above their weight" around the world (in reality, a position of glorified coat-holder for the world's current playground bully)? What is 'affordable' about massive bail-outs to banks which - true to their recent pattern of behaviour - then use the public's money to ensure that they can keep themselves in the style to which they have become all too accustomed?
But no; we must pay for their bungles, their corruption, their arrogance. We, along with the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, must take it in the crotch.
The Phony War is coming to an end. Shortly the real battles must be fought. And, for the sake of the ability to continue to live in something which is worth calling 'a civilised society', it is crucial that we are not defeated.
For further reading, I guide you to this statement from my union, PCS. OK, you might think that it is biased from the other side to the self-styled 'PSPC', but I know from personal experience and knowledge that it is far closer to how things actually are than the eager slavering of the owning class.
(*) Welsh for "Socks! Socks!".
(†) Whereby the Polish contingent of the RAF used to drop not only bombs but full chemical toilets on the Reich, until the Nazis complained to the Red Cross about an illegal use of 'chemical weapons').
I think that on the whole I've had better weeks than this one.
It was supposed to be a week where - off work for my standard June fortnight - I was going to chill out, enjoy my birthday, perhaps get some major tidying up done around the house and garden, and go out for a day somewhere.
Instead of which: Tex Burke died (see here); someone I knew in sixth form died suddenly the same day at the age of 48 (deeply worrying when contemporaries start dropping off the twig through variations of 'natural causes' - a major epileptic seizure in this case); the weather's been generally shite; I still can't get that reel-to-reel tape recorder to function properly so that I can digitise my old tapes; the drain at the back of the house has got itself bunged up again less than a fortnight after my next-door neighbour rodded it through; and my dear friends at Arriva have managed to rejig the bus timetables so that the one I want to take me to and from work (the one which doesn't go through the village with the largest concentration of neds and no-marks this side of Speke) runs exactly - but exactly - half an hour out from when I would like it to.
Have all the planets gone bloody retrograde, or what?
No, not Cameron and Clegg, nor yet the Milliband Brothers.
What do you get if you cross avant-garde rockers The Residents...
...with the cute and scary Teletubbies...
...and hand over the results to one of those black holes of real creativity, a 'design studio'?
Answer: you get these:
These are the mascots for that extravaganza of cheating, corruption and corporate bingeing called 'The Olympic Games', coming to a London near you in two years' time.
They're called Hemlock and Mandelson...erm, no sorry, mistake there. They're called Fetlock and Mandibles...no, that's not right either. Wedlock and Mandelbrot? Hmm, no.
Ah yes! Wenlock and Mandeville. One named after an obscure town, the other after a refuge for cripples. Seems about right to me.
The hype, however, seeks to portray these oddities as representing droplets of the steel used to build the impending white elephant of the Olympic Stadium. In which case, given the general standard of construction of public projects in this country, both of them should have turned brown and crumbled into dust by the summer of '12.
The organising committee for this hyperextended version of the three-legged race, which now seems to rejoice (if that's the word, which it isn't) in the acronym LOCOG, has been a bit coy as to exactly how much this has cost. They remember only too well the nearly half a million knicker the games' logo cost three years ago. £400 000 for something which was memorably described as looking like Lisa Simpson giving someone oral relief.
There has been the usual marketing Bollocksese (making free use of words such as 'interactivity' and 'flexibility'), from 'Lord' Coe, one-time athlete and now permanent ambassador for Coca-Cola, Nike and McDonalds. But, I think these could catch on. After all, strangely-dressed and rather creepy baggy figures (one of which appears to have pissed itself) wearing CCTV cameras on their heads is quite emblematic of British society in the early twenty-first century, isn't it? It's something you can see around you every day in this happy land, and so is probably a winner.
For Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonalds, importers of knock-off models made by slaves in Shanghai...
It is, of course, not my place to be telling you how to vote on Thursday.
Nonetheless, may I beg you to vote - wherever possible - to keep these people out of office:
Those of us who remember the eighties and nineties have little desire to see them back in power. And, should you think that the Conservative Party has become cuddly and progressive, consider:
And - if you really want to know what will almost certainly happen if you let these people take control, see how Cammie-boy's 'Compassionate Conservatism' (you know, the sort practised by George W. Bush) operates in reality, read this piece by Johann Hari in The Independent. That is what it will mean for the poor, the sick and the weak.
Make your choice, but remember that it won't just be you who will face the consequences. We can't afford a society at war with itself again. We've scarcely recovered from the last time it happened.
For possibly the first time ever, I find myself somewhat on Gordon Brown's side.
The illiterates who pass for journalists in this happy land have already named it "Bigotgate", but Brown's opinion of an old bag who assailed him in the street in Rochdale yesterday must surely be said to fall under the heading of 'fair comment'?
After all, what did Gillian Duffy (for it was she) actually say?
"You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're..."
You're what, dearie? The 'R' word, perhaps?
We are constantly being told that "You can't talk about immigration in this country...!". And yet, this is a malevolent meme promoted by the Murdoch press (and their twisted sisters under the skin in the Mail and Express camps) and further promoted by their political soulmates in 'Migrationwatch', UKIP and the BNP. Yes, the very same people who can talk about nothing other than immigration in their newspapers and manifestos (see hereinter alia).
If any blame is to be apportioned on the political side of this, it should go in two directions. Firstly, to Brown himself, a) for his grovelling apology and for being a hypocrite (Justin McKeating nails this one), and b) to his spin doctors. It is on this latter point that things get a little sinister.
It should come as no surprise that the Murdoch media empire, having changed sides a few months back, are stick-shittingly eager to see that shiny Etonian gobshite Cameron walking in through the front door of Number Ten on May 7. The air of desperation which has come over them as the polls seem to suggest that he won't be able to do that - at least, not without being carried over the threshold by another public schoolboy (Clegg of the Lower Third) - has manifested itself in lurid, screaming headlines aimed against the resurgent Liberal Democrats in general and Clegg in particular. Notably piquant was the Mail's oh-so-subtle insinuation that Clegg was suspect because his mother was Dutch, his father half-Russian and his wife is Spanish (see Anton Vowl's takedown of such arsewipery).
So, when Sky News (motto: "We want to be Fox, but the law won't let us") offered to hook Gordon (or, as The Independent inadvertently - one assumes - called him the other day, "Gorgon") up to a radio mic during a walkabout amongst the ambulatory consumer units yesterday, surely someone in the Brown entourage should have smelled a rat? One called Rupert?
Apparently not. So when Brown got back into his car and gave his real opinion of the Gorgon he'd just encountered, it was of course a mere accident that the Murdoch operatives had 'forgotten' to switch the mic off.
And how remarkably quickly the story spread! And how equally remarkable is the swiftness with which Ould Granny Duffy has ended up with a public relations company trying to sell her story to the press!
For the one thing that the Murdoch empire fears more than anything else - even more than having to pay taxes, or having to produce responsible journalism - is the possibility that, for the first time in over thirty years this country might have a government which, to some substantial degree, is not beholden to the empire's hackrags and their rapacious owners.
So it is that, not only is this election perhaps the best chance of reform of the political process in generations, but also the best chance we have ever had of ridding our governments of the need to bow and scrape to, and enthusiastically to fellate, the worst scum press in the western world.
That is why the last paragraph of my previous Rant still stands as my position. Or, as the great Beau Bo D'Or has put it more graphically (literally):
It may have occurred to you that I haven't uttered a word about the Election yet, and here we are scarcely ten days away from polling day.
Perhaps you think I'm simply being cautious, given that my employment conditions require me to be politically neutral in any official capacity. Or that I'm simply maintaining a lofty and dispassionate stance from which I shall - in due course - pronounce my judgement.
If so, you're welcome. But you're wrong.
It's largely because it is - despite the orgasmic twitterings of the punditocracy - probably the most uninspiring campaign I've ever witnessed. True, unlike - say - 1983, the outcome is not a foregone conclusion; but all the same, there is a complete absence of choice in what is generally on offer to us. The publicity campaigns have been much as expected, emphasising that nebulous concept of 'image' over substance; a continuation of the adman's baleful influence which has emptied our political discourse of its meaning over the last thirty years.
After a period of three or four years in which the stock of politicians has sunk to a level not seen in the lifetimes of any of us, still we see no prospect other than the continuation of the same arrogant isolation, the same sense of near-divine entitlement, the same implication that things will carry on as they are because that's the only way they can ever possibly be. Which we know to be bollocks on a plinth, of course.
But not only do they provide little hope of a change to the system itself, the three 'mainstream' parties give no indication of any substantive differences between them on a whole range of policies. Just to take a f'rinstance: despite the fact that the current economic difficulties have arisen almost totally from the banking sector being able to conduct its affairs like a particularly corrupt casino, all three parties are agreed on one thing above all others; spending on public services must be cut, and cut viciously. So while the bankers get bailed out by billions of pounds of our money (and newly-released figures show that the richest in this country have managed to increase their incomes by a staggering thirty per cent in the last year), essential services that millions of people - most of whom can only dream of increasing their rather less substantial incomes by thirty per cent during their whole lifetimes - rely on will be reduced, removed, or handed over to what are euphemistically termed 'other providers', i.e. corporations or charities.
And if you cut services in this way, it goes without saying that you will be cutting the jobs of the hundreds of thousands who provide them. Unemployment is already over two and a half million (even by the official fiddled figures); what a great way to re-energise a struggling economy by removing hundreds of thousands more incomes from circulation. Although they will almost certainly ameliorate the effect by ensuring that the ever-expanding layers of needless management which has infested the public sector in the last fifteen years is protected from the axe, so that only those on the lowest pay will get the chop and thus have less overall effect on, say, the property market.
The point I'm trying to make here in the immediate context is that the Big Three are all committed to huge cuts. All that differs between them is the timing of those cuts. Labour says next year (and on a scale greater than even the 1980s); the Conservatives say immediately. Even those fluffy Liberal Democrats (of whom more anon) say that they will make cuts at least equal to those promised by the other two. So we have three parties all bursting themselves to do the same thing, and only the timescale is different.
You could run the same pattern across the range of policies: all three parties want the war on the population of Afghanistan and the propping up of its terminally corrupt government to continue; all three want to continue the fawning, uncritical Atlanticism which has blighted foreign and defence policies for over three decades and made us an object of dismay across our own continent; all three insist on continuing with that post-imperial virility symbol, the so-called 'independent nuclear deterrent'; all three are in favour of the increasing invasion of the private sector and its management techniques into publicly-funded services; and all three will - to use a phrase from one of Billy Bragg's songs - "wrap themselves in the Union Jack and just carry on the same" whenever the situation demands it.
This applies just as much to the Lib Dems as it does to the other two. For all the claims to be 'different', 'radical' or 'progressive', the underlying premise of Clegg's party is much the same: unfettered marketism (both the newly-canonised leader and his financial adviser Cable are on the notorious 'Orange Book' wing of the party); privatisation; and some very illiberal views on workers' rights (Cable recently suggested that public sector workers should be banned from taking strike action outright).
But what about their stance on electoral reform? Well, yes, that's been their big selling point since the days of the old SDP-Liberal Alliance (that media-darling agglomeration which enabled the detested Thatcher to get an enormous parliamentary majority in 1983 which her share of the vote did not warrant), but I can't help but wonder whether that policy is simply the result of a desire for electoral advantage and whether - should they get their hands on some of the levers of power at Westminster - their commitment will waver once the existing system (totally discredited as it is, with its defenders now being about as credible as the Catholic cardinals who are busy blaming the current scandals engulfing their Corporation Christi on the media, liberals, gays and Jews) looks like it might work for them after all.
You also have to bear in mind how the Lib Dems actually operate once they do get into power, although this has so far only occurred in the devolved parliaments and on local councils. There seems to be little cohesion on a national scale in what they do in those circumstances. Our own county council has for the last seven years been run by an odd coalition of Lib Dems and various other (mostly independent) groups, and it has certainly been a change for the better when compared to the arrogant one-party Labour state which preceded it. However, I'm well aware that this is not the experience elsewhere, where the Cleggies have formed alliances with some rather unsavoury groups (and not just the Conservative Party, either), and where they have pushed the failed policies of cuts, privatisation and 'outsourcing' just like the other mobs.
For the first time since 1974, we face an election where no-one dare predict the outcome even this close to the day. If the opinion polls are to be believed - although there is no reason to believe them - then we will have an election where the Big Three will end up with a similar proportion of the total vote, at around thirty per cent. Our cock-eyed electoral system, however, means that this will not be reflected in the number of seats won by those parties. Labour could end up being the largest single party, or even having an overall majority, on such a share of votes, whilst the Lib Dems would have scarcely a third of that number of seats on a very similar percentage. Barring some major upheaval in the coming week or so, the Conservatives look to have blown it yet again, but they could still end up as the largest single party, albeit a long way short of a majority.
This election might therefore be the ideal time for a bit of radical action. If you have a credible candidate from outside of the Big Three (and I use the word 'credible' so as automatically to exclude both the Hitler-worshippers of the BNP and their golf club lounge cousins in UKIP), then why not vote for them instead? This would do two things: firstly, it would send a message to all of the Big Three that we wish a plague on all their houses (especially the ones they've been fraudulently claiming expenses on); and secondly, it would reduce the percentage share of the vote of LabConDem still further and throw the crippling deficiencies of the current voting system into sharp relief when any combination of those parties try to claim legitimacy for their term of office. As such, it wouldn't affect the short-term outcome, but it might awaken even the more ovine elements of the electorate into realising that our system is fucked and in need of radical overhaul. That way, we might just start getting somewhere.
Watch this footage from the protests against the G20 meeting in London last year:
In the first half, we see a young black demonstrator who wanted to get something to eat. He was not going to be allowed to, because the Metropolitan Police had 'kettled' the protestors; that is, they were keeping them penned up in a confined area to prevent them protesting, and they weren't going to let them out for anything, even to go for a piss.
When the young man insists on trying to exercise his fundamental rights in what our rulers insist is a 'free' country, he is viciously assaulted by a cop.
A young woman called Nicola Fisher makes a very strong verbal protest to another officer present, one Sergeant Delroy Smellie (and no, I'm not making shit up!).
Smellie's reaction is first to deliver a backhand slap to the face of Ms Fisher, a woman who looks scarcely more than half the cop's size; then, when she insists on continuing to protest, he takes his baton and smashes her across the legs with it.
In court, Smellie claimed that he believed that Fisher 'posed a threat to himself and fellow officers'. Yes, a small woman posed a threat to a bunch of tooled-up brick shithouses. He also said that he believed Fisher was carrying weapons. Well, if you count a carton of orange juice and a small digital camera as 'weapons', I suppose you probably would feel under threat - from everything.
It should come as no surprise, then, that District Judge Daphne Wickham today acquitted Sergeant Smellie of assault. She opined that Smellie's use of the baton was 'correct' and 'measured', and that poor Stinky, sorry, Smellie had had "...a mere seven seconds to react".
Try an experiment with me, chums. I want you to count - in a moderate tempo - from one to seven.....
One...
...Two...
...Three...
...Four...
...Five...
...Six...
...Seven.
There. Now, perhaps you might feel that that would be more than enough time to be able to figure out that, a) you were facing an adversary who was about two-thirds your height and a third of your weight, and b) that she was carrying a carton of orange juice and a digital camera rather than, say, half a house-brick and a small sewing kit.
If so, you might also come to the conclusion that Sergeant Smellie is spectacularly slow on the uptake even for a member of the 'Territorial Support Group (TSG)', the successors of the infamous 'Special Patrol Group' implicated in acts of violence against unarmed members of the public in the late Seventies and early Eighties.
Smellie refused to talk to the press afterwards, claiming, "I have a reputation to protect".
Oh, you have, Sarge, you have indeed. However, let me be the first to reassure you that your reputation as a power-mad thuggish little cunt is beyond anyone's capability to damage.
What it also means, in a wider context, is that nearly twelve months after the event depicted above, plus the killing of Ian Tomlinson, and despite the well-documented use of violence, and despite the myriad complaints to the ever more risibly titled 'Independent Police Complaints Commission', not one single cop has been convicted of any illegal actions during the G20 protests.
The police, especially the Met, and more especially still groups like the TSG, are beyond all effective control, and their misconduct is beyond all effective remedy. The courts, too, seem to be incapable of defending us against them. Indeed, in the case of the protestors against Israel's murderous assault on Gaza last year, the courts seem to take a perverted pleasure in passing extreme sentences on people convicted of comparatively minor offences.
Here too, the police played their part by denying that they had exculpatory video evidence in the case of one defendant right up until two days before his trial was due to start. Had some of that 'non-existant' footage not turned up on YouTube, yet another innocent man would have been imprisoned. Perhaps that is another reason why those set in power over us want to grab as much power over the internet as possible (see the wretched crook Mandelson's 'Digital Economy Bill' currently being rushed through Parliament for possibly evidence of this).
Don't protest, don't raise your voice against the wrongdoings of state agents, don't try to get anything without paying a friendly, party-funding corporation for the privilege. That way, you can sleep soundly in your bed - and sleepwalk securely through your days.
This statement has appeared on the website of our ever-so-dependable local bus near-monopoly (I've left the spelling mistakes and all other illiteracy as it stands):
"Changes to Wrexham Service 12 and 13
"From Tuesday 6 April 2010, Arriva's service 13 will be improved and extended.
"Running every 30 minutes from Brymbo, calling into the Plas Coch Retail Park and Wrexham General Station, then extended from Wrexham Bus Station to Wrexham Industrial Estate via Rhosduu Road, Sandway Road, Box Lane, Jeffreys Road and Dean Road.
"Also from 6 April, service 12 will operate from Pentre Broughton to Wrexham Bus Station every 20 minutes. For customers in Brymbo whishing to travel to Maelor Hospital, a shuttle service will operate (Monday to Saturday daytime) between between Brymbo and Pentre Broughton whilst Railway Road is closed. Evening and Sunday journeys will continue to serve Brymbo.
"When Railway Road is re-opened service 12 journeys will be extended to Brymbo."
A few Qs and As for you (and for Arriva):
Q. What improvement does this provide?
A. A reduction in the service to and from Brymbo from three buses per hour to two.
Q. Any more?
A. Certainly. It means no more direct bus services from a village of over 2500 inhabitants to or from the local hospital.
Q. But there'll be a shuttle service to and from Pentre Broughton, won't there?
A. Yes, but Arriva haven't said when it will run, how often, how reliable it will be (although we can safely guess that bit from 'extended' experience), and how long people trying to get to and from hospital appointments or daytime visiting will have to wait in Pentre Broughton in howling winds straight off the Urals for their connection. Brymbo will be the only village out of fourteen in an arc from the A541 Mold road to the A525 Ruthin road on the western side of the borough (and the second largest of all fourteen) without a direct bus link with the hospital.
Q. OK, but the new service will go via Plas Coch Retail Park. Handy for Sainsbury's.
A. If you like, but how many people have demanded such a service? And how much will it add to the overall journey time for people who simply want to get into town? Even more than the amount of time which has been added to the current journey by having to go in and out of the Station yard when no-one ever gets on or off there?
Q. But it means the new service will be 'extended', won't it? It'll also mean that people can get from Brymbo to the Industrial Estate and back. That's got to be an improvement, hasn't it?
A. Most people from here who need to get to and from the Industrial Estate need to do so in the early morning, and this won't remotely meet that need. On top of which, Arriva's predecessor (Crosville) tried back in the 1990s to tack the Brymbo route on to the end of one which started on the opposite side of town (Queen's Park). This meant that the buses had to deal with heavy, slow traffic on both sides of the town centre, which led to the buses to Brymbo (which also ran through Brynteg and Pentre Broughton at that time) being invariably ten to twenty minutes late. It was so useless that even Crosville saw sense eventually and rejigged things after a few months.
Q. But they're still telling the truth when they say that the service will be 'extended', aren't they?
A. Yes, especially in terms of how long it'll take for people to get where they need to go. That will certainly be 'extended'.
On strike yesterday and today, in protest against our employer unilaterally tearing up our redundancy agreement, just totally coincidentally (of course!) before they start on their bold work of slashing thousands of jobs from the public sector in order to be able to afford to buy off the crooks in the financial services sector.
I took the opportunity yesterday - the weather being fine, if chilly - to go for a little walk around the village. Today, I had shopping to do and, as this took me past the office, I thought I'd call on my comrades on the picket line. I was glad to hear that support has been very solid, although you wouldn't get that impression from the statements made by Tessa Jowell, the responsible (sic) minister. You know, the one who stood by her crook of a husband until he became a political embarassment and potential hindrance to Her Glorious Career.
The media coverage has, on the whole, been predictable, with official statements being treated as hard fact. The comments on the news websites has been the usual cascade of diarrhoea as well, especially on the site which the BBC calls "Have Your Say", but which really should be called "Hurl Your Bile". Some things never change, because the same thing happened the last time we were out (see here for an analysis).
There are underlying issues beyond the redundancy scheme, though. Management in the Depratment seems in the last couple of years to have morphed into a self-regarding clique of amateur Samurai for whom staff relations, logic, even humanity itself must forever take a back seat to arbitrary and ever more restrictive 'guidelines' imposed from the top and - I'm sad to say - put into effect with ill-disguised glee by many managers at the 'sharp end' whose own experience should have made them wise to what is happening; even they seem to have 'gone native'.
(I'm in dispute over the effects of some of these at present, and hope to be able to make a public statement here about this in due course).
It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that in a recent survey carried out across no fewer than ninety six public sector organisations, the Depratment was in the bottom ten in all bar a handful of the fifty six categories, and was absolutely last when it came to recommending it as a place to work and being proud to work in it.
(I wish I could post the full results here, but I'm not sure of the status of the documents in question yet. Previous staff survey results have been published on the Depratment's public website but - for some unfathomable reason - not this one. Watch This Space).
In the light of this, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the Treasury Select Committee has just published a report stating that it is "deeply concerned about employee engagement....and its effect on performance". Nor that our Chief Executive should try to bullshit her way out of it by denying that staff morale was poor (she previously described the survey results I've mentioned as "encouraging"). Nor, indeed, that a spokesbeing for the Depratment should say something like, "HMRC senior managers are addressing the causes of low morale". Short of resigning en masse, I can't see how they could be of any help at all, since - like a fish - the rot starts at the head.
The level of disillusionment of staff who have, in many cases, given their whole working lives to the Civil Service is now so deep, so palpable, that nothing other than the removal of the management 'culture' which has infested the Depratment since the stupid and badly-managed merger which created it five years ago will do to even begin to address the issues. This is, alas, about as likely as the majority of the job cuts which will follow in the next few years coming in the areas where they are most necessary; amongst the swelling ranks of senior and middle managers who are either responsible for directing the stream of noxious piss that is current practice on the heads of those of us doing the job we're supposed to be doing; or who are filling 'non-jobs' supervising all the contracts with external corporations which have been forced on the Depratment in recent years; or being there simply to ensure that boxes are ticked for presentation to their political masters. For it is there that the 'waste' that the enemies of the public sector like to wibble on about is to be found, and found in abundance.
Yup, it's them again. Having to hang around when you need (not want, note; just need) to get to work of a morning is bad enough, but having to do it in freezing weather because some tool can't get his own arse off the bed of a morning is - how shall I put it? - fucking annoying.
Last week, I was due back in work on Wednesday. We had a heavy snowfall on Tuesday night, so no buses got up to us at all the next day. I had to phone the office to tell them I couldn't get in.
Because our Council was running out of grit for the roads, the main road from Wrexham up to us (a village of nearly three thousand people) wasn't gritted at all on Wednesday night. This meant that the roads were so iced up on Thursday morning that there were no buses up to us until early afternoon. So that was another day's work lost.
I managed to get to work on Friday, but nearly an hour and a half late for the same reason.
We had another heavy fall of snow on Sunday night into Monday morning. Again, this meant no public transport until late morning (and then only an hourly service), by which time it wouldn't have been worth going in to work anyway.
I got into work OK on Tuesday, but had to finish about half an hour earlier than usual because of an appointment at the dentist.
It started snowing heavily again on Tuesday night, and has scarcely stopped since. This is how my front garden looked shortly after 4pm:
For once, though, this was irrelevant, because last night I came down with some bug or other which produced aching shoulders, a cough, a fair bit of phlegm (sorry) and my drifting in and out of sleep every half an hour or so. So I was able to phone the office to tell them that I was ill this time.
Now here's the rant bit: as some of you will know (and others will have figured out), I work for a Depratment of Government. Because it, like most other parts of the public sector in recent times, has been taken over by management consultants, accountants and other fraudsters, caring for the staff has gone right down the Swannee. So it is that, instead of recognising the difficulties some of us will have in getting into work in bad weather like this, those in charge seem to take a great pleasure in being as mean-spirited as possible when compensating those of us in that position for the time that we lose as a result. Even when they are shamed into doing the right thing, they then seem to delight in making the process as difficult and aggravating as possible.
So it is that - as of Tuesday lunchtime at least - I still don't know whether I will have to take leave to cover the two days I lost last week. And as for Monday of this week, well the message seems to be "Forget it".
The Depratment operates what it calls the 'four mile rule'. That means that in bad weather you are expected to get in to work if you live within four miles of your office. The trouble is that that rule was clearly designed for fairly flat urban areas with good public transport networks. Up here, four miles horizontally equals about four hundred and fifty feet vertically, and the weather up here is almost invariably worse than down in the lowlands where my office is.
But of course, "rules is rules" and "guidance is guidance", even if it flies in the face of reason or reality.
And do you know the thing that really sticks in my craw? The fact that this comes from a section of the same government machine which has all but ordered local councils not to grit any roads other than the main routes because of the grit shortage, so leading to me and my neighbours not being able to get out of the village! Incompetent wankers.
I'm feeling a little better this evening, but I won't be going in tomorrow either. For one thing, there's little likelihood that we'll have any bus service before mid morning at the latest, and I'm unlikely to feel well enough to walk down to the bottom of the village and stand around up to my ankles in it in the hope of catching anything other than pneumonia.
Instead, his family and friends have been attending the unveiling of a mural mosaic by Mary Edwards to commemorate his murder at the hands of the police at Stockwell underground station in July 2005.
Just a reminder: no prosecution has ever been brought against the officer who shot him seven or eight times at point-blank range in front of a carriage-full of witnesses, and the thuggish incompetent who was supposedly in charge of the operation, the unfortunately-named Cressida Dick, was not only promoted afterwards but - in one of those sick jokes that the established order like to perpetrate on the human conscience - was last week awarded the Queen's Police Medal (QPM) for 'distinguished service'.
Perhaps 'QPM' might better stand for 'Questionable Policing Methods'. Or even, 'Quota of Police Murders'.
Just as the rest of the world goes forward into a new decade (although it doesn't - not until this time next year - but that's an argument for another time), Ireland has decided to make A Great Leap Sideways into the 16th Century.
It should come as no surprise that that priest-ridden land should have had a provision in its laws since about 1937 that that meaningless phenomenon called 'blasphemy' should be an offense. Nor should it be a cause of any astonishment that the law was effectively unenforceable because it didn't actually define what constituted 'blasphemy'.
This was all 'remedied' last year when, despite repeated recommendations from Dáil committees and other inquiries to ditch the idea - and indeed, to remove any mention of god from the Constitution itself - and in spite of even the UK quietly consigning its own laws against 'blasphemy' and 'blasphemous libel' to the grave, the Justice Minister Dermot Ahern shoved through a law (which was supported by Fianna Fáil's junior partners in The Greens (to their enormous and eternal discredit) which makes 'blasphemy' punishable by a fine of up to €25000. This time however, to give credit where it's due, the new law does define 'blasphemy'. It is defined as:
"...publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion."
There are one or two get-outs, but it will be for the courts to decide whether they can be invoked or not.
Leaving aside the folly of granting even greater refuge for religionists following a year of damning revelations regarding the conduct of Ireland's prime cultist institutions, let alone the dangerous notion it promotes that anyone has the right to have his/her beliefs protected from challenge by force of criminal sanction, this new law will be a godsend (pun intended) to any group of self-righteous nutters and mediaevalists, who will be able to encourage an atmosphere of repression and self-censorship which will ill-serve the people of that land.
With this stupid and hateful piece of legislation finally coming into effect todaty, I'm glad to say that my fellow atheists in Ireland are continuing to fight for its abolition, even to the point of deliberately publishing on their website a list of twenty-five potentially 'blasphemous' quotes, and daring the fundies to come after them. The quotes come from as wide a range of sources as Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammed, Mark Twain and Richard Dawkins.
So, if you're reading this (or the page I've linked to above) in The Ould Sod, then you have immediately committed a crime against intelligence and should turn yourself in at the nearest Gardaí station for re-education. However, you can always tell them that you're in Holy Orders. That should get you a free pass to do what the fuck you like; it usually does.
Rants Archive 2010
