Don't play my game, Kieth. You won't win.

 First of all, apologies for having been absent for some time. A number of things collided, much the most important of which was getting back into Gig Mode for my first feature in about a year, at King Ink at the mighty Pop Recs in Sunderland. I tend to oscillate between Gig Mode and Writing Mode such that I do very little writing while working on performance, and vice versa, so for a month or so whenever things which would normally be a natural trigger to fire something off on here have occurred they've just wound up being filed away while I concentrated on getting off-book for 'Cancellation, Baby'. Anyway, the gig footage is up on my YouTube now for you all to enjoy, and I actually think I look kinda cute in it, in a clodhopping chungus kind of way:

Also I went up to Edinburgh with family to celebrate my brother's birthday. Here, have a photo I took while in the Athens of the North, specifically St Andrew Square, which is home to some incredible buildings and statuary:

And this.

By far the most annoying thing about being temporarily in Gig Mode, though, was not having the time for but desperately wanting to write about one of the most bizarre political events of the last week, which was the mystifying decision by Sir Kier Starmer QC to take a leaf out of my book and start calling his enemies nonces. 

I can't speak for Kier, here, but when I do this it's mainly in the sense that turnabout's fair play. You may have noticed the constant drumbeat of conservative media outlets trying to link LGBTQ+ people and grooming: my position is that I will stop saying anyone who opposes trans rights is a paedophile when these people stop repeating what Bad Gays host Ben Miller has called the queer equivalent of blood libel, and not one moment sooner. 

Or maybe I won't, to be quite honest, because there's one Hell of a pattern of behaviour with these fuckers. Whether it's defending child marriage, partying with underage students, publishing a book full of 'erotic' photos of children or being busted in possession of an underage sex doll, it sure is weird how often the soi-disant defenders of women and children turn out to have form for exactly the kind of crimes they accuse queer people of. I've been pointing this out in some form or another for years (the key turning point for me was learning from some pals in a hacker collective that a guy who was calling me immoral for supporting Fallon Fox was a full-on paedophile), but it's only recently that I decided to go full mask-off and just start outright calling these people nonces because quite honestly, what else do I have to lose? I've burned most of my bridges in poetry due to my refusal to play nice with scene darlings I know to be transphobes or rapists, Long Covid has made me a physical wreck, and the government of my country is literally engaging in the early stages of genocide against people like me while most folks look away or offer mealy-mouthed expressions of concern before looking up how to hide their Hogwarts Legacy trophies. If you won't save me from the noose, at least let me spit from the gallows. 

Thing is, Sir Kier Starmer QC is hardly on the scaffold, however much he may have lusted to send Gary McKinnon to almost certain suicide in an American prison. In fact, prior to this attack ad controversy, his party were way ahead of Sunak's Tories in the polls. Admittedly, Labour have been banging the law and order drum in recent months, with Kier giving speeches about how terribly traumatic it is to be able to smell cannabis; and Starmer's personal Islamophobia and racism are screamingly obvious to anyone who looks into how the party's disciplinary apparatus is being used; and no doubt there is a reasonably large slice of the electorate who can be pandered to with insinuations that Britain's first Asian Prime Minister is the kind of man his Home Secretary accuses of being in 'grooming gangs' (even though by far the vast majority of such gangs are made up of white dudes), but even so, you'd think Kier would guess this wouldn't be received well, if for no other reason than if you start suggesting the Prime Minister is a nonce defender people might start asking questions about the media that supports him and, indeed, the man who asked him to form a government. I don't shy away from asking those questions - but then I'm not hoping to move into 10 Downing Street. 

And also, unlike Starmer, I have never defended nonces myself, whereas Starmer quite literally has: he was on the legal team that defended Silvio Berlusconi against accusations that, among other things, he had sex with a thirteen year old girl. Quite literal nonce defending, right there on Starmer's CV. And he has to know that the Tory media are going to go ham on this stuff as soon as the election is announced. The only reason to go all-in on accusing Sunak of things Starmer himself literally did that seems even vaguely logical to me is to try and draw the poison now, get it all out in the open so it can't be used in the campaign - but that's a very risky strategy for Starmer personally. 

Assuming, of course, that he actually wants to be PM. It's pretty clear, when you look at Starmer's career, that a big part of it has been about him making himself useful to various bad actors (the most prominent of which is, I've always tended to assume, MI5, though having seen how often he's flown to DC on my dime I think we need to take seriously the possibility he's actually a CIA asset, though tbqfh whichever flag he has branded on his arse he's the same kind of piggy), of which the Labour right is only the most recent. It could well be that, having seen to it that socialism is now well and truly cast out of the party, Starmer is moving to the next stage of his role, suicide-bombing his own reputation in order to dirty up Rishi with the 'groomer' insinuation, before moving aside for a more charismatic 'clean skin' from his side of the party who can play at being Blair Mark 2. After all, as we all now know, he'll be able to retire quite comfortably. 

That's my best guess, anyway. It remains to be seen whether appealing to the racism of the red-faced wall will actually net Labour more votes. But the Starmer/Berlusconi stuff is going to get picked up on by the media sometime, and when that happens, I guarantee that you'll hear some Baz pointing out that 'say what you want about Corbyn, he only defended terrorists, not nonces.' I'm touching the lathe as we speak.