If, for one fleeting moment of self-delusion, you have allowed yourself to believe all the shit from those who have never known a day's disadvantage in their lives who tell you that "We're all in this together", and that everyone must "make sacrifices" to put the economy back to a state whereby the bonds market and other sociopaths can use our fair land as a fucking casino yet again; if you have allowed yourself to be taken in by that egregious lie, then read this piece by disability campaigner Sue Marsh:
And so we have come to a pass whereby the seriously ill and disabled are coldly, calculatingly denied the help they need, and the help they should be entitled to expect from a civilised and very rich society.
There are sinister overtones to this particular case, in that it would not be remotely surprising to anyone who has observed the naked politicisation of public administration in the past few years if it were to be found that Sue had been turned down for DLA because she campaigns to defend the weak and the sick.
Beyond that, however, this is merely the current modus operandi of those running the welfare systems of this country. Perhaps this is what that Single Point Of Failure currently calling himself Prime Minister meant when he said that Britain is a Christian country:
"To those who have it shall be given, and those who have not, it shall be taken away."
Leaving aside the sheer chutzpah of Cameron's claims, though, the fact that administrators feel that they can do this because they believe they can get away with it is the inevitable end-product of a process whereby an atmosphere is allowed to develop - or is even encouraged to develop - whereby the tiny minority who abuse the system are demonised out of all proportion to whatever harm they may be causing. Incrementally, that anathema will descend on those who are guilty of nothing more than wanting to receive that to which the law - and common human decency - states they are entitled.
That process of dehumanising that latter category makes it far easier for those in power to do things to that group without the danger of any significant outrage which might otherwise be engendered.
It's an old tactic; indeed, it's as old as the earliest pogrom you can think of. And such is the lamentable state of ignorance in which most of the public exists - a state which is also allowed or encouraged by those who fear that their privilege may be challenged - that it still works. Remember Niemöller.
It really does feel nowadays as if we're living in a land under alien occupation; ruled by people who might as well be a different species, such is their lack of understanding, empathy or compassion. Stand up and fight, in howsoever cack-handed a way, and here come the reprisals in the myriad ways in which the powerful can deliver them, be it by petty officials covering their own arses, by complaisant police who have embraced the status of being private militias for banks and property speculators, or by a judiciary which now clearly sees itself as a caste of class warriors.
Protests and petitions will have little or no effect on this. Despite my wishes to the contrary, I really can see no positive change occurring without violent upheaval for which what happened back in August may have been merely the warm-up act. Perhaps only when the politicians start getting bricks through their windows will they actually take notice of what is really happening outside their cosy bubble and its attendant media flying circus.
(I can't credit the image, unfortunately; it's one of hundreds of similar concoctions which are likely to end up giving the vicious little thug Lootenunt John Pike of University of California Davis Police Department his own TV show on Fox)
"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" (*)
(*) "Eating comes first, then Ethics" (Berthold Brecht)
It's a bit frustrating when you can't find a way adequately to express your anger and frustration with the way things are going in the world; you know, the nasty, venal thugs-in-office, the use of State force of one sort or another to intimidate and beat down those with a more humane moral view of the world, and the attempts to cow us (or bull us) into compliance, obedience and silence.
I'm lucky, though - I have a friend who can express it for me far better than I find myself able to. Take it away, Alex:
"A war is going on, but it is not the war you see in the news. It's not being fought in dusty foreign streets by decent men and women in camo fatigues - though Gods know, if you think about it their fight's just a symptom of this one.
"This is a fight taking place in the streets of American, British and European towns and cities. And it is a deadly one, with an overwhelmingly powerful enemy that has its claws in the influential people who roam the halls of power, and it is not afraid to use its influence.
"This enemy is dangerous, expansionistic, imperialist and Hell bent on conquering and enslaving. It is fighting by subornation, by smear campaigns, and when these fail it uses our own society's protectors against us, turning cops into pawns of their Will.
"This battle is even now going on in the halls of power to strip the people of the one thing we have that they have not yet poisoned and tarnished: the freedom to communicate with one another through this internet of ours.
"They want our blind, compliant obedience. They want our silence.
"They demand our consent, at gunpoint if necessary, by default if the guns fail.
"The enemy is Ambition. The enemy is Greed. The enemy is ... well, the enemy is Power, frankly, and the delusion of Entitlement.
"I would say that the indigo children have come to rule, and what spoiled bastards they are when they do claim the reins of power - but truth is, there's an awful lot of cookie cutter old, fat, bald white men out there, all wearing identical $2000 Worsted suits, and they've never been poor but somehow they all claim to know what it's like.
"We all know the enemy, though. The real enemy.
"It's our complacency.
"We were blinded to the lessons of as early as twenty years ago. 1991, the Berlin Wall had come down, Clinton was about to pull a miracle in Northern Ireland, Nelson Mandela was out of Robben Island, the Soviet Union was about to fall down. Back then, the future really did look so rosy.
"We had no idea that the next few years would prove so shitty. Even Labour destroying the Tories in 1997 only provided a tiny glimmer of relief. We'd had Desert Storm, we had Eastern Europe in flames, and not long afterwards would come Rwanda and genocide, and seemingly an endless war going in on Africa.
"Back home, scandals. Financial, political. John Major, the British PM, with his "Back to Basics," all his crap about family values while at the same time not only was one of his MPs dying of autoerotic asphyxiation with a satsuma in his mouth and a plastic bag over his head, but Johnny Boy himself, that old hypocrite, was boning Edwina Currie.
"We had the Clinton scandal - the right wing finding his weakness and pressing the home advantage (why couldn't you have seen this and put a stop to it back then, before they became the Tea Party loonies?) - and we had the birth of spin doctoring and tabloid excesses and the death of Diana.
"We had our scare stories that never happened - back then it was SARS and Y2K, with foot and mouth ten years ago.
"And we had a fight on our hands back then, with the Tories and then Labour pushing and pushing relentlessly for mandatory biometric ID cards and a DNA database with mandatory contributions from all donors, innocent or otherwise.
"We have had to fight this corrupt core of evil at the top of Western society, now, for more than thirty years. Back in 1981, we were being demonised by the state's puppets in the right wing tabloids just for having the temerity to be unemployed. Thirty years on, nothing changes.
"It's been a long, long fight; but all across the world, this year, people have started to realise that those who have put themselves in power have not had the public's interests at all. The cynics and conspiracy theorists complaining about the stifling, corrupt State have been vindicated. The people are just realising how evil those at the top truly are, and we are starting to rattle the cages now, on the eve of the bastards welding the cage door permanently shut.
"We are being locked into this cage, an entire generation of people being rounded up for a workforce of slaves to perform the functions of society for no money while those who have siphoned off all the money sit back and laugh at all the poor and starving people. Their slaves. Their servants. Their entertainment when we lie down and die.
"And all the while, the priests try and silence our protests with false promises of Heaven for the faithful and Hell for the deviants. Just as they used to do, when feudalism ruled the world.
"This world faces a crisis which could see the rise of a new form of feudalism, replacing democracy as the dominant political form. A handful of people at the top, owning everything, accountable to no-one but themselves, and ranks of people below them with lesser degrees of power, answerable to increasing numbers of people until the Ponzi pyramid gets right down to us, at the bottom, answerable to everybody, nobody to command, and our only job being to put up those pyramids and statues and temples to worship the movers and shakers at the top.
"2012 is around the corner, and an ending could be upon us - this has the potential of getting far worse before it gets any better, with tear gas giving way to baton rounds to live ammunition, with some dickheads using the possible future dissolution of the EU as an excuse to reinstate the death penalty in the UK, and with the State putting padlocks on the internet and having armed boot boy rentacops on every street corner before people start pulling their finger out and take the fight home to the wankers in charge.
"Because we need to get through, somehow, to those men with the guns that they are not fighting some screaming enemy coming at them with a bomb in one hand and a barbaric curse in their mouths. They are gunning down their own.
"They are shooting at their own wives, sons, daughters.
"And they are watching us fall, only to start getting up again, and keep on coming, because we are now no longer afraid to die: and it would be preferable to life under the thumb of those whose commands are behind the pulled triggers.
"Yes, there is a war going on. And yes, the grim fears of the last ten years have come true: this war is taking place right here, right now, in our own homes and streets.
"It's a war against everything that we should have been fighting against before, but did not. It's a war against the callousness of humans towards their own. It's a war against Brecht's maxim of "Grub first, ethics later."
"And like it or not, we are at, or approaching, the end game.
"Perhaps, in this moment of crisis, we can evolve. I think we must. The alternative is slavery and extinction.
"And I would rather join Peter Carroll in practicing my sorceries among the stars, rather than huddled in the ruins.
I sometimes wonder how I manage to type the pieces in this section. After all, it's really difficult to type accurately with your fists clenched.
Such has been my response to two articles which have appeared on the BBC News website in recent days.
Now, there's a pretty well-established practice that the media in this country do not, as a rule, provide a platform for convicted criminals. It seems that the BBC - in keeping with its recent determination to betray whatever of its finest traditions of independence might stand between it and avoiding dismemberment at the hands of the froth-lipped ideologues at the heart of government - have decided that exceptions can always be made in certain circumstances.
How else can one explain the appearance - only two days apart - of what amount to puff pieces for two members of the House Of Nominees who are both out on licence from prison, having fiddled their expenses?
First up on Wednesday was this piece on 'Lord' Taylor of Warwick (Mr John Taylor as was), talking about his experiences in prison (which seem on the whole to have been rather jollier than the norm, especially the two months he spent in an open prison in Kent) after being done for diddling us out of over £11 000 over a period of years. Now out on an electronic tag - a boon denied to many prisoners who have done far less damage to society - Taylor says he wants to "inform the debate on prison reform", and is looking forward to speaking when he is allowed back into his former position of privilege and power in less than seven months' time.
I'm sorry, Mr Taylor; no-one is more interested in pushing the idea of major reform of the penal system than I am - as anyone who has read this site in recent months could testify - but I think that you are one of the least suitable people to do it, inasmuch as any involvement from you is likely to produce little more than further antagonism on the part of the public to the whole idea that our system is catastrophically useless; and it is the public who most need to be convinced on this issue, because it is the perceived pressure from them upon MPs which goads said politicians into the colonic spasms of vengeance which have characterised policy in this field for many years. If you must campaign on this issue - and I accept you have a right to do that, and I commend you for it - then please do so behind the scenes and at a practical level. And don't claim any expenses that you're not genuinely entitled to, please.
As antagonistic as I am to Taylor of Warwick (and what do the people of Warwick feel about having a bent lord named after their town? Not that it matters; peerage means never having a say - sorry), it is as nothing to my thoughts on his fellow jailbird, the so-called Lord Hanningfield.
For, two days after Taylor's free shot, comes this piece on Paul White - the aforementioned 'Lord' - who was done for fiddling an even higher sum than Taylor and who spent no more than a handful of weeks locked up - in the same 'open' prison as Taylor.
Unlike Taylor - who seems to have shown something approaching a state of mild contrition - White spent much of his interview with a hackette on the Broadcorpsing Castration's Radio 5Live (yes, I'm afraid it does seem to be spelt that way) going on about how badly-done-by he thinks he is. "I've paid my debt", he sniffed (taking the onion out of his pocket), but qualifies this by adding the killer conditional, "if I was wrong." (emphasis mine), and using words such as "mistake" to cover a catalogue of extended criminality.
Where this unabashed wretch completely loses it, however, is where he compares his 'ordeal' prior to his trial to being in the United States' torture camp on the northern coast of Cuba:
"Before I went to prison I felt I could almost have been in Guantanamo Bay because I was having such a hard time.
"I think people need to realise the stress and strains, which are worse than prison, of all the previous bits."
Yes, that's right Paulie baby; you were dressed up in an orange jump suit, made to assume all sorts of embarrassing, stressful and painful postures, routinely subjected to what the Yanks (unforgivably) call 'enhanced interrogation techniques' and left in a complete legal limbo for eight years or more. Of course, we understand you now, milord; how you suffered!
Don't blaspheme, you arrogant, dunderheaded git! You had at your disposal all the rights which come from living in a (mostly) civilised country; you no doubt had the benefit of the best shysters you could buy; and you probably thought you could depend on your title impressing the judge at your trial (and it worked to some extent - you got a substantially shorter sentence than Taylor did, despite the fact that you were an even bigger crook).
How dare you compare your experiences with the victims of American legal exceptionalism!
And yet you, too, Mr White, will return to the scene of your crimes, won't you? Your suspension will run out even sooner than Taylor's, and then you will regain your power to pass laws which will put thousands of people - most of whom will not have your immense advantages of wealth and status - in prison, and for terms far longer than anything you have had to endure, and with consequences far more damaging than the comparatively minor inconvenience you have undergone.
You too claim that you want to assist the debate on penal reform. Very well, but my message to you is the same as that to John Taylor; do it discreetly and without drawing further attention to your poor self. Start by telling your boss - you know, the one who does Prime Minister impressions - and his colleagues to stop urging our feral judiciary to further depths of vindictiveness; to stop ramping up the rhetoric of revenge at the behest of the terminally ignorant (and their readers); and to stop destroying the life chances of thousands of young people every year in an attempt to "crack down" on something-or-other or to "send a message".
And, if you both want to make a truly valuable contribution, you should have the decency never to set foot in the legislature again, and to renounce your politically-given peerages. Otherwise, no-one will take anything you say seriously, and quite bloody right, too!
And a last message to the BBC: will you now publish sympathetic interviews with Frank Fernie? Or with Charlie Gilmour and Ed Woollard when they're released? Or, as with the appalling Andy Coulson, do 'second chances' only apply to those who - as the French put it - avoir le piston?
I've mentioned before those anti-social twerps who allow their iPods, mp3 players, phones, what-'ave-yew to play in confined spaces and pollute the air all around them.
Today, I encountered a new twist to the offence.
Got on the bus to work this morning and, making my way to my seat, heard the unmistakable sound of one of these hellish devices. Not the "tsk, tsk, tsk" of someone who doesn't realise that their earpieces are leaking like an incontinent dachshund, but the full sound.
Looking around for the culprit, the only other passenger on the bus was an elderly gentleman who clearly was not the source of the outrage.
I then realised that the racket was coming from the cab.
Yes, on a bus festooned with notices with headlines like "Switch it off!" and "Keep it down!", the bloody driver had whatever it was on. And it was clearly audible right down the bus, too.
I sat there and seethed all the way down. Other people got on, but were either not bothered by it or didn't want to commit that tewwible Bwitish sin, 'making a fuss'.
Not wanting to get thrown off and be late for work, I waited until I reached my stop. As I got to the door, I turned to the oaf (late-40s, bald, glasses) and said, "Do you know you're not supposed to have that on?"
"I can have it on if I like", he grunted.
"It's the same rule for you as for passengers.", I said. "If we shouldn't, then neither should you."
"I'm not allowed to wear headphones when I'm driving", said the yob, as if by way of explanation.
"Why do you need it on at all?", I enquired.
"Entertainment", he said, as if that clinched it.
"Sorry", I said, "but if it happens again, I'll have to report you."
"Report me if you like", sneered the tool as I got off.
I was wondering whether he would be driving the bus I was to catch home this afternoon, and had visions of the bastard deliberately driving past me. In which event, I also had visions of me walking a short distance up the hill to the bus depot and making a formal complaint.
You might think that I'm making too much of this, but his behaviour was just so bloody rude. I mean, it's bad enough when it's one of those "I can do what I like and fuck you" teenage girls that seem to infest our area nowadays, but when it's the bus driver himself, I have to say something.
I await his revenge, and will be careful to stay clear of kerb-side puddles for the foreseeable.
Pan ddeffroais i'r bore 'ma, roedd gen i bennill cyflawn yn fy mhen. Roedd o'n un da, hefyd.
O fewn dwy funud, roedd yr uffar wedi mynd yn angof. Yn llwyr. Gallwn i ddim cofio'i destun hyd yn oed erbyn hynny, a dwi'n siwr na ddaw'r cyth byth yn ôl.
Damia!
**********
Lost For Words
I woke up this morning with a fully-formed poem in my head. It was a good one, too.
Within two minutes, the bloody thing had gone. Completely. I couldn't even remember what it was about by then, and I'm sure it'll never come back again.
Who Will Judge The Judges?, or "Mind What You Type, Citizen" ***Now Updated***
Believe me, I've tried to resist writing this piece. Tried to resist for a variety of reasons: not wishing to bore you, The Reader, with another turn on this old hobbyhorse of mine; not wishing to plunge myself into yet another froth of anger at the vicious, short-sighted stupidity of those set in power over us; not wishing either to drop myself back into the mire of my 'prisoner complex' (q.v.); and not being sure if - for all my efforts - I will be able to express myself concisely and cogently.
And yet, comment I must.
Perhaps I'm naïve, or trusting. Maybe I still believe deep down in what I was brought up to believe; namely, that we live in a country which is run by people of altogether civilised intent, for whom the concepts of 'fair play' and 'moderation' are things by which to live at all times.
Whatever the ultimate source of my delusion, however, I really had hoped that the Court of Appeal, in hearing requests for reviews of some of the sentences passed by Crown Courts on people involved in various ways with the unrest of early August, would demonstrate a sense of proportion not at all apparent in the trial judges.
This was particularly true in the cases of Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, the two twenty-somethings from Cheshire who posted messages on Faecesbook intended - quoth the prosecution - to encourage people to create disorder in Northwich and Warrington. The incitements were totally dismissed by all who read them, and their pathetic nature was underlined by the fact that Blackshaw was actually dumb enough to turn up for his own 'riot', to be met only by a number of Cheshire Constabulary's finest who were able to make probably the easiest arrest of their entire careers.
For this, he and Sutcliffe-Keenan were handed four-year prison sentences by Judge Elgan Edwards at Chester for an offence under the 2007 Serious Crime Act of "encouraging [...] offences believing one or more would be committed". Edwards went in for an awful lot of the usual judicial whiffling about the good citizens of those towns being reduced to lying acouched of a night trembling, awaiting the inevitable fate of being murdered in their beds. This along with the now boiler-plate judgly insistence about how examples must be made, how deterrence must be applied and how messages must be sent.
So it was that two young men - with nothing more than two or three minor instances of 'previous' between them - ended up getting sentences on a scale usually meted out to people convicted of kidnapping, serious sexual assault or causing death by drunken driving. For a Facebook message!
Now, I'm not saying they shouldn't have been punished at all - that would be daft. Perhaps even a few months in the jug would have sufficed to show them that being a prick is not a sound career move. But these sentences were needlessly disproportionate - vindictive, even - especially bearing in mind that people who have issued a whole sequence of death threats on social networking sites have garnered no more than three months inside.
That there were mutterings of concern over the extremity of the punishment even in the comment pages of the Daily Mail and amongst the more alert members of the judiciary itself gave one a vague hope that, when the Appeal Court came to consider the matter in less inflamed times, some sense of proportion might be restored.
Such hopes were shown to be futile yesterday, however, when Lord Chief Justice Judge (yes: incredibly, there is a Judge Judge, Igor by given name too) and two of his colleagues flatly rejected Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan's appeals. In language which was even more redolent of the smell of old horsehair and fustian than that of Judge Edwards, and of the sort which in earlier times invited skewering by the likes of Beachcomber and A.P. Herbert, Judge Judge spoke of the "stout-hearted citizens" who had - 'stout-heartedness' notwithstanding - apparently been terrified out of their collected wits by a message on a social network site, and even used words like "ghastly" (though not "beastly", it seems; a chance for self-parody grievously missed, I fear). Interwoven with all this musty rhetoric was a rallying call for official vindictiveness, of punishment beyond reason for someone on the basis of something which didn't in fact happen, and in the context of events over which the appellants had no control and with which they had had only marginal involvement (I can't think of a place much more marginal than Northwich, for goodness sake). Thrown into the mix as well was a broadside at all this confounded modern technology which was aiding and abetting people to communicate easily with each other to the detriment of the sort of exemplary order which we used in enjoy in the good old days of hanging, queer-bashing...and the Krays.
(As an aside, such distrust of the proles being able to talk to each other without first seeking official approval is not by any means new. At the end of the 1970s, in a debate in the House Of Lords, one Lord Wells-Pestell bemoaned the coming of Citizens' Band (CB) radio (ask your grandad about that, boys and girls), complaining of the increased ability of people being able readily to communicate with one another, almost certainly for nefarious purposes. Simon Hoggart in a parliamentary sketch in Punch (ask grandad about that as well) opined that His Lordship was in for a shock when he tumbled to the existence of letters and telephones. And Igor himself has 'form' - only a few months ago he was whingeing on about how the existence of Twitter had made it impossible for philandering sports stars to use their wealth to get gagging orders from the courts).
The footling of Judge Igor was a melange of self-righteousness, technophobia and fear of the mob which has done nothing much more than compound the short-sighted stupidity of Judge Edwards' original sentence. But these cases raise something far more serious, far more sinister, and I'll return to that later.
For the moment, however, let us just think through the consequence of these sentences on those subject to them. For one thing, unlike our bent ex-MPs and serving members of the House Of Nominees, Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan will not be eligible for release on electronic tag after just a quarter of their terms. Such an option does not apply to sentences of four years or more. So, they will not be let out of prison until they have done at least two years, putting their release date at mid-August 2013.
And what will their position in the world be at that time? Well, there is a probability approaching unity that they will be homeless. If they ever had much chance of employment before all this, they sure as hell won't when they get out. An estimated sixty per cent of employers will not take on anyone who has done prison time, and the length of the sentence means that they will have to declare the conviction on all applications for employment, voluntary work, education, training, a driving licence or passport and even for insurance for the rest of their lives. So they are - to all intents and purposes - royally fucked forever. A life sentence in all but official designation.
Where will they live? How will they live? And who will have to pay for it? You may have worked the last bit out for yourselves; the same people who will have to fork out somewhere in the region of £160 000 to keep them inside just for two years.
I wonder how those - from the alleged Prime Minister down (or sideways) - feel now that their insensate desire for mindless revenge has been (for the moment at least) sated at the news that we, the great 'stout-hearted' taxpaying public will have to pay for these two tools for the rest of their lives? Be careful what you wish for...
There's another effect as well, in that other appeal cases have been on hold pending the decisions of Judge Twice and his chums. The judge who heard the appeals of Charlie Gilmour and Frank Fernie last month held off on his decisions pending yesterday's announcements. It is possible (although impossible to be sure, because cards have been played extremely close to the chest on the matter throughout) that Edward Woollard's appeal may be being handled similarly. It matters little; there was nothing in Igor's words yesterday that could give any of those three young men the slightest hope. Similarly, those who have yet to be sentenced in connection with August's events must now know that they, too, are going to be regally shafted. More young lives permanently blighted. Add to those simple facts the alienation, cynicism and anger (easy to comprehend if not condone) that will be generated within all of them, and the real likelihood of them learning inside skills which most emphatically do not feature in the national curriculum, and what a legacy we are allowing to be established for the future!
The more sinister aspects I adverted to earlier are not merely the use of extreme sentences to intimidate people from taking to the streets, however peaceably; the prosecution of those involved in UKUncut's totally non-violent actions must be brought in here as well. But Judge²'s rantings about technology reveal a clear unease on the part of those whose power and influence over the ability of us mere plebs to communicate without reference to the customary 'framing' of debate by them; and also reveal a clear desire to control - even to emasculate - any communications which the ruling class regards as dangerous to them. Hence Cameron's first reaction to the August riots - after sending a clear signal that he wanted everyone put in prison irrespective of the circumstances - was to try to strong-arm the companies which run social media sites into censorship or outright suppression.
Add to this the libel reform proposals currently being suggested which include an immediate take-down of any post, article or comment on any web site which someone takes exception to (the fact that this would be unworkable in most cases doesn't seem to matter to the technological illiterates who rule us), and we are seeing another run of attempts to neuter our ability to communicate with each other without the imprimatur of the powerful.
Some might like to make the old, old point about freedom of speech not being limitless, and that there is no protected right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre (unless there is a fire, of course). So much may be true, but the use of draconian laws - some of them promoted by the secret state, others pushed for by the media corporations who want to 'tame' the Web and turn it into just another source of income for themselves - and of disproportionate punishment merely brings what is a valid enough point into disrepute.
So, if I were to say that I think someone should get hold of Judge Judge and fry his shrivelled scrotum in Mazola for seven minutes until crispy (I do apologise for that image) until he either gets a sense of humanity, or at least stops appearing in public wearing an outfit which makes him look like a badly-stuffed penguin soft toy...
(Note for the Police, the Clown Persecution Service and other such automata: this is what is known as a 'hypothetical'; that is to say, an example used for illustrative purposes. It is emphatically not to be taken as 'incitement' to someone to go and incinerate the old ball-bag - any part of him. Much).
...would I then be liable to four years imprisonment (or six to ten years if I refused to plead guilty), even though no-one took any notice or actually followed through on it? Judging by the precedents now being set, such a lack of consequence would be deemed not to reflect positively on me, and I could expect to cop the full wad, ball and shot.
In which case, shall we extend this to other spheres of dubious endeavour? For example, if someone is caught driving at 30mph in a 20mph residential area, shall we prosecute them for causing the death of a child by careless/reckless/dangerous driving? Yes, it didn't actually happen but it might have done. By the twisted logic of Judge Doubledip and others, this is surely what should happen?
I hold to a fundamental principle that if someone is to be punished, they should be punished for what they themselves have done and the actual consequences of what they themselves have done and nothing else. To do otherwise brings speculation, supposition - in short, guesswork - into the equation, which leads - as we have seen too clearly and too often this year - to arbitrarily harsh sentences on people for things over which they, ultimately, had no control and for which they, in point of fact, had no actual responsibility.
But I'm aware that I'm repeating points that I've made previously on these matters, so I'll not try your patience (finding it as guilty as a fox in a henhouse and sentencing it to four years in the slammer) any further. I cannot help, however, being thoroughly dismayed as to what those whose judgement is supposed to be calm, rational, proportionate and humane are setting us all up for in the future.
Update: As if to provide further collateral for the belief that the judicial system in this country is completely Dagenham Heathway (i.e., three stops beyond Barking), scarcely four days after Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan's appeals were so contemptuously dismissed, a 20-year-old female was convicted at Cambridge Crown Court. She had:
Driven a car whilst under the influence of cocaine and mephodrone (and possibly cannabis as well),
Crashed the car,
Killed the two men in the rear seats of the car, rendering five children fatherless,
Co-operated rather less than fully with the investigating authorities,
Did not change her plea to 'guilty' until a mere four days before her trial was due to begin.
In the light of all that, what sentence did you think she got?
Well, I'll tell you.
Three years and four months.
That's all.
(The story is covered here if you want more details).
There are two things to note here, I think.
The first is something I've covered before, namely that culpably killing someone with a motor vehicle is considered considerably less severe a crime than killing them in any other way; and the second is that it now becomes even more clear that the sentences we have been seeing recently are nakedly political in their intent.
Consider this: Reynolds not only got a far shorter sentence for killing two people than she would have done for posting something on Facebook, she will serve no more than twenty months inside; indeed, because her sentence is under four years, she may well be home on a tagged curfew by the end of next August, when Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan will still be no more than halfway through their period of custody.
Who will rid us of these judicial lunatics? Or will I now be liable to nearly half a decade in the clink for even suggesting that someone should rid us of them?
So, last Friday I had a phone call from someone at PlusNet just after I got home from work (I hadn't even had time to take my coat off), trying to arrange another appointment for the BT engineer to call.
I made the point that I had lost a day's working time due to their failure last Monday, and that I didn't intend losing any more. So, I said, I would not be available until after 15:00.
This caused call-centre person to umm and ahh about how it would be difficult to arrange a visit during such a clearly-defined time-slot, as BT works (assuming that such a word can apply here) to a 13:00-18:00 spread. An offer was made to try to get BT out on a weekend (which they are, by all accounts, not supposed to do - I daresay it's 'inefficient', or some such management bollocks), but it wouldn't be the weekend then upcoming, but the weekend after.
I said that I wanted the problem sorted out and so agreed - reluctantly - to get home by 13:00 Monday (that's today).
And that's what I did. I dropped nearly two hours' working time and got here at about 13:01. And waited...
...and waited...
...and waited...
...and now, at 18:40, I'm still fucking waiting. Yep, another no-show.
I don't care whether the failure is with PlusNet, with BT, with both, or in that mystical territory which constitutes the interface between the two. This is now going to be a formal complaint - assuming, of course, that I can get online and stay online long enough to complete and send the form.
I've mentioned elsewhere here that my internet connection has been unreliable for two or three weeks, caused by a very low downstream signal-to-noise ratio.
My ISP arranged for BT to send an engineer out to deal with it. Said engineer was due to call this morning between 08:00 and 13:00.
I suppose it won't come as a surprise to hear that no-one from BT turned up at all today, and I've lost a day's work for nothing.
What between that and that corporation's 'Payment Services' division charging me an extra £5.40 per quarter on the phone bill for exercising my 'consumer choice' by refusing to pay by Direct Debit, it's high time that that company had its near-monopoly position removed.
I certainly don't intend taking another day off just for their convenience. They can call when I'm available, not when it suits them, even if that means I sit here with an internet connection which is practically unusable for large parts of every evening.
**********
Birthday Wishes And Solidarity
(I know, two Rants on the same day).
This is to send best wishes to Edward Woollard, who will mark his nineteenth birthday this week in prison as a result of the blatantly politicised sentence passed on him in January this year.
(There are some things which strike me as odd, though, I have to say. There has been no mention of any appeal against his sentence, which I would have thought was a must given all the circumstances of it. I would have thought that any appeal would have been heard by now, even taking into account the dilatory malevolence of the authorities. Also, Edward should have been eligible for release on a tagged curfew by now, having served a quarter of his sentence. One can only assume that his release has been blocked because someone - out of incompetence, stupidity or spite - claims that he's a risk to the public - unlike bent ex-MPs and peers, obviously. I can't help wonder why, as well, the website set up to support him has been so lacking in updates during the last six months: have he and his family been warned off?).
Whichever way, have as happy a birthday as you can in the circumstances, Ed. Be patient - better days are coming.
Also, solidarity to Charlie Gilmour and Frank Fernie - two further victims of the same judicial thuggery which put Woollard in prison for a disproportionate length of time - and who are waiting to hear the outcomes of their appeals.
Solidarity too to Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, jailed for four years - the sort of sentence usually handed out for kidnapping or for killing by drunken driving - for posting something stupid on Facebook, who are also awaiting the results of their appeals. And to Ahmed Pelle of Nottingham, another one who fell prey to the feral judgery of recent months, who got over two and a half years for a similar 'offence'.
Black, Brown, White - The Colour Of The Shirt Doesn't Matter
You may have been unaware that over the last week or so, thousands of people have gathered in New York to protest against the effective takeover of the political processes of the USA by corporations and their hired politicians.
You may be unaware because - with the odd honourable exception - the media (owned by much the same corporate interests as those being complained against in the Occupy Wall Street campaign) have either studiously ignored the protest, or have slanted what little coverage they have given to it in such as way as to portray the protestors in as malign a light as possible (they haven't yet claimed that Occupy Wall Street is an Al Qaeda front, but maybe they will given the time).
It is in some strange way gratifying that the New World™ can still learn from the Old. We have seen here over the past year or more how protests can be totally neutralised in the eyes of the Great <insert name of country here> Public™ by deliberately skewed media coverage. We have also seen here in that same period how the judiciary can always be depended upon by the powerful to play their part in chilling and canning anything which smacks of effective dissent against That To Which There Is No Permitted Alternative; that has not come to the US yet, but when the first arrestees finally get their day in court, I'm sure that American judges will not be found wanting in that regard.
And we have also seen elements in the police being allowed to use disproportionate action against non-violent demonstrators, and for such extreme conduct to be excused or even condoned by their commanders and political bosses.
How nice to see that we have managed another successful export to The Land Of The Free-If-You're-Rich-White-And-Fundy:
Kudos here to Lawrence O'Donnell for bringing this to a wider public, and to MSNBC for giving him the chance to do so - it goes a little way towards making up for their cowardice in sacking Keith Olbermann last year.
And for further comment on how the USA is turning into the worst sort of police state, that is, one where there is no one huge step towards tyranny but where the change is incremental, rather like the famous Boiling Frog analogy, then read this piece by John Grant in Counterpunch.
Contempt? Yes, And Quite Right Too ***Now Updated***
I'm sorry that I keep returning to this subject, what what the fuck is the matter with the English judiciary? Have you seen a group of people so far up themselves in this country these days?
He took a picture of the inside of a courtroom with his phone.
Off with his head!
This happened at Luton Crown Court. The judge, one Barbara Mensah, was outraged at such a wanton breach of etiquette, and sentenced nineteen-year-old Paul Thompson of that town to two months in the slammer.
Yes, at a time when our prisons are already overflowing - largely as a result of judicial activism - she put someone in the jug for between three and eight weeks for taking a fucking photograph!
This little tyrant in knickers wittered, "This is a serious offence!"
Oh, get over yourself, dearie! He took a picture. Got that? A picture. No-one was robbed, no-one hurt or killed. He took a picture.
And you may have just cost him his home; his job (if he had one) or the prospect of one (if he hadn't) from having done time and having a conviction he will have to declare on all job applications for the next ten years; you could also have caused the death of his puppy; and you have just cost Us, The Hard-Working Taxpayer™, between £2300 and £6700 to keep this dangerous criminal mastermind locked up. Well bloody done!
Can we please have all candidates for the judiciary, at whatever level, forced to have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids the words, "Prison is only for people who are a danger to the public!"?
I suppose all we would get as a 'defence' of this disproportion is a lot of old cack about "the dignity of The Court" or "the majesty of The Law". The truth is that courts are there to serve a particular utility in a society - that of deciding on issues of criminal and civil law. They are not there as some sort of temples of Kabbalistic mystery where secret rites are conducted which are beyond the comprehension of the know-nothings (although this may be a point of debate). They are certainly not there so that upper-middle-class shysters who have been promoted above their conception of reality can dive into the dressing-up box and emerge looking like shabby penguins in order for them to display for the groundlings their total divorce from any sense of reality.
What strange metamorphosis comes over people when they are appointed to the judiciary in this happy land? We can see that the most egregious abuses of basic due process and proportionality in recent weeks have been carried out not by the lay magistracy but by so-called 'District Judges'. These used to be called 'Stipendiary Magistrates' until - in an equivalent to 'grade inflation' - some New Labour booby decided to give them a fancier title. They now seem to think that this makes them real judges, and that this entitles them to behave with the worst excesses of the professional judiciary (wrong sort of Facebook page? That'll be four years, please).
Or perhaps the job actually attracts unsuitable people, rather like prison officers, many of whom - I'm reliably informed - took the job because they wanted to be paid for wearing a uniform and being nasty to people, but didn't have the numeracy skills to become car-park attendants. There certainly seems to be a proportion of the judgery who appear to have graduated summa cum laude from some sort of School of Applied Sadism, and who get off in some way from the power they wield and - more significantly - from they way that they are allowed to wield it.
That this has taken place at a time when the man who currently has the job of doing Prime Minister impressions has drooled that he wants to see cameras brought into the courts - just so that the plebs can have someone else to turn their officially-approved hate upon - is so ironic that you could pick it up with a magnet from a distance of several hundred yards.
As for contempt, nothing is more likely to induce it with regards to the legal and judicial systems of a country than to see those administering them wilfully and - it seems all too often - gleefully abusing the powers that we entrust to them.
Postscript: The thought has just occurred to me that, with Legal Aid now being cut further and further back, thus denying access to justice to more and more people on low and average incomes, we are seeing the commodification of the whole justice system. It's perfectly analogous to Premiership football: fewer and fewer people can afford to attend a game, but everyone will be encouraged to watch the edited highlights later that evening.
Update: I don't usually revisit old stuff, but I think it right that I should refer you to this New Statesman piece by lawyer and author David Allen Green, in which he points out that Thompson had behaved in a disruptive and prickish manner throughout the hearing.
I don't think that this necessarily invalidates my central point, however, which is to decry the gleeful ease with which the judiciary routinely put people in prison for offences which could be dealt with more than adequately in more constructive (or, at least, less destructive) and less expensive ways.
Spot the disjuncture in the words of Iain Duncan-Smith, failed Tory leader and now Secretary of State for All Work and No Pensions:
"England has to become "the nation of the second chance" to rehabilitate people..."
OK so far?
"Lawbreakers must be punished but also offered a way out of their present situation, said the minister..."
Who deniges of it, Betsey? But wait:
"...said the minister, who is considering reducing benefits and rights to social housing for families of those responsible for violence and looting."
So in Dumbtwunt-Smith's "nation of the second chance", just as the terminally ill are told to take up their beds and work, and just as the poor are made to get back on their feet by having to sell all their furniture, so those who fall victim to the latest Government-sponsored spasm of judicial activism will be given a 'second chance', so long as they do it whilst begging alongside their families in the cardboard box they will be sharing (Tory politicians, stepping over as they come out of the opera, for the use of) as a result of a deliberate policy of collective punishment.
I am only precluded from calling this self-righteous hypocritical little shite what he should be called due to my high regard for the far greater intelligence, compassion and integrity of the folk with whom I would be comparing him:
I wish I didn't have cause to say, "I told you so.". But I'm afraid I do.
It has become monstrously clear in the last few days that the whole administration of what it still pleases us to delude ourselves into calling 'justice' has been corrupted by considerations which should have no part in the cool, deliberative assessment that such a system should embody.
More and more people have been herded through the lower courts in London and elsewhere, where magistrates - who could not possibly have had enough time properly to assess the cases in front of them - have been sentencing people to terms of imprisonment completely out of proportion to whatever criminal act they may have actually committed.
It is quite possible that some of them - be it for reasons of personal whim, ideological rigour or just a heightened sense of their own importance - would have handed out sentences of this nature anyway, but in the light of statements such as those from the man who is currently in charge of doing impressions of a Prime Minister, to whit that anyone convicted of anything which might be remotely connected to the 'riots' ought to be put in prison, it seemed - even at such an early juncture - perfectly clear that the junior judiciary was being put under pressure.
To which one must ask; then why did you use it, y'worship?
So this is what we have come to: that many of the sentences which are now being passed (or which will be passed when most of those who have been imprisoned without trial by the same amateurs come up at the higher courts for trial and/or sentencing) - sentences which, as I have previously pointed out, are sufficient totally to wreck the 'life chances' of those subject to them - are not only being motivated by lack of scrutiny or some sort of class animus (magistrates are mostly middle-class, middle-aged and middle-income), but are the result of a deliberate end-run around sentencing guidelines which have been established by due and careful consultation and consideration in order to comply with a nakedly political imperative.
The only possible good thing which might come from this is that the latest revelations of political interference might ensure that these sentences are overturned on appeal, although it remains to be seen whether those appeals - even if successful - will be dealt with with sufficient dispatch to prevent the original sentences having their destructive effects (a basic rule of the English legal system is that a miscarriage of justice may take minutes to create, but it will always take years to remedy).
And if you are one of those who sits there cheering on the judiciary as they obey the 'directives' of a government which is all too aware that it is in deep shit, and if you are one of those who thinks that it doesn't matter what happens to 'rioters' or 'looters' or 'anarchists' or whoever the officially-designated 'Other' du jour might be, because they're all as guilty as hell anyway and they deserve it; then, when you are lying all smug and warm in your bed tonight, just after you've turned the light off, then ponder a little, and hope and (if you are so minded) pray that neither you nor anyone you care about ever has to come up in front of a magistrate or judge who might be in a similar position. If that happens, you can scream and whine all you want, but you were happy to let the precedent be set and so must face the consequences.
In all this, as ever, the most certain way of ensuring that justice will be done to us, should we ever find ourselves on the sharp end of it, and the best way of safeguarding our own right to fair treatment, is to ensure that that justice, that fair treatment, apply to everyone, even - in fact, especially - to those of whom we disapprove.
So there we have it: three years for incapacitating someone for life, but four years for posting some words on a website. Something is very, very rotten here.
Once events in Tottenham and elsewhere had kicked off, there was only ever going to be one set of responses from those in power.
In contrast to recent events in a civilised country - Norway, the horror of which puts a bit of freewheeling entrepreneurialism in the cities of England in the shade, and which led to the people and government of that land stiffening their resolve in defence of human (and humane) values - the reaction (a most appropriate word in the context) of our self-styled leaders here has been the standard, tabloid-driven, knee-jerk sanctimony.
We have also had what has now become the standard response from senior Labour politicians - a mixture of mild hand-wringing (tempered by the knowledge that they had thirteen years seriously to address the economic and social problems of England's cities without ever being keen to do so) and desperate attempts to outflank the Conservatives from the right.
We have had the risible (to anyone with a sense of perspective, let alone one of irony) invocation of the 'Spirit Of The Blitz™', supposedly epitomised by people cleaning up the streets after the unrest; conveniently forgetting that they were doing so because they knew that - were it left to what are termed, with ever-rising inaccuracy, the 'responsible bodies' - it wouldn't get done at all.
In short, we have had - greatly in contrast to the Norwegian example - hypocrisy, manufactured outrage and a sort of blood-lust all combined. The English will tell you that they are the most tolerant people in the world, but it doesn't take much to make eighty percent of the population of that land belch out what amounts to one long stream of bile unworthy even of the Daily Mail.
What we are also already seeing are the hundreds being herded through specially-convened courts, processed as nothing more than so many cattle, subject to what amounts to little more than summary justice in a time of heightened emotions (real or appliqué), being given - without much in the way of due process - prison sentences which are just long enough to destroy any hopes they may have had of future education or employment; or imprisoned without trial (the euphemism in this case being 'remanded in custody') to await either trial or the prospect of even longer sentences pour encourager les autres within a system which is already just about beyond bursting point. We are seeing people. some of whom are - legally - children being arrested, detained, imprisoned without trial simply for something they put on their Facebook page.
And many of those who do get the nearest to what we have nowadays to a fair trial will face the charge of 'violent disorder', the charge du jour of the Crown Prosecution Service; convenient because - if you examine the wording of the law on the matter - practically anyone can be done for practically anything at practically anytime under its rubric, provided an equally vague basic criterion is passed. Convenient also because it carries a maximum sentence higher than that of any public order offence other than Riot (which the Police prefer not to have used because it opens them up to legal and financial liabilities). So we will see in the coming weeks and months people whose offences, had they been committed on a typical Friday night in any city or large town, would have merited no more than six months inside getting instead sentences of three to five years, with all that that implies for their own futures and for the future of the society into which they will, eventually, be released.
More repulsively and rebarbatively still, we have council leaders - particularly those in notoriously corrupt councils such as Westminster and Nottingham - stating quite clearly that they are eager and willing to evict entire families from their homes if one member of that family is convicted in connection with this week's évènements. In addition, an online petition demanding that anyone involved be deprived of any assistance from the welfare system has reached one hundred thousand signatures within hours. For what better way can there possibly be of teaching these dreadful people the error of their ways and leading them in the paths of officially-sanctioned and market-approved righteousness than by making their parents and kid siblings homeless and by limiting their own future prospects to those of either beggary or more crime? Especially as sixty per cent of employers simply will not under any circumstances employ ex-prisoners.
And in all of this, the background to what has happened - the years of neglect, the out-of-control thuggishness of the Police (especially the Met), the egregious callousness of a system which tells millions of people from every billboard and commercial that they are nothing without such-and-such a product, whilst at the same time gaming the system to make it impossible for them (legally) to get it - all of this goes deliberately unexamined. This is partly because of a lingering sense of shame, of the type which leads 'respectable' families to have their elderly, demented relatives shunted away in a (privatised) care home somewhere rather than look after them themselves, and thereby avoid the awful truth that Granny pisses herself twice a day and thinks she's still in the WAAF; it would give too much away about their own frailty and callousness, and would detract from their own self-image. But mostly because of a condign refusal to see that the emperor is not only naked, but is waving his dick about in a scandalously perverted manner in order to create fear, panic and self-subjugation in the eyes of his subjects.
For this is where the Anglo-American form of capitalism always has and always will lead. To the fortunate few - the born-to-it, the sociopathic, the downright lucky - the spoils at all times, good or bad. To most of the rest, the constant struggle to keep their heads above water, their families off the street. To the remainder, a large, institutional "fuck off!"; a mere existence, ignored unless it becomes necessary (as it always does) for those in the first group to provide a convenient scapegoat for those in the second to regard with scorn, dismissiveness or just simple, outright hate. Be it in Detroit or Deptford, Santiago or Salford, the poor ye shall always have with you, because it's nice to be able to have someone else to blame for your own cupidity and cowardice.
And so the prospect faces us of a society falling into a pattern whereby the top conducts a war against the bottom, using the powers - economic, political, communicational - which Topside (to use Priestly's formulation) believes are its birthright exclusively to use; and where the bottom, when finally roused from its television-and-cheap-booze-fuelled stupor sufficiently to rise up - however ineptly or misdirectedly - to at least remind Topside that tumbrils can be knocked together in a couple of hours or so, can be invoked as a collective folk devil to engage the 'squeezed middle' (an appallingly unsonorous phrase which could only have originated with a third-rate academic attached to a think-tank) and its own attendant paranoias.
We seem to be unable to learn from history, and therefore are doomed to repeat it. The first time was tragedy; the second time may be an ITV comedy series - badly-made, not remotely amusing, and doomed to failure.
What is truly interesting about it to me, though, is this quote:
"Lord Ashcroft, founder and Crimestoppers chairman, said: "This is not a victimless crime. Every single one of us is paying higher taxes, bank charges and insurance fees because of fraud.""
So "every single one of us" is paying more tax because of a handful of dodgy dealers, eh, M'Lord?. Are you sure about that, M'Lord? Do they operate in Belize as well, M'Lord?
"Every single one of us"? Or just those who don't have the shyster accountants and the balls of the government in their hands?
A small piece of advice to the medical profession: keep an oxyacetylene torch to hand, just in case this dodgy, dodging parasite ever needs surgery on his neck.
A tanked-up 20-year-old first offender protesting against the régime's cuts in education for all bar the children of the wealthy throws two thin sticks in the direction of a couple of riot-gear-clad police officers.
Charge: violent disorder.
Punishment: twelve months' imprisonment.
A neo-Nazi shithead with previous convictions leads a mob of a hundred people in actual violence against people and criminal damage.
Charge: using threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour.
Punishment: a twelve-month 'rehabiliation order'. Oh, and an appearance on Newsnight.
#2:
A Muslim (any Muslim you care to think of) kills half a dozen or so people with a bomb.
Reaction of the media and politicians: this is yet another example of why we must continue to harrass people of a non-white colouration, subject them to house arrest and seizure of all assets, and continue to expand our practice of officials groping people at airports in order to protect our civilised values against being destroyed by the onward march of Jihad on Europe.
A white-supremacist Christian fundamentalist kills seven or eight people with a bomb, prior to going on the rampage with assault weapons and killing upwards of sixty or seventy teenagers.
Reaction of the media and politicians: well, the poor boy is quite obviously sick in the head and it's all the fault of the Muslims and their Marxist multiculturalist, 'elf-n-safety gawn maaaad fellow travellers anyway, just 'cos they're there. And there is no network of neo-Fascists across Europe engaging in daily violence against anyone they don't like the look of, deary me no, that's all been got up by the left-liberal media.
Following on from earlier posts, the inevitable has now happened and Craig Thomson has now lost his job with Hearts following a decision by the Russian oligarch who owns that club.
Well done, everybody. You've now rendered someone whose offences were deemed nowhere near serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence practically unemployable in his chosen profession in Scotland (or indeed anywhere else), and perhaps unemployable altogether.
'Children 1st', bottled-water companies, yapping hacks and dodgy businessmen, I hope you enjoy basking in the effects of your self-righteousness. In fact, I hope you fucking well choke on it.
then those responsible - the 'journalists' who did it and the editors and proprietors who either sanctioned it or turned a blind eye to it - must be put on trial and, if convicted, sentenced to substantial terms of imprisonment (there are people serving prison sentences for things far less rebarbative than this).
At the very least, all those involved should be debarred from ever working in the media again, and be forced to undertake tasks which are far more morally elevated than what they've been doing; like rounding up cats for vivisectionists.
As this stench all emanates from the media corporation to which successive governments and others have grovelled over the last thirty years, however, and as the police have had to have a gun held to their heads to get them to investigate any part of the whole affair properly, I can't say that I'm optimistic.
Following on from the last post, with a terrible and tedious predictability Hearts today suspended Craig Thomson from his job with them, despite initially trying to weather the manufactured outrage.
So, what changed? Well, apart from the confected shit-storm, one of the club's sponsors - the company which supplies its bottled water, no less - announced on Monday that it was withdrawing its support. The company - which I won't name here because they can pay for their own publicity - stated that they could not continue their £5000-a-year deal, citing their "strong family values".
I've an idea: can someone examine the practices of that firm and see if their "strong family values" include paying all of their staff a proper living wage - you know, one that you could keep a family on without their having to resort to claiming benefits or tax credits? I somehow don't think their "strong family values" extend as far as that, do you?
And looky here! Here's another mouthpiece for 'Children 1st' - their 'Chief Executive' this time - practically wetting her knickers at the thought that her organisation has almost certainly managed to destroy the current and future livelihood of a young man (albeit one who has behaved like an eejit) who had already been punished in the only appropriate way that anyone in a well-ordered society should be punished - through a court of law after a properly-constituted trial.
It has been claimed that 'further revelations' have been made about Thomson's behaviour. 'Claimed', that is, in a hack-rag that isn't even any use to wipe one's arse with. The police have said they are not investigating any such allegations, so 'claims' are all they are, at least for now. Until and unless something else may be proved against Thomson, then that is where it should rest. But it won't, of course. As the great John Cooper Clarke put it:
"The people pay The paper sells Its plug-ugly sub-animal yells."
Two things I really can't abide: self-righteousness and hypocrisy. But there's one thing I detest more.
That's when self-righteousness and hypocrisy combine, and are then amalgamated with a disturbing - I might say indecent - glee at someone's life being destroyed. That is the mark of the thug, the bully, the psychopath.
This is a slightly tricky subject, one which it is difficult to discuss without falling foul of the tendencies of our terminally-misled society to damn people for all eternity for one mis-step added to a propensity for media-induced prurience, but there is what Valentine Michael Smith would call 'a wrongness' about something here, so I must raise it.
It concerns a young Scottish football player called Craig Thomson. Earlier this month, he was found guilty of indecent behaviour towards two under-age girls over the internet. He was fined £4000 and ordered to be placed on the sex offenders' register.
His employer, Heart Of Midlothian FC, having investigated the matter further and discussed it with Thomson (who has issued a public apology for his conduct), have decided to allow him to continue to play for the club.
So far, so legal, so reasonable.
But this has not been enough for an organisation calling itself 'Children 1st'. In a radio interview, they have called for Thomson to be sacked as well.
I do not for one moment condone what Thomson did; he has behaved like a prick, and seems to have acknowledged the fact. But what more do 'Children 1st' actually want? Consider that Thomson:
has been arrested, questioned, charged, prosecuted, tried, convicted and punished in accordance with the law,
has thus been publicly exposed as someone who - even if it was only a one-off - committed an offence which most people would find pretty distasteful,
is now likely to be subjected on a weekly basis to the sort of vicious verbal abuse for which that category of semi-humans called 'football fans' are justifiably famous,
and yet despite all this, 'Children 1st' want him to lose his job in addition to the punishments already handed to him by a properly-constituted court of law after a trial which - we must assume - was fair.
Let's consider what would happen if they got their way. By dint of the criminal record (and the type of offence he committed), Thomson would find it very difficult to find employment elsewhere. Not just as a footballer, but in any sphere of employment. After all, it's not as if there are employers in every town in the Realm who think, "Well, it doesn't matter if he's a convicted nonce; of course we'll take him.", is it?
Similarly, if he wanted to try to continue his chosen career elsewhere, he would find it all but impossible, as no other country would be likely to let him in even to visit (the only place which might allow the import of perverts - the Vatican - doesn't have a football team).
So, if Hearts sacked him, he would - at least for some considerable time to come - be practically unemployable.
Perhaps 'Children 1st' would like to explain whether this would make Thomson (even assuming that he would be a risk of repeat offending, which is a substantial 'if' without any supporting evidence) less of a risk to underage girls or more of one? Especially given that he might be excused for thinking that there was nothing much more that could be done to him, so he might as well be as bad as he could be. How many times do you get to kick someone when he's down, and what purpose - other than serving your own sense of self-righteousness and rectitude - would such a course of action serve?
There's a broader point to this than the fate of just one ball-kicking numpty, however. We now seem to be a land full of people setting themselves up as groups advocating this and that, or on behalf of some group or another (even if the group being advocated on behalf of - is that grammatical? - doesn't necessarily want them to do so).
The nature of these groups can vary.
At one end of the scale you have the likes of the thoroughly risible 'Taxpayers' Alliance' (which claims to speak for all downtrodden taxpayers but which, when you see what they come out with, is clearly in favour of slashing expenditure on public services so that the wealthy can continue to entertain themselves in the style to which they have become all too accustomed in recent times, and whose calls for 'transparency' in others are somewhat weakened by their own deep-seated coyness about the sources of their own funding).
At the other end, you have no end of campaigning organisations who think that 'something should be done' about whatever it is they believe is wrong. Many of these groups have aims which are, at least, laudable in themselves; better treatment for people with mental illnesses, for example, or stronger action against the mutilation of the genitals of infants for reasons of mere cultural conformity. However what tends to happen with these and all the others is that their Great Cause provokes them into a stridency, shrillness and unwillingness to reason which in the end actually damages the cause they claim to be so concerned about.
(It also helps if you have a snappy name for your organisation, by the way. I checked out 'Children 1st' earlier on. It turns out to be what used to be called the Royal Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children; this obviously was not 'dynamic' enough, and so they were 're-branded').
This might not matter so much if we still had something worthy of being called 'journalism' in this country. But we don't anymore. In place of the old practice of newspapers and the broadcast news media which basically ran, "Find the story, investigate the story, confirm the story, print/broadcast the story and be damned", the vast majority of those who call themselves 'journalists' today are little more than stenographers, either repeating what those in positions of political and economic power want the public to know or think, or mindlessly doing Ctrl+C > Ctrl+V from the outpourings of any organisation sufficiently sharp to have someone capable of creating an effective press release. And this without doing anything which could remotely be called 'research', something which is surely easier now (if not necessarily more reliable) than at any previous time in human history.
It is this latter tendency which is the more dangerous, simply because it means that the most appalling bollocks gets disseminated as if it were the truth because no critical filters have been applied to it beforehand as a sort of veracity quality control. And so, in the case of the 'Taxpayers' Alliance', for example, it means that their mouthpieces get invited onto television and radio programmes to spout their fake-outrage twaddling as if they really were speaking on behalf of the vast majority of the population rather than just for a very small and already well-favoured section of it. And in the case of other organisations, it means that those who shout the loudest, or can twang what the media perceive are the heart-strings of the Great British Public, can always rely on getting a hearing out of all proportion to the significance - or even the integrity - of what they have to say.
So it is that, for example, the self-appointed moral watchdogs of our time such as the ludicrous 'Mediawatch' (one mad, wife-beating fundamentalist in Carmarthenshire) are taken with undue seriousness by today's media compared to their precursors such as Mary Whitehouse in what we are supposed now to consider to have been less enlightened times. So it is also that groups created ostensbly to help, say, the victims of crime are given disproportionate coverage and influence in the media and poltical agendas.
What this all does is not merely to skew the public debate, often twisting it into forms which have no recognisable relation to reality, but all too often it serves totally to shut down that debate. All you have to do is to cry something like, "Won't someone fink of duh kiddies?", and no further discussion is possible, because to seek to argue against the points made by such groups - however cogent your argument, however baseless or batshit the other side may be - immediately categorises you in the eyes of the masses as being in favour of, for example, child rape. This was the way in which massive public opposition to the Blair régime's illegal war on Iraq could be negated by portraying all those of us who opposed that murderous agenda as being a fellow-traveller of Saddam Hussein (Nick Cohen in The Observer is still doing this eight or nine years on).
So calm, rational debate on matters of import becomes less and less possible because you have to compete against lobbying groups which are often well-equipped and invariably very loud. This means that the campaigning groups get what amounts to a free pass to channel opinions which - if not outright barmy - are singularly ill-thought-out, not least because it is very difficult to challenge them without being misrepresented oneself.
What it also means is that organisations which do try to do things calmly and engage in something which could be called a proper debate fare very badly, because the wells of discourse have been poisoned by the shouters and screamers in such a way that you cannot get your point heard unless you resort to the same tactics yourself. This is an extreme and damaging corrosion of the body politic which harms all of us.
And that is why organisations such as 'Children 1st' can call for a young man who has already been punished to the proper extent of the law to have his current (and future) employment prospects removed from him without anyone being able to tell them that they are talking nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that.
As ever, the key question to ask oneself when you hear anyone with an axe sedulously grinding it in public is the old standby: Cui bono?
I suppose I should be glad that even as I near half a century in this world I can still be seduced by wishful thinking. Keeps the mind young, I suppose.
But when one is exposed as being gullible it isn't pleasant.
I really did believe that there was a possibility, with Kenneth Clarke in charge of penal policy in the UK and his 'Breaking The Cycle' Green Paper of late last year, that something might finally be done to expose and eradicate the shameful failures of our systems of punishment over the last thirty years. An end to the knee-jerk, tabloid-pleasing, curtain-twitcher-licking pattern of 'crackdowns' and 'tough talking' which has destroyed so many hopes and lives.
I also knew, however, that it was (to use that appallingly cloth-eared phrase) a 'tough ask' for any Justice Secretary - especially a Conservative one - to try to get any positive reform of those systems into effect without them being diluted into meaningless slogans.
And so indeed it has been. After his minor mis-speak over sentence reductions a few weeks ago (which managed to put both the tabloid hacks and the more witless modern feminists on the same side of the barricades - an almost unprecedented event), it was clear that the daggers - already kept nice and sharp by those in his party who detest him for his pro-European views - would be plunged into Clarke's back at the appropriate moment.
Yesterday, they were. And the plunging was done by his own boss, the egregious PR man Cameron. Having, one presumed, given the go-ahead to the policy positions contained in 'Breaking The Cycle' and getting them through Cabinet, Cameron has now stamped on the only Cabinet minister who has any idea of what he's talking about in his own area of responsibility, preferring instead to go after the same, extreme, 'get tough' soundbites and making up policy on the hoof which has led our penal system to be an affront to European civilisation.
Gone are the reduced sentences for early pleas of guilty; gone are the plans to increase the use of community sentences as an alternative to custody. Instead, we have the out-of-the-air announcement of automatic custodial sentences for anyone found threatening someone with a knife, irrespective of the circumstances of the individual case and further reducing what declining discretion the professional judiciary have in deciding these matters; we have the proposal to take away even more of the tiny amount prisoners are permitted to earn, supposedly to give to 'victim support groups' (Road Fund Tax, anyone?); we have the pledge to reduce drug use in prisons (presumably by further invasions of the privacy and persons of people visiting their family members, rather than tackling the real source of contraband in prisons, i.e. bent prison officers); and we have the proposal not to do away with the abusive and abused IPPs (see the previous post), but merely to convert some of them into extremely long determinate terms, which will not resolve the issue in the slightest.
In short, it's as if Straw, Blunkett, Reid, Clarke (Charles), Smith and Johnson had never left office. Round and around we go again, dancing to the tune of the scummiest hack-rags in the developed world and the prejudices of the contented ignorant.
More lives will be destroyed, more families broken up, more injustices will be caused by refusing to allow the judiciary to exercise its proper rôle. Just so that the know-nothings and don't-wish-to-knows can be pandered to, and the same inflated rhetoric can be deployed to assuage them as has been used ad nauseam since the days of David Waddington and Leon Brittan.
As you were...
(Inspired by this piece from the ever-admirable Septicisle)
You, dear reader, can start by reading this piece in yesterday's Guardian. Come back here when you've done that, please...
Back? Good. Horrified? If not, perhaps you should be.
Let's run through the facts here, shall we?
Item: A young man with a previous history of psychiatric ill-health begins to exhibit symptoms of a relapse.
Item: He recognises that his condition is deteriorating, and so voluntarily submits himself for admission to a local hospital for assessment.
Item: Forty-eight hours later, and in a state of obvious distress, he tries to escape from the locked ward he had been placed in. The damage he causes is minor, and no-one is injured.
Item: Seemingly at the insistence of the hospital, the police get involved and the Clown Persecution Service insists on prosecuting for arson.
Item: The young man is transferred out of the psychiatric ward and is placed first of all in a police cell, and then in a prison.
Item: The young man pleads guilty, and offers to pay for the damage he caused.
Item: A psychiatrist assesses that the young man was not mentally ill at the time of his escape attempt (a curiously quick diagnosis given that his condition was supposed to be assessed over a period of twenty-eight days rather than one fourteenth of that time), but that nonetheless he does not pose a danger to the public.
Item: A probation officer, who has never even met the person he was supposed to be assessing, nevertheless comes to the conclusion that the young man does constitute such a danger.
Item: The trial judge, ignoring the inconvenient part of the doctor's judgement and endorsing the probation officer's view, gives the young man a sentence of indeterminate length under the provisions of yet another example of New Labour's tabloid-pleasing grandstanding - the 2003 Criminal Justice (sic) Act. At the very minimum, the young man will have to spend at least two years in prison before he can even be considered for parole.
All this taken together is bad enough, but consider this: the probation officer reached his conclusion as to whether Joe Paraskeva was dangerous or not as follows:
"...by inputting facts about the case and Paraskeva's background into a computerised risk-analysis system, which crunched the data through complex algorithms and categorised him as dangerous."
Consider this as well:
"The Judge said in court that he dismissed all Joe's previous psychiatric history as 'in the past' so he did not take any of the mitigating evidence into account...When Joe's barrister mentioned his long-standing diagnosis of bipolar and subsequent treatment, the judge dismissed this as past history."
So, to sum up: a young man with a history of psychiatric illness, who voluntarily submitted himself for assessment and who - in the throes of his own illness - committed a minor act of damage for which he apologised and offered to make amends for is not sent to a psychiatric hospital for the treatment which he needs to be able to live a productive life, but is instead thrown into prison (where the treatment he needs will almost certainly not be available to him) - possibly for the rest of his days - on the basis of what a computer program said and on the say-so of a judge who was quite clearly ill-disposed not only to the young man but also to anything which could be called 'sense', let alone simple human compassion.
For fuck sake, how did we get here? How did we get to a system where a mentally ill young man is locked away in a prison without any time limit on his sentence on the basis of a piece of software and a pig-ignorant judge?
I'm sorry; there are further points to be made - not least the points that all the officials involved in this case are the ones who should be locked away until they are no longer a danger to the public; and that we have come to a very dangerous state where people can have their lives destroyed by replacing the considered assessments of experienced experts with a decision reached by a computer algorithm (I'm sure it's far more 'cost-effective' and 'efficient') - but I'm too angry to make them right now. The facts of this wretched case should be sufficient to worry anyone who cares about justice. It might easily happen to one of your own, you know.
Joe Paraskeva's family and friends have set up a website to co-ordinate a response and support for him and his mother. It's at Justice For Joe.
This should probably have gone in the Raves section, but it relates to the last two items here, so I'm at least being consistent.
I mentioned the fund set up by Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist blog to help finance Damon Fowler's education now that his parents have decided that supporting their own kith and kin plays a distant second behind flashing their own self-righteousness to all their neighbours.
Well, the fund closed earlier on today, and in just a dozen days, contributors from all around the US and the world contributed a grand total of:
<FX:Roll of Drums...>
$31,095.40
Which works out at about $25 per contributor.
As I said, compare and contrast this with the behaviour of so-called 'Christians' in Bastrop, La. and elsewhere.
Hemant is now seeking to establish a trust fund or something of that ilk, so that Damon has it to support his education. Mind you, some of us wouldn't have minded if he'd blown half of it on booze and hookers...and wasted the rest.
The graduation ceremony at Bastrop High duly took place on Friday night. Damon Fowler was there which, if nothing else, shows he's got more guts than most of those who have been scorning and threatening him.
And guess what? One of the graduating class stood up and prayed. And the school must have known she was going to do it.
Oh, and of course the fundy butterball in question started her law-breaking with the words:
"I respect the beliefs of other people, but..."
Yup, that old phony attempt at a get-out. You can not excuse your stupidity and hatred by claiming you are not what you then by your own words and deeds go on to prove that you are. Pathetic, truly pathetic.
And the 'moment of silence for reflection' which the school put in to try to edge away from having their asses sued from there to Albuquerque lasted all of four seconds.
There were more sinister elements to all this. First was this statement (published in the same woeful hack-rag that published the wretched article on the matter shortly before). It comes from school principal Stacey Pullen:
"Principal Stacey Pullen said earlier in the day that additional security officers were requested because of the outcry by atheists from across the country who sided with the student who filed the protest."
See what they all did there? Yep, they had to hire a goon squad to protect all those poor, oppressed fundies from one lone atheist. One supposes that it simply wouldn't have occurred to them to hire anyone to protect Damon Fowler from the fuckwits who had been scorning him and threatening him (which is something which the school should have felt itself obliged to do anyway, but obviously didn't).
The second sinister thing was that the school tried to rearrange the order in which the students went on stage to receive their diplomas so that Damon Fowler was the last student to go up. A letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation seems to have put paid to that nasty little piece of victimisation, but a million shames on the school authorities for even thinking of doing something so pathetically vindictive and puerile.
Add to this the fact that at the ceremony the school gave a special award for 'great service' to 'Mitzi' Quinn, the teacher who publicly trashed Damon Fowler in print earlier in the week, and you have a perfect storm of redneck ignorance and hate.
Damon Fowler is now on his way to live with his elder brother in Texas (and isn't it a measure of how royally fucked-up north-eastern Louisana must be that Texas is seen as liberal?), but not before his fundy asshat parents threw his belongings out onto the front porch and skipped town for 'a vacation'. So that's two sons they've permanently alienated. Well, it may give the fuckers kudos in the 'church of their choice', but the rest of the world will know them for exactly what they are. Cnuts.
Damon, you'll probably never read this, but you and your brother have shown yourselves to be more mature, more honest, more humane and more courageous than anyone else in the wretched buttscuttle town you had the misfortune to grow up in. I wish you strength and ease of conscience for the rest of your lives.
Update update: Given that Damon Fowler has been cut off from any possibility of his parents funding his college career, Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist decided to start a fund to help the lad through the next stage of his education.
Within forty-eight hours it has raised over $11 000, and more money is going in all the time. To be scrupulously fair, some of that money (and moral support) has been donated by people who describe themselves as religious.
So the next time some bod-gotherer tells you that without 'faith' you have no morality and no empathy with others, and that godless commie-loving fag atheists are self-centered nihilists who have no generosity towards others (you know, like me), just point this out to them, would you?
Damon Fowler is a young American man who is about to graduate from his high school. The graduation ceremony is this evening (Friday). By rights, it should be one of the happiest moments of his life.
Except that it almost certainly won't be.
The salient reasons why what should have been a celebration of his academic achievements will instead be a time of deep pain for him are:
He is an atheist.
He contacted his school administrators recently to point out that having a prayer as part of the graduation ceremony (confusingly for some of us, known as 'commencement' when it actually comes at the end of one's school days) was against State law and against the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. The school, having consulted its lawyers, realised that Mr Fowler was correct. They - albeit reluctantly - pulled the prayer from the ceremony, replacing it with a moment of silence for reflection.
Damon Fowler lives in a town called Bastrop in the northern part of the state of Louisiana. It seems to be the sort of place you would expect to find there, filled with the sort of people you would expect to inhabit it (the reason clichés become clichés is because they contain a kernel of truth).
This seems to have been borne out by what has happened since he made his intervention on the side of what was right and lawful. The reaction from his peers seems to have been one of scorn, mockery and sheer, naked hate; the reaction from his parents (mental-fundyists by all accounts) has been to take his phone off him so he can't call his brother for support (said brother lives six-hours' drive away and is on Damon's side); and the reaction of the school has been little short of disgraceful, to judge from the comments attributed to its officials in a pathetically biased article in the local hack-rag. A 'senior advisor' from the school, rejoicing (if that's the word I'm looking for) in the name of 'Mitzi Quinn', went public with her vilification of young Mr Fowler:
In the past, Quinn said there have been students who were atheist, agnostic and other non-Christian religions who "had no problems" with the prayer.
"They respected the majority of their classmates and didn't say anything," Quinn said. "We've never had this come up before. Never."
(In other words, they were too scared of the consequences to stand up for their legal and constitutional rights. Shameful for them, but understandable in a human sense)
and, worse still:
"And what's even more sad is this is a student who really hasn't contributed anything to graduation or to their classmates," Quinn said.
This from someone who has been on the staff of Bastrop High School for nearly twenty-five years? Presumably as a janitor, because she seems to know an awful lot about dirt and how to spread it.
Of course, 'Mitzi' (and is that really the name on her (long-form) birth certificate?), the school principal, the scorn-mongers and hate-threateners amongst the rest of the student body at Bastrop High, the alleged journalist who wrote the piece in the Bastrop Enterprise from which the above quotes have been taken, and the flaky commenters on the paper's website; all will, no doubt, proclaim their 'faith' in the Gahd of Lurve. This is the sort of 'lurve' they mean:
"If they don't want to pray then stick your fingers in your ears."
"[T]here are enough God fearing people in this parish, I don't think they [the American Civil Liberties Union] would want to come down here and start something that the majority of Bastrop would finish."
"We are all responsible to Keep our freedom to PRAY."
"What would be funny is if the 99% of the students that are ok with GOD & prayer being a part of their graduation proceedings didn't show up for graduation & let this one student stand alone. Afterall, that's what she or he wants isn't it to be singled out!"
"When I go to a graduation in America I expect to hear a Christian prayer."
"What a disgrace to this town. That student should just have to have his/her one man graduation ceremony all alone."
"Our country was built on Christianity. And that includes the right to pray! There are two things you stand for. They are GOD and Family!!!!!"
(Note that: five exclamation marks - a sure sign of the deranged mind)
"WE have the right to pray and he has the right to just sit there, because those are his beliefs!!!!"
(Same hick, but only four this time; perhaps his meds had kicked in)
"If the graduating seniors and the entire audience decided to pray in unison at anytime during the ceremony nobody including the ACLU could stop them. Then this young man would either have to close his ears or listen."
"To say that it is unconstitutional for someone to pray at a school event is tyranny [...] These people, including this student, as simply people who want to silence other people."
"I know of many students and parents who have decided to pray out loud during the moment of silence. There is nothing that can be done to stop them. I hope that the little athiest is offended."
"GO YOUNG CHRISTIAN LEADERS of Bastrop! Stand up for your faith."
"This kid is no hero [...] The kid was likely a recluse and apathetic about most everything until now."
"If this kid can't sit still while others pray, he's got problems [...] He can sit and twiddle his thumbs for the (2 minute?) prayer OR step out while it is going on."
"I hope that spontaneous prayer during the moment of silence makes a profound statement. The little atheist will have to listen to prayer one way or another."
"I'm a Senior at Bastrop High School. This is not FAIR to the Class Of 2011. It's 200 plus students that will be on that same field as that student that don't believe in GOD. If he don't want prayer at graduation he can stay at home and not come to graduation."
(Snide comment: if this is an example of the educational standards at Bastrop High, then Damon Fowler is well out of it).
"Shame, shame, shame!
Shame on this student and shame on the evil, communistic, atheistic Muhammadan supporters at the ACLU!
This yet another example of creeping Sharia law in our sadly fallen nation."
(I would like to think that this was an ironic comment, but given all the heretofore and a later comment by the same asshat, I fear not)
"So who care's if you are anyone else in this blog are offended by Christians. I hope they put enough pressure on this kid to convert him and save his soul from the fire of hell !!"
(I've just tried to count how many Deadly Sins these 'Christians' have committed in these comments; my calculator has just exploded).
"If you don't like what the majority has to say... Move !!"
Well, that is what it seems Damon Fowler is going to have to do. Especially after what happened on Thursday night. That was the evening of what is called Class Night, which seems to be a combination of a prize-giving ceremony for the senior class and a dry-run for the graduation ceremony proper.
In it, one student - assigned to deliver a welcoming speech - got up and recited a prayer, thus immediately rendering her school in violation of the Constitution. Not only that, but the 'prayer' went on for about three minutes without interruption. Worst of all, the conclusion of this breach not only of the law but of basic good manners was met by loud cheers and a storm of applause from nearly all those there assembled.
I should imagine that Mr Fowler (who was obliged to be present) gained another important insight last night, in addition to the ones he may already have accrued on subjects as diverse as the perverse hatred which leads a woman to care more about her Gahd than about the well-being and integrity of her own son, and the never-ending weaseloid behaviour of so many who proclaim their own moral superiority on the basis of what someone scribbled on a goat-skin fifteen hundred to three thousand years ago.
The insight he may have gained was a first-hand view of how tyrranies begin and are maintained; in a kind of mob conformity which will countenance no opposition, however rationally expressed, however correct it may be in legal or ethical procedure, even how well it may conform to simple good manners.
In which case, it seems highly probable that Damon Fowler will leave not only Bastrop High School and its poisonous students and officials, but also the very town of Bastrop, La. itself which has now earned a thoroughly deserved reputation for being mired in unthinking mediaeval primitivism. His brother has stated that he will take Damon away immediately after the graduation ceremony (should he decide to attend it; I would like to say that I would have done, but I haven't had to face what he has endured these past few weeks), and take him to stay with him in Texas.
He will be better off without Bastrop, and Bastrop can bask in its newly-won status as the fundy asshole capital of the western world.
Mr Fowler, I salute your courage and wish you peace of mind and every success. You, rather than those who scorn you, embody what America should be.
Update (later that same night): I have to append this fine verse from The Digital Cuttlefish:
Attack Of The Minnows
"The big fish in their tiny pool
Where all the world is just one school
Can taunt and tease the godless fool
And bow their heads and pray.
But video technology
Means now the outside world can see
The worst of Christianity
In prominent display.
"Replacing prayer with silent thought?
Not good enough! And so, they fought!
They never figured to be caught -
And also, it was fun!
So, proving that they have no shame,
The cowards held the kid to blame
And broke the law; it's just the same
As Jesus would have done."
I think it was George Melly who once said that the sign of growing old was when you stopped doing things for the first time and started doing things for what you strongly suspected was the last time.
It's somewhat heartening to me, therefore, to have done something today for the very first time.
I have to the best of my recollection voted in every election (local and state) and every referendum I have been qualified to take part in since way back in the early 1980s. I have done so firstly because I believe that it's important to use your right to vote whenever the opportunity arises because a lot of people have struggled, fought and died to ensure that you can. Secondly (and this is particularly true in elections and other ballots in my union), I think that if you have the right to vote but can't be bothered to use it then you forfeit most, if not all, of any rights you might think you have to complain about the result if it goes against you.
I maintain this position despite the fact that I have never as far as I can remember voted for a winning candidate in a parliamentary election. Local elections, yes. The one referendum I'd voted in before today, yes. But for parliament (be it Westminster or Cardiff Bay)? No, not once.
The main reason for this is due to the ridiculous and disproportionate voting system we have to use for those elections. First Past The Post (FPTP) (or as I tend to call it nowadays, First At The Trough) often means that MPs can be elected to a rather cushy number with high expenses and salaries for up to five years on the basis of securing one third or less of the votes cast. This means that there are parliamentary seats - scores of them - which have not changed party in living memory. They have become nothing more than 'vote banks', rotten boroughs where one party habitually piles up such a proportion of the votes that even fielding candidates against that party seems an exercise in futility. It is no coincidence that those are the seats where turnout is regularly far lower - often embarrassingly so - than in constituencies where there is more of a contest.
This leads to a culture of impunity amongst those candidates who stand for the habitual winners, and this in turn engenders an arrogance on the part of these people, who believe - not without reason in any practical sense - that they have a 'job for life'. This leads in its inevitable course to an even greater disillusionment on the part of those of the electorate in those constituencies who don't want that candidate or that party to claim to speak on their behalf.
As an amateur student of such matters, I made the discovery prior to last year's Westminster election that very nearly three-quarters of all parliamentary constituencies were deemed 'safe seats', taking the standard psephological criterion of defining a 'safe seat' as one where the winning party had a majority of ten per cent or more of the votes cast over the second placed candidate. This means that - barring the sort of seismic shifts we saw in 1983 and 1997 - many people will live their whole lives in a constituency where not only does the incumbent party never change, it never will change, however much that party may never be their choice at all.
It cannot be good for any sense amongst the electorate that their vote matters if they are, for example, a Conservative voter in Bootle or Doncaster North, or a Labour voter in New Forest East or Wokingham. The feeling of permanent disenfranchisement and the consequent disillusionment, taken along with a sense of increasing disgust at the arrogant conduct of politicians in general (in which politicians take it as axiomatic that the political process belongs to them and them alone rather than to us all), leads to the obvious result of a gradual withdrawal from participation in the electoral process by an increasingly large proportion of the population. The same process can be seen in the United States, another country where the legislature is elected on the basis of 'most votes wins even if it's still a minority' - turnout figures there are at least as bad as, if not worse than, in the UK.
The other side of this is that parliamentary elections are won and lost entirely on the basis of the results in a small minority of seats. These tend all to be of a similar socio-economic make-up and are concentrated in suburban areas in central and southern England. So the political parties know that - in order to get the biggest bang for their buck - they need only concentrate their strongest efforts on these marginal constituencies. That these areas tend to be of similar type means that certain kinds of 'message' are seen as key to winning the support of people in those constituencies.
And so it is that the parties' manifestos and general outlook are conditioned by a need to butter-up middle-class, economically and/or socially conservative, 'aspirational' voters and to hell, to all intents and purposes, with the rest; they'll vote the same way they always have done, or so it is - all too often correctly - assumed. This, rather than some substantial shift in the political identification of the populace as a whole, is what has led to the landscape in the UK being dominated by three parties all of whom say what amounts to the same thing, ideologically speaking; namely that globalised market capitalism is the only game in town, and that to look elsewhere for your inspiration for a better society renders you at best obsolete, at worst a threat to the stability of the nation. Again, see the US for how this same phenomenon has operated there for so long that third-party candidates have virtually no chance of ever being elected.
Given all this, therefore, and given the opportunity to vote to change that system, you might be forgiven for thinking that I would use the opportunity today to support a positive change to the voting system for parliamentary elections.
Well, you would have been correct, but only if you count the so-called Alternative Vote (AV) as being a positive change. I don't, and I don't for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, there is no evidence that the results AV would produce would be any less prone to an inflationary advantage to one or other of the main parties; indeed, what evidence can be adduced would tend to suggest that it could make matters worse and give parties with well under 50 per cent of the total vote across the country even bigger majorities than are currently the case under FPTP.
Secondly, there is no evidence to suggest that smaller parties, be they Greens, Socialists or Nationalists of some stripe or other, would find it any easier to be elected. The election of Caroline Lucas as Westminster's first Green MP last year was certainly a surprise, but was down far more to tactical voting amongst those in a very cosmopolitan and politically aware constituency who couldn't face another term of being represented by a New Labour stooge than it was to be attributed to any massive upsurge in support for the Green Party's political message.
This has not stopped those who wish to see the perpetuation of the current loopily inadequate system from scaremongering about how much easier it would be for Greens, 'Commies' or 'Neo-Nazis' to be elected under AV. The argument is - to put it at its kindest - disingenuous. And even if it were true, then shouldn't people, in a democracy, be represented by people who have sufficient support amongst them, however much others elsewhere may disapprove? If people in the East End of London wanted, for example, to be represented by an extreme Islamist, then shouldn't they have that choice? Similarly, if people in parts of the East Midlands of England actually want to be spoken for by someone who believes that The Sun has never set on the Empire and that the best way of defending the National Interest™ is by fortifying Dover to deter The Hun, shouldn't their wishes be acceded to? It's their responsibility and, if and when they find that they have elected a total wanker, they will have the choice whether to re-elect said onanista next time. It's called Democracy, I believe.
Thirdly, AV would mean that real power in the electoral process would remain precisely where it is; in the hands of the party machines. This has led to more self-serving, insolent and indolent non-entities being elected to parliament than any other factor. Get yourself in favour with the apparat of your chosen party and you will be parachuted into the first safe seat which becomes available. That means that people in that constituency who may want to vote for your party but who emphatically do not want to vote for you will be left with two choices: vote for the party but in one of Polly Toynbee's famous 'nosepeg' moments; or not vote at all, either because principle will not allow a vote for any other, or for fear of their chosen party losing the seat altogether.
If you think this is fanciful, then I have just two words for you: Peter Mandelson.
This would not change under AV: the Party decides on who is their candidate, or on the ranking order of those running under their banner and, if you vote for that party, you get whichever candidate has managed to ingratiate him/herself most effectively with the party hierarchy.
If we are ever to break free from the party machinery, then a properly proportional system of representation is an absolute must. A system of Single Transferable Vote with party lists which are fully open (that is, where voters can rank candidates within a party list according to their preferences) is the only way in which we can not only determine as best we can which party should claim to speak for us in Westminster, but which candidate we believe is best for the job as well.
For these reasons and a few more (none of which, incidentally, includes the desire to give that treacherous Orange-Booker Clegg the blow in the 'nads which he truly deserves), when I went into the polling booth this morning I - for the very first time - deliberately 'spoiled' my paper by writing on it the words:
GIVE ME A REAL CHOICE! P.R. NOW!"
Petulant? Some who should know better would no doubt claim so. But what other option did I have, given that not bothering to vote at all would be a denial of what I hold as a principled position (see the first paragraph of this marathon), or would have identified me in the media imagination as someone who didn't give a flying one what voting system I was permitted to use.
Playing into the hands of those who wish to maintain the status quo? Again, I don't think so. I'm not sure if the tellers for this referendum are required to tally the numbers of 'invalid' papers, let alone break those numbers down by type of 'error', but if not, they should be required to. That might be a pretty good indication of how many do want a better voting system, but are convinced that AV isn't it.
Missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for reform? Once more, I doubt it. Certainly the vested interests who wish to retain the current system will crow over the near-certain defeat of the only alternative currently on offer to us, but their arrogant jubilation will be, I believe, totally misplaced. Consider what will happen from hereon in: the existing system will continue; the tendencies we've seen for that system to perpetuate and promote the increasing insolence of the politicians and to increase the gap in perceptions between the governed and governing will continue to widen; turnout in parliamentary elections will continue to fall and will lead, ultimately, to a crisis of legitimacy for the Westminster system of a degree which even the venal thugs currently in possession of it will be unable to ignore, and which they will be unable to dispel by claiming that today's referendum showed that The People™ don't want reform. This will perforce lead to us being offered - although I concede it may take four or five years - a meaningful choice; perhaps one in which FPTP will not even be on the table, giving us a real chance of reform. Passing AV today would mean that that would be the system we would be stuck with for a generation or more. We cannot afford to delay that long.
Hey, you dig that Barack Obama? He's one helluva fellah, yeah? I mean, extrajudicial killings, funding terrorist régimes, undermining the rule of international law? He's just one awesome regular guy, right?
He's one heck of a stand-up comedian, too. Here he is at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night (before his victory in single-handed non-combat in Abbottabad).
(The link to the clip is here; I'm not going to bother embedding the thing).
Chuckle as he takes the Birthers on at their own game! Hoot as he explains very clearly to the Fox News table that what they have just seen is a joke! And howl with hilarity as he sends the ego of that über-Clown of Capitalism Donald Trump crashing to the ground!
But, I beg you, save your most gale-force of guffaws for this little bit near the end:
"In the last months, we've seen journalists threatened, arrested, beaten, attacked, and in some cases even killed, simply for doing their best to bring us The Story, to give people a voice, and to hold leaders accountable. And through it all, we've seen daring men and women risk their lives for the simple idea that no-one should be silenced, and everyone deserves to know the truth."
Yeah! Go Barry! Saturday Night Live is on the phone!
Except...
...there is one young man who, whilst not a journalist, adhered to these same high principles. When he saw the casual inhumanity being committed by those who claimed to represent his country (inhumanity up to and including sheer merciless murder), and when he saw the way in which attempts were made right to the very top of the power structure to excuse, to exonerate, even to hide outright that same corruption; when he saw that, he decided that his conscience was of more importance than his career, even his 'freedom'. And so he (allegedly - still an important word here) committed himself to revealing The Story, to giving a voice to the people without a voice, and to holding his country's leaders accountable for their actions.
His reward? Not to be praised and buttered-up at a glitzy event, and certainly not to be commended for his principles as being the epitome of what America The Beautiful, America The Brave is all about.
No. His reward has been to be placed in a military prison for nearly a year, during which time he has been held in solitary confinement; deprived of even the most basic of his human dignities in order to either extract a forced 'confession' from him or to break him in body, mind or both; had charge upon footling charge piled upon his head (each of which carrying a sentence which would put this twenty-three-year-old in prison for the rest of his life); and where the self-same President who spouted the pious cack I've quoted above has pronounced him guilty before there has even been anything approximating to a trial. And now this young man has been transferred to yet another 'facility' where - or so it is claimed - he will be able to 'associate' with other prisoners, with the Department of Defense no doubt hoping that some fucked-up Marine Corps grunt with PTSD will do what his captors don't quite have the nerve to try to get away with doing themselves.
And all this from a President who came into office stating that those who reveal wrongdoing amongst the powerful were of vital importance in a 'free', 'democratic' society.
That courageous young man's name is Bradley Manning, Private First Class, United States Army. And, Mr President Improv, his conscience and ethics, his rights, his freedom are at least as important as yours.
I had originally intended to go out today for one of my six-mile walks, but the weather seemed too unsettled and too dull for the occasion (if you are going to spend three to four hours trekking around and through a forest, it helps if the sun is shining). So, I turned over in bed and went back to sleep.
I have to say that I'm pretty proud of my neighbourhood; I haven't seen a single square centimetre of bunting of any description anywhere; no sign of the street parties which the corporate media assured us would be clogging up every thoroughfare and cul-de-sac the length of the Realm. The only place I have seen such clutter was - shamefully for them - around a children's day nursery near where I work. It seems some people still want to propagandise the tinies to know their place in the constitutional (dis)order in the same way that they wish to bamboozle them with visions of heavens and nightmares of fiery hells.
As someone who remembers the fête de merde which marked the marriage of William Saxe Coburg Gotha von Battenburg's parents thirty years ago this coming July, I find some cause to be heartened. I remember going out on a similar hike on that occasion, but far more flags were put out, far more bunting was bunted then than one has been able to find.
This didn't stop the embedded media trying to put the best possible construction on it by careful use of numbers. "Thousands of people"(*), the BBC breathlessly assured us, were taking part in "more than 5000" street parties. Now, if we assume that this figure is in any way accurate in the first place, and if we also assume that these grovel-fests were taking place both in urban residential areas and in small country villages (as well as all points inbetween), then we can also make an assumption of an average attendance of, say, one hundred people per party across the board.
Five thousand times one hundred equals half a million people. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Until you consider that the population of the Yuck-Eh? is above sixty million; that means that only about one person in a hundred and twenty could be arsed to attend one of these street parties. It's even less impressive when you consider that - such is the generally mercenary mentality of our world today - an awful lot of people will do anything for a freebie; and that a lot of those present will have been children - in whom the 'something for nothing' culture has always been deeply embedded (and why not?) - who also might have been dragged along by their parents anyway.
Either way, it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of public support for PR-puffed late-model feudalism, is it? Perhaps the scales have fallen from more eyes than those in whose interests the present system operates would care to admit even to themselves.
The obsession of the media in covering the publicly-funded wedding of two otherwise quite unremarkable people has, of course, enabled those in power to utilise the occasion to try to bury bad news while most people are looking the other way; or to continue the policies of both contemporaneous and pre-emptive stifling and intimidation of dissent against the power structure.
In the former category, look at some of the stories which have been conveniently buried in the miasma of monarchist crud which has been pumped into the eyeballs of the 'ordinary, decent, hard-working, law-abiding, cliché-loving' public:
Which follows this revealing quote from a Commander of the Metropolitan Police a couple of days or so ago:
"This is a day of celebration, joy and pageantry for Great Britain. Any criminals attempting to disrupt it - be that in the guise of protest or otherwise - will be met by a robust, decisive, flexible and proportionate policing response."
(bold type is mine).
And just to show that it isn't just the State itself which is capable of undermining our fundamental right to dissent:
Add to all this the decision by the UK authorities to charge Alfie Meadows, a protestor at last December's protest in London who was hit so hard by a police baton that he had to have life-saving brain surgery, with 'Violent Disorder', which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison (it's the same rap that Edward Woollard took).
Taken all in all, we can see a pattern emerging here; that attempts at protest against the régime's destructive policies, no matter how peaceful or nuanced, will be met with threats, intimidation and - if deemed necessary - a disproportionately violent response. Someone really ought to remind those in power at the moment that those who make peaceful change impossible effectively render violent change inevitable, because people will come to realise that if they are going to be pre-emptively arrested, held on dubious pretexts, railroaded through a policing and judicial system which is shot through with a bias against dissent and subjected to draconian penalties, then they might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. And that, of course, will be taken as the green light for even more repressive methods to be deployed, and the masses will be kept 'on message' by portraying all dissenters as 'violent anarchists' or 'middle-class entitlement-junkies'.
We could be in for a long, hot summer, and who knows how many people whose only 'crime' (or 'pre-crime') is a dissenting view from that of the powerful in our land will have had their lives disrupted by wrongful arrest or prosecution, ruined by disproportionate punishment or even ended by unaccountable police thuggery by the time the grey fogs of autumn call again.
(*)Update: By the time I'd posted this page, the Bullingdon Broadcasting Corporation had amended this to "millions of people". Perhaps they'd got the Metropolitan Police in to do the counting for them (see point 3 here).
Going back to the piece before last, allow me to direct you to this superb tour d'horizon by Kieran Manjarrez in Counterpunch of what has gone horribly wrong in the judicio-penal structures of the United States in recent times.
It should be mandatory reading for those in the US who proudly proclaim themselves as 'liberals', but who remain silent with cowardice whilst the blustering bullies of their political and legal systems shred the Constitution and use the Bill Of Rights to wipe their lardy asses.
"Give Me Your Starving Poor, So That We Can Make A Profit Out Of Them"
I sometimes have cause to believe that it's me who's totally sane, and that it's the rest of the world that's rapidly going coo-coo.
I've just been shaken out of my early-evening nap by a telephone call. It was on behalf of one of the world's most famous charities. I won't say which one, but its name sounds like a hungry bull.
Anyway, I let the woman on the other end witter on about what that particular organisation was doing in Ethopia, all the time waiting to fend her off with my customary explanation, viz. that I do give to charities, but as one-off donations depending on the circumstances at the time.
Then, at the end of the call, she gave me a piece of information (for 'legal reasons', apparently) which caused my eyebrows to levitate. She said that she worked for a 'professional fund-raising company' (which she didn't name) which was being paid about £800 000 by said charity to raise something in excess of £3m for the organisation.
What the hell business does a charity have in handing over about a quarter of its proceeds to a company to do its cold-calling for it?
I know that said charity has what the police call 'form', however. Many years ago, my sister-in-law's mother and a friend of hers used to raise money for this same organisation. Usually, they would simply collect together what they had raised, write a cheque and send it off to their headquarters in London.
On one occasion, however, they decided - for the sake of adventure - to have a couple of days in London and hand the dosh in in person. When they got to the offices of this group, they saw plush carpets, works of art and other fripperies all over the reception area, and a general atmosphere of opulence.
Stony-faced, they handed over the cheque, turned on their heels and left and vowed never to raise a penny for that organisation again. I can't help but remember them this evening, and to think - once again - that they were absolutely right.
You will currently see on the home page of this here site a couple of graphics with a common theme (*). The first one illustrates my current King Charles' Head, the fate of Edward Woollard.
As egregious a miscarriage of justice as that is, there are worse. Far worse.
Let me take a few quotes from an article which appeared in The Guardian today. See if you can guess which backward, third-world kleptocracy you would expect to treat unconvicted and untried prisoners like this:
"------ is allowed visits only on Saturday and Sunday. The rest of the week he is kept in his cell 23 hours a day, fed a daily diet of antidepressant pills, forbidden to exercise in his cell, and forcibly woken if he attempts to sleep in the daytime. He is continually subject to what is called "maximum custody", and also to a so-called "prevention of injury" order, which among other things, deprives him of his clothes at night and also of normal sheets and bedding in favour of a blanket he describes as being like the lead apron used when operating x-ray machines. He is allowed no personal possessions."
Getting warm? Here's a bit more:
"Problems increased after a small demonstration at the [...] gates. He was then abruptly placed on a further "suicide watch". He wrote in a letter of protest, submitted by his lawyer, a reserve lieutenant colonel in the military: "I was stripped of all clothing with the exception of my underwear. My prescription eyeglasses were taken away from me and I was forced to sit in essential blindness." He writes: "I became upset. Out of frustration, I clenched my hair with my fingers and yelled: 'Why are you doing this to me? Why am I being punished? I have done nothing wrong.'"
Still not quite got it? Some more:
"The suicide watch was lifted after protests, but following the refusal of an appeal to downgrade his status to that of a normal prisoner, more indignities appear to have been invented. ------ says he made the mistake of saying sarcastically that he could no doubt harm himself with the elastic of his boxer shorts at night. The shorts were then taken away and he was made to parade naked."
One last touch:
"He has to take the antidepressant medication the military give him - directly before the hour in which he can either watch TV or write or take a shower. He finds it very hard to write under the influence of these antidepressants - and also at some points they do not give him a pen."
Some horrific military dictatorship, right? Of the sort regularly railed against by - for example - the US government (except when the dictatorship has large-scale oil reserves, natch), right?
Except that - as you may well have guessed from the complete giveaway in the title of this piece - all this is being done by the US government; or, at least, its military arm.
For the un-named victim of these weird and sordid practices is Private First Class Bradley Manning, US Army. Manning's alleged crime is that he passed data to Wikileaks including the infamous video footage of a US Apache helicopter crew murdering twelve Iraqi citizens in cold blood in July 2007.
Note that I said alleged there; that's very important.
Having been held initially at a US military prison in Kuwait, Manning was transported back to the US in July 2010 and placed in 'maximum custody' in a Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Va. awaiting medical reports and a pre-trial hearing. 'Maximum custody' in this case seems to involve - amongst other things - solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, no proper bedclothes, enforced medication and public humiliation (this last particularly nasty as Manning is gay). He has been on suicide watch or the next most intense measure to it, despite a number of official psychiatrists clearly stating that Manning is a low risk of self-harm.
This has rightly attracted the attention of human-rights organisations and other activists, including the United Nations and Amnesty. Only last week, a spokesman for the US State Department itself went on record to describe the US military's treatment of Manning as "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid". The spokesman was forced to resign two days later.
The pressure for his removal came from the White House itself, where the ever more disillusioning Obama claimed that all was well because the Department of Defense had told him so.
What makes this even worse is that it is likely that Manning isn't even the real target of the US régime. That would appear to be Julian Assange, head honcho of Wikileaks, which released large quantities of information from diplomatic cables and other communications which showed the way in which Washington was controlling and suborning governments and states around the world. The US are keen for Assange to be extradited from the UK to Sweden for questioning regarding a strangely set-up sexual encounter Assange is supposed to have had in that country; the US obviously sees this as an opportunity to demand Assange's further extradition to America so that he can be subject to a politicised trial and sentence there.
To this end, the inhuman and dehumanising treatment of Bradley Manning is quite clearly intended to break him so that he will give a confession - however inaccurate, however coerced - implicating Assange. No matter that any such confession would be chucked out of any civilian court in any country based on the proper rules of justice; Manning faces military law and so is at an immediate disadvantage, given that military law (of whatever country) is designed first and foremost to protect the amour propre of the military establishment itself. And so Manning - should he break, and even if he doesn't - faces being stitched up completely and subjected to penalties of up to life imprisonment without parole, especially as the US military are throwing just about every charge they can think of at him in order to coerce him into incriminating either himself or Assange, including one of "aiding the enemy" ('enemy' being as yet undefined; perhaps it's the American people, or even the truth) which carries the possibility of the death penalty (although the DoD have kindly decided that they won't press for that - what sweeties they are).
Manning's real 'crime' (should he have committed one at all) seems to have been to try to help the poor, misruled and misinformed citizens of the United States of some of the criminal acts which are being carried out by that country's government in their name. In embarrassing the political and military hierarchy, he would have served his people well. Unfortunately the events at Quantico serve a very different purpose; it is to demonstrate to anyone else in the US military who has had a gutful of staying silent regarding the criminal acts carried out by their 'comrades-in-arms' and covered up by their commanders that - should they give in to their consciences - they too will be made examples of and have their lives destroyed in the name of America The Omnipotent.
Or, if not their lives, then certainly their minds. The treatment of Private First Class Bradley Manning at Quantico clearly constitutes inhumane treatment, if not in some aspects of it actual torture as defined by the international laws to which the US is - at least in theory - a signatory. Solitary confinement - especially over a long period of time - has been demonstrated time and again to have a permanently debilitating effect on its victims. All the other disgraceful indignities being piled upon Manning at present are likely merely to hasten the process so that - even if by some miracle Manning is acquitted or released - he will have been irreparably damaged by the experience.
And all this is happening to someone who hasn't even been tried yet, let alone convicted.
That this should happen in the US - and to one of their own citizens - seems to demonstrate that the downward spiral into decadence and inhumanity into which that country has been spinning for many years continues unabated irrespective of which cipher occupies the Oval Office. For, make no mistake, Obama could order a relaxation of Bradley Manning's conditions tomorrow should he choose to do so; he is, after all, Commander-in-Chief. That he does not seem to wish to do so would indicate not only that he is an irredeemably weak man, but that his country is heading towards - and indeed may have already become in many respects - a form of dictatorship not only by the corporate interests which long ago suborned Congress, but also by the armchair generals of the Pentagon, both of these establishments aided and abetted by a wide variety of religious maniacs.
So, the next time you hear an American yabbing on about their 'freedom' and 'democracy', just counter with two words:
a public consultation which came down heavily against it,
widespread apathy towards, or complete lack of conviction regarding it,
the ridiculous expense involved at a time of extreme belt-tightening in the public finances, and
having lost once before (to Newport! I mean, come on! If you lose a competition to a place like Newport, you had no business being in it in the first place),
the clowns on Wrexham County Borough Council still intend making an application for the town to have 'city status' from next year.
Just a couple of questions, m'lud:
What will the ordinary people of the Wrexham area get out of this? We know the obvious benefits for councillors and senior officers, namely the ability to swan and swank around claiming that they would be representing a city (along, no doubt, with a suitable increase in remuneration for them).
Would city status really do anything to solve the county's economic problems? And would it really mean a sudden influx of businesses to a town centre which has been ravaged not only by recession but by the results of the all too cosy relationship between the Council and successive waves of property speculators who were allowed to build 'retail experiences' or whatever the monstrosities may be called outside the town centre, thus leading to the sight of closed and boarded-up retail sites along every street in town? This along with the creeping demolition of any building of any character in the town centre, which has left it looking like Legoland?
As I believe they used to say in the police force when confronted with an unconvincing alibi, "Don't piss on my boots and tell me it's raining".
"Coming up after the break: a hard-hitting and exclusive report from our Woodland Correspondent on the shocking truth behind ursine defecatory habits."
I'm glad to see that Edward Woollard's family and friends have set up a website to support him whilst he endures his politicised sentence, and to help him continue his education both during and after his imprisonment.
I had the misfortune today to come across another example of the public flaunting of illiteracy.
It was one of those 'humorous' signs that people dangle in the rear windows of their car. It said:
"Help! Let us out! Dad,s farted!"
Yes, you read that correctly: "Dad,s".
It is indicative of my own educational standards - I hope - that I had to try typing that abomination three times. It certainly didn't come naturally.
The all-too-common misplaced or absent apostrophe is bad enough (and a quick refresher course can be found here), but where the hell did anyone get the idea that there should be a comma in there?
OK, let's get one thing straight from the off, shall we?
Edward Woollard behaved like a tit. Dropping a fire extinguisher from the top of a seven-storey building when there is a crowd of people (and police) milling about below is not the most intelligent idea anyone ever had for making a political point.
It was also inevitable - especially given the screaming from the pols and the hacks - that he faced imprisonment when he appeared yesterday before Judge Geoffrey Rivlin to be sentenced for 'Violent Disorder'.
But thirty-two months? The nature of the sentence, and the order that Woollard must serve at least half of that time in prison (when most people sentenced to imprisonment for comparatively minor offences tend to be released in some way or another after about one third of the full distance), causes me considerable unease that there is something other than the calm, deliberate, impersonal dispensing of justice going on here.
Let's also clear something else up while we're at it: no-one was hurt as a result of what Woollard did. One fire extinguisher and a couple of paving stones were the only injured parties here. This has not, of course, stopped the commentariat and the "they say" mob from going around saying things like, "It could have landed on someone and killed them!", "It could have left a policeman dead and his lickle kiddies orphaned!!"
But it didn't, did it? The worst it did was cause some of those on the pavement to have an urgent need for a change of underwear. No-one was actually injured.
Each one of us lives our daily life in the realms of "could haves".Each one of us comes closer to death or dishonour on a regular basis than it would comfortable for us to realise.
I would have liked to have thought that we still lived in a society where people were judged and punished on the basis of things which actually happened, rather than on the basis of hypotheticals. However, as we have emerged from a decade or more when penal policy has seemed to be instructed far more from frequent watching of Minority Report - creating a system where people are punished even unto house arrest or actual imprisonment based on some official's guess of what they might, just possibly do at some indeterminate point in some notional future (like the detestable 'control orders' which our freedom-loving Coalition government still can't quite bring themselves meaningfully to abolish) - perhaps I was expecting too much.
This sentence was clearly designed to send out 'a message', and is an early indicator of what might face such as Charlie Gilmour when he comes up before the beak for swinging from a flagpole; the individuals who 'desecrated' the monument to that old reactionary and ethnic-cleanser Churchill by pissing on it (although they could plead that the police had illegally detained them without toilet facilities for so long that they were left with little choice); and - most heinous of all - those who apparently poked Mrs Parker-Knoll with a stick.
(In a thoroughly gratuitous aside here, I'd like it known that that would be the only thing I would ever be tempted to poke the ould hoor with)
Clearly the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (who have shown remarkably alacrity in bringing this case in comparison with cases they could have brought in a timely fashion against - say, for the sake of argument - police officers who have caused serious injury or death to demonstrators or those nearby), the Ministry and the whole political class see it as important to send 'a message' that not only will anything other than the meekest of manifestations of opposition to the current régime not be tolerated, but those involved will be given exemplarily extreme punishments. Indeed, the clear intent may well be to deter anyone from protesting at all for fear of far-reaching consequences.
And, speaking of consequences, let me return to the specifics of the sentence upon Edward Woollard.
It has not been remarked upon at all in the corporate media reports of yesterday's proceedings as far as I can see exactly what the ramifications of the sentence upon this youth will actually be. I have already made the point that ordering that he should serve at least half the sentence in prison is not consistent with what tends to happen in such cases in other circumstances. What needs further to be pointed out is that - despite the wibbling from some quarters about how it'll be a mere minor inconvenience to him and that he'll have every chance to rebuild his life afterwards - the sentence is of sufficient length, his age being eighteen at the time of the conviction (though not at the time of his offence), that the conviction can never, as the law stands at present (and any changes to the laws on rehabilitation of offenders are not likely to be in a liberal direction), be regarded as 'spent'. That is to say that Woollard will have to state - on every application to enter higher education, on every job application he makes, on every application for a passport or similar document, on every application for a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check - that he has a conviction for 'Violent Disorder' for the rest of his life; say, the next fifty years or so. Given that we live nowadays in a society which is renowned for its charitable attitude on such matters, this means that - whatever else he may seek to achieve - young Woollard is likely to be totally unemployable in substantial sectors of the economy, and practically unemployable in most others. It has also been suggested that - should he return to the family home at the end of his sentence - his family will be unable to obtain insurance because there will be a 'violent offender' living at that address; did you think that it was only in one-party dictatorships that whole families or households were punished for the actions of one member of it?
Will those who are today hugging themselves with delight at the thought of a lower-middle-class boy being handed such a hefty term of imprisonment (and some of the comments on The Guardian's website have been quite chilling, along the lines of the danger of his dropping the soap, for example), be the ones pointing the finger at him in ten to fifteen years time and screeching, "Why is 'e livin' on welfare? Why 'asn' 'e got 'imself a job?" It's difficult to find employment when you have the stigma of a criminal conviction you are never permitted to turn your back on, not even if you live to be a hundred.
And all this for an impulsive act which - stupid beyond belief as it was - ultimately harmed nobody.
Some have tried to point out that the maximum sentence for 'Violent Disorder' is five years, and that Rivlin had made the required deductions to take into account Woollard's guilty plea, his age, the fact that this was his first offence and the fact that he had turned himself in (on the insistence of his mother, of which more anon). That still leaves unanswered exactly why Rivlin felt that the maximum sentence would have been required in the first place. He made a lot of the standard whiffling noises so beloved of our isolated, insulated judiciary about how the public have to be defended from violence (which will be interesting if any police officer is ever arraigned before him for, say, cracking open a young man's head so that he needed life-saving surgery shortly afterwards), and about how precious the right of protest is (when his fellow judges have shown a powerful tendency to send people to prison for substantial periods of time for non-violent direct action against - for example - arms dealers or animal abusers), and even committed one of those judicial witticisms which calls for the resurrection of Peter Cook to rip the piss out of it just like he did to Judge Cantley in the Jeremy Thorpe case (see here).
(A brief word about Woollard's mother. Naïve. Perhaps - far, far too late - the scales may now have fallen from her eyes. Knowing what I know, and seeing what I see about their conduct, I find it increasingly difficult to imagine a set of circumstances in which I would willingly turn a member of my family - or a close friend - in to 'the authorities'. Maybe now she will feel the same about dobbing in her own son. We know too well from the history of the last hundred years what sort of society it is where people are encouraged to denounce members of their intimate circle to the State).
This was quite clearly a case where the maximum sentence should not have been considered - Woollard would be unlikely to be any serious risk in the future (although spending at least a year and a third in a youth prison may well 'educate' him in ways which will not redound to the benefit of society as a whole), and so a sentence of such length could not be justified on the grounds of 'protecting the public'. The only conclusion which can reasonably be drawn is that the nature of the sentence had a strong element of political motivation to it.
One can only hope, therefore, that there is an appeal, and that the judges at the Court of Appeal will replace Rivlin's decision with a sentence which is more in line with the realities of the case. And, just maybe, to 'send a message' to the judiciary that, if they want to 'send messages' they should resign from the bench and go and work for a phone company.
When, sometime in the early part of this year, the real fightback against this unelected cabal of millionaires and other financiers' catamites begins and:
The self-serving 'relaxed about being filty rich' Labour Party crowd around any passing TV news crew, falling over themselves to condemn the behaviour of those who are fighting - as they will, as they have done before,
The bed-wetting fake 'liberals' dash into print about how those who have nothing much more to lose should never, but never, my dears, resort to force to defend themselves, as that is the sole prerogative of those whom god or good schooling have placed above us - as they will, as they have done before,
The various grouplets and cliquettes on the far left carry on arguing with one another as to whether the manifestations are examples of what was predicted by Marx, Lenin, Žižek, or Buster Keaton, and whether it would be better for the protests to be taken over by the People's Liberation Front or the People's Front For Liberation - as they will, as they have done before,
The organs of the State, particularly the Police, seize their chance to make the point of how terribly useful they are to those in Power who might otherwise think of cutting their budgets and, by acts of illegality, violence and even murder seek to crush dissent against the régime and its backers at every turn - as they will, as they have done before,
The Right, proclaiming that they are the defenders of 'traditional British values', give unequivocal support to the forces of the State, and order another 'crackdown' on those who dare defy the Cosylition - as they will, as they have done before, and
The corporate media do their absolute utmost to slant all coverage against the protesters, portraying them at every turn as either 'evil', 'extreme', possibly foreign-controlled, 'terrorists', or (especially if they're middle-class) naïve dupes of 'evil', 'extreme', etc. - as they will, as they have done before,
then might those of us who are too old or too fragile for violent confrontation, but who know all the same that not only is another way possible, but that it is essential, come together one day, standing ten or twelve deep and with arms linked, encircle that fake Gothic sump of late-feudal corruption and arrogance called The Houses Of Parliament, and - at the stroke of noon - chant in unison:
"This band behind me'll tell you that that trophy means more to me than owt else in the whole world. But they'd be wrong! Truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks. Not compared to how people matter. Us winning this trophy won't mean bugger all to most people. But us refusing it - like what we're going to do now - well, then it becomes news, doesn't it?
"You see what I mean? That way, I'll not just be talking to myself, will I? Because over the last ten years, this bloody government has systematically destroyed an entire industry. Our industry. And not just our industry - our communities, our homes, our lives. All in the name of 'progress'. And for a few lousy bob. I'll tell you something else you might not know, as well. A fortnight ago, this band's pit were closed - another thousand men lost their jobs. And that's not all they lost. Most of them lost the will to win a while ago. A few of them even lost the will to fight. But when it comes to losing the will to live, to breathe, the point is - if this lot were seals or whales, you'd all be up in bloody arms. But they're not, are they, no, no they're not. They're just ordinary common-or-garden honest, decent human beings. And not one of them with an ounce of bloody hope left. Oh aye, they can knock out a bloody good tune. But what the fuck does that matter?
"And now I'm going to take my boys out onto the town. Thank you."
(From the film Brassed Off (1996). Script by Mark Herman)
Peter William Postlethwaite Actor
b. 7 February 1946, d. 2 January 2011
Rants Archive 2011
And 
loody 
errible