Martin Kelly

Some Thoughts On Alex Salmond's Proposal For A Referendum On Independence For Scotland

2012-01-31T21:50:00.003Z

Sorry to be a bit behind with this one - as regular readers will know, I no longer have a home internet connection, so my apologies if anyone else has made these points already.

So Alex Salmond (pictured), the constitutional adventurer who for some reason or other holds the rank of First Minister of Scotland, has published his proposals for a referendum on whether Scotland should become independent. The loaded, juvenile use of words such as 'independent' and 'independence' in this context, with their mental associations that Scotland is in some way a colony of the United Kingdom, by Scottish 'civic nationalists' is, of course, a typically gross abuse of language on their part. There are few more independent people in the world than the Scots; at least that's what the Scottish 'civic nationalists' keep telling us. If an independent people are already independent, why should they seek independence?

The Tartanissimo wishes to hold his jamboree in the autumn of 2014. I have seen no comment being made on why this should be the case, but to me the reason for it being held at that time is clear. He is hoping that the Commonwealth Games, due to be held in Glasgow in the summer of 2014, will provide him with a national 'feelgood factor' upon which he will coast to victory.

There is, however, a credible alternative argument, which is that he is hoping that the sight of the English national team winning many more medals than the Scots, a statistical inevitability given the relative sizes of the two nations' populations, will cause an anti-English backlash, hopefully non-violent. I sincerely hope that this is not the case, if only because such a possible rationale for the timing of an event of such importance to our constitution would be negative, frivolous and deeply unstatesmanlike. But in the event that that is the case, I'll be supporting Australia, who'll probably win everything anyway.

The ubiquitous, sylphlike lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone has indicated that she will relocate her business elsewhere if The Tartanissimo is successful in his constitutional adventure. One hopes that Mrs. Mone ultimately has no need to pursue such a drastic course of action. I do not doubt for a moment that she is sincere in her desire that Scotland should remain a part of the United Kingdom, and that she will pursue whatever action she thinks is appropriate for the conduct of her business.

However, there are some matters upon which businesspeople don't have to be automatically believed, and one of them is their protests that they will move their business elsewhere if they don't get what they want - see, for example, Sir Robert Peel speaking on the textile manufacturers' intentions in 1807. The act of relocation is rare and is usually performed by zealots.

However, there is one area in which their word should be trusted as a rule, and that is their descriptions of the negative effects that constitutional uncertainty has upon business, a historical phenomenon usually known as 'decay of trade'. The Tunnocks Teacake is as Scottish as tossing the caber and the Stone of Scone, and Boyd Tunnock, the man who makes them, has already spoken out about the negative effect that constitutional uncertainty will have on Scottish business.

Decay of trade is not a fiction, it is a fact. At the moment, I'm reading 'God's Fury, England's Fire', Michael Braddick's fascinating account of the English Civil Wars. Professor Braddick goes into great detail about just how badly trade decayed during the constitutional upheavals of the 1640s, and how frequently those who were concerned by it expressed their fears (define irony - buying a book about the Puritans with the booktoken you got in the office Secret Santa). It could be that The Tartanissimo believes that any decay in trade occasioned by the uncertainty he is manufacturing over Scotland's constitutional status will be a necessary part of the new nation's birth pangs, before it comes crying in to the light; an intellectually cogent position, if also a lamentably naive one.

It is sincerely to be hoped that The Tartanissimo is not seeking to foster decay of trade, to create an economic position so bad that he will then be able to position himself as the strong guy we can turn to to sort it all out. As well as being horribly negative, it would be suggestive of megalomania.

The Tartanissimo is a member of the Privy Council, and has either sworn or affirmed the following oath -

"You do swear by Almighty God to be a true and faithful Servant unto The Queen's Majesty as one of Her Majesty's Privy Council. You will not know or understand of any manner of thing to be attempted, done or spoken against Her Majesty's Person, Honour, Crown or Dignity Royal, but you will lett and withstand the same to the uttermost of your power, and either cause it to be revealed to Her Majesty Herself, or to such of Her Privy Council as shall advertise Her Majesty of the same. You will in all things to be moved, treated and debated in Council, faithfully and truly declare your Mind and Opinion, according to your Heart and Conscience; and will keep secret all matters committed and revealed unto you, or that shall be treated of secretly in Council. And if any of the said Treaties or Counsels shall touch any of the Counsellors you will not reveal it unto him but will keep the same until such time as, by the consent of Her Majesty or of the Council, Publication shall be made thereof. You will to your uttermost bear Faith and Allegiance to the Queen's Majesty; and will assist and defend all civil and temporal Jurisdictions, Pre-eminences, and Authorities, granted to Her Majesty and annexed to the Crown by Acts of Parliament, or otherwise, against all Foreign Princes, Persons, Prelates, States, or Potentates. And generally in all things you will do as a faithful and true Servant ought to do to Her Majesty so help you God"

Now for the life of me, I can't see how he can square taking an oath to defend all of Her Majesty's 'civil and temporal Jurisdictions' with a course of action which would result in her principal jurisdiction, the United Kingdom, being rent asunder. To my mind, he should resign either from the Privy Council or from the Scottish National Party. While this might seem unfair, don't forget that he is demanding that Scots and those who live in Scotland make a once in a lifetime choice as to what country they live in. The very least he can do is show the way and make a difficult choice himself before insisting that everyone else does.

I might be wrong, but I think that the exercise of power is going to the heads of the soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government' just a little. The absurd gagging order placed on Pollok Pot The Tartan Trot upon his release from chokey, itself less The Long Walk To Freedom than the long walk to Govan, is without precedent in our history. The Tories might have been out of touch with Scotland, but nothing like this ever happened on their watch (and they certainly would have had more political savvy than to place a gagging order on a person infamously incapable of keeping his mouth shut). If I didn't know any better, I'd think that the authorities were afraid of any Scottish republican voice, even as one as discredited as Pollok Pot's, being heard in the public domain. Remember, in their minds the Scottish 'civic nationalists' are the ones who speak for Scotland; nobody else does. Or should.

Similarly, the news that it's planned to give Scottish school pupils the right to study Scots to Higher level makes one wonder just how useful knowing the meaning of words like 'ilquhame' and 'oxter' will be when the Chinese come for our jobs. It's all so Scottish, and my thanks to Professor Braddick for furnishing one of the great quotes on this sort of situation, from a resident of Newcastle-upon-Tyne who had lived under the occupation of the Scottish Covenanters - for a week -

"God grant this viperous brood so freely received into the body of the Kingdom, do not eat through the belly of their fosterers: for I assure you where they shall govern we shall find them proud lords".

As the great philosopher Robert Mitchum noted in 'Anzio', nothing changes except the uniforms and the transportation.

David Cameron's Tourettes Gaff

2012-01-08T13:56:00.003Z

I'm against the clock again, and the background music's terrible, so here goes.

In his book 'Peace of Soul', the Servant of God Fulton Sheen recorded how 'GK's Weekly' once published a satire on Freudian psychology in which the word 'beer' appeared wherever a Freudian would mention the word 'sex'. The result was, of course, hilarious.

This piece came to mind when hearing that David Cameron had said of Ed Balls's behaviour in the House of Commons that 'it’s like having someone with Tourette’s permanently sitting opposite you'. He would never dream of saying that 'it’s like having someone with cancer permanently sitting opposite you', or 'it’s like having a schizophrenic permanently sitting opposite you'; so why mention Tourettes?

Utterly predictably, this incident says more about Cameron than it does about the condition. He required to accustom himself to being challenged by other people at an age far older than the rest of us, and accordingly finds the experience unpleasant; hopefully not as unpleasant as developing a Tourettes symptomology in adulthood, but unpleasant nonetheless. His ideology is still sodden with the dreary insolence that has been the mark of the Tory Party since the eighteenth century. When insolence meets challenge, it lashes out in rage, and rage takes no account of propriety when fixing on a target. Balls challenges Cameron; Cameron lacks the character and experience of life to handle it; so Balls acts like someone with Tourettes. QED.

When barracking Cameron in the House of Commons, Balls is not in fact acting like a Tourettist. He is instead using the time-honoured leftist tactic of trying to prevent your opponent from speaking by talking over them all the time. It says much for Balls that he should try this in a noisy room. I can vividly recall the late Mick McGahey doing this to a representative of the National Coal Board on 'Reporting Scotland' during the miners' strike of 1983-84. It was unpleasant to watch then, indeed is something of a bad memory, and it's still unpleasant to think of now. On the other hand, it's impossible to watch the blimpish Kenneth Clarke on 'Question Time' without seeing him do the same thing to whatever sacrificial lamb the Labour Party has put up for the purpose. Clarke's scenes on that show give me the impression that he must be an utterly horrible person to be around. On the other hand, perhaps it's all theatre. On the other hand perhaps it's not.

What is also evident from Cameron's outburst is that he seems to think he is free to say the same things in public as he might do in private. If correct, this may suggest that the circle within which he moves is a very narrow one, and that he does not make a great deal of contact with people who are not similar to him in terms of their backgrounds and experiences. To my mind, the proof of this is Cameron's now bog standard response to this controversy of his own making, that he didn't mean to cause offence. If he did not realise that he would cause offence, then he may be accustomed to causing offence as a matter of routine, or else spend a lot of time around people who are in the habit of saying offensive things. I recall David Lindsay once writing that Cameron's accent was narrowing with age instead of broadening. With trademark certitude, David remarked that this was the consequence of Cameron only having contact with people like himself, and he might have been more correct than he imagined. If so, it says little about the mindset of the circles Cameron moves in if they are all of the mind that their will should be obeyed without question. Two other groups in society are affected by this pathology; the first are tyrants, the second children. Tyrants tend not to do apologies under any circumstances, leaving only children as the ones to expect conduct demanding an apology to attract no other consequences.

But what should we expect of a Prime Minister whose Chancellor, when in opposition, described the then Chancellor as 'autistic' without suffering any penalty? These incidents say much about those in power and their calibre, or lack thereof.

As a sufferer of Tourettes, I find it a bit rich that a person who refuses to discuss his historic use of recreational drugs should describe a person whose conduct he finds objectionable as having my problem. Hopefully he wasn't strung out when he said it; for how terrible it would be if the finger on the nuclear button belonged to a cokehead or a stoner.

Happy New Year

2012-01-02T15:12:00.004Z

The Year Of Our Lord 2012 has begun with my fourth dose of food poisoning in nine months. My hands are inflamed with contact dermatitis, the windows still haven't been fixed, my face is adorned with a crop of pustules the like of which I haven't had since I was 14, I can't hear out of my left ear as a result of getting water in it in the shower this morning, the Internet's still switched off, I still haven't started the book and I'm back to work on Wednesday. Piling masochism upon improvidence and infirmity, I'm also reading Emerson's 'Essays', a work which, when read along with 'Walden', proves that in the 1840's there couldn't have been a great deal to do in Concord on a Sunday afternoon.

All in all, the year's shaping up nicely.

A very happy, blessed and prosperous New Year to you all.

'Grumpy Old Men'

2012-01-02T15:01:00.002Z

I usually look forward to the BBC's annnual Christmas offering 'Grumpy Old Men', in which a group of aging and probably wealthy celebrities with unrivalled media access moan publicly about how much they dislike the behaviour of the people they share the planet with.

Sometimes it's quite funny, but an odd thing happened while watching this year's (or is it now last year's?) edition. Usually they've got guys like Will Self or Arthur Smith on it, men whose stock in trade is disgust and disaffection, so they make the exercise amusing. However this year it had a remarkably lightweight line up that included Bobby Davro, Huey Morgan and Matthew Le Tissier.

While I was watching it, the thought occurred to me that that particular selection of grumpy old men was, to put it bluntly, crap; and I thus became a grumpy old man at 'Grumpy Old Men'.

I do hope that the producers will do better next year - or is that this year?

David Cameron's New Year Message

2012-01-02T14:50:00.003Z

The tardiness of its delivery makes one wonder whether he was not preparing a statement for New Year, but formulating a position on it instead.

Moving To Somalia

2011-12-17T15:09:00.002Z

Well, it's been an interesting few weeks since I last blogged, all of them jam-packed with life changing incidents of the type you wouldn't believe if you read about them in a book, which you will hopefully be able to do in the near future.

Although the squalid lack of professionalism which assorted commercial contractors have subjected my household to over the past two months shouldn't be considered surprising, it still has been. We have been forced into the act of having to comprehend the depths of the mental squalor in which some of these people operate, and at times it's been very unpleasant. What has been equally surprising has been the discovery that some of them seem to think that you live in that kind of squalor as well. Nothing in the UK seems to work any more. You agree that you will give people money to do things for you, and then they don't do them. This has happened three times in the past two months, capitalism so stagnant and squalid it makes Marxism seem vital. The past two months have merely reinforced my long held impression that the United Kingdom is sinking into a state of torpor and squalor so squalid that recovery from it is an impossibility.

You see this squalor in everything, from the streets paved with dogshit to the almost comically Ruritanian uniforms worn by the Royal Family, from the grossly high number of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed thinktankers and journalists talking about capitalism rather getting out there and doing it, from our Coalition government's dogged insistence that the private sector will take up the slack in the job market when the history of the past 200 years shows that it never does because it never can (if only because true entrepreneurs are as rare as phoenixes), and in the squalid anthropology of the contractor, from their absolute, in my mind now proverbial, lack of dependability to their willingness to lie to you. In his compelling if necessarily grisly book 'Sins Of the Fathers', the late James Pope-Hennessey recorded that the act of subjection makes liars of the subjected. The extent to which the British now tell each other lies makes me wonder whether we have also assumed the psychological mantle of the subjected, and express it in false expressions. If so, we are subjects of the most squalid form of mainstream capitalism that has ever existed; the capitalism of inefficiency, incompetence, squalor and lies.

It's enough to make you want to emigrate. I think Somalia would be a good bet. They've been badly governed for so long that at least it's understandable if things don't work. With any luck, bits of it might be being administered by the UN, so you'll still get rice and bog rolls. Anything, anything, is better than the squalor in which so many British people are forced to live so that some can get rich. If you think it would be better in an independent Scotland think again, because for what my opinion's worth it would be run as squalidly as the UK is run at the moment, but with a higher proportion of narrow-minded village bullies - Bothyneuk Curling Club's Gala Committee writ on a national scale.

All in all, I will be glad to see the back of this year. Merry Christmas to you all.

'Let The Children Live'

2011-10-23T21:42:00.005+01:00

It's not been the best of weeks.

Essential building works being conducted in the house, which should have ended on Wednesday, are still apparently ongoing. It has been largely uninhabitable, rendering the effort to inhabit it unpleasant for everyone concerned. Indeed, at times it's felt that if a movie were to be made of our home life over the past week, of a mother, father and small son living in a cold property full of furniture swathed in dust sheets, it'd be called 'The Shining'.

This has meant that none of us have really been able to do the things we like doing in the comfort of our own home. It's taught us a lot of lessons about ourselves. Hopefully we can take them to heart. In my case, I had planned to blog a little more than usual, if only because Internet service is being switched off tomorrow. This means that any new posts that appear on the blog from now on will be written from other locations, and will appear at best infrequently. Please don't email me, because I won't be able to answer you.

Yet at 12.00 Mass today, God, in His sublime way, gave me a kick up the backside to remind me that no matter how unpleasant the past week has been, there is always some more unfortunate than myself.

We had a guest celebrant today, Father Peter Walters of the charity, 'Let The Children Live'. Father Walters, a convert from Anglicanism whose attitude to the aid establishment seems to be what I can only describe as benign exasperation, has devoted his life to caring for the street children of Colombia. He pulls no punches, particularly to a congregation in the country with the highest rate of cocaine consumption in Europe.

He is a passionate speaker, which makes him a compelling one. He certainly made a good case for supporting his charity to me.

Please support him and his charges.

On Disposing Of Your Constituents' Confidential Documents In Public Bins

2011-10-16T22:44:00.003+01:00

I wonder if he'd ever have dreamed of doing that with paperwork from Rothschilds.

On Freezing Out Civil Servants

2011-10-16T22:34:00.004+01:00

If a hypothetical Cabinet Minister, one who might both look and sound like he was the sort of wee boy who always stayed in the classroom at playtime in order to read 'The Lord Of The Rings', or to play 'Dungeons and Dragons' along with the rest of the nerds in Muck o' Pitbonkle, were to try to remove Labour appointed senior civil servants from his department, would that not amount to an attack on the integrity of the civil service?

Or could it be a much more profound, ideologically motivated attack not upon the Civil Service but on the state itself - to make the state so unattractive an employer to work for that nobody will want to work for it, thus causing the size of the state to reduce; or more properly, for the state to atrophy?

All very neoconservative, it seems to me; all very entryist. But then again it's entirely hypothetical.

Misconduct In Public Office?

2011-10-16T00:43:00.004+01:00

"Misconduct in public office is an offence at common law triable only on indictment. It carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. It is an offence confined to those who are public office holders and is committed when the office holder acts (or fails to act) in a way that constitutes a breach of the duties of that office" -

The Crown Prosecution Service.

Don't want to kick a bloke when he's down and all that, but doesn't seeking funds for a private company, even a non-profit one, when you're a member of the Cabinet fall within that definition?

A Short Thought On Civil Liberties (As We Near The End Of The Blogging Road)

2011-10-13T00:56:00.005+01:00

The Labour government of Tony Blair created over 3,000 new crimes.

This can only be described as government against the people, proscribing the people, attacking the people.

One of the little patterns that Western history has splashed onto the history books is that when an ideology is fresh and untested, it very quickly butts its head against the brick wall of events and then retreats to its natural limits.

The French Revolution's 'Grande Terreur' was the natural consequence of unbridled liberalism. Liberalism born of absolutism proved itself to be as capable of bloodthirstiness and score-settling as absolutism itself. When La Grande Terreur hit its buffers, less than two days after Robespierre was laughed at, so did liberalism, and for all practical purposes it's been on the back foot ever since, and don't let anyone tell you anything different.

Similarly, the oppression of the poor in the early to middle phases of the Industrial Revolution occasioned by self-serving readings of the 'Wealth of Nations' hit the buffers once that book's very obvious failings became clear. That moment came when the evangelical Anglicans of that period, the type deplored by the less reputable type of modern British historian, got wise to them.

So it is and will be with this attack on civil liberties. Under Blair, the Labour Party became a party of the right, intent on restricting the ability of labour to express its collective desires rather than promoting and encouraging it. They never saw a strike they didn't deplore. Yet even although many of Labour's natural supporters now seem to be almost as demented as Adam Smith in their pursuit of self-interest (a pursuit which is a feature of all societies blighted by failing public institutions and a consequent narrowing of what Francis Fukuyama and others have labelled 'the radius of trust'), I retain great hope that the Blair government's attack on civil liberties will go the way of La Grande Terreur and the dark satanic mills in the end; the people will see through it, and its effect will be nullified by that peculiarly British combination of obstinacy and apathy best described as 'Britishness'.

There is always hope.

Men Behaving Badly

2011-10-09T23:38:00.008+01:00

One doesn't really wish to kick a loyal son of South Lanarkshire when he's down, even a self-proclaimed Thatcherite one who might not hesitate doing the same thing to you were the boot ever to be on the other foot, but it's good to see that the 'Daily Telegraph' has picked up on what, for me, is the most disturbing aspect of the current unpleasantness surrounding Doctor Liam Fox.

That newspaper has picked up on the fact that Adam Werritty resided with Dr. Fox at the latter's flat in Southwark at a time when his mortgage costs were being picked up by the taxpayer. 'Resided' seems to be the best verb to use in this context, for Mr. Werritty cannot be described as having been a lodger, if only because the flat's then owner has indicated that he didn't pay rent.

Although one is fully aware that previous regimes for the claiming of parliamentary expenses were notoriously lax, by the same token it is staggering that it didn't occur to a person of opinions so emphatically right-wing as Dr. Fox's seem to be that he might have some moral obligation to minimise the loss that his arrangement with Mr. Werritty occasioned to the public purse. A loss was certainly occasioned, for Mr. Werritty received shelter at no cost to himself, his housing costs being borne by the taxpayer instead. Dr. Fox could have minimised this loss to the taxpayer by charging Mr. Werritty rent. He didn't do so. To my mind, this illustrates an inability to understand his own ideology so profound that it casts a very grey shadow over his judgment.

It all seems very redolent of the kind of relationship portrayed in the sitcom 'Men Behaving Badly'.

In Scotland, Hatred Never Dies

2011-10-02T22:27:00.011+01:00

The best book about Ireland that I have ever read is VS Naipaul's 'Among The Believers'.

Some people might find that sentence surprising, perhaps not least Sir Vidia. However, his analysis of Pakistani nationalism's mindset circa 1980-81 almost directly matches my experience of the Irish nationalist mindset. In particular, his description of how Pakistani nationals of that era regarded emigration as wholly acceptable as they already had a country of their own to be eerily redolent of thinking that I have encountered in some Irish quarters.

This makes all the more questionable the claims of some Scottish civic nationalists - see Angus Calder's 'Scotlands Of The Mind', for example - that everyone who comes to Scotland should be considered to be a Scot, if only because it impertinently removes the freedom to choose which nation they consider themselves as belonging to from the objects of their affection. We can and should consider them to be neighbours; the obligation to show charity demands no less. However, whether they should be considered Scots is really their choice to make. The civic nationalists of the soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government' might know fewer new Scots, and be more unfamiliar with how they think, than they are letting on.

And it goes without saying that any independent Scotland crafted by Scottish civic nationalists will also produce emigrants who feel the same way about Scotland as some Irish emigrants feel about Ireland and Sir Vidia Naipaul reported some Pakistani emigrants as feeling about Pakistan. But they'll be Scots, so it'll be all right.

However, those of us who really have no choice but to belong here must labour under the constraints imposed by the culture of the sometime Best Small Country In The World. Ruth Davidson, a kickboxing lesbian who is currently running for the leadership of the Scottish Conservatives, has parted company with one Ross McFarlane after he got a little carried away with the sectarianism.

If one were in an uncharitable frame of mind, one might be tempted to believe that the very unpleasant nature of his comments reveal Mr. McFarlane to be, in an untranslatable Glaswegian vernacular, a baw-faced balloon. As far as a political career in Scotland goes, he's toast. His name is now filed in too many memories to make any kind of comeback viable; not soon, not ever.

However, it's the disappointingly casual nature of his contempt for others' beliefs that gets to you. In Scotland, this sort of thing never stops getting to you. I've worked in places where being a Catholic, particularly one with some education, has given me the sort of status I imagine that an educated Greek slave might have had on a Roman latifundium; a useful guy to have around when brainwork needs doing but otherwise firmly out of the loop. In this respect, Scotland will never change. In this country, there will always be ignorant wallies out there who feel offended by you just because you're here.

Yes, we're a great wee country.

March Them To The Cashline

2011-10-02T21:51:00.005+01:00

Listening to an alleged tax avoider claiming that the motorway speed limit should be raised from 70 mph to 80 mph in order to bring people inside the law almost had me kicking the TV in fury.

This proposal is absolutely Thatcherite, red meat for Del Boys and rich ferals who regard compliance with the law not as a civic duty but as a lifestyle choice. Lives will be lost so that 'business' can be done even more quickly in the country with the most worker-unfriendly employment laws and longest working hours in the European Union (and the visceral hatred of the Conservative Party for people who work for a living is proved by its stated intention to revisit one of the Blair government's very few progressive measures, the reduction in the qualifying period for bringing a claim of unfair dismissal from two years to one; for people who claim their ideology requires the removal of restrictions on business, they show not the slightest hesitation in regulating those who have only their labour to sell).

A suitable response to such specious claims about speed limits would be to demand stricter enforcement of existing laws and tougher penaties on speeders, such as the confiscation of vehicles driven in excess of the speed limit on the motorway network and mandatory life bans for those found guilty of a third offence. To bring people into the law when the law in unclear is one thing, but to bring people who won't obey the law into the law, even when the law is flashed in front of their eyes in orange lights as the speed limit is on British motorways, is quite another. At that point, such people have won whatever game they think they're playing, because the law will always be changed to suit them and the rule of law has ceased to have any meaning.

However, it was doubly sickening to hear another alleged tax avoider mouthfart today from the Conservative Party Conference about the financial mess the country's in. Their brain may have been addled by the small talk of cravatted manacle salesmen and wannabe sanctions-busters, but the irony that the country's finances may be as bad as they apparently are - a myth I do not buy into - on account of our authorities' ludicrously lax approach to the payment of personal tax by the wealthy might have been lost on them.

No person who's used as a tax avoidance vehicle, either personal or corporate, should be permitted to even become a Member of Parliament for a period of five years after their use of such vehicles has ceased. Any Member of Parliament found to have used such a vehicle should be barred from the House until they have paid all sums that would have been or may be owing at the correct rate of tax, in other words of personal income tax, on sums which they have either paid themself or been paid as rather smelly dividends. As they are both income, salary and dividends should be taxed at the same rate and under the same rules. If this means marching ministers to the cashline to pay up so that they can continue in government, so be it. Similarly, no minister found to have ever used a tax avoidance vehicle should be able to claim their full pension, instead being able to receive one calculated to reflect their calculated failure to contribute; and let's face it, they probably don't need the money anyway.

Fish rots from the head down, says that rotting old Russian proverb; and I for one am damn tired of knocking my pan in at the bottom of the heap while the guys who make the rules also seem to be able to slide around them with no or few questions asked.

The Predatory Pricing Of Nicotine Replacement Therapies

2011-10-02T21:24:00.011+01:00

The braying donkeys of the British mainstream right, which is in fact a far right for all practical purposes, often bray at their opponents that if they are opposed to the business practices of supermarkets then they should not shop in them.

This begs the answer that the world the braying donkeys have helped create is one where there are few shops other than supermarkets, and that even their opponents have the right to eat.

Yesterday's storm in a whisky glass over a supermarket chain's apparent determination to flout the spirit of the law if not its letter, yet another example of a crappily drafted law having oozed out of the Queen's Scottish outhouse for no apparent purpose other than to cause confusion amongst those delegated with its enforcement and contempt amongst those upon whom it is supposed to be enforced, is not the worst example of antisocial business practice by supermarkets I have come across. The worst is one I have recently encountered myself.

I stopped smoking on 9th April this year but continue to use nicotine replacement therapy, specificially Nicorette 4 mg Freshmint gum, sold in packets of 105. These are not prescription medicines. I have purchased them at the branch of Boots on Crow Road, Glasgow at a price of £15.00 per box, if memory serves. I have also purchased them from my local supermarket, at an initial price of £10.00, again if memory serves.

However, the supermarket later cut the price for a packet of 105 Nicorette 4 mg Freshmint gums to £5.00. At the same time, it was retailing a packet of Nicorette 2 mg Freshmint gum, if I recall correctly also a packet of 105, for £8.00; more money for less nicotine, or, if you prefer, less money for more nicotine. At that point, I resolved not to buy anymore. However, my willpower has wavered. When I went to check this afternoon, it looked like the deals were off, and they certainly didn't have any packets of 105 Nicorette 4 mg Freshmint gums on display.

A medicine remains a medicine even when it does not require a prescription. I cannot see how that supermarket chain's decision to charge £5.00 for a medicine which sells for £15.00 in a pharmacy can be anything other than predatory pricing. The predatory pricing of goods that make you well is, to my mind, even more morally reprehensible than the predatory pricing of goods that make you ill. You stop taking the latter when you get ill, but need the former to restore yourself and will suffer more when the price goes up.

The only rational explanation I can think of for this apparently irrational pricing behaviour is that the supermarket might intend its customers to become accustomed to cheap nicotine, and when that's withdrawn they will have second thoughts about not visiting the cigarette stand. If that's the case, then the time has come for the operation of supermarkets to be licenced.

On Lemon-Flavoured Napkins, And Other Things

2011-09-26T22:57:00.012+01:00

In one of his 'Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' books, I cannot remember which, the late Douglas Adams placed his sublime antihero Zaphod Beeblebrox on a passenger spaceship which has crashed on to a wilderness planet.

Beeblebrox is startled to find the passengers sleeping, when they all instantly wake up screaming. A robotic steward later explains to him that the ship crashed while searching for lemon-flavoured napkins. With none available, the passengers have been placed in stasis until a civilisation capable of producing lemon-flavoured napkins can arise, at which point their journey will resume. They are revived once a year for coffee and biscuits, explaining their extreme reaction to a being with two heads.
The story, tall as it is, sprang to my mind after cancelling my Internet subscription a few days ago. For reasons of the type easy to imagine in our current economic climate, but which good taste dictates are still best kept to oneself, the decision has been made to disconnnect oneself from the online community until such time as its activation can be justified again.

Although this might seem hard to believe, it isn't really going to be much of a loss. This is the first time I've been online in days. I have not broken into cold sweats, nor been observed muttering to myself on the streets of Lanarkshire, or certainly no more than usual, at least as far as the muttering's concerned. Life goes on. There was life before the Internet, and there will be life after it. Blogging is a uniquely self-renewing medium. My best man The Big Lad has recently started his own blog, and a very good one it is as well. He has my best wishes for its success. Without wishing to engage in a maudlin 'Vitai Lampada', this kind of churn in creative personnel amongst bloggers is a good thing, a very good thing, for it keeps the medium fresh.

And having had more retirements from blogging than Frank Sinatra from Caesar's Palace, it's a fair bet I'll be back at some point, God willing.

With that in mind, I thought I'd give some last random thoughts before my blogging career goes to the Great Dashboard in the Sky, where everyone can read HTML and nothing is overcoded.

While Orlando Figes may at times have been mercurial and capricious in his personal dealings, his brilliance as a Russianist cannot be doubted. 'The Whisperers' makes the case that Stalin set out to destroy private life in Russia. There never was any real need for eight or nine families to be sharing apartments, but it suited the ideological agenda; fifty people sharing one toilet, and that indoors, can have few secrets from each other.

Having read that book, one can wonder whether neoliberalism has a similar agenda for the destruction of public life. The constant assaults on workers' rights to withdraw their labour - shamefully abetted by leaders of the Labour Party who have never seen a strike, no matter how just, which they haven't deplored and whose consistently spineless failure to defend working people's use of their bargaining chip of last resort will hopefully cause historians of the future to spit their names with venom - the petty indignities inflicted upon Scout troops unable to go to the park or the seaside because they don't have insurance and so on, all seem to indicate the workings of an ideology totally opposed to people having any kind of communal lives, either in the workplace or in pursuit of a shared interest. If it's true then it's rather sad, if only because it's so pathetic.

Murdo Fraser MSP wishes to become leader of the Scottish Conservatives and then reform the party into oblivion. The application of Occam's Razor makes me wonder why he just doesn't resign from the party he's in and start his own.

I am still getting to grips with the new English translation of the Mass. The overly pre-Free State Irish, at times overly-clericalised nature of much Catholic worship in Scotland may have been why the old lady behind me, 85 years old if she was a day, was bobbing up and down with slothlike nimbleness. It would be very sad to think she was putting herself through a set of physical jerks worthy of a Nazi summer camp in order to satisfy her conscience that she has tried to do everything a priest has told her to do. For the first few weeks, a little bit of the Mass's dignity was, to my mind, stripped away as worshippers seemed to be engaged in some sort of arthritic Pilates, a geriatric Zumba class for people who don't yet understand whether they should be standing up or kneeling down for the 'Agnus Dei'. Seeing the apparent discomfort of some of the old, and not so old, people around me at this point in the worship they have chosen to join, I have to confess that an uncharitable recollection concerning public comments made by the Scottish Catholic Church's spokesman regarding the Hokey Cokey has flashed through my head more than once. However, the element of unexpected physicality introduced by the new translation seems to be settling down now. Maybe the hip replacements are finally screaming for mercy. I'm also puzzled by some of the wording. In the Creed, the words 'of one being with the Father' have been replaced with 'consubstantial with the Father'. One would have thought that the words 'of one being' have precisely the same meaning as the word 'consubstantial', while also being very much easier to explain to young children. The more mean-spirited might think that 'consubstantial' is the sort of word best tossed out as refectory repartee, and while theologically exact doesn't really sit well with those, like me, who have no desire to be the most accomplished theologian in the graveyard, particularly when a very much clearer alternative is being pushed aside in its favour. These matters are not in my hands, thank Goodness, but for the first few weeks I was extremely disoriented, a sensation I never handle very well - quiet mutterings, quieter raspberries and all that - and came to understand and develop great sympathy for those souls who must have been disoriented by hearing the Mass in English for the first time. Given that the Mass is, or should be, an act of orientation towards the ultimate, I hope that the grace of the God who has guided the production of this new translation will descend upon His worshippers and lead them to appreciate its subtleties.

While I was not party to the negotiations, and have great sympathy for their loss as a family no matter whatever foibles some of them might possess or have possessed as individuals, the compensation reported as having been paid or which is becoming payable to the family of Milly Dowler by News International for the hacking of her mobile phone seems excessively high.

Earlier this evening, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary entitled 'The Wonderful World of Tony Blair'. This is a very good title for any item which is either written or broadcast about that gentleman, so good in fact that I used it as the title for an article I wrote for 'The Washington Dispatch' almost exactly nine years ago.

And that, for the time being, is that. Thank you all for your kindness in reading, and may God bless you and keep all of you in His tender care. I have made many generous friends through this blog, and wish all of you all the very best. Ave atque vale.

Does The Royal Family Use Tax Avoidance Vehicles?

2011-09-18T23:31:00.004+01:00

This is probably a most unworthy thought for such a loyal subject as myself to have, but given that the Queen now actually pays tax one can't help but wonder whether she or any of her immediate family are the beneficiaries of any schemes the purpose of which is to legitimately minimise their tax liabilities.

I realise that in some circles that question might be regarded as being as tasteless as asking whether any of them have offshore bank accounts - Heaven forbid - but if their advisers have allowed such schemes to be set up on their behalf then that would send out a very poor message to the rest of us. Even if the person in whose name tax is collected isn't aware that they aren't paying as much as they could, what message about paying tax does that send to the rest of us?

'Downton Abbey'

2011-09-18T23:25:00.003+01:00

The second series of Julian Fellowes's sublimely produced period toff porn is shaping up quite nicley.

The first episode, broadcast earlier this evening, was set in 1916. Some of the younger male servants are still not at the front - to the apparent chagrin of some of the more bloodthirsty female characters, it must be said - and at a concert in the Big House two young women start distributing white feathers. Enraged by this, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) shouts at them 'You are the cowards here!'

Later on his gallant valet Bates (Brendan Coyle) leaves Downton at dead of night, apparently to prevent a sexual scandal from engulfing his empoyer's family.

It's edge of the seat stuff, I can tell you.

'The Rational Optimist'

2011-09-16T23:20:00.005+01:00

In my last post, I described Matt Ridley's book 'The Rational Optimist' as being 'thoroughly squalid and meretricious'. Having now finished it, I fear I might have been pulling my punches.

With the justified garlands gained in his previous career as a scientist and populariser of science now tarnished by that irrational optimism which led him to believe that he could help run a bank, Ridley may have felt that he had something to prove to his public, with this book being the result. If that was the case then in my opinion he has failed, for to my eyes it merely reads like a frantic restatement of his really quite right-wing economic beliefs; the thoughts of a man desperately clinging on to the hope that the beliefs he holds and has held are true beliefs.

It is blighted by Ridley's belief, perhaps a predictable one given his background, that human beings evolved from apes, a proposition for which, to my knowledge, not a shred of evidence sits on the scientific record. Earlier this year, it was very interesting to see two different writers advance almost exactly the same argument for this faintly absurd suggestion; that it was so credible that it could only be true, and to think otherwise could be deemed unreasonable. One was H. G. Wells, in his 'Short History Of The World', published in 1928, while the other was Simon Schama, in his appositely titled anthology 'Scribble, Scribble, Scribble', published in 2010 (and a wonderful read it is as well, if only because the author, already much beloved on this blog, manages to skid from extremes of fanatical Obamaphilia to the most dessicated pointy-headedness when discussing art to his apparent default mode of Tiggerish harmlessness, all souffles and Charlotte Rampling, in the way other men change their socks).

Ridley might not have set out to be self-serving, but it is certainly my opinion that his perhaps legally accurate description of himself as having been 'non-executive chairman' of Northern Rock at the time it required to be rescued does seem self-serving. Were the words 'non-executive' included to try to put even a little distance between himself and what was going on inside the institution? If they were, it hasn't worked.

The thrust of the book is that human development has grown up through trade and, in Ridley's rather squalid phrase, 'ideas having sex'. Organised religions seem to be bad because, in Ridley's rather sweeping view, they need temporal empires in order to spread themselves - what Saints Paul, Thomas, Patrick, Columbkille and Francis Xavier might have thought of this view can only be speculated upon. But while organised religion may be a very bad thing - and organised religion is, incidentally, the only entity that lends legitimacy to the ranks held by the aristocracy of which Ridley is a member, on the basis that they are or have been granted by monarchs whose own very slender claims to legitimacy have depended upon their seizure of the title 'Fidei Defensor', that title which they claim to be theirs and which is so important that it's the only one on the coins - spontaneously ordered religion seems to be very good, and that old Mitteleuropan hack Hayek is its prophet. According to Ridley we should be actively seeking Catallaxy, not a good idea in my opinion for, as he should know very well, Catallaxy bites. We are not into science here, folks, but we are very heavily into eschatology of the most brutally materialistic sort.

This would all be a better class of agitprop if he hadn't made such sweeping judgements, nor tripped over himself so much, nor made such glaring mistakes. One mistake that really jumped off the page appears on Page 129, when he writes that,

"Other descendants of the Black Sea refugees took to the plains of what is now Ukraine where they domesticated the horse and developed a new language, Indo-European, that would come to dominate the western half of the Eurasian continent, and of which Sankrit and Gaelic are both descendants".

If you wish to read one book of universal history, read Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's 'Civilisations'. In that most wonderful of books, Professor Fernandez-Armesto writes that there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of, in his words, an 'ur-Sprach' from which the Indo-European family of languages sprang, nor of any particular place, no 'ur-Heimat', from which they sprang. If Ridley had studied this area of history more closely before sitting down at the PC, he might have learned, possibly even to his great delight, that modern scholarship in this area believes that the Indo-European languagess grew from, of all things, trading links. To my mind, this error reveals a glaring gap in Ridley's scholarship in matters outwith his own area of expertise, which in turn leads one to think that anything he writes upon anything not within his own area of expertise isn't really to be trusted.

And you really can tell something about a man by hearing what sort of people he admires. On Page 170, after listing all...zzz...of the achieve...zzz..ments...that they...zzz...made by, with almost tedious predictability, having little or no government and virtually absolute freedom to trade, he writes 'But in truth, was there ever a more admirable people than the Phoenicians'?

Well, yes, in fact just about anybody who doesn't or didn't practice child sacrifice is more admirable than the Phoenicians. I am perfectly willing to accept that Ridley's over-evolved enthusiasm for his economic beliefs got the better of him when he wrote that sentence, but to my mind it's a shocking, and squalid and meretricious, error of judgement. Then again, it might not be the first one he's ever made.

He trips over himself. On Page 291 he includes the name of Naomi Klein amongst those he seems to think are modern prophets of doom, yet on Page 318, in the context of how the aid system actively impedes development in Africa, he writes,

"...in recent years, much aid has been granted on condition of free-market economic reform, which far from kickstarting economic growth, frequently proves damaging to local traditions, undermining the very mechanisms that get enrichment started".

This sentence could have come straight out of 'The Shock Doctrine', by, er, Naomi Klein. Accordingly, I have to wonder whether Ridley read 'The Shock Doctrine' before denigrating its author.

This may indeed by cold comfort to Ridley, but in this matter he even seems to be to the left of John Pilger.

The last nail in this book's coffin is its list of acknowledgments: Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Johan Norberg, Nigel Lawson, Russell Roberts, David Willetts...the gang's all here. I merely report that having listed Nigel Lawson among the acknowledgments, the paperback version carries a very favourable quote from his son Dominic Lawson on the front cover, quite some way above the title.

This book was not worth reading. In my opinion it reads like a frantic iteration of belief from a man whose experiences may have shaken it. At times, Ridley's writings on economics seem like the outpourings of a fanatic, if only because he will analyse every aspect of the physical world around him but seems to accept the teachings of Hayek absolutely and without question. After reading it, I actually felt quite sorry for him - he puts everything under the microscope but himself.

Twenty Years After

2011-09-14T00:25:00.004+01:00

My apologies for not posting recently - been catching up on my reading, although in the case of Matt Ridley's 'The Rational Optimist', in my opinion a thoroughly squalid and meretricious book, I might as well not have bothered - I couldn't let the occasion pass without comment.

I became physically symptomatic on Friday 13th September 1991 - a day that will live in infamy.

The very insecure old solicitor whose tedious Rumpeltskinian shenanigans got the ball rolling is now dead, so, if only to preserve a point of good manners he was never very keen on observing himself, 'de mortuis nil nisi bonum' and all that. At that time in his life, his early '60's, he looked like Stroessner on the slide - a pot belly on a five foot five inch frame somehow miraculously suspended above a grey Bobby Charlton combover and a pair of Reactolite Rapides. Every damn day he would lose confidence in himself and what he had directed should be done, and blow his top with someone as a result. It seemed like every damn day there would be an apologetic missal posted on the office notice board saying that each day was a new start, or some crap like that; the classic behaviour pattern of an abusive spouse.

However, as far as I was concerned any relationship with the man ended at about 14.30 on Friday 13th September 1991, two months into a two year traineeship on, if memory serves, a very sunny early autumn afternoon on Sauchiehall Street, when the ritualised bollocking, almost a hazing, of being forced to stand in front of his desk while he ripped up my work in front of me while screaming at the top of his voice, got too much for me and both my head and right arm suddenly snapped from the middle to the right and would not stop snapping no matter what I did ('duties of care', anyone?). I remember running through the office from his room on the ground floor to mine on the mezzanine level just to get away from him, and I don't remember anything else of that afternoon. A year long diagnostic process followed thereafter, I was diagnosed in November 1992 and by the grace of God I'm still bloody well here.

It's been an interesting twenty years - you can't have 22 jobs in 20 years and not have an interesting time - but the high points have, of course, been becoming a husband and then becoming a father. He's a lovely boy, you know. I suppose many fathers look at their children slightly wistfully, hoping that they will be able to do more with their talents than their fathers have. Maybe he'll be the one to crack writing for a living.

On the other hand, I'm not dead yet.

The Neil Lennon Verdict Explained (I Think)

2011-09-01T23:29:00.006+01:00

While one side of my brain remains baffled by John Wilson's acquittal, the other thinks it might be able to explain why the jury reached its decision.

The critical element in the BBC report is this passage -

"The jury of seven women and eight men deleted the reference to making a sectarian remark from the charge relating to breach of the peace, and that the offence was aggravated by religious prejudice."

I may have this all wrong, and have not examined the relevant legislation - pulling out one's own fingernails with a pair of pliers would be an infinitely more enlightening and profitable pastime - but the wording of that report suggests to me that it has been framed in such a way that the alleged crime which is alleged to have been aggravated by sectarianism cannot be separated from the aggravation. In other words, in cases such as this, where a sectarian aggravation has been libelled, it is not enough merely for the crime to be proved for a conviction to be obtained; in order for the prosecution to be successful, the aggravation must also be proved.

If this is true then the law is not just an ass, it's ass backwards. For want of a better expression, an aggravation should always be the icing on the cake in such matters. A crime must always have been committed before it can be aggravated. What we might have here is an aggravation in search of a crime to attach itself to.

If this is the case, it suggests to me that the pitifully low standard of legislative draftsmanship displayed by the Scottish Parliament since devolution shows no signs of improving. Holyrood has a track record of producing badly written laws, and this one may be no exception.

It could also suggest that we might be on the way back to those days recalled by G. M. Trevelyan in his 'English Social History', when the phrase 'You might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb' had real meaning. Trevelyan records that in the 18th and 19th Centuries juries were often unwilling to convict in cases of minor crimes, often committed out of desperation, which carried grossly disproportionate penalties (ah yes, 'Merrie England', the birthplace of transportation and the man-trap). Given the political focus on stamping out sectarianism - a futile exercise to conduct in the west of Scotland, but I suppose God loves a trier - it may be the case that juries will not convict unless they are absolutely sure of guilt, applying a self-imposed standard of absolute and not merely reasonable doubt to their deliberations and allowing perfectly good cases which would have succeeded without the allegation of sectarian aggravation to fall.

And just as well, because as a self- proclaimed civil libertarian one can't really take any issue with 100 guilty men going free and so on and so forth and all that.

If any of the above is not the case, then I would be very interested to know whether the Crown Office was placed under any pressure by the soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government' to prosecute this matter with a sectarian aggravation attached. The Tartanissimo has held forth at length on the need for anti-sectarian legislation, and what better way of driving home the need for such laws than a high-profile trial in which it will be alleged (with the word 'alleged' in this context meaning that the events were broadcast around the world) that a high-profile Catholic was subjected to a sectarian assault during the course of his employment as manager of Celtic Football Club, with the scene of the crime being pitchside during a league fixture. In Scotland, you don't get more high profile than that. If it is the case that the Crown Office was leaned on to make sure that the sectarian element stayed on the indictment to the bitter end, we're further down the road to Tartanitarianism than even I have feared.

The End Of Solicitor-Client Confidentiality In Scotland

2011-08-31T23:28:00.008+01:00

It seems that my former professional brethren are all at risk of being co-opted as special constables in the war against the gangs.

I don't care what fine words are uttered by the President and Council of The Law Society of Scotland on this matter; although they might not intend to turn solicitors into snitches, that will be the consequence of their actions. The purpose of solicitor-client confidentiality is to ensure that clients are able to receive all relevant advice, and they can only receive all relevant advice when they are able to provide their solicitors with all relevant facts. If solicitors feel compelled to act like Eaglesham's or Eyemouth's answer to Eliot Ness, then clients will not discuss matters with their solicitors as fully as they should.

One possible, and very possibly unintended, consequence of this state of affairs coming about will be non-gang members being prosecuted for gang-related crimes. If a gang-member knows that he can't discuss gang activity with his solicitor then there is no reason for him to plead guilty to anything, if only because he can't obtain the appropriate professional advice. This would in turn result in increases not only in the number of unsuccessful prosecutions but also of less convincing prosecutions being brought before the courts; should the police ever feel under pressure to keep up their war on the gangs, the temptation to cast their net wider and throw a whale in order to catch a sprat might become very strong.

Another very possible, and most hopefully unintended, consequence would be jealous and avaricious solicitors maliciously 'shopping' their more successful peers in the hope of tarring them with the suspicion of being gang lawyers. One would hope that if such behaviours were ever detected, the beaks would have the culprits in their jaws in a flash.

This is just another example of how the civil liberties of Scots are being degraded during an administration which boasts of its wish to set Scotland free. Although freedom might be slavery and ignorance strength, The Tartanissimo and the agencies under his control also seem to believe that tyranny is liberty. As James Erskine of Grange remarked of pre-Union Scotland in 1732, 'Liberty was a stranger here'. It seems that in many ways she's still a stranger.

'That Bastard Verdict'

2011-08-31T23:20:00.002+01:00

Although I will defend Scotland's unique 'Not Proven' verdict with the last breath in my body, there are times when one knows just what Walter Scott meant.

This is Scotland in the 21st Century, folks. Go figure.

Libyan Extradition Policy

2011-08-29T23:29:00.005+01:00

The announcement that the now located Abdelbaset al-Megrahi would not be extradited by any new Libyan government, as neither would any other Libyan national, does make one wonder just why the BBC keeps referring to Gaddafi as being wanted by the International Criminal Court.

If he is ever caught, then it would seem to be the case that if his former subjects wish to try him themselves they will do so without any interference from abroad.

Similarly, it would be hard to see how any offer of amnesty or immunity made to him by any new Libyan government could ever be challenged by any other nation. The Libyans seem to be following the line taken by the Russians in their insistent refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoy to the UK for questioning regarding the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, that to do so would be contrary to their law (which it would be) and that they're not going to be dictated to in their own country by foreigners. We'll see how this one pans out; hopefully not into nationalism or pan-Arabist chauvinism, but a healthy regard for civil liberties, for law and for the rule of law instead.

To be forced to live in peace in a peaceful country in which he knows he is immune from prosecution but in which he can't oppress anyone anymore would be hell on Earth for Gaddafi, and at that point his transformation into a North African Pinochet would be complete.

A Short Guide To Reading 'The Guardian'

2011-08-29T23:08:00.004+01:00

While the BBC, the 'Daily Telegraph', the 'Daily Mirror' and the 'Daily Mail' all saw fit to record the passing of the Scottish SAS veteran John McAleese, as at the time of writing this I have been unable to find any reference to his death in the online edition of 'The Guardian'.

I hope that they have made some mention of it in the paper edition. If they have not, its editors would be guilty either of shocking carelessness or unforgivable churlishness. While we might not like the uses to which our armed forces are sometimes put, we should always be on the side of the very brave men on the ground who do the fighting, the ordinary soldiers who didn't go to Eton or Harrow. They're the ones whose side 'The Guardian' is always supposed to be on.

'The Guardian' is often at its best when Britain is at its worst, such as during the phone-hacking scandal. Equally, it is when Britain is or has been at its best that 'The Guardian' is often at its worst, and this is a classic case in point. It takes physical courage greater than I can fathom to do what Mr. McAleese and his colleagues did in 1980, and to be disrespectful to those who preserve your liberty is to treat it with contempt.

My condolences to Mr. McAleese's family.

Legal Thoughts, Part I

2011-08-27T23:15:00.006+01:00

It has been reported that a new suspect has been identified during the re-animated investigation into the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. I am troubled by this.

The heartbreaking fact of the matter is that WPC Fletcher's murderer, whoever they might be or have been (given the current situation in Libya, this might perhaps be a more fluid, less definite condition than they might be wholly comfortable with), very probably walked out of the Libyan Embassy in London under the cover of diplomatic immunity. If they had immunity at the time, then I cannot see how they do not enjoy immunity now. I cannot possibly see how diplomats whose credentials have once been accepted can later be held to account for anything they did or might have done while their credentials were recognised.

For even after her murder, their credentials were recognised. That's why they walked out of their own accord, rather than being carried out in body bags after a brief encounter with some gentlemen from Hereford.

All we would achieve by pursuing a prosecution in this matter would be to make every British diplomat fair game for illegal prosecution, wherever in the world they might have served and without regard for whatever period of time might have elapsed after their posting had finished. I am beginning to wonder if those in charge of this country's government have finally lost all understanding of that the rule of law really is.

Legal Thoughts, Part II

2011-08-27T22:41:00.004+01:00

The apparent thuggishness displayed by Frederick Goodwin, the most financially destructive incompetent in British corporate history, while flying the Royal Bank of Scotland nose first into the ground is being exposed in a soon to be published book entitled 'Masters Of Nothing: The Crash And How It Will Happen Again'.

Goodwin is reported as having thrown a Queeg-like wobbly when presented with the 'wrong' type of biscuit. If true, it seems like pathetically juvenile behaviour from the leader of a multi-billion pound organisation. More alarming, however, is the question of fire alarms.

As inimitably paraphrased by 'The Daily Record',

"At dinner functions, an engineer was kept on standby until the early hours to switch off fire alarms when fatcats wanted to smoke inside".

This raises two issues which might appear to merit closer investigation by the authorities.

The first is whether or not the Royal Bank of Scotland jeopardised the safety of its staff or contractors contrary to the Health and Safety at Work, etc Act 1974. There would be staff and contractors on site while these dinners were taking place, even if it was only the engineer who turned the fire alarms off having to wait around to turn them back on again. It would be interesting to know whether individuals who pursued what might perhaps be a course of criminal conduct, the alleged neutralisation of the fire alarm system, did so of their own volition or under duress, and if under duress what form that duress took.

The second is whether any of these reported puff-fests took place during the period between the banning of smoking in certain public places in Scotland and Goodwin's defenestration from the Royal Bank of Scotland. One would imagine that the Royal Bank of Scotland does not permit its staff to smoke within any of its places of business, although it might permit smoking in certain designated areas outside them. One would also imagine that the law of Scotland would deem all of the Royal Bank of Scotland's places of business to be public places of the type in which smoking has been banned. If the ban has been breached, then it would seem to be a simple matter for those who breached it and for those who allowed it to be breached to be held to account for their actions. We do not have one law for people at the top and another for people at the bottom.

That's the theory, anyway.

On Mozilla Firefox

2011-08-27T01:37:00.003+01:00

This puppy's wonderful!

I've been paying for broadband for over six years, and at last I've got what I've been paying for!

As sad as it is to say, when even a literary-minded non-techie Internet Explorer loyalist like me decides to investigate whether there might be better browsers out there, the only conclusion one can draw is that Bill has blown it; and that is a state of affairs for which he has nobody to blame but himself.

The 'Publish Post' button actually works now! Look! Look!

On Gaddafi And Bounties

2011-08-26T17:32:00.009+01:00

As someone whose repugnance at the rapprochement between the western nations and the Gaddafi regime has now been on record for the best part of a decade, I still have reservations about the approach being taken to effect his capture.

I can't stand the whole 'bounty' thing; it reeks of the desperation that accompanies lawlessness. It sends out the wrong message, that justice is a commodity that can be bought and sold like any other. The FCO, otherwise known as the FO with a great big C in the middle, should be discouraging it forcefully, if only because it gives the impression that either the world's most sophisticated intelligence services don't know where he is, or that it is thought that he might be much more difficult to catch than anyone anticipated.

If it is legitimate to pay a bounty for Gaddafi, it would presumably also be legitimate to pay bounties for the capture of other people associated with his regime, such as Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and this is where the law and morality of it all becomes very muddy. There have been rumblings from Washington that Megrahi should be delivered to American justice. This would be a travesty, as he has already been convicted under the law of Scotland. For the rest of his days, he will be a prisoner of Her Majesty's sentenced to a period of imprisonment for life but who has been released on licence. That is his status; he has no other. It is unfortunate that many relatives of American victims, and some American politicians, were unhappy that he was released on compassionate grounds, but that's all it is; unfortunate. In fact and in law the USA has no jurisdiction over him, and any ex post facto claim of jurisdiction over him by the USA would be contrary to law and the rule of law; revolutionary justice of the worst sort.

They might see it as being unfortunate that he has survived for so long after his release, to which one can only say that if you were a non-UK national dying of cancer in Greenock prison who was released on compassionate grounds, then the combined effects of being transferred to your own country, of being around your own family again and of having access to drugs and medical care which might not be available on the NHS might prolong your survival for longer than anticipated as well. That he is still alive so long after having been released shouldn't really be a cause for irritation. It's only surprising that we should be surprised.

If the chaps from Fort Bragg do wish to take him for a ride, they can perfectly legitimately take him to see his social worker at East Renfrewshire Council, the only non-Libyan official in the world with legal authority over him; and the sight of Dwight and Clayton Lee doing a rope slide from a Black Hawk over Rouken Glen Park would probably be something they don't see in Giffnock every day.

(Update 26/08/11 - a matter of moments after this item was posted, the 'BBC Six O'Clock News' reported that Megrahi might appear to have broken the terms of his licence by no longer apparently being in residence at his villa in Tripoli. While this is obviously an undesirable state of affairs, I can't really recall any other situation where a Scottish prisoner on licence has breached its terms while living in a country which was undergoing a revolution and in which they were regarded as being close to the ancien regime, perhaps making them feel that they might be at risk if they continue to stay at the address they provided to the authorities. Megrahi's case has been exceptional from the outset, and I think even the Scottish Prison Service might understand if he's uncontactable for a few days under present circumstances. If he were really smart, he'd be looking to claim asylum in the one country in the world which possesses both a working government and a duty of care towards him, which is, er, the United Kingdom. Just imagine what fun the Daily Mail would have with that one, and by law there wouldn't be a damn thing anyone could do about it. The bugger will probably end up living in Buckingham Palace before he's done).

Back On The Blog

2011-08-26T17:13:00.007+01:00

Regular readers will have noticed that the blog has been off-line for six days. I had deleted it.

This was on account of my desire to write a book, and the blog was proving to be so much of a distraction that I could not commence that task. However, having finally started writing it last night, I realised that it would be too big a job, and that I would be unable to complete it without causing lasting damage to my health.

So with my apologies to my loyal readers, I'm back here and will stay here, unremunerated and unedited but at least able to write something that someone, somewhere might read. Blogging might be one of the most ephemeral forms of literature, its merit lying somewhere between pamphleteering and graffiti, but I find it's one of the most enjoyable to produce. I never should have stopped.

Where was I?

(Update 27/08/2011 - Some reflection has led me to believe that readers deserve an explanation of the phrase 'I would be unable to complete it without causing lasting damage to my health'.

The realisation was achieved while banging my head off the wooden leg of a sofa in my workplace, during the course of one of those seizures to which I am fortunately only occasionally prone)

Raising Train Fares In The Wake Of The Riots

2011-08-18T21:10:00.003+01:00

Last week, we saw riots in England, many of them in areas where there is high unemployment.

This week, we hear that there will soon be large increases in the cost of rail fares.

Constantly telling people of the importance of having a job and then making it very difficult for them to get to it seems to me to be an unsatisfactory way of trying to reduce unemployment, or of staving off the threat of violent dissent.

On David Cameron's Use Of The Word 'Sick' To Describe Some Parts Of Society

2011-08-18T21:00:00.003+01:00

This was fascist language, used in the fascist sense. Individuals are sick. Cultures can become corrupt. Polities and peoples are never sick.

What's coming next, some great plan to restore national vigour? A little more therapeutic violence overseas? A new political liturgy? Shirt movements? What? Once you've complained about the cultural hygiene of parts of the society you govern, anything's on the cards.

On The Character Of Alex Salmond

2011-08-18T20:53:00.002+01:00

It has been reported that the First Minister recently exchanged words with Thomas Docherty MP, and that during the exchange The Tartanissimo remarked to Mr. Docherty, 'How long have you been an MP, son?'

If true, this extremely patronising remark shows just how deeply arrogance and aggression run with The Tartanissmo's character. I have been trying to tell you, you know.

HRH The Prince Of Wales Favours 'National Community Service'

2011-08-18T20:38:00.003+01:00

On a visit to Tottenham yesterday that was probably 11 days too late, HRH The Prince of Wales spoke of his desire to see a scheme for 'national community service'.

That HRH The Prince of Wales is in favour of something usually means that it should be opposed unflinchingly, and this is no exception. To my mind that was an unwarranted and perhaps even unconstitutional intrusion into politics. Under our system, what he does or does not want to see in our society is neither here nor there. His functions are to wave politely, to ask people whether they have come far and to sign bills passed by Parliament into law.

If he believes that he will reign as some kind of benevolent pater patriae, a philosopher king sharing his wisdom to his subjects when he feels it is required, then he is frankly delusional. I am the best arbiter of the type of education and training my son will require in order to become a rounded member of society, and I will suffer no more damn insolence from HRH The Prince of Wales on that subject.

On The Absence Of Comparative Justice In The Wake Of The Riots

2011-08-17T20:49:00.004+01:00

Although Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan's attempts to start a riot in Latchford via Facebook were malevolent, and although he deserves to have his Facebook page thrown at him for the attempt, it is hard to square the sentence of four years' imprisonment he has received with the sentence of 16 months' imprisonment handed down to Elliot Morley for claiming more than £30,000 of parliamentary expenses to which he was not entitled.

On the face of it, it is hard to see whose offence was more grave. Sutcliffe-Keenan is an unpleasant, dough-headed yob; Morley was at one time a Minister of the Crown, not merely expected but presumed to possess the highest standards of integrity. No harm to life or property took place as a result of Sutcliffe-Keenan's actions, while Morley got away with a lot of money. Sutcliffe-Keenan's offence would not have been committed if like-minded unpleasant, dough-headed yobs not taken the initiative in Tottenham; Morley's was a premeditated, calculating and very cynical course of conduct pursued over the course of several years. Although Sutcliffe-Keenan was trying to incite violent disorder, Morley certainly wasn't the only one with a creative approach to accounting and an over-developed sense of entitlement.

It is hard to determine just why these offences have been treated so differently. If a savage and retributive sentence required to be imposed on Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan pour encourager les autres, it must surely have been passed in the knowledge that les autres were in no way encouraged by those actions of his which have placed him before the court. Trappist monks have ignited rioting more effectively than he did.

Where is Shami Chakrabarti when she is most needed? Come to think of it, who's Shami Chakrabarti?

On The Unpleasantness Of Libertarian Rhetoric

2011-08-16T22:51:00.005+01:00

Given that they might have seen and possibly even lived through real looting, I hope that no libertarian ever describes the simple act of paying lawful tax as looting ever again.

Owen Hatherley

2011-08-16T22:26:00.004+01:00

Good article from this chap, who seems to be an architecture writer, in 'The Guardian' about the proposals to evict rioters' families. He appears to reach broadly the same conclusions regarding the de facto enclosure of the social housing sector as I did in a post of June 28 2010, but coming at it from a different angle. If anything else, the 'Shock Doctrine' element of these proposals is very much more pronounced now than it was then, the riots having presented those determined to clear the estates with a perfect example of a crisis that should not be allowed to go to waste. It remains to be seen whether anyone will lose their home unjustly as a result of being maliciously 'shopped' on account of a neighbourhood vendetta, but given the interesting times we live in I wouldn't bet against someone trying to do it. I'm actually kicking myself a wee bit that I didn't think of the points he's made when the news of this stupid and unpleasant proposal broke, so kudos to Mr. Hatherley. He's a very capable and thoughtful writer.

As I wrote last week, our government seems intent on creating a vagabond class, permanently marginalised and thus stigmatised. They might just get it. If they do, that will be the point at which the problems will really start. As I wrote yesterday, we might just be going through one of those phases of societal transition that history is littered with. Let us all hope - and pray - that what comes next is in every way better than this.

FANS (Fathers Against National Service)

2011-08-16T12:39:00.003+01:00

David Cameron has today re-launched his scheme for 'National Citizen Service'. As I wrote at the time he first mentioned it, if anyone wishes to put a gun in my boy's hand then someone will have to put one to my head first.

Now, one of the most important lessons one can draw from the study of British history is that the British state is not and has never been beyond arranging such an outcome. However, in my opinion it is of the utmost importance for every father of young sons in the land to oppose this policy. Even its title is misleading, given that British nationals are not citizens but subjects. If enacted, it would degenerate very quickly into national military service. That is the way of all these things. The British state will eventually require to deploy national military service, if only because my son is now a little over one year old and I can see no end to our involvement in Afghanistan; not soon, not ever. Athough the poor are still so poor that they keep volunteering, at some point in the future they just won't volunteer any more, and those in power will have to do something about it. With that in mind, I am no longer frightened of saying that my wife and I did not bring our boy into the world for him to become cannon fodder for the grand plans of some Washington think-tank loons, and those of their British acolytes too scared to think for themselves, to try to bring peace to an unpacifiable country. No. That is intolerable, and accordingly will not be tolerated. Here I stand. I can do no other.

If he wishes to fight for you, fine. He will at least have all the facts I can give him before making a final decision on that course of action. But if you think you can order him to fight for you, then you can go and take a three-cornered flying one to yourselves. I have not spent two decades chuntering away at the fag end of the Great British Globalised Economy, over-educated and under-rewarded, qualified for a profession I can't practice, blowing raspberries at VDUs while cheaptack, badly written programs requiring more RAM than the base unit can handle won't load on to them, for those who bear no small measure of responsibility for that state of affairs to demand my son as well.

There will be those people who read that and say I am being disrespectful to those who have lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such people are obtuse, willingly blind advocates of DFO (Death For Others). My heart goes out to every parent who's lost a son in those places. I hope they understand when I write that I do not wish my son to share the fate of theirs. There will be those who will say, 'Kelly, this isn't about your son, it's about you'; and they'd be dead right. A very great deal has been said in the past few days about the importance of fathers staying with families, providing their children with good example. How this is possible for men confronted with a gynocentric family law system which those in charge of it seem to have no intention of reforming, even in light of recent events, or of altering the moral mindset which has come to regard human conception as a purely biological, morally neutral act of little consequence, like pollination, does not seem to register with David Cameron. It was quite sick of him to enunciate all the ways in which our society has become sick, when they have all been the consequence of the exercise of Parliament's will. That notwithstanding, opposition to any form of national service is, in my opinion, a cause against which every father should rally. If he wishes a display of fatherpower, then he should have it.

Accordingly, I raise the standard of FANS (Fathers Against National Service). Oh, don't worry, it's all very Big Society. Without regard for creed, colour or status, FANS is open to British fathers living with the mothers of their children in nuclear families, adoptive fathers in the same position, and to grandfathers acting as de facto fathers to children whose own have gone AWOL, the bastards. Freelance sperm donors, cranks, careerists, opportunists, axe-grinders and ideologues of whatever hue need not apply; my energy is limited, and that in turn plays havoc with my patience for time-wasting adults.

One striking conclusion we can draw from the past fortnight's events is that families are very similar to societies. They do not die of their own accord, but at the hand of outside agencies. Some of them even commit suicide. However, those of us British fathers whose interest in and love for their children is absolute need to step back and say as one that we will not be rolled over, that our sons and daughters are the best of subjects and that there is no need for them to be press-ganged iton sweeping streets they haven't littered, against both our wishes for them and our knowledge of their characters. Fatherhood is a privilege. It is not a political football.

If such a law as Cameron proposes comes to pass, I will have to seriously consider whether I wish my family to remain residents of the United Kingdom. Now, we have somewhere to go, as do Antonio, Alberto and Miguel Clegg (if National Citizen Service is good for some, it's good for all). But millions don't have that option. As I said, if a display of fatherpower is what is felt is required, then it should be given. Please email martinkellyllbdiplp@yahoo.co.uk to let me know if you want to join FANS. Let's get the ball rolling, and deal with the formalities later.

The Holy Island

2011-08-15T21:42:00.004+01:00

One night in 793, some quiet Northumbrian monk on the island of Lindisfarne, his name lost to history, might have thought his eyes were playing tricks on him when, late at night, he spotted a light out to sea.

He would not have known that the fate he and his brothers were to endure would be repeated again and again and again as the Vikings ravaged England for centuries. Nobody really knows why they started coming at all. One suggestion I've read was that it was on account of an internal explosion in population of a type so sudden and extreme it made them realise that they had to move outwards or die. There just wasn't space for them all in Scandinavia, so conquest was their only hope of survival.

Yet for all their rage, pillage and unbelievable capacity for violence, for all of the chasm between their pagan beliefs and the Christianity of the English, many of them eventually integrated. Anyone with Norman heritage has a little bit of Forkbeard in them. They were not merely a criminal gang, they were one of the most frightening criminal gangs of all time. Yet although they made an enormous impact on the system, by themselves they never brought the system down.

Political England was never the same after their arrival as it was before, but Christian England never wavered an inch in its faith in their ultimate defeat, trusting in God, as it should have done, to protect them from the Norsemens' wrath.

Over the past few days, we have seen berserkers roaming the ways of England once again. The horned helmets have been replaced with hoodies, but the senseless rage and lust for pillage differ in no way from that suffered by the English over a thousand years ago. I leave it to professional social scientists to theorise about why what happened happened. No doubt they will produce any number of hypotheses, possibly tainted by their own convictions. Yet the pillagers did not win then, and the pillagers will not win now. The reason they will not win is that whatever else is broadcast about it or claimed to the contrary for it, this is a godly land, and if enough of His children pray for deliverance from this menace He will deliver us from it.

Lindisfarne, the place where the Vikings made landfall, is also known as 'The Holy Island'. If the British wish to recover anything from their experiences of past few days, the hope of holiness would be a good place to start.

The Wilding Of David Starkey

2011-08-15T10:54:00.003+01:00

The old rood boy's got himself into a spot of hot water over some comments he made on 'Newsnight' about the role of race in the riots. Whatever Piers Morgan (aka Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan, ne Piers Stefan O' Meara; he's got more bloody names than Prince Edward) and the Hon. Robert Peston might think about what he said, although he might have expressed himself badly he might also have had a point.

The point I think that he was trying to make is that race was irrelevant to the riots, and that because people of different races have lived together so closely in London for so long, that part of the world has to all intents and purposes developed its own culture. I don't think anyone would go so far as to call it a civilisation just yet, particularly after the events of the past few days, but that might still happen. It's been a field lesson in anthropology just as much as a crisis of political and police authority. What seems to be going on down there now is that we have what is to all intents and purposes the sort of colonial society of the type that develops wherever two cultures meet, the effects of which have been magnified by the mixing of very many more cultures than merely two. It has developed its own customs and language, its own mores and values. Given time, it might even develop its own religion and tabus.

Given the history of colonial societies as colonial societies per se, whether it ever develops into a vigourous civilisation is a bet I wouldn't put a fiver on in William Hill's. The barbarian war bands seem too numerous and too diverse to enable any single one of them to establish themselves as pacifiers and conquerors. The thoughts of Sir Vidia Naipaul on what has happened and what is going on might just be very illuminating. And may God in His divine mercy help us all.

The Strange Invisibility Of Her Majesty The Queen During Our Recent Crisis

2011-08-15T10:15:00.003+01:00

I feel I owe an apology to HRH The Prince of Wales regarding what I had mistakenly perceived to be his absence from the public arena during the recent rioting crisis. On the evening of Sunday 14th August he appeared on BBC1's 'Britain's Hidden Heritage', enthusing over the quality of the plasterwork in the pink dining room at Dumfries House.

At times like this, you have to remember the important things in life. My apologies.

A random thought occurred to me while pondering the noticeable absence of HM The Queen in recent days. One would have thought that at times like this, and during events of the type we have seen, the head of state should be out front and centre, appealing for calm among her subjects, imploring them to stop stealing from one another and requesting that they co-operate with her agencies. Unless I am greatly mistaken, this did not happen. Why it did not puzzles me. What other purpose does a national figurehead serve other than to be a focal point in times of crisis?

The only conclusion I can draw is that the British oligarchy is extremely nervous of the Queen, or any indeed any monarch, not merely being disobeyed but being both seen and heard to be disobeyed. After all this time, they are still frightened of their position's fragility. Perhaps they know all too well that everything they hold depends upon the monarch being able to claim the title 'Fidei Defensor', an assumed royal title so important to everything that happens in British public life that it is the only one to appear on British coinage alongside the monarch's name and their rank, and the thinnest of threads by which to be connected to that to which you feel entitled. Being a national figurehead when the Germans are dropping bombs is one thing. Being a national figurehead when your subjects are engaging in riotous disorder is quite another.

If that's the case, it's a viewpoint which in its own way is a rather pathetic one to hold after you've been at the top for nearly a thousand years. I almost feel sorry for them.

You may have noticed an increase in what might be perceived to be anti-monarchical sentiment appearing on the blog in recent weeks. You might not be wrong. This is a direct consequence at the wave of disgust that swept over me when I saw HRH The Prince of Wales done up in full regalia, including those spotless spats, presiding over the Armed Forces Day celebrations held in Edinburgh on 25th June this year. It was the spats that did it; impractical, toytown footwear that would show the slightest stain being worn in front of men who've been there and done it where military matters are concerned. The volume of what one might perhaps not unreasonably feel to be largely unearned decorations being worn by members of the Royal Family at the wedding of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was laughably Ruritanian. I wouldn't have fancied being in a plane over London at the time, if only because of the impact all that metal might have had on the compass.

However, for what my perhaps incorrect, if not deranged, opinion's worth, all that posturing serves a deadly serious purpose. It tells anyone who might be minded to challenge our oligarchy that it has the army; and as any Roman usurper could tell you, if you can keep that, you're pretty secure.

Other Bits And Pieces From The Riots

2011-08-14T23:22:00.003+01:00

It appears that even while the blood of innocents was flowing in the streets, The Tartanissimo, with his trademark toxic mixture of 'Come Ahead' chippiness and braggadocio, has insisted that the riots be referred to as 'English riots' and not 'UK riots'.

He never knows when to shut up, so here's something for him to think about the next time he decides to open his mouth on a matter which is none of his business and which common decency demands he should steer well clear of. In the last few days, Strathclyde Police have been held up as masters of the art of policing gangs. It sounds like the sort of thing that should be studied at Hogwarts. However for Glaswegians like me, who like to read books and think about the wider world without someone like The Tartanissmo telling me what to think about my own country, it has always been an embarrassment that our town has had such a bad reputation for gang violence. We've always wanted it to be like the rest of the UK. We needn't have worried. It seems that the rest of the UK is becoming like us. That's something for everyone to get worried about.

Of course, in The Tartanissmo's Scotland every problem will be solved, every tear wiped away, with a wee dram and a folk song, backed up as ever by the Scottish iron fist, developed from Calvinist authoritarianism and toned over half a millenium by constant and willing exercise. It'll be like 'Demolition Man', but with fewer good-looking women of the type who don't look as if they consider the cubic metre to be a measurement of underwear size, and with very much higher annual average rainfall.

Sorry, I'm having a wee Denis Leary moment. It'll pass. But not yet.

It's gratifying to see that the Tory psychos have been out in force. I keep saying on this blog, and have been saying for many years now, that there is a deeply sadistic strain in Conservative thought that likes punishing people, not because it's necessary but because they like doing it. That it should always be right-wingers who are the most prolific S & M spankers is not a coincidence. It is a perfectly natural of extension of their public views into the private sphere. Danny Kruger, a former Conservative candidate for Parliament who was sacked for calling for 'a period of creative destruction in the public services' has echoed the call of Tim Montgomerie, the Tory, er, blogger in chief that the police should (this is a classic!) 'baton charge the yobs'.

Let's go one better! Let's handcuff them to railings and birch their naked buttocks! Let's plant explosive devices in their skulls that we can set off when we catch them writing graffiti! Or even if we just suspect them of doing it! These are of course merely the soft options! What we should be doing is decapitating them on the spot, sticking their heads on railings and hanging signs around them saying 'This Is What Happens To Looters Round Here'!

The previous paragraph was, of course, intended to be satirical. Looting is theft, and deserves to be treated seriously, if only because it went unpunished everyone would be at it. Over the past few days, very many people were. The frothing bloviations of Montgomerie and Kruger, both of whom might run a mile from any looter to whom they might feel inclined to quote Schumpeter under normal circumstances and who is in the act of perpetrating their own kind of creative destruction, are a marked contrast to the dignity displayed by Tariq Jahan when discussing the murder of his son. If anything, the composure of Mr. Jahan in the face of such violence and its consequences is a standing rebuke to every figure of authority in the society in which he lives, from its invisible queen and her invisible heir downwards. Over the past week, Mr. Jahan has given them all what for him was I'm sure was a most unwanted lesson in the nature of authority. For right-wing ideologues, the answer is always for the police to baton charge the yobs, to stick the boot in. Mr. Jahan just told them to go home. They probably did. Last week, he did a better job than the Home Secretary.

But the nutter right still wants those relatively few public services enjoyed by many of the looters to be cut. It's the best case I've seen for closing SETI, because first contact has clearly already been made.

The expression 'gang violence' is a redundancy in the context of much of the criminal activity now taking place in the UK. As I mentioned on this blog in both June and December of 2008, these entities are instead barbarian war bands of the type described by Arnold J. Toynbee in his 'A Study of History', marauders who appear on the periphery of every civilisation on the slide.

For what my opinion's worth, David Cameron's hiring of Bill Bratton is a panic measure designed to give him good press. Not good press on the BBC or Sky News, but on Fox News, the majority of whose viewers will be very much more aware of Mr. Bratton's name than the majority of the BBC's. It is probably something he's wanted to do for a while, but didn't have a good reason for doing so before. He now thinks he has. Good luck to them both, and I hope they're very happy together.

One thing that Mr. Bratton might suggest was not such a good idea was to broadcast in advance that you're tripling police numbers in one area. One can only wonder just how much property was stolen across England for no other reason that the local cat was away, and the local mice thought they'd come out to play.

My Apologies For The Typos In The Post Below

2011-08-13T13:29:00.002+01:00

I was doing fine, had performed the necessary katas and quadrilles to make sure that I could get the words down, then - Boom! - the 'Save Now' button froze when I went back in to edit the post. It jumped out at me from nowehere, like Burt Kwouk jumping out at Peter Sellers from the cupboard.

The boys in California should put down their skinny lattes, stop stroking their creative facial hair and start dealing with this. It is a pain. I try to write literate English, and the impact of one piece of technology upon another is making me sound like an embittered middle aged man with Tourette Syndrome. I can't do this alone. Perhaps because my own is so screwed up, I can't write software, I only expect to be able to use it. Right now I can't, and it's annoying.

On Benefits And Evictions

2011-08-13T12:25:00.011+01:00

After finishing writing 'The Lord Of The Rings', Tolkien felt it necessary to rewrite it backwards, while Carlyle had to rewrite his history of the French Revolution from memory after Macaulay's maid had used the original manuscript to light the fire. That story put me off ever lending a book to anyone.

After the sheer hassle I've been having trying to get Blogger to work with IE9, I can understand the frustration both of them must have felt.

OK, let's boil down two hours's worth of prose into a few sentence.

The public enemas currently parading through the courts on charges relating to their involvement in rioting are undeserving of sympathy. The worst of the bunch are the middle-class ones living in good houses. They are not common or garden slum-dwellers, but the worse kind, slum-dwellers of the mind, people who will turn any area they live in into a slum.

The nutter right is currently having a jolly time lodging e-petitions demanding that any benefits being paid to persons convicted of riot-related charges be removed from them. To do this would be contrary to law and the rule of law. It would be the equivalent of a Bill of Attainder being passed to permit the confiscation of the pension being paid to Fred Goodwin, the most financially destructive incompetent in British corporate history, an issue over which the nutter right got its knickers in a twist two years ago. It would be correct to say that Goodwin has not been charged with any crime. However, those charged with riot-related offences have presumably not been charged with any offences alleging they have misrepresented their eligibility to claim benefits. If sanctity of contract and the rule of law hold good for financially destructive incompetents reponsible for enormous burdens on the public purse, they presumably also hold good for rioting benefit claimants who are also responsible for enormous burdens being placed on the public purse. In time, it will be interesting to review the numbers, if they are ever made available, and see whether the uninsured losses occasioned by these riots are equivalent to the sums which have been spent propping up the Royal Bank of Scotland. For all we know, The Shred might still be ahead on points.

If benefits were to be removed from convicts in this way, it would be a landslide occasioned by the ongoing erosion of British civic life. The nutter right hates paying tax. This is unfortunate, but also too bad. They must come to realise that they have obligations to the people around them. It would be interesting to see the numbers, if they are ever made available, to see whether uninsured losses occasioned by the recent riots are equivalent in value to, or greater in value than, the amount lost to the British economy every year through perfectly legitimate tax avoidance. It is hard to see how you can demand the right not to pay your share and then demand that others pay for your property to be protected. This is infantile logic, the screams of infants at the breast. If you want police, you have to pay them. In their minds, the blameless poor are equally as guilty as the shameless poor, their mutual crime being their common poverty. If this becomes law, people will stand to lose their benefits if convicted of failing to have a television licence, that most piddling and much-prosecuted of crimes which, to the best of my limited knowledge and earnest belief, is still the crime for which a single mother living on benefits in England and Wales is most likely to appear before the courts.

But they're poor, so they can get stuffed. Its only effect would be to increase property crime, as the poor would become desperate and turn to illegal money-lenders whose primary concerns do not conform to the goals of the Big Society. But they're poor, so they can get stuffed.

The proposed eviction of social housing tenants who have family members residing with them who have been convicted of riot-related offences goes one step further. The permanent exclusion of these people from social housing would not merely create, or enlarge, an underclass of desperate people. It would create a permanent vagabond class, permanent outsiders. Where are these people going to live? We tried this once. Some of them ended up living in Sherwood Forest, and engaged in a notorious course of ideologically-motivated property crime borne of desperation. It didn't work then, and it's not going to work now. As for the local authorities, they would do well to remember that their tenants are their tenants and not their serfs. If tenants are compelled to keep their families under lock and key to ensure their good behaviour, they are also entitled to have tenancies that are warm and dry in areas which are properly maintained and policed and where the bins are collected regularly. The sword that is the law of landlord and tenant is one that cuts both ways.

You would think that these proposals would have Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty, shouting in rage from the rooftops. Sadly, and once again when she should be out front and centre - you know, when the going's getting tough for civil liberties of the poor, the sick and the weak - Her Shaminess once again seems to have ridden off into the sunset, possibly on Shergar while accompanied by Lord Lucan, and is nowhere to be seen, a recurring and disappointing theme of her career. She may be exercising some influence over policy at the moment; possibly even a gnostic one.

Their abuse of the phrase 'on their watch' has shown that our political class seems to have no regard for the unsuitable deployment of inappropriate and out-of-conext maritime metaphors. With the very honourable exception of Lord Prescott, I would doubt whether any of them have ever served on a ship bigger than a rowing boat. However, I'm afraid I have to use an inappropriate metaphor of my own, one derived from American football, that slowest and most incomprehensible of games.

David Cameron's Monday morning quarterbacking of police performance during the riots will have made him no friends among senior police ranks. I hope that one of them remembers that the Prime Minister has been remarkably coy about his own history of drug use. He could be doing with making friends in those circles, not alienating them. The sound of a multi-millionaire saying that social housing tenants are receiving a service at a massive discount was revolting, particularly when his party gave much of the stock away at massive discounts and at enormous cost to the public purse. It would be interesting to see the numbers, if they are ever made available, to see whether uninsured losses occasioned by the recent riots are equivalent to, or greater in value than, the cost to the public purse in capital lossesand interest charges occasioned by the 'Right To Buy' policy. As if they'd ever let us know.

And That was about it, I think.

Terrible Problems Cutting And Pasting Into Blogger On IE8 And IE9

2011-08-13T00:49:00.005+01:00

This is very frustrating, as it significantly diminishes both the utility of the package and the pleasure one derives from using it.

I also find that I now can't paste a post's URL on to the 'Link' bar, and that to publish a post I have to save it, go into 'Edit Posts', select the item and post from there. The 'Publish Post' button is about as useful as a padlock in Clapham Junction.

Sory to seem a bit pissed off about this, but I've just come within a hair's breadth of losing a 1,600 word post it's taken me two hours to write.

Any suggestions?

Scarman, Interrupted

2011-08-10T22:48:00.006+01:00

Thirty years on, it now seems clear that Lord Scarman was in many ways a prophet. The people who engaged in the rioting he reported on seemed to have very many of the same problems as some of those who have been making their presences felt over the past few days; indeed, they might even be related. It is the fate of some prophets to spend their days shouting to themselves in the wilderness. Scarman may have been one of them.

When in doubt, you can always trust the Tories to play to that psychopathic element in their own ranks who live for the idea of doing violence to those weaker than themselves, but most of all to their neighbours' children. The Prime Minister has uttered the words 'water cannon', something of a spastic reversion to type to get the bastards back into line. I don't think even Baroness Thatcher ever went that far. But then again, she wasn't a Bullingdonian. Probably a bit too soft for her own good.

The absence of any kind of introspection from David Cameron as to why this situation should have come about probably means that references to the Big Society will become few and far between. This would be a pity, if only because the riots have been a wonderful example of a Big Society type of project. People have got off their backsides, taken the initiative, done things in their communities and made an enormous impact.

We have a coalition government consisting of two parties. I don't think I've seen or heard any comment from Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister. He must be having a hell of a hard time. It must be embarrassing to be the first Liberal leader in 80 years to have a place in government and then having the poor on whose behalf you're supposed to be liberal going and messing the place up, and that's even without images of the police taking the truncheons to them. How Clegg reacts to this will dictate whether he faces a leadership challenge later this year, one that could seal the fate of the coalition. The fact that Cameron has gone in mob-handed, so to speak, and authorised the iron fist in the iron glove suggests to me that he did not consult Clegg prior to his displays of bravura from behind his bodyguards. This in turn suggests that the working relationship between the Prime Minister and his deputy is poor, or that Cameron has no regard for the niceties of coalition government (which probably wouldn't surprise me), or that Clegg doesn't want to be contacted. These are all very disturbing possibilities, and none of them reflect well on Clegg. Though Scripture tells us that the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the leopard with the kid, when it comes to making bedfellows most bootboys don't usually appreciate the sight of sandals in the hallway. Having gone right on cuts, it will be very hard for him to go even further right on law and order. If he did that, he'd be accused of imitating Tony Blair. Ouch!

One wonders how many of those on the streets were raised in homes that didn't have stable father figures who were in constant employment. My guess would be most. But we are told that no fault divorce is a good thing. Having practiced family law for some years I never saw much evidence of that myself - indeed it mostly seemed to be about finding fault - but what would I know?

It would be disappointing if the advances made in consequence of the Scarman Report were to be undone as a result of these events. I wouldn't put anything past these guys.

Mr. Tariq Jahan is one of the most dignified and composed people I've ever seen. My condolences.

On The Images Of Our Rioting Class Currently Being Beamed Around The World

2011-08-09T22:57:00.003+01:00

I wonder how this is playing on Libyan state TV - if it's still on air, of course. Don't forget, we're involved in that nation's affairs in order to bring about peace and prosperity. Or was it prosperity and peace? I can't remember.

The rioters whose images I've seen on TV all look as if they hail from that demographic which suffers altitude sickness if required to rise from bed before lunchtime. One can almost hear their doxies, every one a poissonarde de nos jours, all built like onions with tattooed cocktail sticks shoved into the base, their fleshy, pendulous breasts hanging in the air, horribly, like the 'Hindenburg' in flames, screaming encouragement from the sidelines. If the cops play their cards right, their examination of CCTV footage might just lead to the slashing of Disability Living Allowance claims in the worst hit areas. Who knows, that might even cover the cost of reconstruction. Not that that will do a damn thing for the price of insurance, which will soar once this is over, and that isn't even taking into account businesses that might have been torched by the owners. After all, who needs cashflow problems when you've got a riot taking place on your doorstep?

Sarajevo had an Olympics as well, and they didn't even have riots beforehand.

It would be deeply depressing if the coalition government were to use these events to crack down on us further. Police services that constantly feel the need for more powers should be given the civic equivalent of a random drugs test.

The alleged use of Twitter and other social media to fuel these events show that they have the potential to be antisocial in equal measure to their potential to be social.

Conservative government elected in 1970, industrial unrest in 1972 and 1974. Conservative government elected in 1979, riots in 1981. Conservative Prime Minister elected (sort of) in 2010, riots in 2011. The lead time seems to be going down. Without wishing to seem partisan, there seems to be something about Conservative governments that make people want to go out and smash things. Could this possibly be because they have all been insanely right-wing and have governed without regard for the sensibilities and needs of the majority of the population? Perish the thought.

Where are HM The Queen and HRH The Prince of Wales when you need them? Why isn't the heir to the throne out on the streets appealing to his future subjects for order and calm? They are national figureheads, or so we're told, so surely at times like this they should be helping to bring the nation together. If they're not national figureheads to be seen and flocked round at times like this, why do we pay for them?

This is our Katrina, folks, Expect the right-wing backlash to be long and deep. After the phone-hacking scandal and the de facto burying of Rupert Murdoch's political influence, those of our ultras at the top table will have been gagging for the chance to stick the boot in and restore what they consider to be 'discipline'. This is what the right does, everywhere, every time. After the defeat of Napoleon, the crackdown on civil liberties that occurred in the UK then took decades to unravel. It was only after that event, when the ideological competition had been crushed, that breaking your loom was made a capital crime. In Russia in 1905, the throne and altar brigade did not fail to immediately organise itself after the proclamation of the first Duma, creating the civic equivalent of a coronary blockage. After the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989, our own right exposed what their own motivations had been all along. They were only interested in us for as long as there were Communists to oppose - once they were gone the lipservice to social democracy went out straight after them, a state of affairs which has led to our current and, as the scenes in London and elsewhere have shown, apparently insupportable gap between rich and poor. In that regard, the rioters have shown themselves to be true Thatcherites; they are not rioting for the right to vote, nor the right to wear their socks on their foreheads, but for stuff. They are doing it for the plasma TV and the smartphone. They have taken consumerism all the way round the clock and have reverted to pillage, the form of capitalism with the least expensive lawyers.

We British are so bloody hung up on property and owning stuff, concepts which did not exist at all in the early Church. Why can't we be like those saints, and live together in peace and harmony? When all is said and done, why can't we all get along?

A Strangely Convenient Riot

2011-08-09T00:36:00.003+01:00

My memories of the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981 consist of being a small boy of 11, still in short trousers, glued to the TV news in a holiday flat in Ventnor; one who was desperately hoping that the rioters weren't coming for him.

For the avoidance of doubt, in those days they did let Glaswegians into Ventnor. Who knows, they might still do (there are a hell of a lot of deaths to knife crime amongst young men in the West of Scotland, you know); but that's another story.

Hopefully without sounding like the looniest type of conspiracy theorist - although why conspiracy theories should be deemed loony per se escapes me; I know many men of stout common sense who would declaim 'It's a cock-up, not a conspiracy' as they were being herded into the gas chambers, and it was left to literature's most coldly analytical, unemotional detective to say that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth - I must confess to being a little perturbed at the appearance of these riots when the Metropolitan Police is at the lowest ebb in its history. There's nothing like a good riot to make the British oligarchy feel that its investment in its security apparatuses has been money well spent; and we can't have the police feeling demoralised when they have to go out and fight menaces to society.

I heard one retired plod on the BBC News Channel this evening talking about how the lads on the front line will be needing their rest breaks to stop them keeling over from exhaustion. As if. I imagine that the adrenaline rush generated by taking a truncheon to a rioter is vastly greater than any generated by kettling grannies and Old Etonians.

On Heather Brooke's Allegation That Julian Assange Is A Narcissist

2011-08-07T22:55:00.003+01:00

Apart from her apparent carelessness in appearing to have mislaid part of her previous Wikipedia entry, I have a lot of time for Heather Brooke. However I couldn't help having a bit of a laugh at the extract from her book 'The Revolution Will Be Digitised', concerning her dealings with Julian Assange, that was serialised in today's 'Mail on Sunday'. In it, she alleges that Mr. Assange is a narcissist.

It certainly provides an interesting, if sometimes uninteresting, insight into the mental workings of both Ms. Brooke and Mr. Assange ('The teenage girl in me swooned'...och, for goodness' sake!) However her allegations couldn't help but bring to mind the BBC docudrama 'On Expenses', based on her previous triumph of having been the prime mover in exposing the scandal surrounding unjustifiable expenses claimed by some Members of Parliament.

In that show she was portrayed by Anna Maxwell Martin, but when I saw it I thought there was something odd about a moment that had nothing to do with anything else in the drama. In the scene in which Michael Martin (Brian Cox) is elected Speaker, just for a second the camera suddenly cuts to a red-haired, female Labour MP clapping wildly. When I saw it, I was almost certain that the MP was being played by Ms. Brooke. I could of course be mistaken.

As any schoolboy scholar of Greek mythology could tell you, Narcissus would never had been heard of if it hadn't been for Echo.

'Double If His Arms Are Broken First'

2011-08-03T23:34:00.006+01:00

Who was Murray?

At the beginning of 'A Study in Scarlet', Watson's life is saved in Afghanistan by his orderly Murray. However, in 'J. Habakkuk Jephson's Statement', one of Conan Doyle's earliest published stories, one which, to my eyes, bears a certain, shall we say, resemblance to Herman Melville's story 'Benito Cereno', a planter named Murray saves the protagonist and narrator Jephson's life at the beginning of his career.

So who was Murray? And what was he to Conan Doyle?

The recent unpleasantness in which Duncan Bannatyne has found himself, entirely through no choice or fault of his own, does give one cause for reflection.

Mr. Bannatyne is a famous critic of smoking. In one of his books, I can't remember whether it was 'The Four Loves' or 'Mere Christianity', C.S. Lewis wrote of 'a certain type of bad man' who insists upon everyone around him pursuing their pleasures according to his tastes.

Now, I am not suggesting for a moment that Mr. Bannatyne is a bad man. After all, he is a philanthropist, in particular having supported the very worthy work undertaken by the charity 'Mary's Meals'. Although one always approaches the study of philanthropy with the suggestion made by Chesterton in 'St. Francis of Assisi', that its practice indicates nothing more than an affinity for anthropoids, at the back of one's mind, one could see why Mary's Meals would appeal to an entrepreneur like Mr. Bannatyne. They have an excellent business model for saving two birds with one stone - the children get fed, but have to be at school in order to get it. This particular charity is always worthy of support, and his support for it is praiseworthy at all times and under all circumstances.

However, writing as someone who has themself made a habit of saying stupid and boorish things in public via social media, it might have been unwise of him to follow the very commendable act of posting a reward for information about the person uttering threats against his daughter by immediately offering to double it 'if (her tormentor's) arms are broken first'. As a father, one can understand the passion any fellow father would feel at the thought of anyone threatening their child. I hope that the bugger who's threatened his girl is brought to book by the authorities, wherever in the world they might be. However, as a public figure, and a very wealthy one, Mr. Bannatyne also has certain responsibilities. For what my opinion's worth, 'Dragon's Den', the TV show through which he became a household name, is a very seedy affair, the entertainment hook of which is rich people humiliating poor people who want to be rich people. It is a good thing that he has either removed or been compelled to remove Tweets in which he could not unreasonably be said to be appearing to offer a premium on his original reward offer should violence be done to the person he is pursuing. For those Tweets to have stood unchallenged would have sent out the very unwholesome and confusing message that if you are rich you are above the law, and that the normal rules of behaviour don't apply to you; a theory which Rupert and James Murdoch have recently tested to destruction, and which is now destroyed.

This has been a very sorry episode, one as a result of which Mr. Bannatyne's public image has been tarnished when it could have become glorious. I'm sure that won't bother him very much, probably being focussed as he is on catching the person who's threatened his daughter. However it leaves a bad taste, and for some reason one is drawn back to 'A Study in Scarlet' and the words that Conan Doyle gave to Sherlock Holmes, that the most winning woman he had ever known was hanged for murdering her children for the insurance money while the greatest boor was a philanthropist who had given a quarter of a million to London's poor.

Who was Murray?

How Limiting It Is When You Have Something To Say...

2011-08-03T23:30:00.002+01:00

and your PC is verryy sloowwww....

Thought For The Day

2011-08-03T23:05:00.005+01:00

"I am under no duty whatsoever to either respect or relate to the opinions of anyone at all".
Well said, Tim.

Another Prediction Of Mine Comes True (Almost)

2011-07-29T23:12:00.003+01:00

Unless I'm mistaken, I think the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking has all of the powers and remits suggested in this post from last April.

I don't even remember writing it, but some kind soul in Farnham read it earlier today.

A Prediction Of Mine Comes True (Almost)

2011-07-28T22:13:00.006+01:00

On 22 June 2011 I wrote of the cheap labour lobby that,

"I wonder just how long it will be before a Conservative MP suggests lowering the school leaving age to 14".

Well, the answer was 36 days.

It has only taken just over a month for that prediction to come true; and the suggestion was made not by a Tory MP but by Digby Jones, who, having been both the head of the CBI and a New Labour minister, is probably just as good as one.

While he might think he is being well-intentioned, and the nature of his utterances do tend to make one believe that he is well-intentioned, his views are so primitive that they almost make me weep. We are in the 21st Century, and he wants to reduce the school leaving age for some to 14. This is mindless, unthinking reaction red in tooth and claw, a call to counter-revolution; a demand for an end to progress and a turning back of the clock. It is the exposure of the lie that the men who worked in heavy manufacturing in the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland were told, that they couldn't compete with cheaper labour from the Far East. If they couldn't compete even when their rights as trades unionists were smashed, how can their grandsons be expected to compete now? At a time when food and energy prices are soaring, what plans would Jones have to simultaneously reduce the cost of living, as great an impediment to 'competitiveness' as high wages? Sometimes I think some people at the top of our society won't be happy until we've all been herded back into the workhouse in rags. They'd go one better than the Victorians - they'd sell off the workhouse as a going concern.

There is no merit in this idea, none whatsover. It could not be realised successfully without massive public spending in other areas which would render any long-term benefits null and void, Oh, it would be hash in the bong for the cheap labour lobby, for whom cheap labour is as addictive as crack cocaine. For all practical purposes theirs is the most destructive subculture of addiction in the country. They can't get enough of it, no matter where it comes from. But what would it say about us as a culture? Whatever it would say, it wouldn't be very flattering.

When faced with such primitive views being espoused by one of the country's most influential people, a guy who'll always get the call to go on to 'Question Time' before me no matter how banal and reactionary his opinions, I can only be afraid for the world my boy might grow up in. Digby Jones might be well-intentioned, but his good intentions would pave a road to Hell for others to walk down. Thank God for God, for giving the poor something to hope and believe in.

On The Suggestion That Anders Behring Breivik Be Charged With Crimes Against Humanity

2011-07-28T01:06:00.007+01:00

Far be it from me to comment upon a jurisprudence of which I know absolutely nothing, but it seems to me that charging Breivik with crimes against humanity, offences which attract a maximum sentence of 30 years under the Norwegian penal code, as opposed to murder, which carries a maximum sentence of 21 years, would be a rather un-Norwegian act.

A great deal of time, care and thought has obviously gone into the crafting of the Norwegian penal code. The penalty of 21 years imprisonment for murder seems rather too exact for it to be anything other than the product of such thought. To try to find a punishment which you think is suitable for the criminal rather than trying the criminal for the crimes they have committed is something that any British government would do without a moment's hesitation. However, in this case it would require the expression of prosecutorial creativity. That would not only be a diminution of Norwegian jurisprudence but would also be also an act of disrespect against the memories of Breivik's victims. They didn't believe Norwegians should act like neocons. It would be unbecoming if Norwegians acted like neocons in their name.

Revisit the penalties for murder under Norwegian law, for sure, but don't bend it out of its current shape on account of that troll. If that's what they do, they should go ahead and enact their own version of the PATRIOT Act, if only because they'd be no different from the neocons, so they might as well be consistent. The neos have no respect for the rule of law, and if Norway's criminal justice establishment were to try him for crimes against humanity when the appropriate charge under that country's laws is murder in the hope of him receiving a longer sentence than that which could rightly be imposed on him for his crimes purely on the basis that he might then get a heavier sentence, they themselves could rightly be accused of having no respect for the rule of law either.

A Short Thought On Ockers

2011-07-28T00:08:00.007+01:00

Dior-clad ockers cavorting about inappropriately in the realms of the finally sacred are still just ockers. They might all just as well have been farting about in cork-brimmed hats with coldies in their hands for all the impiety implicit in that display of arrogance. Does public understanding of Christianity not exist anymore in the land of Mary MacKillop and Daniel Mannix? If the Wagga Wagga Strollers were to mount a production of 'The Last Temptation Of Christ', they still couldn't compete with those ockers on Jordan's banks, otherwise known as Australia's cultural elite, for sheer ockerliness.

The once-jolly swagman might soon be looking for a new billabong to camp out by. He might not have read of the fate of Herod Agrippa as recorded in 'The Acts of The Apostles', nor read that most dramatic enactment of it created by Robert Graves in 'Claudius the God', which is something of a pity, really. If he had, he would have known that God will not be mocked.

O Lord, reproach me not for my arrogance. AMDG.

The 'Sunday Times' Has Finally Gone Down The Toilet

2011-07-24T22:29:00.006+01:00

The 'Sunday Times' finally descended down the U-bend into risibility today, going down with all guns blazing. In fairness, it's been a long time coming, having been teetering on the brink for a number of months.

The only reason I have had for buying that newspaper of late is that it publishes A.A. Gill. I suspect I might not be alone in that. Mr. Gill is very possibly the UK's second-best creator of English prose, the best being V. S. Naipaul. His TV and restaurant reviews are weekly object lessons in how English prose should be written. He stands head and shoulder above the paper's other writers, and it was disappointing to see him, in my opinion, being dragged down along with the title he writes so well for.

There have been many reasons not to buy it, principal among which has been the gradual and relentless pornogrification of its magazine. Given his age it does not yet present a risk of moral harm to my son, but the day will come when he will be old enough to be damaged by it, and that day won't be long in coming. In such circumstances, it is gratifying that the publishers have today given me a series of reasons for not buying it any more rather than merely, and rather pathetically, giving up my weekly dose of Adrian Gill - of whom more later.

First up to enter the Hall of Shame is Daisy Goodwin, writing in the Culture section, from which more can be read in the post immediately below. Her review of Asti Hustvedt's book 'Medical Muses: Hysteria in 19th Century Paris' caught my eye, for what this blog's more devoted readers will understand are obvious reasons.

She was doing well until she wrote that"...it is hard to credit that Charcot and his team (which included Jean Gilles de la Tourette, who discovered the eponymous syndrome)...

I don't have a clue who Jean Gilles de la Tourette, but wherever Georges Gilles de la Tourette is he might not be too happy.

Now, I appreciate that putting this error in front of me, of all people, is not unlike presenting Gary Lineker with a scoring chance in front of an open goal. While I am fully aware that my appetite for neurological arcania is vast, not everyone might share it. Indeed, having no intention of reading Hustvedt's book on 19th Century French hysterics, if only because I am in many respects living their dream, I have no way of knowing whether the mistake is Hustvedt's or Goodwin's. But to my mind, it says a lot about the quality of the fact-checking involved in the preparation of the most cerebral part of the most serious newspaper in the News International stable. Maybe Robert Murdoch should give the editor a call.

Every week, the main section of the 'Sunday Times' publishes a big profile of a person who's been in the news during the preceding week. The week ending 24th July 2011 produced several candidates whom one might think worthy of being profiled, such as Tom Watson MP, or Jens Stoltenberg, the Prime Minister of Norway, or, at a pinch, Amy Winehouse. The 'Sunday Times' of 24th July 2011 profiled - Wendi Deng, otherwise known as Mrs. Rupert Murdoch. Yes, they profiled the boss's wife.

Ms. Deng earned this accolade for slapping a saddo who allegedly struck her husband with a custard pie. While her devotion to her husband is admirable, and while I'm sure the alleged incident was alarming for all concerned, her conduct strikes me as being at the lower end of the scale of what her husband's less literate newspapers might term 'have a go heroism'. She did not foil a bank robbery, nor tackle a knifeman in a playground. She did her bit for sure, but was only presented with her chance to shine because her husband and stepson were summoned to Parliament by the Serjeant-at-Arms, on pain of contempt, in order to answer questions about the apparently systematic criminality which took place under their noses. They had initially declined to appear. They presented a defence of ignorance - and how could they have known? After all, they were only issuing orders - and the old boy got through it in one piece and is now out of the country. Whether he ever comes back is anyone's guess.

In my opinion, the profile was a grovel to the boss's wife far beyond what her conduct actually merited. Maybe next week they'll get round to profiling the politician who's leading his country through the aftermath of Europe's worst Nazi atrocity since 1945.

Then came Adrian Gill in the 'News Review' section. Sigh.

Mr. Gill was present at Rupert Murdoch's unhappy slapping with the custard pie. He doesn't write much about politics. It may be the case that he was assigned to attend by his employers. It may be the case that he has enough leverage to select his own assignments, and decided that this was worth taking in. What was noticeable was that although he is his newspaper's star attraction, his employers did not seem to consider him to be suitable to be included within the Murdoch party, meaning that he had to queue for four hours in the corridor with everyone else.

If that were the case, if I were Adrian Gill and I were ever treated so disrespectfully by my employers I'd be looking around for new ones.

For what it's worth, in my opinion Mr. Gill produced the goods for them. The proceedings were boring, one of Mr. Murdoch's persecutors has 'porcine eyes', another doesn't know the difference between Prospero and Banquo, the decision of another parliamentary committee to allow the shooting of badgers gets a good laugh...you get the picture. It struck me as being a very odd piece for Mr. Gill to write, and I get the impression he wouldn't have been too bothered if he hadn't got in. He could then have made his excuses and left.

The piece de resistance of all the crap published in the 24th July 2011 edition of the 'Sunday Times' is contained in the post directly below this one. Oh, don't get me wrong, it wasn't all bad, only about 99% of it. Andrew Sullivan came back to the UK and called Fox News 'screeching, ugly propaganda', without of course commenting upon how relieved he might be that News Corporation has withdrawn its bid for BSkyB, thus saving Sky News from possibly suffering the same fate as Fox News in the future. The Business section carried an admirably neutral piece on the possible consequences that its current difficulties in the UK might have for News Corporation in the USA. However, for sheer crapness the item below is run a close second by a comment from Rod Liddle, the paper's resident Northern bloke.

In a piece on the iniquity of above-inflation rises in household energy costs imposed by privatised utility companies, Liddle wrote,

"These were botched privatisations, lucrative franchises flogged off by the last Labour government with a sort of deranged and gleeful haste to the highest bidder".

The utilities were privatised by Margaret Thatcher. If you see Rod, tell him.

So, it's farewell to the 'Sunday Times'. I look forward to reading Adrian Gill again, but not while he's there.

The 'Sunday Times' Culture Section On Amy Winehouse

2011-07-24T22:23:00.005+01:00

"I can't believe Amy Winehouse self-harms. She's so irritating, she must be able to find someone to do it for her" -

Joke once told by one Zoe Lyons about Miss Winehouse, presumably before the latter's death on 23rd July 2011, printed in the 'Sunday Times' Culture section of 24th July 2011, Page 9. My condolences to Miss Winehouse's family.

Things sure are bad at News International.

A Letter To 'Private Eye'

2011-07-23T16:14:00.008+01:00

Issue 1293 of 'Private Eye' came out last week. The 'Literary Review' carried a parody of Margaret Drabble's new book 'A Day In The Life Of A Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories', under the heading 'What You Didn't Miss'.

After reading it, I sent the following letter to the editor -

"While 'The Bluestockings Chapbook' sounds like the sort of menswear catalogue from which Andrew Marr might purchase his more luridly aquamarine socks - he seems to be partial to blue stockings - I have to wonder whether 'Bookworm', perhaps even subconsciously, hasn't developed a case of the Johann Haris worthy of the Orwell prize.

Their confection of "I can't blow my nose without thinking of what the conditions must be like in the handkerchief factories" seems eerily similar to Cyril Connolly's comment that Orwell "would not blow his nose without moralising on the conditions in the handkerchief industry".

I'll see if I get any feedback.

Norway

2011-07-23T16:14:00.006+01:00

Shame on him. Shame.

The Great British Blogger Is Getting Stamped On Because Rupert Murdoch Couldn't Run A Raffle

2011-07-23T15:46:00.006+01:00

The day of the licensed blogger will soon be upon us.

This will be the outcome of David Cameron's enquiry into media conduct, which for some reason includes social media. As far as I'm aware (and having been providing Internet commentary since 8th September 2002, I'm almost a fossil amongst bloggers), no British blogger has ever hacked into the mobile phones of The Duke of Cambridge, Sienna Miller or Milly Dowler. As far as I'm aware no British blogger has ever been sent down for hacking into anyone's mobile phone, nor been successfully sued for breaching any S & M spanker's privacy by publishing pictures of them in a spanking dungeon. However this writer, sitting in their bedroom in Glasgow, will be subject to the same degree of regulation as the multi-billion pound corporation whose employees did hack into The Duke of Cambridge's phone and were sent down for so doing, and which was successfully sued by an S & M spanker for invading his privacy. This is another example of the our ultra right-wing government using a fleeting set of circumstances to enact a permanent restriction on individual liberty. They call it not letting a good crisis go to waste. I call it tyranny.

Dave, who's been about as much use as a sieve in a thunderstorm over the past few weeks, has invited this blog's old friend the professional civil libertarian Shami Chakrabarti, occasionally ubiquitous when it suits her but never when it matters, to sit on his enquiry. Her conduct may just provide the proof of an assertion I've been making for some years - that professional civil libertarians are not interested in the liberties you have but in those they think you should have, your freedoms not the ones they choose to defend but those which they have the privilege of defining.

Many eyes will be upon her, and many voices might just be holding her to account for what she does and does not do on this enquiry. I await its findings with great interest.

The Ramblings Of Enda Kenny

2011-07-20T23:26:00.008+01:00

Irish must be the only European language which you can be unable to speak yourself but which can still leave you wondering where others have learned it.

My favourite example of this is assorted London BBC journalists' pronunciation of the word 'Gardai'. I once heard one newscaster pronounce this word 'Gorrrrrdeeeeeee', their chin almost hitting their chest on the downstroke and their nose on the upswing, the whole action performed almost balletically in a slow motion worthy of a John Woo gunfight.

From what one reads of the recent ramblings of Enda Kenny, An Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, he seems to have taken to speaking English in the same manner.

I am indebted to Mark Shea for pointing out that the Irish government is proposing to abolish the seal of the confessional, and that the clergy are not for it. Good for them, and shame on Kenny. There seems to be a strong but intellectually lazy strain in modern Irish thought that believes that when all else fails, you should kick the priests. Now, this mindset may stem from having been kicked by priests, or more properly that your fathers and grandfathers were, or may have been, kicked by priests (Kenny is an hereditary member of the Irish political elite, so I would doubt whether any priest has ever aimed so much as a dirty look in his direction). However not even dourly Presbyterian Scotland, the most reformed nation in Europe, with its Orange marching bands proclaiming 'For God and Ulster!' when even the most unbiased observer could fairly note their apparent distance from both, would ever dare to go so far as to break the seal of the confessional. This move would not be a reformation of the Irish law of evidence, but would be an attempt to pick a fight with the Vatican; perhaps even a deliberate attempt to have Ireland placed under interdict.

That might please the usual gobshite tendency of windy soi-disant intellectuals with Dublin 4 postcodes, and those internationalised 'businesspeople' of the type who got the country into the mess it's in and who want to be able to do what they like with whom they like when they like and how they like without any damn priest telling them what to do. However, for the very great majority of ordinary Irish people the breaking of the confessional's seal would be one break too far from their cultural roots; what would happen if the churches were closed doesn't bear thinking about. The Irish government might find that some, probably even most, Irish people would be more loyal to their churches and confessionals than they would be to Ireland, and would then find itself attacking the Irish peoples' freedom of religion, their human rights, when successive Irish governments have made not just a song and dance but a veritable pub lock-in of proclaiming the need for other nations to preserve and protect their citizens' human rights.

As I say, you can have none of the tongue yourself, and still wonder where others have learned it. I wonder what the Irish word for 'Kulturkampf' is.

Gotcha!

2011-07-19T22:50:00.003+01:00

(David Cameron (far right) at Prime Minister's Questions tomorrow)

Well, somebody had to say it, didn't they? If it's a distasteful thing to say when an old man allegedly gets a custard pie in the face, just think of how much more distasteful it was for one of his newspapers to say it of a shipful of dead Argentinian conscripts.

I have only seen the edited highlights, but on the basis of what what was available I didn't see any of the MP's asking the kind of questions they, and only really they, could have asked, such as, 'Mr. Murdoch, we must be careful not to prejudice ongoing investigations, but what do you think the discovery of such widespread and persistent lawbreaking at The News Of The World says about News Corporation's management culture? We know that News Corporation employs 53,000 people around the world, but it hasn't grown to that size with a gun at its head. Presumably just as in every other business, decisions were made by the board and were presumably carried out by subordinates. Presumably just as in every other business, the management style was set by the men at the top. After this, how can the British newspaper-buying public be sure that you and your fellow directors have not only tossed all the bad apples out of the barrel but were not responsible for them going bad by the way you as their Chairman managed their managers?'

That would have been a good one. I hope that point was made.

Tomorrow promises to be a sweaty day for David Cameron, his very own Dog Dave Afternoon. His current isolation is not that of principle, but of the bunker. The famous portrait of Catiline enduring the rhetoric of Cicero springs to mind. It was a mark of good character for him to say last week that he would have thought it bad form just to ditch his friendship with Andy Coulson on account of the latter's resignation from the government, one which to all intents and purposes was enforced. However, on hearing that I realised that while Dave may be a man of character, he also lacks toughness. He wouldn't have lasted a day in a Glasgow call-centre, a working environment which I realised many years ago was one in which it wasn't a good idea to develop close friendships, if only because the absurdly high levels of staff turnover demanded by a flexible labour market could cause them to terminate them quite abruptly.

Being rich enough not to have to work can have its downs as well as its ups.

The Incredible Imploding British Establishment

2011-07-18T23:38:00.004+01:00

Somewhere, Wallis and David are having a quiet laugh to themselves at the idea that people could have got so upset about the possibility of the King marrying a divorcee.

The crisis in which the Establishment has been engulfed for the past month is, in my opinion, unprecedented in our recent history. It's not quite 1688 without the anti-Catholicism, but it's coming pretty close. I can't think of anything recent which has matched it for longevity or gravity. Perhaps Profumo did, but I wasn't around for that. We are in uncharted waters here, folks. Every day is giving us something new. Our system is destabilising before our eyes, and it's wonderful to watch.

What we are witnessing here is the death rattle of the very post-1989 idea that we should concentrate upon the needs of the elites. The phone-hacking scandal has shown the British public that those who imagine themselves to be our elites are remarkably incapable elites. It should be unsurprising that Parliament is finally becoming vigourous about getting to the root of this matter - Parliament is scared, for these revelations show that for many years it has done nothing like enough about the muck in its own backyard and it now finds that it has a lot of ground to make up.

We are seeing a shift in the balance of power away from the cosy consensualism whereby Dave/Tony/Peter and Rebekah/Silvio/Nat would be very happy to socialise with each other out of office hours. While nothing improper might ever have happened, it gave an appearance of impropriety which not even the most seasoned and ruthless PR people could dispel. It gave the appearance that there were no boundaries at the top, and over the past month the public has made clear that boundaries are what they want, and lots of them.

We might even be seeing the beginning of the end of 'globalisation', that foggily pernicious, undescribable attempt to knit the world's financial markets together in pursuit of the cheapest of all possible labour. The greatest con trick that the world's bankers ever played on the public was letting us think they were on our side during the Cold War. They never were, they were only interested in us because we were anti-Communist, and their behaviour since the collapse of Communism has provided ample proof of that fact. 'Globalisation' absolutely depends on the relationship between government and business being fluid, and the public doesn't want that anymore. We've been motivated to give a toss by the sheer scale of the apparent badness that's been at work. We've called time on it all, and not a moment too soon.

These are interesting times. May we all come through them in one piece.

'A Fit And Proper Person'

2011-07-18T00:05:00.007+01:00

I have recently heard it said that the 'fit and proper person' test applied to determine whether one should be considered worthy to run a British television station is a very difficult one to fail.

The test of whether one is a fit and proper person is also used by the Law Society of Scotland to determine whether an individual is suitable to have their name added to the Roll of Solicitors in this country. In my opinion, in the past that body has applied that test tyranically, with people suffering from medical problems, many of which have possibly been brought on the stress of having to deal with some of the individuals who disport themselves through the doors of solicitors' offices every day, being barred from applying the credentials they have spent years acquiring. That the public often benefits from the use of those credentials just as much as their holders does not ever seem to be taken into account. Those responsible for this state of affairs have cited the protection of the public as a justification for what they do and have done, a course of action which should cause every entrant to the profession to realise that their professional body considers them to be a potentially dangerous man or woman. To hear the iron tongue of those who wield the iron fist in the iron glove is never really the healthiest start to any relationship, but with the Law Society of Scotland that just seems to be the way it is.

Hopefully the relevation of just what those who are demonstrably unfit and improper can come within a hair's breadth of getting away with if they know the right people will force the Society to reassess the violence with which it has applied that test against its own members in the past. On the other hand, I wouldn't bank on it. To do so would require reassessment of its past panjandrums' actions and attitudes, and that might be be too painful for all concerned.

Lest anyone think this post is sour grapes, think again. When I was a member of the Law Society of Scotland, I was never subjected to disciplinary proceeedings, nor was ever the subject of complaint. When it comes to this stuff, officially I'm as clean as a whistle. And I wouldn't go back into it if you paid me.

My Apologies To My Readers

2011-07-15T20:51:00.007+01:00

I have deleted the post I put up last night entitled 'A Short Thought On News Corporation's Abandonment Of Its Bid For BSkyB'.

It was coarse and mean-spirited, and of neither the intellectual nor moral standard to which I aspire. While it was probably appropriate for my own level, posting it was disrespectful to those readers who take time they could be doing other things to read what I have to say, regardless of when I bother to say it.

Please accept my apologies.

Prison Break Stories

2011-07-14T23:07:00.003+01:00

This could be my 'Golden Arches Theory of History' moment, but a phenomenon that we haven't seen for a while in this country is a really good prison break story.

It's not that we don't have lots of prisons, we certainly do. I for one do not subscribe to the Littlejohnian view that our prisons have become little more than health resorts.

However, could it be the case that our exceptionally lenient laws regarding the remission of sentences act as an incentive for prisoners to try to stay in prison? The thought certainly struck me as plausible. Wonder if any research has been done on it.

Strike!

2011-07-08T07:35:00.003+01:00

Wouldn't it be great if News International's plans to print the last edition of 'The News Of The World' had to be abandoned because its departing staff decided to tell Jimbo Murdoch to get stuffed and went on strike in protest at their treatment?

After all, what would he be able to do to stop them? Suspend their redundancy payments? The one thing that News International presumably doesn't want at the moment is for anyone else to be suing it. Or would he try and go for the ringleaders? On what basis? That they were encouraging their colleagues to behave illegally? Just how much ice do you think that argument would cut with a judge asked to injunct News International staff from striking?

No, I think the staff of the News Of The World should turn up today, vote on strike acion and then walk out again, leaving Jimbo and Brooksy to produce their own newspaper and Keith to stew in the knowledge that all of his efforts to thwart the rights of working people in this country, one which has never had any claim over him but which has allowed him to rampage through it for no purpose higher than the pursuit of his own gain, have been in vain. By going on strike, those NoW staff being made redundant through no fault of their own would be able to make a practical demonstration of their solidarity with those people whose lives have been disrupted, and privacy invaded, by their colleagues, no matter the managerial level at which they might have sat. No matter who pays the wages, people will only take so much crap. After all, this isn't the 1980's any more, and it's not as if any trade union is going to have any long-term impact on the way anything's done.

So let's see the Murdoch staff who have made him the most money walking out of a workplace that was designed to thwart unions in disgust at the manner of their treatment in a matter in which they have done no wrong. I hope Jimbo and Brooksy have a fun day on Saturday; but it might be a long one.

There Was The News

2011-07-07T23:48:00.004+01:00

Once again proving that the love of money is the root of all evil (for that's really what this whole affaire's been about from start to finish), James 'Jimbo' Murdoch, the George W. Bush of the international media world, and his sinister accomplice Rebekah Brooks have closed 'The News Of The World'.

It was a classically tawdry, hole-in-the-corner Murdoch operation apparently both designed and executed with the intention of depriving the victims of their dignity at the same time as relieving them of their jobs, no doubt reminding them that they never were 'their' jobs but Keith's and Jimbo's all the time. To close 'The News Of The World' might be considered to be an act of cutting off your nose to spite your face on a similar scale to cutting your throat, but if nothing else its staff would leave its employment knowing who the real bosses were. At times like this, you have to remember the important things in life.

It was an unashamedly plutocratic act emanating from a section of moral bandwidth unknown to the general public, the sort of stunt that you pull when you actually believe, as Rupert and James Murdoch both appear to, that you can do anything that you want, and that nobody whom you might encounter in any capacity has the right to expect common decency from you. Their behaviour has been of the type exhibited by all ancien regimes before they are overthrown, obsessively protective of their own 'liberties' while contemptuous of others' liberties to the point of becoming numb to the demands of common morality. If they are social Darwinists, then I thank God I am not one, if that's what it turns you into. If Steptoe & Son actually believe that this move is not only going to make the phone-hacking scandal go away but also make the advertisers come back, they are on to plums. The scandal is not going away. The political pressure on News International, its parent, its management and its shareholders is not going to go away. No amount of pressure put on junior employees to either up-sell or cross-sell News Corporation products, or keeping the pressure on them by putting them in windowless office buildings, is going to resurrect News International. As of now, it is dead, and while it might thrash about like a decapitated chicken for a while, its influence on British public life is zero. I'd like to know just what sort of reception would have been given to any executive who ever tried to suggest to Keith and Jimbo that Nemesis would follow Hubris. The people around them probably knew better than to try.

The role of Rebekah Brooks in this scandal is puzzling. She certainly doesn't seem to be the type that would ever challenge either Keith or Jimbo. The Murdoch family seems incredibly loyal to her. One wonders why. Their relationship with her seems not dis-similar to AJP Taylor's description of Hitler's attitude to Mussolini; after he came out in support of Germany, the Fuhrer would always bend over backwards to accommodate the Duce. One has to wonder why she provokes such loyalty from such famously unsentimental businesspeople. Perhaps she has been the perfect acolyte, always willing to do what others were not in order to keep the titles in her charge at the top of the tree. While some might consider this to be a worthy quality in an employee, it doesn't by itself make you an outstanding member of the human race. The ability of human beings to damage themselves and others in order to advance the cause of 'getting on' is boundless, but then again those who live in glass houses, like you and me and everyone else, shouldn't throw stones. After all, we might be better at it than those who do it for a living, and that would be depressing to think about on the way to work tomorrow.

While speculation can often be unfair, it's only fair to speculate upon what News International's reactions might have been if it had been the 'Daily Mirror' or the 'Daily Mail' at the centre of a phone-hacking scandal. Brooks would very probably have been calling for the resignation of their senior management. When presented now with a perfect opportunity to practice what she might, or would, have preached, she seems to be going nowhere. Her failure to resign, and her superiors' unwillingness to sack her, is, to my mind, the most direct challenge to human decency that the Murdoch family and their disciples have laid down to the rest of us since this episode began. They appear to be unwilling to take responsibility for what goes in the businesses they manage and control. They do not seem to believe that ordinary norms of human behaviour apply to them. Well, they might discover that the rules do apply to them, and in the near future too. It would be regrettable if freedom of the press were to be curtailed because these clowns actually believed the guff they spouted about needing to cut back on regulations. They cut back on editorial regulations, and created moral monsters. As for proof of Rebekah Brooks's hyprocrisy, that just might appear on its own. It usually does, and almost always when least expected.

Random Thoughts On The Passing Scene

2011-07-06T21:42:00.003+01:00

It was disappointing to hear the Labour Party criticise last week's strike by public sector workers. I hope to live long enough to hear Labour actually support a strike. Any strike.

The delay in holding a public enquiry into the allegations of phone-hacking conducted by persons connected to the 'News Of The World' newspaper is a classic British Establishment fudge. The only cliche that was absent was 'We don't discuss operational matters'. That saying, 'We don't discuss operational matters', has enabled the British state to get away with murder; indeed, it is its licence to kill. Events and decisions are never subjected to audit and scrutiny as they unfold. Junior people get hung out to dry at judicial enquiries often held years later, but that doesn't matter just as long as the immediate threat to our oligarchy is removed; by any means necessary. The same thing will happen here. The police enquiry can go on an on and on until Some New Big Issue begins to dominate events, and everything will go back to the way it was.

Mind you, even I was taken aback by hearing that they might have hacked murder victims' phones. What type of person does such a thing? And what type of environment must they work in?

HRH The Prince Of Wales...

2011-07-03T23:22:00.011+01:00

has apparently been summoning ministers responsible for assorted 'hobby-horse' areas of his.

It also seems that the Freedom of Information Act has been altered specifically to ensure the confidentiality of these briefings, the constitutional propriety of which, in my opinion, may be questionable. As has always been the case in British history, it might be the case that it's one rule for some, and another for Those Who Matter. In this country, you need do nothing but merely be in order to matter, an admirably Christian position but not one that's universally applied. Today's news is not really the sort of disclosure that makes you proud to be British, God wot.

I can't understand why that man just can't stick to talking to his plants and leave the rest of us in peace without hectoring us, and the people who are entrusted with our government, with his views, while his fondness for killing wild animals for sport and lecturing the rest of us on the need to eat less meat seems precisely the same philosophy of life once expounded to Bugs Bunny by Elmer Fudd. Instead of pandering to his nonsense on the sole basis that he will one day, and in my view illegitimately, if only because their use by every monarch since Henry VIII has been illegitimate, the initials 'FD', those two little initials that seem to be the rock upon which every British government since Henry's day has been built and such an important one that they still appear on every coin minted, it might be good for our government's health for him to be ignored for a while instead.

Freddy McConnel

2011-06-28T22:06:00.004+01:00

Without wishing to intrude upon the grief being felt by his parents and his sister, the recent, and very tragic death, of Freddy McConnel has shone a very welcome light into some of our culture's darker corners.

Freddy, 18 at the time of his death, was the son of James McConnel, a composer who suffers from Tourette Syndrome, and who wrote of how his illness was ameliorated by the effects of alcohol, of his subsequent slide into alcoholism and his ascent from it, in his memoir 'Life, Interrupted', a book which, while it might not be perfect, should be mandatory reading for the parent of every child diagnosed with our illness.

Very shortly before his death, Freddy had become friendly with a young woman known as Peaches Geldof, the daughter of Bob Geldof, a man who, in my opinion, has no respect for anyone or anything. A very sad and touching interview given by his parents to the 'Daily Mail' shortly after his death was announced recorded the following -

"Freddy formed a friendship with Peaches Geldof, the 22-year-old, wild-child daughter of Sir Bob Geldof. Extraordinarily, the Mail can reveal that Peaches this week telephoned Freddy’s father to confess that — although she had nothing whatsoever to do with his death — she had given money to Freddy to buy drugs in the months before he died.

In their first interview since their son’s death, James and Annie expressed their fury at Peaches and criticised the way that young drug-taking celebrities are all too often portrayed as cool and bohemian rather than indulging in a terrifying activity which destroys lives.
James says: ‘Peaches sounded more interested in protecting herself when she phoned me this week than sorry for what had happened to my son. She confessed to giving Freddy money to buy drugs. She said she had done it only once, but who knows?"

If it is not illegal for one person to provide another with the means to buy narcotics, it bloody well should be. It is astonishing to note the rise of what one might call the 'Geldof class', for he is a perfect example of that breed, a very common one in the so-called music business. The times he has lived in, and presumably also the astuteness of his career moves (the professional rebel is the most astute of all careerists) has enabled him to parlay what is in my opinion a minimal talent for the production of sound into a three-decade long career. Like a Napoleonic field marshal who has risen to nobility from the ranks, albeit one who started off not with a baton but a microphone in his napsack, his title and fame seem to have become heritable, regardless of his descendants' merits. I am sure Peaches Geldof has some. She just didn't seem to exhibit them to Freddy McConnel.

It would be very interesting to know just how and why the two became friendly. Hopefully Peaches Geldof saw Freddy McConnel's qualities for what they were, and saw the clever young man underneath the one who idolised Pete Doherty. From the outside, the establishment of the friendship seems puzzling. Although there was only four years of an age difference between them, at that age it is still a large one, particularly where the male is younger than the female. I hope to live long enough to read her memoirs, and to read how and why her friendship with Freddy McConnel came into being. She might even be working on that bit right now, for all I know.

The sooner we disengage ourselves from this horrible 'celebrity' culture, appearing to worship nothing but fame for fame's sake, the better and more wholesome our culture will become, one where talented and clever young men like Freddy McConnel won't die needlessly because they're impressed by someone so apparently vacuous as a rock musician. Since the turn of the millenium, Peaches Geldof, possessor of the daintiest of cultural footprints, has been one of that culture's poster girls. Let us all hope for a new look.

On Appeals

2011-06-28T21:18:00.005+01:00

The behaviours of the murderous public pest William Beggs have been cited in today's 'Scottish Daily Mail' as an example of how our appeals system favours prisoners at the expense of their victims' families.

In 1999 Beggs, an Ulsterman, sexually assaulted and murdered an 18 year old youth named Barry Wallace at a flat in Kilmarnock, before dismembering his remains and dumping them in Loch Lomond. He is serving a sentence of imprisonment for life, the punishment tariff of which is 20 years.

Since his imprisonment, Beggs has shown neither decency nor humanity towards his victim's family, and has embarked upon a series of appeals so unsuccessful that one suspects many of them to have been frivolous. If it was his intention to prove himself as a jailhouse lawyer, he has shown himself to be so spectacularly inept that if he were in the business on the outside he'd be up before the disciplinary authorities in a flash.

However, he has been abetted in his course by the accident of having been convicted at almost the same time as the Human Rights Act became law. Beggs, who at one stage in his life was deeply involved in hardline Ulster Unionist politics, comes from a cultural background where people like him had been accustomed to imposing their will upon others whether they might like it or not. When allied to the novelty of the Human Rights Act, this cultural burden might have found a natural outlet in the conduct of specious legislation.

The paper quotes Frank Mulholland (qv), Scotland's new Lord Advocate, as being naturally sympathetic to Mr. Wallace's family - what reasonable, humane person is not? - and as saying,

"It's hard enough dealing with what's happened after an appalling crime, for example, dealing with the consequences of losing a loved one. In William Beggs' case, it's taken nearly ten years to have his appeal against conviction and sentence refused".

I must confess that I am rather suspicious of Mr. Mulholland, whose public statements are, in my opinion, even more authoritarian than one might expect from the head of the Scottish prosecutorial establishment (one thing we're still very good at making in Scotland is criminals). In the case of Beggs, then, it is to be hoped that the Crown has never sought any adjournments of any of his appeals. If it has, then it would have done its own bit to ensure that the suffering endured by Mr. Wallace's family continued as the lurching, staggering appeals of William Beggs blundered their way through process.

I have written in the past of the need for justice to be final, and of how infinite process renders verdicts meaningless. However, the presence of one very bad apple in the appeals system, rotten to the core with a conceit born either from contempt towards his victim's family, which is the option that my money's on, or from the delusion that he is innocent, should not be the sole example held up as evidence in support of restricting rights of appeal. You won't hear them admit it either loudly or often, but the police and the Crown do sometimes get it wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. It would be a great shame for Scotland if our appeals system were altered solely because of the monomania of a murderous bully.

The Death Of Christopher Shale

2011-06-27T23:46:00.004+01:00

While Mr. Shale's family have my condolences for their loss, and without wishing either to add to their grief or speculate on the cause of his death, I find myself asking questions about the reporting of the circumstances in which his remains were discovered.

How frequently were the portable toilets in the VIP area at Glastonbury being checked? It's been many years since I stepped inside a nightclub, but even then the goons would make an ostentatious display of searching the toilets for signs of drug abuse. Were these toilets being checked in the same way? And if not, why not? If they were checked more frequently, then from the little that I have read, itself always bound to be incomplete at such an early stage as this, perhaps Mr. Shale's remains might have been discovered a little more quickly.

I am not suggesting for a second that either the organisers of the Glastonbury Festival, or their security contractors, or the local police service might have been turning a blind eye to the possibility of VIPs abusing drugs on site. In addition to being contrary to both law and policy, it would also be monstrously negligent of all their public duties and private duties of care.

The Milly Dowler Murder Trial

2011-06-27T23:34:00.004+01:00

While I have every sympathy for Miss Dowler's family, they cannot complain that they have not received justice. Our courts do not administer individual, retributive justice, but collective justice; The Queen's Justice. However badly they feel they might have been treated in its pursuit, and however low and wicked his character might be, Levi Bellfield still remained and remains as entitled to the fairness and transparency of the Queen's Justice as they are, and I hope that that will always be the case.

Their sister and daughter had the misfortune to encounter a serial killer, a shocking but rare event which does not by itself justify altering the methods by which the Queen's Justice is either pursued or dispensed in any way whatsoever; and our senior police officers would do well to remember that their function in the system is ended once the Crown has presented its case. For any of them to utter any word regarding any other aspect of the trial might be regarded as improper in some circles.

The Idiocy Of Oligarchy

2011-06-22T22:30:00.003+01:00

While thinking about my post of last night, the depth of the extent to which attempts to turn the disabled into the next great untapped labour market demonstrates the idiocy of oligarchy's tediously eternal and eternally tedious quest for cheap labour became a little clearer.

The majority of oligarchical Darwinists, unchallenged by any ethics other than those which encourage their own sense of gain, may for many years have quietly applauded the silent genocide perpetrated upon Down's Syndrome sufferers in the womb. Now that the Poles have gone home, of course, bingo! there is no group left other than those like Down's sufferers, and others they have long resented feeling that they have to pay for, regardless of whether they have had to or not, whom they can try to persuade to enserf themselves.

They look for cheap labour now among the ranks of those of whose destruction they heartily approved, and there might not be enough there to do the trick. I wonder just how long it will be before a Conservative MP suggests lowering the school leaving age to 14.

What Being A Disabled Worker In The United Kingdom Is Like (In The Real World)

2011-06-21T20:55:00.006+01:00

After writing my post of Sunday night on the Neanderthal comments of Philip Davies MP regarding allowing the disabled to opt out of the minimum wage, I came across Tim Worstall's sadly inevitable, and also, and equally sadly, inevitably flawed defence of them.

I like Tim a lot, he is a very generous person, but as Owen Barder once remarked of him there are times when he jumps in both feet first, and this has been one of them. At the time of writing this, the link to Tim's post is down, but I will link to it in the event of its reappearance, and quote from memory. Readers can decide whether I have done so accurately when it is restored.

As an example of the sort of disabled person who might benefit from opting out of minimum wage, Tim suggests a teenage Down's Syndrome sufferer. In the comments, I have pointed out that there aren't any teenage Down's Syndrome sufferers, not in the UK at least. The last time I saw one was in Dublin in 2009. Tim lives in Portugal, and may see them there on account of the local prevalence of Catholic ethics. In the UK, and also I believe in the USA, the suffering imposed by Down's Syndrome may be on schedule for elimination, although someone will have deemed it necessary to eliminate the sufferers in order to do so. Perhaps Richard D. North, writer and broadcaster, and also, in my opinion, a nasty old rascal, might hail this as a progressive step. Davies seems just to want not to pay for us. North gives the impression of not wanting even to see us.

Davies has suggested that the changes he proposes are necessary in order to help disabled people get a job in 'the real world'. Oligarchical Darwinists like Davies, whose comments give me the impression that he's just another of the cheap labour lobby's mindless, bog standard sock-puppets, like to cite the 'real world' in defence of their positions, when in my experience the real world they describe is one which is both unreal and unworldly. While his attempt to cast the disabled as the new Poles, The New Next Big Untapped Labour Market Just Waiting to Be Enserfed In The Cause Of Cheap Labour, is perversely flattering, to my eyes it's also risibly transparent. In Davies's case, the attempt is even more insolent and patronising than usual. He would never dream of suggesting that black people be permitted to opt themselves out of the minimum wage solely because they are black, and quite rightly so, so why should he suggest it of the disabled? As a third-generation public scholboy and third-genration university graduate, nothing has given me such experience of what life is really like as becoming disabled, a level of exposure to reality in all its hideousness that I would imagine Davies would struggle to cope with.

However, after reading Tim's post, I thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to outline just a few of the issues that his factually fictional Down's Syndrome teenager would encounter in Davies's 'real world', should the type of law he desires be enacted.

Well, the first challenge they would encounter is how those hard-headed practical men living in the real world, the ones who would be employing this glut of disabled cheap labour, would cope with the operation of the Disability Discrimination Act. Say what? Yes, the Disability Discrimination Act, the one that requires employers to make reasonable adjustments for their disabled employees if it is reasonable for them to do so. If Tim's Down's sufferer couldn't cope with pushing trolleys for his multi-billion pound supermarket employer, said multi-billion pound supermarket employer would have to make a reasonable adjustment for him, which, given its size, would I imagine lead any employment tribunal hearing such a DDA case to find that it would be reasonable for them to do. There is a perfect way round this, of course, which is to scrap DDA, which unfortunately Westminster can't do, given that, to my understanding, it emanated from Brussels.

So that's point one dealt with. The second would be whether Tim's Down's sufferer would actually be able to opt out of the minimum wage, or have their opting-out presented to them as a fait accompli.

In my experience as a serial holder of low-income jobs in the real world, I have never, to my knowledge, actually been given the option of opting out of the Working Time Directive, that European initiative that limits the working week to 48 hours. I don't have my current contract to hand, but vividly recall signing a number of contracts which indicated that by signing the contract I consented to opting out of WTD. Again if flawed memory serves, this was a particular feature of contracts I signed with recruitment consultancies providing temporary staff (you should feel no pity for me on this score, for I was a recruitment consultant for three years, and probably colluded in doing this to others; at that time, I thought I was living in the real world, and God will not be mocked). Now, I could quite easily envision a situation whereby Tim's Down's sufferer gets handed a piece of paper to sign, which states that their signature indicates that they have opted out of the laws regarding the payment of the statutory minimum wage. It would be directly analogous to the situation in which many millions of able-bodied and low-paid British people, those of whose lives Philip Davies and those like him seem to know nothing, have found themselves in regarding their right to opt out of the Working Time Directive; as far as they're concerned, the right is solely a notional one, for people are on their back to get them to work, and the people with the jobs won't let them have one unless they sign away their right to a 48 hour week for nothing.

Who would be on their backs to get them to work? Why, the Department of Work and Pensions, of course.

In his 'Diaries', Richard Crossman, the first Secretary of State of the Department of Health and Social Security (as was) in the late 1960's, records how even then it seemed to be the case that the welfare state's administrators seemed to be deliberately unhelpful to those who were seeking their assistance, and opaque in the information they provided. I am sad to say that I have personally encountered, as in been on the receiving end, of two separate instances of such behaviours in the past three years. No matter what name the welfare state goes by, its attitude towards those who seek its help has not changed since Crossman's time in my experience. Having been on their receiving end, it's fair to say that both experiences were squalid.

In 2008, I required to claim Incapacity Benefit. The focus of Incapacity Benefit is (was?) not to tide you over until you recover, but to get you back to work. The pressure that was put on sick people to get back to work in 2008 was enormous. It was squalid.

Equally squalid was the experience of dealing with a benefit adviser in 2010, whose nominal function was to assist me with a claim for Disability Living Allowance. One of the individual quirks of my Tourettes that is that while I cannot walk forwards very far without falling over, I can walk backwards with considerable ease. In that adviser's view, that alone rendered my claim unsupportable, and I felt under such pressure from them to drop it that I caved. I got the distinct impression that this individual was more interested in the management of their statistics than in helping me claim DLA. I am glad that I believe in a physical, real place called Hell, and that the idea of going there hopefully prevents me from treating any another person in such a squalid way.

The best way to describe that adviser was that they were not unlike those Grizzlies who come down from the mountains to root among trashcans, or the Siberian tigers who hunt in the suburbs of Vladivostok; they were a hunter who should be a long way from civilisation, but who now lives, furtively and sneakily, on the margins of society, hoping for easy prey.

The operations of the British welfare state have shown, in my opinion and experience, that while the corpse of Jeremy Bentham has been stuffed and mounted in its case for a very long time now, his vengeful, hateful spirit still strides among us. Anyone who says it doesn't, doesn't know know what they're talking about it.

So the authorities, those possessing nominal duties of care to those such as Tim's Down's Syndrome teenager, probably wouldn't hesitate to put the frighteners on them in order to get them off the benefit roll. Hopefully any law which enabled the disabled to enserf themselves by opting out of minimum wage would also allow for any contract presented to them to be reviewed by an independent and appropriate adult, with a power to veto the employment without penalty to the disabled person. Philip Davies MP might consider this to be an unnecessary regulatory burden, and he might be right.

After all, he lives in the real world.

Greek Tragedy

2011-06-21T20:36:00.005+01:00

Whether the Greek government stands or falls is of no interest to me personally, although one would hope that the situation can be resolved peacefully.

At the risk of being branded xenophobic (a good Greek word), I can't help but think that Greece has been a military dictatorship within very recent living memory, as also has Spain. If some Eurozone nations fail to bail out others, it's not difficult to imagine a scenario where either the mob or the generals might decide to take matters into their own hands. Hopefully both nations' militaries have been thoroughly indoctrinated against such nonsense, and that they and the peoples they serve are so revolted by the memory of dictatorship that they would shun it even if affairs were in chaos.

But if it were to happen, and I hope that it does not, God forbid, it would be interesting to know just what the European Union and/or NATO would do about it or would be able to do about it. Would an invasion of either Greece or Spain be attempted in order to restore democracy? After all, if the Afghans and the Iraqis are worthy of such efforts, why wouldn't the Greeks and the Spanish be worthy of them as well?

For even a casual student of universal history, it has been wonderful to see the events of the past few months unfold. While Scotland, the birthplace of the Enlightenment, lapses into pre-Enlightenment authoritarianism and personality cults, the Mediterranean is feeling the birthpangs of democracy all over again. As Napoleon might have put it, the revolution is complete.

On Being Disabled In The United Kingdom, Part I

2011-06-20T00:00:00.003+01:00

Today's 'Sunday Times' carries a report which heavily quotes one 'Paul Slowey'.

Mr. Slowey runs an outfit called 'Blue Badge Fraud Investigation Ltd', described as 'a unique specialist criminal investigation and prosecution company'. Mr. Slowey appears to have set himself up in business, and all of his clients seem to be local authorities, in order to 'carry out comprehensive operations in target areas, identifying, enforcing and prosecuting cases of blue badge misuse'.

I am no longer a solicitor, and would not dream of offering legal advice on any subject, however while reading today's 'Sunday Times', the following questions came into my head -

1. In the UK, criminal investigations are conducted by the police. BBFI's claim that it conducts 'criminal investigations of suspected (Blue Badge) fraud and misuse' must raise some issues regarding how its operations interact with the Human Rights Act. It claims to be investigating alleged crimes - in what capacity? And upon whose authority? If it is upon the authority of local government bodies, do those bodies have the power either to conduct the type of investigations being conducted by BBFI or to outsource their conduct to contractors?

2. Esto BBFI's alarming comment that it conducts 'evidence and public interest tests and issue(s) a lot of warnings and cautions'. What warnings? What cautions? Upon what basis? In whose name? And upon what authority?

3. Again, it says it takes 'criminal prosecutions where badges are misused' (note, not 'allegedly misused'). In whose name, and upon whose authority? This is a private company, albeit maybe one that wouldn't appear to need to exist if local authorities ran Blue Badge properly. What is it doing taking prosecutions?

4. One wonders what safeguards are built in Mr. Slowey's business model to prevent his company being used as a passive instrument for the conduct of feuds and vendettas. In a society that increasingly looks upon the disabled as a burden, Blue Badge envy, the idea that someone has conned their way to privilege, can be a powerful force for ill.

My own Blue Badge is where only I can find it. I've tried to use it twice, and have succeeded in doing so only once. On the unsuccessful occasion, at Glasgow Airport, all of the disabled parking bays had been taken by rockin' great 4 x 4's, and not one of them was displaying a Blue Badge.

As Mr. Slowey would hopefully be the first to agree, that wasn't a victimless crime.

On Being Disabled In The United Kingdom, Part II

2011-06-19T23:09:00.004+01:00

The Conservative MP Philip Davies has drawn righteous flak for suggesting that the disabled should be able to opt out of the minimum wage because, apparently, we're less productive than other candidates.

As a disabled British person who has been in almost continuous, if varied, employment for the past 20 years, my first thought was that if Mr. Davies thinks the able-bodied are productive he clearly hasn't worked in some of the same places that I have. It is also gratifying to see that David Cameron's people have rejected the idea. To my mind, this amounts to a Coalition commitment to maintaining the minimum wage.

That Mr. Davies is, to my eyes, a Tory Neanderthal goes without saying. In the real world, it is highly unlikely that the program he has suggested would ever happen, which makes me wonder just how much he knows about 'the real world'. When faced with a disabled candidate and a non-disabled candidate, if a prospective employer believes that the disabled candidate is going to be less productive than the non-disabled candidate then it would be irrational for him to hire the disabled, regardless of whether or not the disabled candidate had the option of opting out of the minimum wage. For Mr. Davies to express the view that an employer might take on a less productive employee than he could get because they're willing to work for less than what would otherwise be the going rate is the babbling of a naive ideologue. It does, however, neatly sum up both the basis of British immigration policy for the past 15 years and also the philosophy underpinning the phenomenon of 'offshoring'. While his views might be daft, Mr. Davies might just have been preaching to the choir.

However, if his views gain momentum, and, sadly, I suspect they will, given what I perceive to be the mounting degree of unpleasantness being both felt and expressed towards the disabled in our country (a situation which is not going to be improved by permitting the idea that the disabled are undercutting wages to develop), then one might be able to suggest a series of trade-offs to make his Vision for a Better Britain come true.

For example, if the disabled must be given the option of being able to be paid less than our fellows, it would seem only fair for us to also be given the option of opting out of the income tax system in its entirety. I see no virtue in a system which would permit the institutional pauperisation of the disabled by paying them less for the same work as their able-bodied colleagues, while subjecting them to a universal rate of income tax. In such a scenario, to permit the disabled and non-disabled to work on different pay rates would amount to a double pay cut, the first being the lower pay rate, the second being a rate of income tax de facto higher than that paid by their colleagues on account of being paid less in real terms.

If that proposal is unappealing, there could be an alternative, a Disabled Workers Credit that could be claimed by all disabled people who feel that they have had to opt themself out of minimum wage in order to gain work (I suspect that the pressure that would be put on unemployed disabled people by the Department of Work and Pensions to opt out would be enormous). Its purpose would be to top up reduced earnings to the level which would have been payable had they not opted out. Mr. Davies might not be aware of this, but when you come off JSA you have to pay rent instead of claiming Housing Benefit. The purpose of the Disabled Workers Credit would be to ensure that disabled workers opting out of minimum wage don't then immediately get themselves into rent arrears because they're earning less than they need in order to pay their rent, and lose their jobs as a result. The extent of the naivety behind Mr. Davies's babblings is alarming,

However, given that opting out of minimum wage would amount to a surrender of economic liberty, it would only be appropriate for a liberty not to be granted, but taken. If the disabled must work for less money, it is only appropriate that the vote of a disabled person should carry more weight than that of a non-disabled person. Having given up more than others to ensure the system's success, it is only appropriate that they should have more of a say in how it is run. I could quite happily live in a country where my vote has 10 times the weight of Alex Salmond's. I do not imagine this would be politically feasible, but we're a democracy, or so we're told, and the poor, the sick and the weak aren't just thrown on the scrapheap - aren't they?

Alex Salmond's Attacks Upon Lord Hope And Tony Kelly

2011-06-15T23:09:00.005+01:00

While most of the two-fisted, two-footed assaults mounted by the soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government' upon the law of Scotland, the rule of the law in Scotland and the civil liberties of the Scots now summon little more than unsurprised abhorrence and disgust, Alex Salmond's attacks upon Lord Hope of Craighead and Tony Kelly have plumbed sinister new lows.

For any politician to launch such a breathtakingly arrogant personal attack upon such a senior judge is, to my understanding, unprecedented in recent British history. Does The Tartanissimo understand the law of Scotland to be nothing more than a vehicle for the performance of his will? Is what he thinks right to be the only law?

Lord Hope's 'crime' was to concur in the granting of a criminal appeal which it was competent for the court of which he is a member, the UK Supreme Court, to hear. You might not like the idea of the UK having a Supreme Court, presumably capable of over-riding Parliament (if it could not, it could not be described as Supreme), but for the time being we've got one, and there is no legal dispute regarding its competence to adjudicate upon the appeal. That appeal, Nat Fraser's, was successful on the basis that it was held to be incorrect for the authorities prosecuting him to have withheld evidence that might have been of assistance to him in his defence. Frankly, it is shocking that Fraser should have had to go as far as the Supreme Court for that principle to be enunciated. That he should have had to do so is, in my opinion, a shocking commentary upon the state of Scotland's criminal justice system from top to bottom. Instead of The Tartanissimo electing to play to his own gallery, using the mere fact that a British court, one with jurisdiction over the subject matter, has determined that an unpopular Scottish convict has not received justice from the Scottish courts in order to do it, he should instead be ordering an enquiry into the whole matter. This might be as gruesome an affaire as the 'Ayr Murder'. As painful as it might be for his wife's relations to hear, it might now be the case that it is impossible for Nat Fraser to be fairly tried before a Scottish court, with the only appropriate disposal for him being immediate release.

One might think that a responsible First Minister would seek to learn lessons from this episode, to ensure that no accused person and no victim's relatives are ever put through a similar ordeal. Yet The Tartanissmo's arrogant, tedious 'Braveheart' chauvinism leads him down the cul-de-sac of Scotianism, at a time when we're supposed to be another funky, outward-looking small European nation. As far as I can see, he appears to believe that having a uniquely Scottish criminal justice system is a greater public good than that accused persons be fairly tried. It is my opinion that if that is his view, then that is an expression not of the 'civic nationalism' that his clique proclaims, whatever it might actually be, but of historically much more common despotic nationalism instead; the nationalism of Milosevic.

Although The Tartanissmo's attack on Lord Hope is unprecedented on account of its extremely ad hominem, demagogic character, British judges are always a safe target for populist outbursts from those of our politicians whose own elitism leaves them in blissful ignorance of what they're talking about. They never answer back, even Lord Hutton, in my opinion our country's least complaining victim of serial libel. Yet even then, The Tartanissimo couldn't leave it alone. He's attacked a lawyer, Tony Kelly, by name.

His spokesman's subsequent bloviations suggest that The Tartanissmo is now sweatier than after he's bitten off more than he can chew from his Saturday night Jalfrezi, and, for what my opinion's worth, so he bloody well should be. This is what he said - The First Minister of Scotland actually said this -

"There is not a single person, outwith Professor Kelly, who was the instigator of many of the actions, that believes that the judicial system is there to serve their interests and to make sure they can make an incredibly comfortable living by trailing around the prison cells and other establishments of Scotland trying to find what might be construed as a breach of human rights of an unlimited liability back to 1999, and that is what we were faced with."

Good frickin' grief! No wonder Tony Kelly's taking legal advice! Wouldn't you, if you were a lawyer and something like that had been said about you? If the arrogance of The Tartanissimo's comments about Lord Hope was breathtaking, there are no words to describe the depth of arrogance animating what he's said about Tony Kelly.

This has the potential to end very badly for The Tartanissimo. While these episodes cast a very great cloud over his personal judgment, they have shone a blinding light upon his attitudes regarding what the law of Scotland is there for, and what those who work in it are there to do. It is unfortunate that The Scotland Act does not seem to contain any procedure for the impeachment of a First Minister. This is a revision which clearly needs to be made, for, in my opinion, Alex Salmond's statements show that he is neither a fit nor proper person to have control of Scotland's criminal justice system; and when you can't be trusted with that, with the power to say who or what may be considered criminal, you can't be trusted with power.

The Great Big Little Girls' Clothing Debate

2011-06-11T01:50:00.004+01:00

Watching 'Question Time' last night, it was difficult not to feel just a little sorry for Peter Hitchens.

The science of animatronics has worked wonders for our understanding of paleontology in recent years. Watching Mr. Hitchens getting mauled by the audience while trying to ram home his ultraconservative talking points on how our decline started in the '60's, etc., etc., etc., one could not help but think of such wonderful TV shows as 'Walking with Dinosaurs', and of how closely Mr. Hitchens resembled an old stegosaur left to rot at the back of the pack, moaning and beating his tail off the ground in frustration.

The same debate provoked Germaine Greer to make her rather creepy point that girls learn to become coy and manipulative when kissing their fathers goodnight. One audience member ripped her a new one for that comment, in my opinion quite rightly; as far as I can see, it certainly added fuel to the argument that Dr. Greer might properly be considered to be dirty-minded. On the other hand, most Brits' abiding memory of her should be that wonderful image of her storming out of the 'Celebrity Big Brother' house while dressed as a milkmaid. She wrote 'The Female Eunuch' - for that?

In stegosaur mode, Mr. Hitchens did, sadly, miss the most open of goals. The question related to whether government can do anything to reverse the trend towards the sexualisation of children, in particular the unpleasant phenomenon of mature clothing designed for young girls. If memory serves, Andrew Mitchell (Conservative), Charles Clarke (Labour), and Jo Swinson (Liberal Democrat) all indicated that they believed that the role of the family in shaping such behaviour was more important than that of government.

If Mr. Hitchens had been on his game, he could have noted the following.

For Charles Clarke to publicly downplay the role that government can play in shaping attitudes and behaviour of any kind was an act of breathtaking hypocrisy, given that he was a member of the government that legislated the Human Rights Act into existence while simultaneously creating over 3,000 new offences, some of which enabled local authorities to use legislation intended to combat terrorism in order to spy on people suspected of trying to get their children into better schools, while also placing speed cameras all over the place. If any government knew anything about the power that government has to try to shape peoples' behaviour, it was the one of which Mr. Clarke was a member. It was strange, almost alien, to hear a Labour politician of his vintage say that any entity other than government might be better able to tackle any problem.

Given their tri-partite, and quite newfound, support for the institution of the family, Mr. Hitchens could have taken all three of them to task on just why all their parties have supported the weakening of the family through their promotion of liberal divorce laws and the formalisation of 'alternative' lifestyles, almost all of which are temporary at best, dysfunctional at worst, but which we're all supposed to make-believe are just as normal and wholesome as The Waltons. Up and down the land, there are wee lassies in the family way who have never known what it's like to live in a family. Whose fault is that? Theirs? Knock it off.

This uniformity of thought amongst all two-and-a-half of our main political parties makes one wonder whether any of them really care about the sexualisation of young female children. For what my opinion's worth, they probably don't, being so dirty-minded that they would prefer to see children become pregnant rather than countenance any official sanction on the satisfaction of any of their own appetites. Hope they enjoy it while it lasts. It might be later than they think.

'Crossroads'

2011-06-11T01:19:00.005+01:00

While it was favourably reviewed by both Will Hutton and Stephen Roach (pbuh), Peter Nolan's 'Crossroads' is at times quite a chilling book.

Mr. Nolan's narration of precisely how the banking system collapsed so quickly between 2007 and 2008 made one wonder just how one could have afforded to smoke 20 cigarettes a day and drink three bottles of red wine a week while it was happening. Reading of it three years later, I was more frightened of it now than I was then. Then again, maybe I had the right approach at the time, the correct posture towards it all having been to stay pleasantly pissed, and hope it will all go away.

Sometimes English speakers have a bad habit of abusing the expression 'There but for the Grace of God go I". In my experience, the Grace of God has a great deal to recommend it. This might have been a classic case in point.

However, Mr. Nolan's book is very much more ambivalent when describing state violence. The Tiananmen Square massacres of 1989 are described as 'the Tiananmen events', while, if memory serves, he does not stint on the use of stronger language when describing Israeli actions towards Palestinians. If memory serves, the book is billed as a description of how globalisation will force us to revisit our views on China and the Muslim world. His apparent concern to assuage both the official sensibilities of the Chinese government and the unofficial sensibilities of the Arab street makes one wonder whether Nr. Nolan's book is directed to those readerships. If so, he can only be described as adept at preaching to the choir.

The book is also impeded by what, in my opinion, was a pointless and rather embarrassing postscript concerning the author's late father. To my eyes, it had nothing to do with the rest of the book.

If you are looking for a crisp recounting of how the counting houses' card houses came tumbling down, 'Crossroads' provides as clear a history as any. For anything else, then, in my opinion, approach with caution.

Ground Troops In Libya

2011-06-11T01:01:00.005+01:00

On last night's 'Question Time', the question was asked whether institutional rape instigated by Gaddafi loyalists should be cited as grounds for committing troops to an invasion of Libya.

I would not be fighting in any such war, and will send my son to his mother's avowedly neutral homeland rather then see any bugger ever try to put a gun in his hand to fight for HMG, thanks but no thanks. However, I can think of only one condition upon which British infantry forces, drawn largely as they are from those parts of society otherwise excluded from wider economic activity, could be committed to an invasion of Libya.

That would be on the basis that they would be liberating Libya's natural resources for the benefit of the Libyans, and not for the benefit of BP or anyone else. This could be verified by various BBC camera crews not allowed but mandated to record that any provisional government was using this vast pool of wealth for the benefit of the people, and not for the benefit of donors to British political parties which had promoted the invasion as if it were a second-rate wrestling bill in Clacton-on-Sea.

'Walden'

2011-06-11T00:12:00.007+01:00

Anyone who quotes Henry David Thoreau approvingly obviously hasn't read him.

Mr. Thoreau, who must have cut have cut a hell of a dash even in the ultraliberal atmosphere of 1840's Concord, Massachusetts, was something of a proto-hippy, born maybe 120 years before his time. Taking Indian scriptures, as in the Vedas, as his guide, he famously went to live off the land at Walden Pond. He does not record its owner's views on his adventure.

Mr. Thoreau has a few good lines. A vegetarian, he glibly remarks on the foolishness inherent on the statement that the ploughman must have his meat, observing that the plough-horse doing the work eats only straw. I'm sure that this would have had Emerson peeing himself with self-satisfied laughter, until one very quickly realises that Thoreau has set up what can only be described as, for want of a better phrase, a straw man; one of the creatures he is describing is a man, while the other is a horse.

He is famous, really only famous, for his comment that most men live their lives in quiet desperation. This comment appears very early in his book. It is not passed as a rueful observation on the lot of his fellow men, but as a supercilious rebuke to their perceived inferiority. Almost immediately afterwards, he remarks that at the age of 30 he had learned nothing useful from anyone older than himself. I have a very bad habit of abusing the old books in my ownership, graffitoing them in Biro while turning down page corners with abandon. While coarse, and perhaps disrespectful of future owners, I can only plead that I'm one of Thatcher's children. However, I did not treat 'Walden' that way. My copy, published in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1884, has been unsullied by my hand, However, that particular observation provoked a reader, presumably from a quieter, gentler age, to leave the following mark beside it - '?'

I can understand where they were coming from.

However, the nadir of Mr. Thoreau's unpleasantness is reached with his visit to his Irish neighbour. His Irish neighbour worked with his hands all day long. Mr. Thoreau records how he paid him a visit in order to evangelise him in the ways of vegetarianism, an exercise he seems to have conducted with all of the priggishness and sanctimony one might expect from HRH The Prince of Wales, perhaps a soulmate of Mr. Thoreau's. When his Irish neighbour quietly rebuffs his suggestion with a level of dignity apparently alien to Mr. Thoreau, his karmic liberalism fails him and he lets himself rip, describing his neighbour, if memory serves, as a web-footed bog-trotter.

If you should ever feel compelled to read 'Walden', please find yourself another, wholly more productive pastime, such as trimming the hamster's toenails, or giving the cat a perm. After two years, Mr. Thoreau just upped sticks and walked away from Walden Pond. Reading that he had done this, it was difficult not to recall C S Lewis's observation on Coleridge, that after having written about nature for so much of his life he couldn't bear to look at it in the end. With both writers, one can only question the degree of their initial commitment to their endeavours.

Overseas Aid And Tax Avoidance

2011-06-11T00:02:00.007+01:00

Again on last night's 'Question Time'', it was fascinating to hear Andrew Mitchell, the Secretary of State for International Development, lashing out at the inappropriate use of development funds by members of recipient governments.

Mr. Mitchell is a sometime suspected tax-avoider. The degree of doublethink required to criticise governments that abuse taxpayer-sourced funds provided by other nations when you, or your interests, might not be paying all that's required under your own country's laws is quite staggering.

Weird Hits

2011-06-08T21:47:00.008+01:00

Traffic has been significantly boosted today from hits to this old post.

Starting off at 02.51 from IP 41.184.85.174, based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, they came in thick and fast. Next up was at 04.30 from 41.220.69.58 in Ibadan, Nigeria, then, in order, at 04.04 from 41.220.69.10, also in Ibadan; 04.42, from 86.145.236.154 in Canvey, Slough, UK; 05.58, from 41.206.12.46 at an unknown address in Nigeria; 07.42, from 86.173.5.185 in Milton Keynes, UK; 07.43, from 196.207.1.202 in Lagos, Nigeria; 08.18, from 41.220.77.56, again in Lagos; 08.29, from 193.63.86.249 in Bedford, UK; 08.30, from 41.75.199.19 at an unknown location in Nigeria; 08.48, from 210.187.58.166 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; 08.49, from 80.248.9.50, also at an unknown address in Nigeria; at 09.03, from 216.226.227.9 in Abuja, Nigeria; at 09.12, from 90.210.163.42 in Peterborough, UK; at 09.22, from 194.176.105.55 at an unknown address in the UK; at 09.24, from 41.220.69.9, again in Ibadan; at 09.39, from 62.244.185.135 in London; at 10.09, from 69.156.95.34 in McGregor, Ontario, Canada (!); at 10.28, from 97.90.192.224 in Alhambra, California (!!); at 10.38, from 91.113.51.162 in Enzenkirchen, Austria(!!!); at 10.41, from 99.246.107.133 in Ottawa; at 10.48, from 217.14.94.22, again in Abuja; at 10.49, from 196.216.251.103, at an undisclosed address in Nigeria; at 11.03, from 80.248.8.75, again at an undisclosed address in Nigeria; at 11.07, from 41.155.114.134, again at an undisclosed address in Nigeria; at 11.55, from 196.220.18.60 in Mushin, Lagos, Nigeria; at 12.10, from 92.234.44.248 in London; at 12.14, from 217.14.88.33, again at undisclosed address in Nigeria; at 12.32, from 41.184.6.42, in Isheri, Ogun, Nigeria; at 13.08, from 41.184.6.42, at an undisclosed address in the UK; at 13.20, from 92.21.34.85, in Redditch, Worcestershire, UK (maybe pals of Laban Tall's); 13.55, from 68.84.14.63, in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA; and at 14.56, from 66.214.238.149, in Hacienda Heights, California.

If somebody is trying to creep me out, it's working. If you want to make a point, or to pass comment on previous content, just send me an email, for God's sake.

'A Good Man Goes To War'

2011-06-06T22:40:00.004+01:00

Sorry, folks, this is a me post, with lots of spoilers.

At the end of a very unpleasant weekend of DYI, both planned and unplanned, with the day and a great deal more once again having been saved by two household implements best described as The Magic Pump and The Bicycle Lock Of The Apocalypse, I really was rather looking forward to the finale of the sixth series of the revived 'Doctor Who'. Sadly, like so many once fine pleasures, the anticipation of the event was more enjoyable than the reality.

Entitled 'A Good Man Goes To War', it ranks amongst the most pointless, disjointed pieces of television I've ever seen. The second series to star Matt Smith as The Doctor has been of a markedly lower standard than the first. Two episodes, 'The Rebel Flesh', and 'The Almost People', should have been classed as horror instead of science fiction, fit only for being broadcast after the now perhaps only notional 9pm watershed. They were not suitable viewing for young children, always proclaimed by that show's makers to be an integral, if not core, part of its audience. I found the imagery they displayed unsettling, and I'm 41 years old and have attended a murder victim's post mortem.

This series had had more loose threads than a sweatshop kilt. The second show in the run ended with a young girl undergoing a Time Lord's regeneration cycle. This was interesting, as one of the revived show's main premises is that The Doctor is the last of the Time Lords. This incident was neither explained nor resolved. In the episode 'The Doctor's Wife', written by Neil Gaiman, another horrifying episode which was doubly unsuitable for children due to the use of sexual language, reference was made to other Time Lords having been alive at some point. Admittedly, this was in the context of them having been murdered for their body parts, but no explanation was provided as to how they might have escaped from the time bubble in which the Time War was apparently locked.

'A Good Man Goes To War' proceeded on the basis that Amy Pond (Karen Gillan), the Doctor's assistant, had been kidnapped at some point and was due to give birth on an asteroid known as 'Demon's Run'. No explanation was provided regarding where or when she had been abducted. At the start of the episode, her husband Rory (Arthur Darvill) is shown confronting the recurring villains the Cybermen, and demanding to know where his wife was. No explanation was provided regarding why the Cybermen might know that. The Doctor assembles an army to recover her. The army is comprised of characters who have appeared in episodes of 'Doctor Who' starring Matt Smith. This seemed to be a reprise of the plot device used more effectively, and much more affectingly, to conclude Series 4, particularly the episode entitled 'Journey's End', and previously criticised here. In the case of 'A Good Man Goes To War', the producers might as well have had Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney getting the kids together to put on a show for all of the passion that some of these characters seemed to exhibit for the task in hand. For example, there was a Sontaran nurse that I didn't really recall from other episodes, but he did get to say that he'd had a good life, being nearly 12. Maybe I've watched too much bubblegum TV science fiction, but to me this was reminiscent of the early episode of 'Star Trek Voyager' in which an Ocampa, played by Gary Graham, announced his astonishing longevity of nearly 14. There was also what, to my mind, was an unwholeseome depiction of a quasi-lesbian relationship between a human and a Silurian (Silurians are lizards). And to cap it all, we had Hugh Bonneville. For a moment or two, at least.

Mr. Bonneville had appeared as a pirate captain in an earlier episode of Series 6 entitled 'The Curse Of The Black Spot'. That might sound like some horrific sort of venereal disease to the less cultured viewer, but that hackneyed homage to 'Treasure Island' enabled him to appear and then almost immediately disappear as a member of The Doctor's 'army' in 'A Good Man Goes To War'. For a star of his magnitude, his appearance in the latter episode was so fleeting as to be pointless, making one wonder whether he had other commitments to attend to.

But we've got to give the producers their due - they really know how to stick it to the Catholic Church!

Among the villains of 'A Good Man Goes To War' are the Headless Monks. Unsurprisingly, these are a group of monks who don't have heads. Predictably, there are two things we weren't told about them. The first was why they don't have heads. The second was why they were after The Doctor.

But hey, one of the characters was given the line that he had received a dispensation from 'the papal mainframe herself' to remove their hoods! The piece of dialogue was, to my mind, a gratuitous slap in the face to this show's Catholic fans. That might not have been the writer's intention, but that was certainly how it was perceived.

In all this has been a shoddy, crappy series, one rounded off by a particularly shoddy, crappy finale. The previous faults of the show are creeping back in, in particular unspeakable dialogue and viscous plots so densely larded on top of sound effects so loud that you have to have the subtitles on in order to keep track of the action (at this point one can only say thank goodness for the iPlayer, as an unscheduled trip to, or, after last weekend, even trip into, the bathroom would leave you bamboozled for the rest of the run, and that's even if the threads had all come together). The TARDIS is famous for being bigger on the inside than the outside. The show itself is becoming the reverse, being now very much bigger on the outside than the inside. The Doctor is able to travel across time and space at will. It seems that the show's writers are trying to perform the same trick with the rules of plot and narrative.

Why does this matter? Like all deeply unserious things, it matters a great deal. 'Doctor Who' is perhaps the only taxpayer-funded institution this country has which is held in universal affection, and I include the monarchy in that assessment. There is no point in reviving a show if you aren't going to do it well, and this series has not been done well. I loved it as a child, and I still love it. I'll love it forever, but right now I wouldn't want my own son to watch it. And that's not my fault, it's not the fault of the show or the format, but it is entirely the fault of the people making it at the moment. Right now, they seem to be angling to have their careers kicked into the nearest black hole.

A Few Words On Words

2011-06-03T23:36:00.005+01:00

Bear with me.

I've recently finished Anthony Storr's wonderful wee book 'Music and the Mind'. In it, he writes, "(t)he balanced sentences of a prose stylist like Edward Gibbon are probably derived from the antiphonal singing of psalms"(p.132).

This brought to mind an observation of Arnold Toynbee's on F.M. Cornford's 'Thucydides Mythistoricus', specifically Cornford's contention that Thucydides should be read as if he were writing an epic poem, like 'The Iliad', and not a history.

Apart from showing that I am devastatingly well-read, what does any of this have to do with the price of fish? Well, there now follows a short exercise in ontology; one which I am sure very many more devastatingly well-read people than myself have conducted and in so doing have reached the same conclusion, but if they have, I haven't seen it.

Prayer is as uniquely human as the religious impulse (atheists sometimes have a blind spot when it comes to admitting that not believing in God is as surefire an exercise of the human religious impulse as belief in Him; a direct analogy from the political sphere is the truism that not having a policy is itself a policy). Spoken and written language are also uniquely human. Might it not be the case that prayer is not a function of language, but that all language is a function of prayer? In the sense that all language initially developed for no purpose other than the expression of the religious impulse?

One need only think of how much of the world's earliest literatures seem to be dedicated to the religious impulse to see how the theory might have some validity. After all, the Bible, the Vedas and the Koran had all been best-sellers long before 'The Wealth of Nations' appeared. And if that theory is correct, then who, or what, facilitated, animated, or perhaps even created in humans the need to develop this method for the expression of the religious impulse? Or are we all really foolish enough to believe the foolishness that these universal linguistic and religious impulses appeared randomly, like magic, amongst an extraordinarily diverse group of primates?

'The Elders'

2011-06-03T23:15:00.003+01:00

In a move which may give some of those reductionists who think that it's all a cock-up and not a conspiracy a little pause for thought, Sir Richard Branson has been quoted this week in his capacity as co-founder of a group called 'The Elders'.

Whenever I see or hear of that very perfect gentle knight, I have two automatic reactions. The first is that the theme tune from 'Gremlins' comes into my head. The second is the memory that before he got rich, he was up to his neck in abortion.

While the name 'The Elders' is capable of invoking any number of images, from, say, a group of militant Presbyterians to a clapped-out folk band playing The Last Chance Saloon, to my eyes its prominent supporters look hideously white, with the only possible ethnic minority 'prominent supporter' having a lower profile than Benjamin Zephaniah on a pro-AV leaflet in Cornwall. If these people wish to spend their time and, preferably, their own money trying to tell us what to do and how we should live and govern ourselves then they are free to do so, just as we are free to ignore them if we wish.

On Injunctions And Civil Liberties

2011-05-29T22:20:00.007+01:00

One wonders how long it will be before somebody blames the naming of Ryan Giggs as the holder of a super-injunction as the real reason Manchester United lost to Barcelona in the final of the Champions League.

Mr. Giggs's pursuit of Twitter users in the High Court would seem to indicate that his team's 'never say die' spirit does not translate well to other fora. It was also gratifying to see that the surreptitiously expressed, yet, somehow appropriately, overheard, desire of Sir Alex Ferguson, his team's manager, to 'get' a journalist who asked him a question about Mr. Giggs that he didn't like was thwarted. It is always a good and wholesome thing for the powerful to be challenged. It is even better for them sometimes to be thwarted. For all that he is a famous Glaswegian, in my opinion Sir Alex has often, indeed sometimes very often, seemed to exude an unattractively brutish air. Without question, he is very good at what he does; but what he does is manage a fitba' team.

And I do hope that the Greater Manchester Police Service is taking a keen interest in identifying the mob that slashed the tyres, and egged the cars, of journalists outside Mr. Giggs's home. This is by far the most sinister development in the whole sorry saga. It is to be hoped that their investigation into this matter is conducted without fear or favour, and that the law will take its course, to whatever doors it might lead.

It is distressing to see that one holder of a super-injunction seems to have tried to justify their actions on the basis that they may have been the subject of a blackmail plot. This point does not seem to have been picked up by any media that I have seen, but is of vital importance to the privacy debate. Blackmail is, of course, a crime. The anonymity of blackmail victims has always been preserved by law, but blackmailers are tried in public. If this person were the subject of a blackmail plot, they already had a remedy - to go to the police. Although their conduct might have been odious, perhaps irretrievably damaging to their other personal realtionships, they have not been engaged in any legally prohibited conduct. Civil laws criminalising homosexuality were regarded as blackmailers' charters, as the blackmail victim could not seek legal redress without exposing themself to prosecution. No holder of a super-injunction is under that pressure, and it is disrespectful to those many men who, before 1967, took their own lives rather than be 'exposed' as homosexual for them to pray in aid of their own schemes that they are the prey of others' schemes. If you're being blackmailed, you should be a man, phone the cops, tell the missus and take the hit. While it might cost you money, you aren't going to go to jail for frequenting hotel bedrooms with prostitutes young enough to be your daughter; and one hopes that the next celebrity to seek a super-injunction claiming that they are being blackmailed is sent away from the bar with a flea in their ear, and given the phone number of Victim Support.

For the scholar, a title to which I make no claim for myself, the whole question of whether a privacy law should be permitted to be developed judicially is yet another interesting example of watching an ideology, in this case liberalism, eating its own young. Liberalism says that privacy is a good thing. Liberalism also says that generous financial provision on divorce is a good thing. The genesis of the super-injunction has created a situation whereby the desire to protect your privacy might provide you with a vehicle for thwarting somebody else's right to generous financial provison on divorce, by preventing them from finding out that grounds for divorce might exist. This is the type of Gordian Knot that liberalism always ties up for its adherents to try to unravel, leaving the rest of us to marvel at the intellectual contortions demanded by their attempts. In the case of the new English laws on privacy, this has been no fault of the judges. By enacting the Human Rights Act, Parliament gave them the tools, and all they have done is show the will to finish the job.

However, this episode in our history is illustrative of how easily societies can slide into oligarchies, where only the rights and liberties of the oligarchs are deemed worthy of consideration. Those among us who are prepared to spend largely inconsequentially gotten gains on preventing the public knowing what they have done would have fitted right in to some of history's great oligarchies, like late Rome, or 17th Century Poland. Like all oligarchs, they want to have their cake and eat it, and preferably all the cake.

As I have said before, and until any other information becomes available it must remain the last word on that subject, it is my opinion that those who hold super-injunctions, or who have held now thwarted super-injunctions, do not possess a single shred of personal honour between them, for having allowed the good name of a virtuous wife like Mrs. Gabby Logan to become the subject of unwarranted gossip. All of them, every one of them, owe her an apology. If nothing more positive comes from this affaire than that, then all of the protest and outrage will have been worthwhile.

On the general subject of privacy laws, it was interesting to see Shami Chakrabarti quoted in today's 'Sunday Times' as saying that "(t)o suggest that when you are in public life you should have absolutely no privacy is as wrong as the argument that a woman wearing a miniskirt is asking to be assaulted". One beneficiary of an injunction who is very likely to have much worse done to them than be assaulted should its terms be breached is a gentleman named Jon Venables, in defence of whose rights as possibly the most vulnerable adult within the English criminal justice system Ms. Chakrabarti has been ubiquitously silent, a fact of which she, and everyone else, should be reminded as often as possible.

It has also been interesting to see The Tartanissimo railing against the Supreme Court's decision to quash Nat Fraser's murder conviction. At some points in his life, Mr. Fraser seems to have been a violent, thoroughly dislikable person, yet the tenor of last week's judgement is that he should not have been convicted of murder because evidence which might have been helpful to his defence had been suppressed. Witness The Tartanissimo's reaction - instead of saying that full investigations would be held into Northern Constabulary's and the Crown Office's conduct of this case, his spastic, Pavlovian approach is to say that the court which directed that the conviction be quashed should have no function in Scottish criminal process.

Now, the Scotch, that cartoon nation of dunderheaded authoritarian blusterers for whom The Tartanissimo, no apparent fan of the Scots' possession of civil liberties as far as I can see, is a poster boy, might applaud his desire to stick the boot into someone they don't like, a depressingly Scottish character trait. However, the Supreme Court's jurisdiction over Scottish criminal process is a consequence of the same roiling change in the British constitution which is the only real reason that he is now First Minister of Scotland. Both he and the Supreme Court are two sides of the same coins (as an aside, I am indebted to Robin Lane Fox for pointing out, in his 'Alexander the Great', that coins are the vehicles which oligarchies usually choose to decorate with their mythologies in order to justify their positions; the insight that one sees this practice alive and well today in the appearance of the initials 'F.D.' on all British coinage is my own).

Nobody in the public sphere in Scotland seems to have challenged The Tartanissimo on his support for the air attack on Libya. I might be wrong, but to my knowledge he has opposed every previous military intervention conducted by the United Kingdom since 1997, presumabley on the basis that these were Britain's wars, not Scotland's. My own belief is that his support for the Libyan intervention is founded upon the involvement of aircraft and crews from bases in the north of Scotland previously marked for closure which, in an apparently classic piece of doublethink, he had campaigned to keep open. However, with the Nat Fraser case, the mental gymnastics become very much more serious.

Does he really believe it to be better for a man whose defence was not provided with all relevant evidence to stay in jail than for his conviction to be quashed by a British court? I'm as much in favour of the independence of Scottish law as the next person, but wouldn't it be better for those who shouldn't be in jail have a chance of not being in jail, regardless of where they receive access of justice?

A Right To Privacy

2011-05-10T22:35:00.006+01:00

ECHR's rejection of Max Mosley's claim should be celebrated.

Those who seek to injunct the world from knowing their business all seem to be successes in the worlds of sports or entertainment. These industries, and all those who work in them, depend upon public goodwill for their entire income. No accurate financial value can ever be placed on goodwill until it has gone. The media images of sportsmen and entertainers are now carefully manufactured; if they were not, the public relations industry would not require to exist. We have laws to prevent the peddling of defectively manufactured washing machines and electric toothbrushes. We have laws which prohibit the making of spurious claims in advertising. It appears to me that in publishing stories about some celebrities' outre lives, our tabloids perform the same role of policing the peddling of defectively or dishonestly manufactured items, namely those celebrities' public images, as the local Trading Standards department does in respect of imitation Rolexes on a barrow at the local market.

In 'The Final Days', Woodward and Bernstein recorded that one of the arguments advanced against the release of Nixon's types was that to do so would constitute an invasion of the public's privacy, of its right not to know. When the public, the crowd, the audience, whatever you care to call them, are paying your bills from income which has already been taxed, it is hard to see how a similar case can be made for the private lives of celebrities. It might be more honest, and would certainly be much more legally intelligible, for those who pursue claims for breach of privacy to pursue the available remedies for trademark infringement instead. After all, in both instances what's at stake is the preservation of brand value, although for some reason that's described as a reputation when you're referring to the brand value of a human being.

To put it another way - when a married actor consorts with a prostitute very much younger than himself, he may believe she is gagging for it; but it is unreasonable of him to believe that she should be gagged for it.

Short Thoughts On Nothing Much In Particular

2011-05-09T22:21:00.005+01:00

It has been the settled law of Scotland since 1987 that contra mundum injunctions issued in other jurisdictions are not recognised here. If you don't believe me, ask Mahzer Mahmood.

In his book 'My Trade', published in 2004, Andrew Marr heaps copious praise on Mahmood, a journalist, for his ability to get the story. In the same book, Mr. Marr also states that he once suppressed a story that would have affected a friend. Mr. Marr has recently said that he didn't go into journalism to censor journalists. One wonders how suppressing stories can be deemed to be any different from censoring journalists. Perhaps this is precisely what Chesterton was describing when he wrote that the United Kingdom not only had freedom from censorship of the press, but also freedom of censorship by the press.

The person in the public eye for whom I feel most sorry at the moment is Mrs. Gabby Logan. Untrue allegations circulated by certain irresponsible users of electronic social media, in the mistaken belief that she has either been granted a 'super-injunction' or has engaged in a relationship with another person who has obtained one to prevent details of a relationship becoming public, have required her to state publicly that she has never been unfaithful to her husband. This is an appalling position for a faithful and loving wife and mother to find herself in.

I have three views on this. The first is that if those who hold super-injunctions had the slightest shred of personal honour, they would all out themselves immediately, perhaps to the permanent harm of their own reputations, or brands, if you prefer, in order to help preserve the integrity of Mrs. Logan's. This only seems fair, as hers has been sullied on account of the existence of the course of action that they have all taken, when she has never done them any harm and has never had reason to use it.

The second is that those users of social media who have spread lies about her should out themselves and face the consequences, wherever they might lead. Users of social media have to appreciate that they must comply with the law of the land. That there is no particular anti-blogging law at the moment doesn't mean there won't be one in the future. What is more likely than anything else to bring one into being is precisely the sort of impossible situation which Mrs. Logan has found herself in, through no fault of her own. It will be irresponsibles such as those who have put her in that situation, and not any totalitarian from the fevered ravings of Friedrich von Hayek or Ayn Rand, who will be responsible for having our freedom to blog being taken away from us.

The third is that if Mrs. Logan elects to take action against those who have spread lies about her, she will find and cite every holder of a super-injunction as a witness to her virtue. While some of them might no doubt consider this to be an impossible intrusion upon their busy schedules, they owe it to Mrs. Logan to help her innocence be written into the law of the land. If they will not do so willingly, they should at least be capable of being compelled to attend court and give witness to that fact. Whether that would be possible under the current law would be a very interesting topic for Parliament to address.

A small person of my acquaintance is due to have their MMR jab very soon. The empirically fatuous link drawn by the now discredited Andrew Wakefield between the MMR jab and autism remains potent in the public mind. Wakefield should properly be considered a charlatan who helped put public confidence in vaccination back two centuries, someone who projected an image of benevolence to a trusting public which their actions did nothing to deserve. Before he was discredited, I remember watching a docudrama about MMR in which he was portrayed by Hugh Bonneville in an almost heroic light. Wakefield's subsequent fall from grace is just another example of how those who court fame and reputation can crash to Earth very quickly.

I have never had much time for Irish anti-clericalism, and as a result couldn't really get into 'Father Ted'. In particular, the character of Mrs. Doyle was an extremely annoying portrayal of what its Irish writers thought would be a caricature of a particular type of elderly Irish lady that an English audience would split their sides laughing at. It was like watching 'Old Mother Reilly' as imagined by Frankie Boyle. To my mind, Mrs. Doyle was a low point amongst a continuous series of low points.

We have a better class of charity shop where I live, with some classic books ripe for the picking. Although I really shouldn't have, I recently treated myself to 'The Count of Monte Cristo'. This once-Indexed classic of world literature seems to be a particularly difficult one to film. Having seen three versions, I retain a soft spot for the first one I saw, the 1977 one starring Richard Chamberlain as Dantes and Trevor Howard as the Abbe Feria. As difficult as it must be to film, it must be virtually impossible to stage. I recall reading of a version put on at the National Theatre, I think it was, many years ago now, which starred David Threlfall as Dantes, that furious and lifelong rager against the injustice done to him by a capricious legal system, and which, if memory serves, had a running time of 19 hours. Such a performance must require enormous degrees of stamina and athleticism, attributes which demand preservation with age.

Being unable to drive any more, I pay no heed to motoring journalists at any time. The little of their ramblings that I have sullied my eyes with have reeked of the saloon bar bore.

In his 'Daily Life in Ancient Rome', Jerome Carcopino records how one of the signs that second century Rome was on the slide was the rise of the celebrity chef. Carcopino's standout recipe was dormice rolled in honey and poppy seeds, to which one can only say Thank God for those food hygiene laws which prevent our own celebrity chefs from inflicting something similar upon an unsuspecting public. However, the commanding heights of Roman culinary nuttiness were held by Domitian, as recorded in Suetonius I think, who once held a banquet the theme of which was the colour black. The room was black, the guests were dressed and painted black, the table was black and the food was painted black.

My own approach to food has always been quite simple, and, after a bout of food poisoning, is now even simpler - as Our Lord says, it is not what goes into a man's mouth that makes him pure, but what comes out of it.

And thank goodness the end of the football season is almost upon us. We've seen enough own goals in the past few weeks to last us all a lifetime.

A Few Things To Remember About The Recent Scottish Parliamentary Elections

2011-05-08T21:20:00.005+01:00

The Scottish Government was not re-elected. No such entity as the 'Scottish Government' exists under the law of Scotland, only a Scottish Parliament and a Scottish Executive.

No matter what your nearest self-satisfied SNP activist might say to you, with Salmondonian smirk slashed across their jowls, the use of the term 'Scottish Government' in the context of contemporary Scottish politics is a gross abuse of both law and language. While Talleyrand's observation that treason is a matter of dates might be correct, according to the dates the current position in Scottish law is quite clear; and anyone, whether politician, teacher or journalist, who uses what is plainly an incorrect, and therefore illegal, form of words should be asked why they persist in so doing.

The Scottish National Party was not re-elected as the party of any soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government'. Although it now has enough seats to form a majority Scottish Executive, the SNP formed a minority Scottish Executive between 2007 to 2011. It did not win the elections of 2007, but formed an administration by default.

Alex Salmond was not re-elected First Minister, as Scotland does not have a presidential system.

The SNP did not win the 2011 election. As far as I could see, its campaign was muted to the point of silence. Labour lost this election through its own incompetence, having elected to re-run the 2010 UK General Election campaign. This was an incredibly stupid thing to do, as it seemed to ignore the SNP, the party that had been administering Scotland for the previous four years. Labour's performance was so bad by any standard that it can only be assumed that the SNP registered the Mither Of All Protest Votes.

If the SNP did not campaign on the issue of holding a referendum on independence, they should not be speaking of one now. But then again, the SNP's adoption of the term 'Scottish Government' in 2007 showed that it is an entity that is willing to abuse both law and language for its own purposes, and that it should never be trusted, so we should not be in the least surprised if it acts in an untrustworthy manner. Coming from these people, the phrase 'referendum on independence' deserves to be treated with all the gravity of a vocal tic, like 'Boo-Wah!', or 'Bums!' The thought of actually governing an independent Scotland probably makes them crap themselves three ways to Sunday. They should know as well as we do that the past four years have shown that the world can be a harsh, unforgiving place for small European nations, and that if you've half a brain in your head you'll know that you're better off as part of a larger one. To think otherwise is, in my view, frankly insane. As it is, The Tartanissimo has the best of all possible worlds. He gets to hold power and always gets be able to claim that if things go wrong it's always someone else's fault. His apparent wish to denude himself of this golden fallback casts grave doubt upon his judgment, and therefore upon his ability to govern, and therefore upon his suitability to govern.

The newly elected SNP majority Scottish Executive can be expected not only to continue its minority predecessor's assault on the civil liberties of Scots, but also to be more insolent and daring in so doing. Keep an eye out for attacks on bloggers' rights. These people can't handle anyone not getting with the program, and daring to say so. These are the type of people who'd try to have your kids taken away from you for disagreeing with them. In particular, I would imagine that an assisted suicide bill will form part of its legislative program for either its second or third years in office. The reason for this will be the desire of many SNP activists to avoid the possibility of seeing Jim Sillars, a former SNP MP, being indicted under current law should he ever help his wife Margo MacDonald end her own life. MacDonald was pretty much left to swing on her own on this one during the last parliament, but an SNP majority means that her pet issue, if not herself, can now be taken into the fold many of them always wanted it to be in.

Lastly, if a referendum on independence is to be held, the SNP will lose it hands down, and will go the way of the Lib Dems. It has no raison d' etre other than to tout independence. Ironically, some of the biggest votes against independence would come from those EU immigrant voters that the SNP has courted assiduously. When they realise that an independent Scotland would be aiming for a slice of the EU handouts their homelands receive, they'll vote 'No' without a second thought.

But at least we'll have another four years of being able to mock The Tartanissimo. That alone makes an SNP victory a good and worthwhile thing.

The Unlawful Killing Of Ian Tomlinson

2011-05-07T06:21:00.004+01:00

It will be interesting to see whether the Crown Prosecution Service elects to bring manslaughter charges against Simon Harwood, the obviously feral, obviously out of control police officer who beat Ian Tomlinson, who died shortly afterwards. Like Mark Andrews, the Scotch Klingon who didn't cause Pamela Somerville's injuries despite dragging her across a floor, Harwood would seem to be the sort of policeman you wouldn't want as a guest in your home, never mind protecting your property.

My guess is that they will not go down that route, but will instead opt for a Jean Charles with all the trimmings, yet another half-baked prosecution of the police service for breaching our laws on health and safety. Such a prosecution would be an exemplary exercise in ass-covering. As far as the police are concerned, the impact of a conviction upon to day to day operational matters would be nil to low. The CPS would be able to say that it had taken heed of the coroner's verdict. Honour would thus be satisfied, and it's off to the Wig and Pen for trebles all round.

There is, of course, a school of thought that says that unless Simon Harwood is prosecuted for aggravated GBH at the very least, then justice will not only not be done but will be seen not to be being done. In this instance, the law must take its course.

As Scotland Elects A Parliament, Behold The Most Important Issue In All Elections

2011-05-05T05:53:00.008+01:00

'Am I not a man and a brother'?

The truly terrible thing is that unlike, say, the death of Osama bin Laden, this is considered 'routine'.

A Short Thought On The Death Of Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-03T21:11:00.004+01:00

I might be in a minority of one with this post, but that's OK. As long as one person can stay a slight distance away from the prevailing view, at least we can say we're still free. It goes without saying that none of my family have been murdered by Al Qa'eda or their associates, and will be the first to admit that if any of them had been, God forbid, it's likely that my views would be radically different.

I find it discomfiting to see crowds in societies based on law and the rule of law cheering the death of a person who was not a head of state, and who had never, to my knowledge, been convicted of any crime.

I find it discomfiting that a person who is not a head of state, who has never been convicted of any crime, and who is a national of one country, can be living in another country and be killed by the security forces of a third country without anybody, anywhere batting an eyelid about what seems to be the mind-boggling precedent this sets concerning everyone's personal safety. Then again, perhaps if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear.

I find it discomfiting to see no apparent regret being expressed regarding the death of children, regardless of their age or degree of culpability. Bin Laden was 54 at the time of his death, meaning that he was 44 at the time of 9/11. I would consider it highly unlikely that any of his children would have been involved in either the planning or the execution of that act, and accordingly one is entitled to ask whether their deaths were 'necessary' in the context of the recent operation. Or does being a bad man's devoted son now automatically make you a target? If that is the case, then at least our security forces can never stand accused of failing to execute their responsibility to conduct counter-terrorism, with the emphasis on terrorism.

I find it discomfiting that the Pakistani state's collusion in his lengthy absence from public view should be so widely assumed, as if the English language has lost the verb 'to hide in plain sight', and nobody's noticed.

I find it discomfiting that a President of the United States, one who has had to release his own birth certificate into the public domain over two years after assuming his office because a significant and vocal minority of his own electorate don't believe he's eligible to hold it, should feel it necessary to be pictured, in casual clothing, sitting watching the action unfolding as if it were a late-night baseball game. To my mind, Barack Obama's behaviour in allowing himself to be pictured in this manner is a rank bastardisation of his office and its reponsibilities. He is the President of the United States, its forces' Commander-in-Chief. He has given the order for the deed to be done. Neither he nor anyone else without direct operational responsibility for its execution needs to see it being done. To my mind, it seemed to be an unwholesome gawping at the application of technology to modern warfare, resulting in that most soul-destroying legacy of modernism, the transformation of war into entertainment; like 'Patriot Games', but for real, with the fact that someone's children are being killed in front of him for no higher reason than that they are their father's children not really seeming to make any impact upon him.

I have to say, though, that the less charitable type of pundit might think that the timing of this attack on Bin Laden, coming as it does so soon after Obama has had to take drastic and extraordinary measures to prove his own fitness to lead, could be seen by some as being quite serendipitous for the president. Overnight, Obama has gone from being a divisive figure of suspicion to being The Man Who Shot Osama Bin Laden. The past week's events have shown that he might just be capable of printing both the truth and the legend. He might never have a better chance to make political capital throughout his soon-to-commence re-election campaign.

I have never been to Chicago, where he cut his political teeth, but I have heard that they play their politics rough there.

And in the context of wider foreign affairs, it might also be seen to be serendipitous when one considers that the Arab world is currently undergoing its greatest upheavals since the end of the imperial age. What better signal could there be to send out to the Islamists among the revolutionaries that there will be no Eighteenth Brumaire of Osama bin Laden to bring order out of chaos? This might be a signal to the Arabs that they can have their revolutions, but only on our terms. This may not be a bad thing, of course, but to my mind the possibility that that might be an aim of policy cannot go unremarked.

The author of a newspaper editorial I read earlier today wrote that Bin Laden was a coward because he didn't either go down fighting in Tora Bora, or blow himself up at a checkpoint. While I was reading it, it struck me that the author didn't really seem to have much grasp of the history of ideas.

We all seem to know such little history nowadays that our public intellectuals do not seem to know that the conditions which allow an Osama bin Laden to rise from obscurity recur again and again. Bin Laden was a bogeyman of the globalisation era, a Western educated and super-wealthy man who wanted to hide out in caves, a soi-disant sheikh whose followers would bring the skies down with box-cutters. Anyone who believes in this goal is deeply unpleasant, because box-cutters are deeply unpleasant weapons. If we are to take the words of those who knew him well, he had been sufficiently radicalised by the 1980's to go and fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. When that conflict was over, he and his men returned to Saudi Arabia, and found themselves excluded by an absolutist regime (the lady who described the Mujahideen as 'brave freedom fighters', is still going strong, and was invited to the Royal Wedding last week, unlike the nation's last two prime ministers). This, of course, only radicalised them against the rulers of Saudi Arabia.

There is a direct analogy between the Mujahideen who returned to Saudi Arabia from Afghanistan in the early 1990's and those members of the French aristocracy who returned home in the early 1780's after fighting in the American War of Independence. Both groups had, to some extent, been outsourced to their causes, their employment in these tasks seen as being a useful occupation to ensure they didn't make trouble at home. While it would have been more wholesome to our taste for the Bourbons to have adapted to the ways of Lafayette than for the Sauds to have adapted to Bin Laden's, the least one can say for the Sauds is that they have that horrible Bourbon tendency of forgetting nothing and learning nothing, and it's served them better than it did the Bourbons.

The chaos that ensued in France, of course, meant that within 20 years, another man who quite willingly let others do the dying for him had seized power; of that man, Dostoyevsky wrote,

"The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people it seems are not of flesh but of bronze!”

I'm not making that claim for Osama bin Laden, of course; but what made him so popular? To my mind, it was what made Napoleon so popular. He gave those who served in the Grande Armee an idea. It was an idea that millions of men were prepared to follow, and die for, and it took a long time to die after he was gone. In one sense, the advent of the European Union might be said to be the small man in the big hat's final, greatest triumph, a mere two centuries after his death. Napoleon didn't need to throw himself in front of guns at Austerlitz or Jena. Those who believed in his idea, or even just in the idea of him, were more than happy to do that on his behalf.

That any people, anywhere, should be receptive to the ideas of Osama bin Laden, or even just to the idea of Osama bin Laden, in the way that men were inspired by Napoleon is depressing to say the least. However, I am almost afraid to say that I think that idea won't die until we engage with those who find it attractive on their terms, not ours. In the age of the drone aircraft and the cluster bomb, when 90% of warfare is directed against civilians and we seem to think we can make people love us by killing their wives and children from 40,000 feet, that doesn't seem to be an option. The genie might not go back into the bottle as quickly as we might like.

Sometimes, it really does seem like 1811 all over again.

Sing-Along-A-Clegg

2011-05-02T06:24:00.006+01:00

The incongruous sight of Nick Clegg, a publicly professed atheist, belting out hymns at the Royal Wedding made one wonder whether he is a hypocrite, or was suffering some kind of flashback to better days, or had momentarily forgotten his lack of belief, or was treating the day like a better class of sing-song. Hypocrisy would, at least in my opinion, seem to be condign with the natural state of being a Liberal Democrat, particularly under that individual's leadership, which is why his poxed campaign to alter this country's voting system must be smashed at the ballot box later this week.

Its aim is to ensure that power is distributed more 'fairly'; that is, with him, and his party, one which is more open to the allegation that it has no constituency other than its own membership than even the BNP, receiving far greater shares of it than could ever be justified by the number of votes cast in their favour under our current system. Not even David Cameron exudes such an air of unjustified entitlement to power and status as Nick Clegg. He seems to have done nothing to justify the position he holds in public life. He seems to have committed no original thought to the public domain. All he seems to have done is to be who he is, and as far as I can see he seems to think we should be grateful to him for it. I have never seen a British politician who gives off such an air of thinking that they're part of some kind of international elite as Clegg. This is not a fantasy which he should be permitted to indulge; just as those with Napoleonic delusions usually end up in asylums, so, too, those who aspire to systems which are incompatible with those under which they were elected should be quietly sidelined, as traffic commissioners for Little Piddlebury On The Slide. There they can enjoy having a little power, and give the little people a bit of trouble by being thoroughly fractious members of the parish council. That is Clegg's natural level, one to which his electorate should consign him very soon; in my view, the sooner, the better.

The past year has given a very welcome insight into his character. The ruthlessness with which he has agreed to every cut in services which kicks the poor, the sick and the weak when they're down indicates to me that this man should not have more power than he has already, but significantly less. He leads a zombie party, neither quite living nor quite dead, a Frankenstein amalgam of two philosophies both of which are further past their sell by date than yesterday's socks. What he needs is the civic equivalent of an encounter with Burberry baseball-capped Buckfast swillers, shouting 'Get it right up ye!" at him while making obscene gestures in his direction. He really does seem to think that he was born to govern us. While Blair had the same contempt, at least he had the common touch, sometimes, once in a while. While completely lacking the common touch, and gaffes about bigoted women notwithstanding, I don't think Gordon Brown held the same contempt for the ordinary as Clegg seems to do. While Clegg's posture apes amity for one's fellow, in reality it is nothing but that very old, bog-standard liberal contempt for old things and old values you don't share, don't understand and won't try to find out about. I would be very surprised if he was not on precisely the same mental wavelength as HRH The Prince of Wales.

My Deepest Thoughts On The Scottish Elections

2011-05-02T06:21:00.003+01:00

Tavish Scott looks like Steve Davis, while Nicol Stephen looks like Will Ferrell.
Is it over yet?

The Royal Wedding

2011-04-28T21:44:00.006+01:00

Best wishes to the happy couple for a long and fulfilling married life; and also to everyone else who has married yesterday and today, who is getting married tomorrow, and who will get married from now until the end of time.