304 Holloway Road

By BigBrother in All posts 1 Comment Tags: , , , , ,

Even if the movie is complete shit – and, given that the New Patron Saint Of Shark Jumping James Corden is in it, there’s every likelihood it will be – this is a great trailer.

(Ministerial Conundrum Of The Day: if the administrators of The Pirate Bay get a fine and prison time for assisting copyright infringement, why do the directors of Google/YouTube/Blogger, Inc. walk free?)

My mobile phone is dying.  I not only don’t care, I’m not sure I even want to replace it.  What the fuck is happening to me?  Is this what beta blockers do to you?

Gordon, Gordon, you bastard, I’m through

By julesallen in All posts No Comments Tags: , , ,

There’s a stake in your fat black heart/ And the villagers never liked you./ They are dancing and stamping on you./ They always knew it was you./ Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Until now, it has never been clear what we are supposed to believe about the political phenomenon that is Gordon Brown.  Is he the architect of New Labour or the idealist who kept a leash on its worse excesses?  Is he the last powerful socialist in UK politics or an egotistical chancer who manipulates everything and everyone for his own aggrandisement?  Is he an intellectual or an idiot?  A brilliant politician or a terrible one?  A statesman, or an incompetent buffoon who has stumbled into politics despite being resolutely unsuited to it?  A straight guy or a liar?

Those who started with a relatively favourable impression of Brown during his days at No. 11 (how could we not with Blair in charge?) and swayed by his portrayal in Peter Morgan’s The Deal as the superior candidate cheated out of his rightful place at the top of UK politics by the smirking jester Blair, can be forgiven for cutting Brown a certain measure of slack.  Whether one admired his political nous (riding the boom wave to concentrate enormous power in his position as Chancellor without an ounce of the accountability due to the PM) or his apparent idealism (stealth policies to alleviate extreme poverty at a time when New Labour could not afford to publicise what it was doing) or both, one had a right to expect radicalism and results.  We have got neither.

The sharpening factionalism of the party – the Blair/Brown camps – could have been viewed as an unfortunate distraction exacerbated by the understandable frustration with Blair’s needless clinging on to power (though it is a truth universally acknowledged that a split party cannot govern) and noises about how the Brownites (the ‘Nutters’ of Iannucci’s The Thick of It) were the worst of the bunch could have been dismissed as Old Blairite propaganda.   Not any more.

Any sympathy, latitude or inner belief one might have been prepared to extend to the political phenomenon that is Gordon Brown has now vanished.  The McBride affair is shocking not because it is hard to imagine that such individuals or such practices exist in British politics, but that someone directly employed by, and extremely close to, the Prime Minister has been caught doing it.  Smearing opposition candidates is a brand of low politics which jostles for a place amongst all the other examples of low politics we have seen in the UK these past 30 years, at the bottom of the barrel .  For my money, it’s winning the fight to be right at the very bottom.

Take for example, that apotheosis of political wrongdoing – Watergate.  This was a juicy news story because the President, after a thriller plot straight out of John Le Carre, was eventually linked to a very illegal wiretap operation.  Next to the McBride affair, which predicates the use of falsehoods to damage an opponent’s standing, then gaining an advantage by unlawfully discovering your opponents next move begins to look like nothing more than canny politics.

For me, this business is far, far worse than Stephen Byers’ aides ‘burying bad news’ after 9/11, even though it provides a less juicy ‘moral outrage’ story for the tabs.  At the heart of it all for me, is that put simply, either Gordon Brown knew about it, or he knew about it.  One cannot sensibly contemplate any alternative scenario.  The only fair-minded and objective conclusion is that at best he sanctioned it and at worst he ordered it.  It will take a bulletproof argument delivered by Alan Dershowitz or the ghost of George Carman QC to sway me from that view.

The real fuel for my own outrage, though, was difficult to pin down until I read Frank Field’s piece in the Guardian on Tuesday.  It isn’t that Gordon Brown is scum.   Although, he quite palpably and demonstrably is.  It’s that there is now no inch of doubt left that the government of the last 12 years stands for nothing.

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.

Straight Outta Compton; side one, track two

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , ,

The Minister’s Wife doesn’t understand why the Minister is so trenchantly cynical about the police.

The Minister’s Wife grew up in the Thames Valley in the late 70s and 80s.

The Minister grew up at the same time in the north of the East Midlands.

While the Minister’s Wife tends to see policemen as brave people who do a job that neither she nor I would want to do and of whom you can safely ask the time before they tell you, pat you on the head and send you on your way with a “Mind how you go,” I tend to see a bunch of overgrown schoolboys who were not fit enough to join the Army in pursuit of the violence- and speed- related adrenaline rushes that seem to sustain them, violence and speed that would be unlawful if performed by a person without a warrant card.

Having read Nineteen Eighty-Four at the age of 11, the Minister was soon afterwards confronted by a year-long nightly spectacle on the local news of policemen assaulting workers daring to stand up for job security; of mounted policemen charging at pickets; of men in full riot gear – shields and batons flailing – laying into men in t-shirts and jeans; of arrogant southerners on triple time standing at roundabouts preventing ordinary and law-abiding northerners from driving where they wanted to go; and of women dragged along the ground and thrown into the back of police vans for the “crime” of shouting the word “scab”.

It made something of an impression on the Young Minister.

(And if you think I exaggerate, I have eight DVDs at home of news and documentary footage from the miner’s strike detailing all of the above and more.)

My subsequent direct contact with the police has been mercifully limited: three burglaries, one instance of criminal damage and a couple of RTA-related matters in a personal capacity and one fraud investigation in a professional capacity.  (Perhaps I should point out that I was not the perpetrator of any of the aforementioned incidents.)  I also met a couple of Chief Constables when they came to speak at my university.

Most of the police officers I met as a consequence were relatively well-intentioned but not terribly bright; a few were downright lazy and incompetent.  One of the Chief Constables and one Detective Constable were genuinely impressive individuals.

All apart from the Chief Constables seemed very, very tired.  Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that not one person has been prosecuted for any of the above crimes.

So when miscarriage of justice followed miscarriage of justice through the 1990s thanks to police conspiracies or improperly-obtained confessions, I was angered but not shocked.  When a judge solemnly pronounced that the capital’s police force was “institutionally racist”, I shrugged and wondered since when stating the bleedin’ obvious became newsworthy.  When police officers lied about the circumstances of the death of Jean-Charles de Menezes and literally got away with murder, I was furious but not surprised.

And now it has emerged once again that a policeman clad in riot gear assaulted an innocent man in a t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and his buddies then lied about it, I barely raise an eyebrow.  Where the chattering classes are appalled that something like this could possibly happen on the streets of Britain in broad daylight and before hundreds of witnesses, some of us have seen every fucking frame of this film before, over and over again.

The police still do a job I wouldn’t want to do but that’s at least in part because I couldn’t possibly stomach working alongside some of the disgraceful excuses for human beings that make up the force.

Under Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian has become a sad parody of the once-great newspaper it was.  It is now only rarely worth the cover price.  Today is one of those days.  Its investigatory and campaigning work in the week since Ian Tomlinson died has been commendable.

Let’s just hope the police have better luck in identifying and apprehending the policeman who assaulted Mr. Tomlinson shortly before he died last Wednesday than they did in catching the fraudsters who diddled my employers out of £800,000 last year or the burglar who ran off with the Minister’s Wife’s camera a year earlier.

Members: sniff your Sharpies

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , ,

The Daily Mash is no Onion, but I do like this:

MPs TO CLAIM FOR BLACK MARKERS USED TO CENSOR EXPENSES CLAIMS

MPs are expected to claim thousands of pounds for the black markers they will use to censor their expenses claims, it emerged last night.

On the day backbenchers accepted a 2.3% pay rise they warned that paying for the extra-thick marker pens themselves would leave them with very little change from their £65,000 salaries.

Tom Logan, Labour MP for North Watford, said: “It’s vital that backbench MPs are able to maintain a steady supply of really good black markers, especially those that live more than 15 minutes from central London.

“Everyone knows that the further you get from London the drier and less effective your marker pen becomes.

“Indeed in my constituency a marker pen will only work if it is accompanied by a 42″ plasma screen TV, an antique fireplace and all 14 volumes of Big Wet Asses.”

1 2 3