The Ministry Of Truth

You know if nuclear power is so safe and our Government is so confident about building all these new nuclear power stations and nuclear powered and armed submarines?

Then why the Hell are they running around the country impounding planes and shutting down restaurants just because a bloke who died of nuclear poisoning flew on them or dined in them?

Just a thought.

Saw Jeremy Hardy tonight. A very funny man. He doesn’t like wasps either.  His description of Scary Ruth Kelly as the Buggery Czar was a particular highlight.

Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter would be proud of “New” Labour and its record-breaking efforts. I’m sure I remember as a kid watching someone on Record Breakers trying to get 40 people inside a Mini. Messrs. Blair, Straw, Blunkett, Clarke and Reid are attempting the same in Britain’s gaols:

• 80,000 Prison population today. There are just 317 spare places.
• 60 Pieces of legislation relating to criminal justice since Labour came to power in 1997.
• 25,000 10-year rise in prison population.
• £100,000 Cost of each new prison place.
• 4,452 Female prisoners in 2004 compared with 1,804 in 1994
• 10,089 Foreign national prisoners.
• 78 Self-inflicted deaths in prison in 2005. There were 65 in 1997.

Tough on crime, not really all that arsed about the causes of crime.

Lord Ramsbotham, the former head of the prison service, today describes this approach as:

the Government’s headlong and self-induced race to absurdity as far as the conduct of imprisonment is concerned.

THIS, however, still remains The Best Criminal Justice Idea Floated By A Serving Home Office Minister In The World… Ever!(TM)

Hilary Benn plans to run for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 2007.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

There is one major drawback to ripping the piss out of that jumped-up little prick Nicky Fucking Campbell’s weekly Guardian column: having to read it.

This week I have opted out - I just don’t have the mental strength today - so I am obliged to a friend for his considered critique:

God that Nicky “Blue Eyed Boy” Cnutbell is an ignorant cnut.

Campbell’s last column - about the cost of the 2012 Olympics - also managed to defy the sort of boundaries traditionally set by the mores of constructive criticism.  However, for reasons that are probably only apparent to Alan Rusbridger, Campbell’s column of 23 November was published on the Guardian’s blog site, thus inviting comments from readers on what they had just read.

The first comment came from “DoctorDick” at 5.26am:

You do realise that it’s going to be the summer olympics in 2012 don’t you? There isn’t going to be any curling so Scotland will win sweet FA so why do you care? Tell you what, give me your surplus council tax money if you are so obliged to be rid of it. Better yet go back to the land of nessie and stick your head in a deep fat fryer. They should make that an event, I’d watch it. But I still wouldn’t pay for it.

“Hulahope” later commented:

There is a difference between journalists who stimulate interesting debate by playing devils advocate. And fools.

“ChuckT” waded in:

Why is your drivel, Campbell, allowed in the sports section when you know nothing about the subject. you are a clown. 

And “AndrewM” managed:

Since Russell [Brand]’s column became tolerable - not good, but tolerable - NC is my new figure of contempt. However, for once I will be sensible and simply avoid his garbage in future.

NC, you have been inflicted upon the British people for too long.

Do one.

“Doleywino” provided the coup de grace:

Nicky, it’s bad enough that I just can’t listen to Five Live in the mornings any more thanks to your self-important faux-intellectual unfunny know-all drivel. Why are we subjected to it in print as well?

You know how the British public wholeheartedly embraces some celebrities and takes them unto the collective national bosom? Well, you’re not one of them.

And all before lunchtime! 

It’s always nice to learn that you are not alone in your irrational hatreds and prejudices.

Oddly enough, this week’s column is not open to reader comments…

Marcel Berlins doesn’t like the Borat movie. But he “admit[s] to laughing quite often because parts of it are very funny”. Jesus wept.

“My objection is to the exploitation of the… ignorant for the sake of a joke.”

Marcel, luv, if we can’t poke fun at the ignorant, then who the Hell is fair game?

“What Borat did was to inveigle ordinary, harmless people into participating in what was promised to be a documentary; the real motive was to abuse their cooperation by making them the objects of ridicule… Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, managed to extract from a few of his pathetic victims some loutish behaviour and racist remarks; they may not have been nice people, but that hardly justifies the effort put in to make them look silly.”

So “ordinary, harmless people” are racist louts? Not where I live they’re not, Marcel.

And since when are we not allowed to make racist louts look silly? For what other reason do they exist? (Apart to beat savagely.)

Fuck me: and this man’s a lawyer, supposedly able to argue a case semi-coherently.

David Conn seems to be the only journalist in the country who gives a damn about the fact that English club football is being bought out by chancers, spivs, crooks and shady foreign characters. The latest in his weekly string of scoops is that Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, The Man behind the man at West Ham, was once convicted of embezzlement.

Does this news not in any way concern the blazers at the FA?

How many more such buy-outs will have to happen before they introduce a “fit and proper persons” test for the owners of much-loved institutions that (usually) give so much to their local communities?

And why the fuck did the BBC allow Garry Richardson to masturbate Eggert Magnusson (Gudmundsson’s front man) on Radio Five Live’s Sportsweek last Sunday morning instead of asking some genuinely taxing questions about his organization’s intentions?

Who knows if there is much worth saving in This Septic Isle these days but surely some of the things that count the most cannot themselves be counted - however big the pile of £50 notes involved?

Chris Spice (crazy name, crazy guy), the former performance director of the Rugby Football Union, has doubtless just boosted his Christmas card count by having a pop not only at the “beleagured” (ie crap) England rugby coach Andy Robinson but the RFU itself.

In doing so, he’s dared to expose the very problem that plagues UK sport:

“Rather than relying on amateur committee men, there should be professionals in charge.”

Who are the top dogs of the Football Association, the England and Wales Cricket Board, UK Athletics, the Jockey Club (as was), the Rugby Football Union, the Lawn Tennis Association and all the other risibly self-important, self-appointed, self-regulated bodies who spend the money paying punters pump into British sport all year round? Everywhere you look in the higher echelons of British sport administration there are chinless grandees wearing blazers and club/old school ties and no apparent qualifications whatsoever for the jobs they are doing.

Say what you like about the FA Premier League (and I could say plenty about them), but they are professionals running a professional organization.  They defend their clubs’ best interests and don’t mind get their hands dirty in the process.

In doing so, of course, they are sending smaller clubs to the wall, constantly draining the pool of homegrown talent and fucking up any chance the current generation of English players may ever once theoretically have had of winning an international tournament but you can’t help but admire what they have achieved commercially in just over a decade.  They’ve turned a poor brand - top flight English football, plagued by the legacy of Heysel, Hillsborough and hooliganism - and made it the most popular and commercially successful (though certainly not the best) football league in the world.

Paula Radcliffe finally got sick and tired of coming fourth, opted out of the established British way of training, surrounded herself with a team of dedicated professionals and has become one of the country’s few genuine sporting success stories in the process.

If some other sporting bodies behaved half as professionally, we might actually win the odd gong instead of devoting acres of newsprint to Why Are We So Poor At [Cricket/Rugby/Football/Tennis] When We Invented The Bloody Sport? articles.

The Corinthians don’t participate in the FA Cup anymore and it’s about time people woke up to that fact if they want this country to enjoy serious sporting success in the way that, for example, Australia has over the past 15 years.

A shit-faced lecturer in Accountancy (which is at least a half-decent explanation for being drunk) overheard in a bar last night: “Accountancy is not boring: it has many practical applications. Take the clitoris, for example - I’m not sure whether it’s an asset or a liability.”

And while we’re at it: NO2ID.

I had hoped my first post would be more inspired but this just made me laugh out loud in my open-plan office, drawing disapproving looks from people whose jobs have something to do with project management but who don’t seem actually to manage any projects - and who therefore have no moral authority to disapprove of me surfing instead of working.

Life, the universe and everything will appear here shortly.