The Stinkiest Stink Bomb Of All ?

As mentioned in the previous post, normal insane profanity sprinkled ranting will now recommence.

The new LibCon coalition have spoken recently of ‘stink bombs’ and ‘mine fields’.

I wonder if the single biggest one might be the huge constituent of ‘wont work’ benefit claimants. Having been in the dole queue myself more than once, I am well aware that there are many people in receipt of state benefits who are desperate to get back to work.

On the other hand, because of both that experience and having lived in some rather desperately unromantic shite holes over the years, I am also well acquainted with the portion of benefit recipients who have no intention of ever getting a job, thank you very much. And that’s even assuming that anyone would hire them in the first place.

Which leaves a big tasty shit sandwich that we’re going to have to eat later. I don’t know what other parts of the UK are like, and at present, I am lucky enough to live in a rather pleasant part of my town, but round about these parts there are hordes of illiterate, unemployable, unskilled benefit claimants who – literally – wouldn’t work if you paid them. Estates full of them and their pastie dusted offspring.

So what are we going to do with them ? Well, it seems that we’re going to cut off their money if they don’t try and get a job. At which point, of course, since they are already living a life of casual criminality sprinkled with ankle tags and ASBOs aplenty, the fuckers are going to come round to your house and rob your stuff.

Stink Bombs Start To Smell ?

Well, what with all the new politics about the place – and as I write this, the first sitting of the new house is ruining my staged withdrawal from 24 hour rolling news and Twitter – something new for this blog. Some news.

Well I say news, it’s more prurient gossip and ill informed opinion, but if you’ve been following the press recently, it’s entirely possible that you can no longer tell the difference.

There has been much talk of “scorched earth” and “stink bombs” as the new coalition move their troops into Whitehall and get their sticky hands on the well worn levers of power. Behind the scenes the fuses are fizzing on goodness knows how many more.

BCU’s source in the FE sector points one of these up. The sector has suffered something of a double blow recently, funding is being cut sharply in many places as a result of Labour’s spending cuts. Some FE colleges were also stung by the massively over budget LSC capital binge which left colleges – with contracts signed for expensive new build and no further access to government funding – reaching for private loans to cover the shortfall and to make up any budget overruns.

Across the North East, colleges are cutting back hard, and many are heading for rounds of redundancies. So many redundancies, in fact, that at a recent regional meeting of one FE union concern was expressed that there would not be enough union reps to go around.

There is no doubt that the funding issues already mentioned are – as the saying goes – the fault of the previous administration, and indeed colleges and universities unions were striking and campaigning about this even before the election.

According to BCU’s source, at one meeting between management and unions at a North East college last week, the union reps – who had been vocal in their support for the outgoing Labour government throughout the election campaign – had to have it forcibly put to them on more than occasion that the troubles they currently face would have remained the same even had Labour remained in power.

The unions, naturally, are already keen to bang the ‘Tory cuts’ drum. And according to BCU’s source it has already begun. Despite the fact that the cuts in question are very much Labour cuts. As the fuses fizz away on all those stink bombs yet to be discovered it seems that the unions stand ready to lay the sins of the old administration very firmly at the feet of the new one.

So there you go, an actual rumour of news, and no swearies. Fuck.

That List In Full

Now Panic And Freak Out

Let it never be said that I won’t admit it when I’m wrong. Well, sometimes anyway. Yesterday I opined that the LibDems approach to Labour was nothing more than par for the course negotiation, finding out if Labour had some counter offer that would make a LibLab deal the better one. I mean, if you were shopping for car insurance, you’d want more than one quote, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to do the same when shopping for a future for the country. Personally I couldn’t imagine Labour being able to offer much, especially in terms of stability.

I will still maintain that this should have been the case, and maybe it still is, but then again, if it was the case, would the Conservatives have thrown in the desperate sounding last ditch offer of a referendum on AV ? And would they now be spinning like tops against a LibLab pact – though still not as badly as Labour, who are actually managing to spin both sides of the argument at the same time ? Surely if this was a move in the spirit I thought it was, it wouldn’t have been a surprise and the Conservatives would be maintaining their dignity – outwith the usual wingnuts whispering smears against Cameron into the ears of Mail hacks, obviously – until all the chips were down.

Who knows. Certainly not me. And until I do I think I will succumb to the prevailing meme, because the serious chance of a ‘progressive coalition’, frankly, appals me. Not least because I can’t get any fucker to explain to me what ‘progressive’ means.

It’s wrong, we should be grown up and just wait for negotiations to pan out, but hey, this way is more exciting.

Keep Calm and Carry On

So Gordon Brown is to step down if the Lib/Con talks break down and allow a new leader to form a Lib/Lab coalition.

It has also been announced that the LIberal Democrats will hold formal talks with the Labour party.

And you’d think, from watching the hysterical newsies on BBC and SKY, and even more so from watching the hysterical party activists on twitter that the sky had fallen.

Tory activists on twitter, and retards on the news, ably aided by spinning Labour types who have suddenly emerged from the gaping silence to fill the airwaves with fear, uncertainty and doubt, think Clegg has betrayed the Conservatives and is now going off with Brown (or rather his successor) in order to form a coalition of losers.

At the same time, Labour sprogs, while wiping the – absurdly – apparently genuine tears from their eyes at the demise of their Great Leader are trumpeting that this means the formation of the much vaunted ‘rainbow coalition’.

All of this, is, of course bollocks.

The biggest clue to this is that all of a sudden, arch cunts like Alistair Campbell are suddenly on TV.

What is happening now is very simple. The Liberal Democrats have negotiated an offer with the Conservatives. They hold the balance of power. Now, Clegg has to go to Brown and tell him what that offer is, and say to him “So Gordon, this is what Dave has offered me, what about you ?”

That is all. So Keep Calm, and Cary On. Nothing untoward is afoot, whatever the sleep deprived, excitable, newsies and the labour bullshit wranglers are trying to tell you.

Antifas Hate Democracy. True.

Since the possibility of PR started to be mooted, there has been a storm of hysterical tweets – often with multiple exclamation marks tagged on to them – warning against the sheer horror of PR on the grounds that it would somehow promote ‘fascism’. I’ll paraphrase them here

OMG in a proper Democracy people I disagree with would be allowed political representation! I protest! UKIP and the BNP would rule us !!! THE RACISTS!!!

Something of a surprise to see UKIP lumped in with the BNP there, presumably this is because the BNP numbers by themselves aren’t sufficiently frightening,

It’s about time, frankly, that these virulent ‘no platform’ fuckwits started to be honest and admitted that they hate democracy, they don’t support freedom of speech, and started to call for what they really want which is a totalitarian regime that brutally suppresses dissent and denies representation to anyone with the wrong kind of opinions.

A bit like, say, Stalin had.

Because by continuing to insist that people they disagree with deserve neither political representation or the right to an opinion, this is precisely what they are wishing for.

So come on antifas, lets have you, lets see you produce a manifesto that calls for the introduction of a dictatorship and the building of gulags or re-education camps.

And don’t let me hear you, ever, say anything about democracy other than that you hate it and think it should be abolished. Anything short of this is not simply hypocrisy, but a massive fucking lie.

UPDATE
The headline “OH MY GOD RACISTS IN CHARGE BY TEATIME” number was that the BNP would have got 12 seats. And looking at the percentage of the vote (1.9%) that is of course true – IF we can extrapolate from FPTP votes to a PR system, which is quite unlikely. While it’s easy to get hysterical about this if you can’t add up, the thing to remember is that those 12 seats, assuming that result came to pass, would mean that the BNP would, by the same maths, have slightly less than 1.9% of the power.

Oh Sweet Irony

Finding it incredible this afternoon that even as Conservative and Lib Dem MPs (or at least leadership teams) are actually acting like adults and talking about deals and compromise and common ground and all sorts of grown up stuff like that, every time the grass-roots activists and voters appear on TV they act more and more like vicious, petulant, squabbling children.

Cameron, of course, doesn’t need to worry to much about his grass-roots, because their affiliation is broadly tribal and his party structure doesn’t require him to ask, or even care, about their opinions. They’ll still vote Conservative, because they simply can’t imagine doing otherwise.

Clegg doesn’t have quite the same kind of tribal affiliation, but his core support is united behind a banner of “Tories are evil fox rapists”, and in his case, the democratic structure of his party means he does have to ask them. And a goodly number of them are going to be simply appalled that he is even talking to Cameron.

Amusingly, this could lead to the delicious situation whereby Clegg manages to ram PR past the Tories and then experiences epic electoral fail in an election run under it because the beardie weirides will never forgive him for dealing the right. Because thatcher, or progressive, or something.

Crikey

It is 06:15 or thereabouts, no one has won. Labour have lost. The greens have an MP. Jacqui Smith Is out.

I am shitfaced and weird from red bull, blogging from my iPhone, and it is all, still, to play for.

Right now, Peter Mandelson is timesharing between putting together a legal challenge to the whole election and felating Nick Clegg,

Balls, sadly, kept his seat and remains a cunt.

But Labour lost. And will continue to lose even if they try to form a coalition.

The next hours and days will be fascinating, as much because they mark the end of the “new labour” project as anything else.

Or something.

Tired,drunk,strungout,hopeful. And now there will need to be some fence mending. As kirsty wark is wont to say, more on that later.

Election Cat

Goodbye Mr Brown, And Good Riddance

If the polls are anywhere near correct, and they may not be, Labour will loose today’s election. Whatever the outcome, it seems likely that gurning fuckmuppet Gordon Brown will finally loose his death like grip on the Labour leadership, And I will rejoice. If you’re unfortunate enough to have read any of this blog, you will know that I am – to put it mildly – no fan of the Labour party.

And yet, I am not a Conservative, or even a Conservative voter. Nor am I a Liberal Democrat.

Like many of Labour’s actual voters, I come from a long line of people who were unionists and Labour supporters, a family tradition that has it’s roots in the Northumberland mining industry. If you spend long enough wading through the grainy archive footage of the miners picnics of the 1940s and 1950s, you will find my father as a boy and his father marching under the banner. Proud.

So you might, given only this, assume that I would be one of the blindly loyal tribal fuckmuppets I’ve been so aggrieved by recently. But I’m not.

Dad was in the union for his industry all his life, went to the meetings, voted in the ballots. He drove a Lada. I want you to take a moment out here and think about that last one because I grew up in Cheshire, in what is now Boy Osborne’s constituency. And my dad drove a Lada. I walked places a lot. He never told anyone how he voted, so I can’t be sure, but really, the Lada is a pretty hefty clue. Especially considering that before we moved to Cheshire he drove a Renault.

My mother, I always suspected was an unreconstructed old Tory. Something we were able to confirm years later, although eventually we managed to ween her off the Daily Mail and get her to form some opinions of her own. She is still suspicious of foreigners, which includes the Scots. She was active in student politics in her college days, when it meant something, but it’s hard to judge a party affiliation from that. In those days student politics wasn’t simply the preserve of mouthy wannabe communists who grew out of it and bolshie future Labour party apparatchiks who didn’t. That came later. Like my dad she never discussed how she voted.

Their attitudes were fairly similar. Neither of them, for instance, were particularly kindly disposed towards homosexuals, foreigners, or people with skin colours other than their own. In those days, of course, Labour supporters weren’t ostracised for not liking ‘puffs or darkies’, something the current crop of drones would rather you forgot.

He was a Catholic, she a Protestant. Perhaps as a result of these disparate backgrounds, they never pressed the issue of party loyalty with their children. Instead they made the concious choice to bring us up to think for ourselves. Naturally, they assumed that this would end up with us coming to the same conclusions as them, but they were wrong about that, and somewhat ungracious when they found out how wrong, if I recall.

So I never had a tribal fealty to any particular political group or party, which is not to say that we never talked about politics or weren’t exposed to it. Growing up in the Thatcher years and through the miners strike, with a family background in the mining communities made it difficult to avoid.

And so, anyway, it came to pass that on 2 May 1997, despite having spent the run up to the election appalled by the grinning shit weasel Blair and his evil puppet master Mandelson, I sat in the sunshine on the steps of my university sharing a celebratory spliff with a group of other people who were – as the saying goes – up for Portillo, optimistically chatting about how things would change for the better. Call it the natural left tendency of the student, or maybe it was the marijuana, but after some dismal years the Torys had been comprehensively chucked out of office and ‘our people’ were in. What could possibly go wrong ?

Well, as it turned out, practically everything. I won’t use up space with a long list of the things that ‘New’ Labour have done which have assured that they will never receive my support or sympathy again, there’s plenty of that on other peoples blogs, their record in office really does speak for itself if you look at it at all objectively. But let me pull out just a couple that piss me off. We were promised ‘reform’. And boy did we get it. Only not the way we expected, and not in the places we expected.

I’m all in favour of reform. I’d like to see the voting system reformed, for instance, into something that more closely approximates a democracy. I’d bite my lip and lose the Lords, despite the fact that it has been a buffer against some of the worst excesses of the ‘reforms’ of the New Labour age. If we had a properly functioning democracy we wouldn’t need the Lords as a backstop. I’d reform parliament, in fact, I’d turn parliament into a museum and build a new one whose architecture would support my visionary new democratic system.

I don’t, as it happens, think much of our ‘democracy’, it’s just less shit than not having any at all. People fought and died to get it, and I don’t think we should insult them by regarding it as anything other than a work in progress. A great work that is by no means at an end. Plenty of hard work still to be done.

Blair et al though, didn’t reform any such thing, other than to stuff the Lords with their cronies and placemen. Lots of the things that I do (or did) respect and care about a great deal were reformed though. Particular among these is our system of common law, our right to trial by jury, our right to be presumed innocent until proven – beyond reasonable doubt – guilty, the right not be held without charge. The basics, if you will, of our justice system.

Justice, my old law tutor drilled into me, must not just be done, but must be seen to be done. New Labour reformed most of these away. Some things you just don’t fuck with.

Perhaps realising that they were eroding the very foundations upon which our society is built, and feeling a bit guilty about it, or perhaps (more realistically) in a shameless bid to claw back some support from the people who realised that this was an assault on civil liberties of unprecedented nastiness, they passed into law the Human Rights Act. And promptly wrote themselves a metric shitload of exemption clauses so that the Act would never apply to them when they needed to trespass on the rights they were apparently so keen on.

Worse, they subsequently ignored not only the Act, but the judgements of the High Court and of the European Court of Human Rights, the final arbiter of cases brought under the Act, against them. Appeal after appeal, loophole after loophole, weasely interpretation after weasely interpretation. Control Orders, DNA retention.

Under the guise of national security they reinstated the sus laws that were the bete noir of so many lefty activists, including most of them.

They lied about WMD in Iraq and started a war of aggression on – at the very least – extremely dubious legal grounds. Then they lied about it some more. Then they connived at torture. Knowingly. Then they lied about that.

Then there was the expenses. I wouldn’t, personally, have needed that extra straw, the camel’s back was already thoroughly shattered by then, but, well, Jesus Christ. This party that had once championed the working classes – and still pretends to, though that link has been severed for many years – with their noses so deep in the trough. No party came of that scandal looking good, but New Labour had promised us that they were better, purer, cleaner than the dreaded sleazy tories.

And then, to add insult to injury, the representatives of the party of the people in the shape of Harriet Harman and her brood of flying monkeys and the unspeakable Speaker Martin tried to bury it and to exempt themselves from further scrutiny. And they would have got away with it to, they very nearly did.

It could be argued that there have been some redeeming factors to this catalogue of horrors. I see a lot of people banging about on the NHS for instance, but given that my father died in a filthy hospital from a post operative infection I am not minded to agree.

Whatever, it simply doesn’t matter. There are some things that are, simply, indefensible. In the run up to the count tonight, there has been a relentless stream of grass roots propaganda which, like the rest of the campaign, invites you to forget these things. To forgive the Labour party because the hated tories must not have power at any cost.

To put it succinctly. No. Fuck Right Off. The Conservatives will not be worse. The worst possible case scenario is that they will be just as bad. In which case we can, as Call me Dave suggests, kick the fuckers out in another five years.

To an extent, I don’t care how the election turns out. I favour a hung parliament because some kind of electoral reform leading to PR would be a step forward. But there’s time for that later. We have bigger problems than that to deal with right now, real, serious, Greece, IMF, Oh My God We’re All Going To Starve To Death problems.

All that matters to me tonight, as I line up the red bull and popcorn and drag computer screens around the place so that I can monitor SKY and the BBC while I watch C4s comedy coverage is that Labour lose.

Ideally, I’d like to see them crushed. Their support and their mandate drained away like so much blood from the exsanguinated corpse of their body politic. That probably won’t happen, which is going to make for a pisser of administration for the Conservatives. The tribal fuckmuppetry of British politics may see to that.

So I’ll settle for them just losing. And in all honesty, if it’s a long, painful drawn out death in an almost hung parliament, so much the better. For once they’re out of power, the thin veneer of solidarity that they’ve preserved in order to maintain their desperate hold on office will come off and they will splinter like the Judean Peoples Front on a bad PMT day.

Good fucking riddance.