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I won’t be watching Cameron’s speech to the Tory faithful this week. Rather, I’ll be playing Dead Space on my Playstation. It’s about a man exploring a drifting, derelict and abandoned hulk in search of human life but instead is confronted by a seemingly endless horde of twisted, slavering freaks.

The Murdochs: from exposing the horrors of Gallipoli to exposing the horrors of Kerry Katona’s coke habit in just two generations. No doubt Sir Keith would be proud.

Welcome to a new feature on Chicken Yoghurt: The Times Higher Education. Here’s where I’ll be banging on about any old rubbish that occurs to me. As I won’t be writing about issues surrounding higher education there will be no overlap in the readership of the other Times Higher Education.

Therefore, I feel well within my rights to call my new feature The Times Higher Education. I have thoughtfully added a ‘The’ to Times Higher Education to avoid any confusion between my Times Higher Education and the other Times Higher Education. Also, any confusion with the Daily Quail’s The Times Higher Education is purely intentional.

Find out what inspired me to start this wonderful new feature here.

So some overpaid centrepiece of our national distraction bangs an on-the-make doxie who seems unsuited to any role in society above extortion and Twitter goes berserk. Pass it on! Pass it on! We’re privvy to secret knowledge. Don’t worry that it’s prurient, finger-sniffing intrusion, just pass it on! Previously sane and rational people who I ordinarily respect immensely are revelling in their role in helping Rupert Murdoch paw through someone’s private life so he can shift more product. No doubt he’s raising a glass to them this evening. They did it for nothing more than the warm feeling of a job well done.

A true victory for free speech. And don’t try to give me that crap about this being part of busting wide open the super-injunction racket so we can unearth corporate wrongdoing. Nobody’s bloody interested. Trafigura?* Wasn’t he on Big Brother 9? Who did he shag?

Into this sewer wades a titan like former state-sponsored liar Alastair Campbell. Paragon of journalistic ethics, Campbell is on Twitter farting on about the Murdoch Empire being all over the story of a footballer with marital problems while largely ignoring it’s own role in the phone hacking scandal. Fair enough. It’s just that Campbell was happy to suck at that particular wizened teat for years at a stretch when it suited him and his old boss. Plus New Labour were masters themselves at shouting ‘look at that over there!’ while shovelling shit out the back door. Lazy, complicit journalism kept and keep him and his mates in paid employment, the ungrateful bastard.

That Murdoch continues to get away with so much is testament to the political cowardice of the last 20 years (at least). Politicians could have reined him in a long time ago; instead, it’s him who likes to ride them good and hard.

Meanwhile.

* Last year Twitter also went berserk over the Trafigura cover up. There was much less interest in what Trafigura were actually covering up. When it came out what Trafigura had actually done, the fuss was nowhere to be seen. It was all about the rights of nice, western journalists. Those poor sods in Ivory Coast? Barely anybody gave a toss. At least not on Twitter. I remember it vividly because I was pissed off then as well. History records that Stephen Fry thought Trafigura’s injunction ‘outrageous, grotesque and squalid’. Anybody tell me what he thinks of the dumping of toxic waste in Africa?

According to the Prime Minister, free schools and more Academy schools ‘is the Big Society way to improve education’. Apparently, they offer ‘more choice for parents’.

We’re having to send our eldest to the local Academy in September because it’s the only show in town. Its specialism is ‘entrepreneurship’. You can probably imagine how thrilled I am about that. The children are obliged to wear blazers in the belief that this instills a sense pride in the school.

You know how much choice I have in this? Go on, guess.

May 5 2011:

The Rwandan government is masterminding an alleged assassination plot in Britain against dissidents critical of the east African country’s increasingly authoritarian regime, The Independent can reveal. [...] But the Rwandan government’s activities against dissidents have increased dramatically recently. Last week police served a “Threats to life warning notice” on Mr Mugenzi and a second Rwandan, Jonathan Musonera, laying out the danger facing them. [...] President Kagame is now charged with becoming increasingly authoritarian, intolerant of dissent and of silencing political opposition.

December 31 2010:

Tony Blair has defended his close personal and working relationship with one of Africa’s most controversial leaders, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, even as foreign governments distance themselves over accusations of war crimes and the suppression of political opposition. [...] But Blair said allowances have to be made for the consequences of the 1994 genocide of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and suggested that Kagame’s economic record outweighed other concerns.

We’ve found him. Moussa Koussa, former Gadaffi right-hand man and butcher turned our guy, has turned up after disappearing a few weeks ago when the UK government let him swan in and then swan out of London.

Turns out he is among other defectors ‘helping Nato bomb secret Gaddafi sites’. Now, I doubt very much that this involves Moussa being on the ground in Tripoli ‘painting’ targets alongside special forces.

More likely, this involves him sitting in a five-star hotel suite in Qatar lazily pointing at a map of Tripoli and saying ‘try there’ before ordering another martini and blow job on MI6′s tab.

I’ve given Prime Minister’s Questions a miss in the last couple of weeks. I was bought a Playstation 3 for my birthday and I find spending my time in a beautifully simulated Renaissance-period Florence a more mature and edifying use of those precious minutes than enduring yet more of our national disgrace.

So I’ve picked up just what’s been going on at the Mother of All Chimp’s Tea Parties via osmosis – news headlines and Twitter. Just what great and lofty topics were debated by the finest minds of this generation?

I really couldn’t tell you. From previous experience I would guess that no such matters were discussed. Bear-trap questions were no doubt offered and evasions thrown back. What I can tell you is that the Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service compared the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition in the United Kingdom to Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards. In turn, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition in the United Kingdom compared the Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service to Flashman. The whole things sounded like it was a hoot, I’m sure you’ll agree.

I wonder, however, how this goes down with outside observers. How many points did the best among us score against each other? Eddie the Eagle was briefly famous 23 years ago. I wonder how many people watching or reading about it later wondered who hell he is. Similarly with Flashman. How many people know who he is? It’s an epithet that gets the likes of the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts fizzy-knickered and who wants to be associated with that? Who outside of smug humps like Cameron, Miliband, Letts and other abject courtiers enjoys this stuff? What purpose does it serve?

Full time summary: After a game of two halves, politics was the loser.

If you’ll permit, I’d like to return briefly to the subject of the ‘Now We Are One‘ speech given by the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday. Another thing in it caught my eye…

I know that the cuts are extremely difficult. But remember that whoever was in government would have had to act in a similar fashion. Labour’s plans would have meant £7 of cuts this year for every £8 that the coalition is cutting.

That reminded me of something. Wasting a larger part of my memory than is healthy retaining the awful stuff said by bastards, this came back to me. Let us visit the distant country that is 2002…

If we want to stop the defence industry operating in this country, we can do so. The result incidentally would be that someone else supplies the arms that we supply.

Guess who? Yep. It was ‘morally dubious’ when Blair used this line of reasoning and it’s the same now that Clegg’s using it. It’s an attempt to make one’s opponents or competitors complicit in one’s own guilt. It’s not ‘a big boy did it an ran away’ it’s ‘if I don’t do it a big boy will do it anyway and run away’.

It’s the creation of alternate reality as a rhetorical device. You used to see it a lot when we were pulversing Iraq. ‘What would you do?’ pro-war types would say. ‘If you got your way Saddam would still be in power, wouldn’t he?’ they would sneer.

Except me and those like me didn’t get our way. We don’t have any blame to carry. Likewise Labour didn’t win the election so how do they figure? And anyway, if I got my way in the matter of the deficit that we must never, ever pass on to the next generation*, we’d have a better choice at the ballot box than between Labour’s £7 for every Tory £8 of cut or the Tories £8 for every £7 of Labour cuts. Or whatever parallel universe hair-splitting device Clegg wants to use do make himself feel better.

* Unlike roads, schools, hospitals, Al Qaeda and the Windsors.

Meanwhile, Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis is giving a speech showing that you should never try and out-bastard Labour (should we really drop the ‘New’?). On the subject of the ‘squeezed-middle’ (whatever that is), Lewis pinpoints the trouble he sees in winning them back…

Today, they see Labour as the party of the North, standing up for the poor, benefit claimants, immigrants and minority groups.

My instant response was: aren’t those groups supposed to be what the Labour Party is for? Granted it doesn’t seem to have given much of toss about any of them since, ooh, 1994 but come on. Surely these people have got enough on their plates right now fighting the predations of the coalition without some Blairite hump using them as target practice.

Read the rest of this entry »

One year in… and the Liberal Democrat’s chief albatross gives a speech in which he attempts to save his worthless, lying*, vote-obliterating arse:

…we need to do a better job of blowing our own trumpet on policies such as cutting income tax for ordinary taxpayers; ending child detention…

Ending child detention…

The UK continues to detain children, a year after the Coalition’s pledge to end it [...] Yet the recent news that six children were held in three separate detention facilities by the UK Border Agency in March comes as no surprise to campaigners who have warned that the UKBA is deliberately flouting Nick Clegg’s pledge to end the ‘moral outrage’ of child detention.

So. Nick Clegg: liar or lied to? Does he know about this or are his officials keeping it from him? Whichever it is, he should get his facts straight before he starts blowing his own trumpet in public.

* I’m willing to consider the theory that people like this can be simply woefully dim and get things badly wrong rather being out and out shits. But when that person is the Deputy Prime Minister why split hairs? The outcome is the same whichever he is.

There have been many false dawns in Iraq since we pulverised it in the name of liberation. Many are the times we have asked ourselves, would the seeds of democracy and freedom flourish and flower in such bitter soil? Well, today, we have the first evidence that western values are finally taking hold in that benighted land…

Iraqi workers have been forming and running their own unions, often in the face of tremendous personal danger, first under Saddam’s repressive regime, and then under the allied occupation and the bloody backlash that followed. Despite these pressures, unions have been improving workplace health and safety, wages and productivity, and building a social security system to help vulnerable workers back on their feet.

No, that’s not it. Hang on. Yes, here it is…

Swimming against the tide of popular uprisings across the region, the Iraqi government is trying to wipe out free and independent trade unions. Two weeks ago it decided that the main trade union body in the country was no longer going to exist

That’s it. There we have it. Iraq embraces 1980s Thatcherism. They hate trade unions every bit as much as we do. We’ve made them just like us. Bloody workers wanting their health and safety and wages and social security. Trots, the lot of them. Worth every drop of spilt blood, wouldn’t you say?

I see Christian fundamentalist liar, self-appointed chief of the sex police and somehow Member of Parliament, Nadine Dorries, is once again courting tawdry notoriety as only she can. Still, it’s not all bad news. In a hugely edifying interview with the Sunday Times today, she informs us that the United Kingdom has a ‘socialist elite’.

I for one am cockerhoop at this news. Brothers and sisters, let us rejoice! There’s me thinking we toil under the stern gaze of emotionally retarded millionaires and other assorted neo-liberal sociopaths when all the time we’ve been living in a Marxist paradise. At last I can stop bitching about the government and enjoy the utopia I’ve hitherto failed to notice flowering around me.

(I would take time to critique Dorries’ revolting scheme to teach sexual abstinence exclusively to girls but it’s a task more suited to the intellectual level of my six year-old daughter. I, of course, do my daughter a grave insult for rhetorical effect. That’s a daughter, incidentally, whose life I will not allow to be soiled by Dorries’ prurient, counter-Enlightenment ‘values’. Dorries wants to set an example to girls? She could try cutting back on her squalid lies and fantasies. I also wonder what message boffing a married man and helping to publicly traduce his wife sends.)

Meanwhile, we’re deporting dissident refugees back to Libya…

A LIBYAN asylum seeker who has been living in Sheffield for nine years has been told he will be deported back to his homeland in the midst of a civil war. Anti-Gaddafi activist Ali Bashir, aged 47, fled his country in 2002 after the Libyan regime targeted him for his views.

We’re protecting you over there, sunshine, not over here…

…maybe.

Still, look at it from an economic point of view. We can’t afford to support scrounging refugees. Not when there’s cruise missiles to be paid for.

On the subject of Osama bin Laden being gathered unto to justice yesterday, the Vatican had this to say…

In the face of a man’s death, a Christian never rejoices…

Are they sure? Call me picky but if I’d been running the Pontiff’s propaganda department over the bank holiday I’d have ascertained the exact ratio of Christians to other denominations in the crowds chanting ‘USA! USA!’ at Ground Zero and the White House, and exulting on Twitter, before issuing my press release.

If I can be less-holier-than-thou for a second, I’m as godless and immoral as any atheist but I wasn’t dancing a jig at the news of someone, however wicked, being shot twice in the face. And according to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor I’m a practitioner of the ‘greatest of evils‘ and ‘not fully human‘.

This poster from the piss-poor Yes to the Alternative Vote* campaign is most amusing…

I suppose it gets across the general thrust of how the system works. I have one or two problems with it though. It’s my fear that if I go to those pubs, I will find them rammed with war criminals, neo-liberal arseholes and other assorted Milibands. In other words, they’re shit pubs.

I put this to insurance salesman Chris Addison on Twitter after he linked to the poster approvingly. ‘What if the pubs are shit,’ I asked. Quick as a flash he replied, ‘Become a landlord’. A very good answer. Unfortunately, however, I’m an indolent, borderline alcoholic. Not a huge barrier to leap, I’m sure you’ll agree, but I can sense this analogy is on the verge of collapse.

* I in no way endorse the No To AV campaign which is a disgrace of which all involved should be ashamed. I’ve yet to ascertain whether one of its main faces, Baroness Warsi, is evil or simply thick as a workhouse butty.

Listen to the voice. Did you ever in your life hear someone sound more dead inside?

Daily Express – 27 Apr 2011

Just back from a very pleasant few days in Dorset. We stayed close to Corfe Castle, a rather Tolkienesque ruin.

click for bigger pic

Back in the day, when the castle was a going concern with a king and serfs and whatnot, it was host to an oubliette, a dungeon into which those who were cast had no hope or means of escape.

click for bigger pic

And reading that, I thought it’s easy to believe that we haven’t really come very far in the last thousand years. Disappear into Bagram and the ‘blunt force trauma‘ means you aren’t coming out. Disappear into custody in Iraq and the fists and boots of your liberators ensure you’re there forever. Disappear into Guantanamo and no amount of heartfelt bleating from a Nobel Peace Prize winner can save you. Due process goes out the window on a whim.

As grim coincidence would have it, my holiday reading was the brilliant The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod (Lenin has a good, spoiler-free review – ‘fucking terrifying’ is right). Set in an alternative near future where the atrocities of The War Against Terror have come home to the UK, one of the characters visits a US black prison on British soil:

Paulson flinched back. The stench became almost overpowering: shit, piss, vomit, unwashed bodies, the iron whiff of blood. He had expected the noise to be as bad as the smell, but it wasn’t: quiet voices, moans, weeping, the growling of dogs. He took a grip on himself and walked forward. The floor and walls were bare concrete that seeped condensation. There was one row of ten cages, of which eight were occupied. There was plenty of room to pass the outstretched arms.

I remember reading a quote by Philip K Dick about him pondering a sequel to his own masterpiece of alternate history The Man In The High Castle. The novel is set in a 1962 where the Axis powers have won the Second World War:

I did 7 years of research for Man In The High Castle. [...] I had prime source material at the Berkeley Cal Library from the Gestapo that they had seized after WW II. It was marked, for the eyes of the higher police only. The higher police is their term for – I was forced to read Gestapo diaries, the Gestapo men in Warsaw, Gestapo agents. I had to read that stuff. I had to sit there because you couldn’t take it out of the library. You had to read it in the stacks. I had to read what those guys wrote in their private journals to write Man In The High Castle. And that’s why I’ve never written a sequel to it. Because it’s too horrible. It’s too awful.

It sounds very much like MacLeod forced his mind to visit other such awful places. I wonder if Blair, Bush, Obama, David Miliband and other grim fellow enablers ever did or do. Now you can. Read about all what’s been done in our names to keep us ‘safe’. And did you hear the one about Binyam Mohamed’s genitals?

I like the idea of Nick Clegg crying all the time very much. In an ideal world, most days he’d be barely able to open his eyes because they’re so red and swollen with his sobbin’. There’s tons of reasons why he should be crying his guts out.

Remember Nick, his moral outrage at the detention of child refugees, and his pledge to end it? How’s that looking?

[T]he Government has effectively created spaces for up to 4,445 children to be detained every year. Not quite the end to detention anyone had in mind.

I bet them kids cry way more than poor Nicky-Wicky.

As Simon Tisdall points out, the A vision of a democratic Libya* document produced by our boys in the Libyan opposition sounds awfully familiar in tone and content. This bit rang a bell with me…

The constitution will also clarify the rights and obligations of citizens in a transparent manner…

It’s the return of Rights and Responsibilities. Somethings never go out of fashion, especially vapid, slightly sinister-sounding platitudes. I’m very much looking forward to a post-Gaddafi government unveiling its very own ASBO legislation.

* There was a lot of love in the room at the London conference on Libya yesterday. It really took me back to the heady days of 2001. Wait, it was 2002. Or was it 2003? Maybe it was 2004. 2006? Definitely 2010.

Next Labour get their foreign policy priorities sorted…

Shadow defence secretary to urge better understanding of Libyan opposition and forging of new defence partnerships

We need to know who these rebel fellows are and whether we can sell them guns. After all, we just lost a good customer in Muammar Gaddafi and there’s a big gap in the order book.

I have asked the police whether they feel they need further powers to prevent violence before it occurs.

…said Theresa (Voted very strongly for the Iraq war) May.

Still, look on the bright side. At least nobody was bombed to shit on Saturday. Stealth bombers and cruise missiles next time, lads and lasses. That’s how to win an argument.

See also… The violence of Boris Johnson.

And… Flying Rodent: Fool Me Twenty-Seven Times, Shame On Left-Wing Extremists Yet Again

Tony Blair, July 2000

On the family, we need two or three eye-catching initiatives that are entirely conventional in terms of their attitude to the family. Despite the rubbish about gay couples, the adoption issue worked well. We need more. I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible.

Nick Clegg, March 2011:

Mr Clegg is particularly worried about his own personal ratings and has asked for ideas about good news initiatives he could be associated with.