The Ministry Of Truth

Tesco has… carried out research which reveals shoppers want more choice when it comes to buying their favourite fruit. Instead of buying a green or yellow banana, the retailer says, shoppers now want a variety of colours.

Forgive me if I’m being a fuckwit, but what other colours do bananas come in apart from (in order) green, yellow, brown and black?

Everything I was going to post this afternoon has already been posted here.  Go there.  Read it.  Click the links.  You won’t be disappointed.  It’s very good.

I know that there are some who’d prefer things like egg-chucking at Griffin not to happen, and I can see that point of view. I just happen to think that seeing his fat smelly face looking frightened and upset is a wondrous thing. For sure, the way to defeat the fascists is to engage the working class into politics they can believe in, to work hard on real solutions to poverty and unemployment, and to fight at every turn to denounce the lies spouted by prejudiced idiots about immigration and multiculturalism. Yes yes, I know that. But making that vile fascist tit look stupid is a good thing. Satire is egg-chucking without the actual egg, and we need that too. We need all kinds of attacks on Griffin, making him look ridiculous in every sense, exposing his nastiness and making him into the national joke he is.

The Nasty Racists received 943,598 votes (which means the UK is home to nearly a million cunts).  This equated to 6.2% of the UK vote.

Sweden’s Pirate Party – campaigning for free downloads and not much else – received 7.1% of the Swedish vote.

If there is hope, it lies with consoles.

(Come on, I’m trying my best here.)

I made a train journey on Saturday – 100 miles took almost exactly three hours; thanks East Midland Trains! To while away the hours I read and re-read a strange little story in Saturday’s Independent:

Veteran Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman yesterday blamed a self-diagnosed “obsessive compulsive disorder” for making bizarre and extravagant claims on the public purse including £8,865 for a 40in LCD Bang & Olufsen television.

Sir Gerald also said his condition led him to purchase a pair of Waterford Crystal grapefruit bowls for £220 on his parliamentary expenses.

Sir Gerald, 79, a former government minister, told the Manchester Evening News that his claim for the Bang & Olufsen TV was “daft”, adding: “I’d self-diagnosed myself with obsessive compulsive disorder and I’d bought a new television set.” Sir Gerald had already bought a similar TV without claiming for it. “Then I decided to have a bigger one,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, you can claim for a TV, so why not?’”

Sir Gerald said he needed two grapefruit bowls because one was for him and another “for any guests”.

He said: “As part of my OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), I have the same breakfast when I’m at home both in London and Manchester every day,” he said. “Half a grapefruit, a bowl of muesli with semi-skimmed milk and a cup of coffee with a Rich Tea biscuit. That’s breakfast.” A cleaner broke one dish, he said “so I got a replacement”.

Sir Gerald also charged the taxpayer £225 for a rollerball pen and admitted when asked to explain his claims that they were “bizarre-sounding”.

A very odd story that simply doesn’t hang together. It turns out that it’s lazy churnalism, almost certainly designed to fill a stray couple of columns, and the genuinely interesting stuff from the MEN interview has been missed.

“I’d self-diagnosed myself with obsessive compulsive disorder and I’d bought a new television set.” Sir Gerald had previously bought a similar TV without claiming for it.

“Then I decided to have a bigger one,” he said. “I thought to myself, `Well, you can claim for a TV, so why not claim for it?’

“Because I’ve got this self-diagnosed OCD, I do things according to rules that I’ve created. I freely acknowledge it was daft and the Commons were quite right to say, `No, you can’t have that on public money.’”

My understanding of OCD is that it most often manifests as repeated behaviour. But Kaufman only claimed for the second TV. If he’d “created his own rules” why didn’t he claim for his first gogglebox? Did he not have his “self-diagnosed” OCD when he bought the first telly? Or when did his self-created rules change to permit expenses claims for 40″ LCD screens?

“Your honour, I have self-diagnosed myself as a kleptomaniac with pyromaniacal tendencies.  I know I shouldn’t have burgled that house and then tried to burn it down, but my self-diagnosed disorders mean I live my life according to my own beliefs so it would be wrong of society to condemn me for my actions.”

“I hadn’t done anything with the flat for maybe 35 years and it really was pretty bedraggled. It was not in all that good a state – and there came a time when it was not really habitable…”

In a letter to a constituent, seen by the M.E.N, Sir Gerald said his flat had ‘deteriorated so much over the years’ he was ‘ashamed to invite visitors’.

But….

Sir Gerald said he needed two grapefruit bowls because one was for him and another ‘for any guests’.

So he’s ashamed to invite visitors because of the state of his flat but needs a spare £220 crystal grapefruit bowl for those visitors, who presumably are otherwise sleeping/sitting/eating in squalour?

The MP also charged the taxpayer £1,851 for a rug imported from the Showplace Antique Centre in New York, including £389 Customs duty.

“It’s not an antique rug, though I got it from an antique centre,” he explained. He said he needed a rug as a replacement in a block of flats with wooden floors and sound-proofing issues.

“I suppose I was a bit dim not to realise that some people might regard it as an extravagance, though minus the shipping and the Customs, it wasn’t monumentally expensive,” he said. I don’t know what my constituents pay for rugs, but it might not be all that much more than some of them buy.”

I don’t know its every nook and cranny but I know where the Manchester Gorton constituency is and the sort of accommodation it contains. It’s where Shameless is set, for crying out loud.

There are not many people in Gorton spending £1,500 on rugs, let alone £8,000 on top-of-the-range plasma screens.  You’d think the man who’d represented the area in Parliament for so long would know this.

“I live very modestly… You may think I oughtn’t to have a Waterford grapefruit dish. But I do. And I ate out of it today.”

Asked about the pen, he explained: “It’s the pen with which I take notes at my surgery, with spares and refills. I thought I’d better get one that would last.

“If I can say so in a very chaste way, I live very modestly. I don’t have much in the way of luxuries.”

Dude, what the fuck?! You’re well known as being legendarily high maintenance. You’ve got two “similar” £8,000 TVs. You rest your weary feet on a £1,500 rug. You eat your breakfast out of lead crystal bowls. I’ve got a Parker ballpoint I bought for a tenner in 1991 that still works perfectly everyday. Only twats feel the need to use £225 pens.

(Great comment about the pen on the MEN site: “You’re 79! How long do you NEED it to last??”)

It’s bullshit. It’s bullshit that should have been called out by the Manchester Evening News journalist (who instead virtually fellated the man in print), and shouldn’t have been lazily repeated by the Independent journalist.

And still politicians wonder why nobody votes and newspapers wonder why nobody wants to pay the cover price.

Listen to the audio of the interview if you can stomach Kaufman’s self-pitying justification:

The Minister is not an adroit Photoshopper but nevertheless hopes this makes a point.

Interesting to note that he can count up to two.

I know I feel so much better, happier and self-confident waking up this morning to the sultry voice of Nick Griffin MEP jizzing all over John Humphrys’ face on Today.

Charlie Brooker summed it up neatly in fewer than 140 characters last night:

BNP voters have ruined the 65th anniversary of D-Day by metaphorically pissing on the graves of all who died fighting the Nazis.

Both of the nasty racists elected as MEPs have convictions for offences aggravated by racial factors.

Which is nice.

After 12 years of “progressive” Labour government, society has changed so much for the better that we’re sending convicted racists to represent us in Europe.  Change you can believe in…

This will do fuck all but I’d still urge you to add your name because you’ll feel marginally less dirty afterwards.

In cuddly Hertfordshire, the BNP has come second (behind the Tories) in half of the County Council wards declared so far.

If this is indicative of how people voted in the European elections, the nasty racists may have some MEPs come Monday morning.

It’s shaping up to be a really bad weekend for Gordon Brown.

On a lighter note…

English libel law is fucked up beyond all recognition.

Thanks to its costs and evidential rules (English libel law being one of a tiny number of areas of law in which a defendant must prove his/her innocence rather than the other way around), it is being abused repeatedly by the wealthy, forcing journalists, authors and publishers to work under increasingly restrictive conditions.  British democracy isn’t working terribly well these days and a free and unfettered press is vital to robust ideological debate and a healthy democracy.

Recently, the remit of the libel courts has extended to the scientific community.  Simon Singh, the science writer, is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association over an article he wrote last year for The Guardian.  Alan Rusbridger has removed the article in question from his newspaper’s website, though a copy can be read here.

I’m going to err on the side of caution where the Contempt of Court Act 1981 is concerned but if you can spot the libel in that article, you’re a better man than me.

I believe it not only desirable but fundamental for the health and development of society that matters of public interest can be discussed openly and criticised constructively without fear of being dragged through the libel courts.  Scientists must be free to evaluate hypotheses and knock them back if they fail scientific scrutiny.

A plethora of issues surrounding English libel law urgently needs addressing by our politicians – HA! – but in the meantime, if you feel strongly about freedom of thought and freedom of speech, you may wish to consider putting your name to a petition being organised by the charitable trusts Sense About Science stating that it is inappropriate to use the English libel laws to silence critical discussion of medical practice and scientific evidence.

Click the button below if you wish to add your support.

Deborah Orr is usually one of the least readable Independent columnists, but fair play to her today:

I don’t actually understand why anyone would wish to step forward and run the country now, it is so totally screwed up. I can’t understand why the left keeps arguing for huge public spending projects when there so clearly is no more money. I can’t understand why economists seem to believe that rising house prices are a sign of “recovery”, when actually they are a sign that the economy is not “rebalancing”.

I can’t understand where Brown finds the resolve every morning to get out of bed and face the day. I can’t understand why there is so little realisation of how tragic and divisive the last 30 years have been, and what desperately few options are left to us. It’s not just the Government that’s in meltdown. It’s the whole bloody shebang, and it will take another 30 years or so to fix it. Well done, Labour.

The tragic news that “Wacky” Jacqui Smith is to “stand down” from the Government in this/next week’s Cabinet reshuffle led me to think about just how irredeemably bad the women who have made it into Cabinet have been since Bliar was surrounded by his 101 ‘babes’ in May 1997.

If I’ve got this correct, there have been 13 or 14 female Cabinet members over the past 12 years (discounting peers).  Those women are:

Hilary Armstrong
Margaret Beckett
Hazel Blears
Yvette Cooper
Harriet Harman
Patricia Hewitt
Tessa Jowell
Ruth Kelly
Helen Liddell*
Estelle Morris
Mo Mowlem
Clare Short
Jacqui Smith
Ann Taylor

(* I am uncertain whether or not the post of Secretary of State for Scotland was a Cabinet-level job between 2001 and 2003, when Helen Liddell was in the role.)

Now, with the best will in the world, I can’t recall a single thing of substance about Armstrong, Liddell and Taylor.

Morris admitted she was a poor Education Secretary and genuinely jumped before she was pushed, thereby actually enhancing her credibility.

Short was a good minister who discredited herself in 2003 by supporting the bombing back to the Dark Ages of Little Brown People to the extent that she ruined her entire career and reputation.

The Harman-Jowell-Hewitt axis was useless; nannying, hectoring, condescending, divorced from reality in their middle-class bubble, and utterly bereft of gravitas.  And don’t even get me started on Harman’s and Jowell’s husbands.

Blears inherited their mantle – anybody who smiles that much when four bucketsful of shit are dripping off their head must just be fucking mental.

Ruth Kelly was simply scary, not least because of Opus Dei.  In her opposition to abortion and gay rights she would have been more at home on the right wing of the Tory Party.

Smith was off with the cuckoos, having drunk deep from the Kool-Aid Well of Intolerance and Knee-Jerk Reactionism that poisons all Labour Home Secretaries the minute they are appointed.  And, frankly, she’s never going to be remembered for anything other than supposedly bunking down in her sister’s spare room while her husbands’ kecks were round his ankles back home in front of some publicly-funded fruity flicks.

Yvette Cooper has been in Cabinet for 18 months now and has done precisely jack and shit, though the role of Chief Secretary of the Treasury is not exactly conducive to extrovert showmanship.  Perhaps we have to reserve judgement on her for now.

Mo Mowlem was a lovable person but not exactly a successful Secretary of State.  It wasn’t until after she left the Cabinet that she found a voice for her conscience, a role that lasted too short a time.

That leaves Margaret Beckett as the most successful female Cabinet minister since 1997.  And she’s fucking shit, a professional chair-filler who was so laughably out of her depth as Foreign Secretary that even she told Bliar to fuck off when he appointed her.

I’m not saying that many of the men have been any better – Jack Cunningham, Ron Davies, Derry Irvine, Stephen Byers, Andrew Smith, Alan Milburn, Geoff Hoon… – but it’s striking and depressing just how little has been achieved by female politicians in Britain since That Bloody Woman was kicked into touch.

And if you look at the next generation of ministers you find the farcial Beverley Hughes and Caroline Flint, while the Shadow Cabinet contains such intellectual heavyweights as Theresa May, Theresa Villiers, TheresaCheryl Gillan and Caroline “Nannygate” Spelman.  Slim pickings.

More white, middleupper-class, middle-aged men it is, then.  Great.