Dear Mr Gove, I hope you don't mind me writing.
Today's prompt was to send an epistle
to an inanimate object. I thought of you
(I know, I know - we're not supposed to know,
but some of us have noticed, Mr G.
Your Secretary does a good impression
of that preposterous voice you used to do.
His talent for ventriloquism? That was just dumb luck).
It's fitting you've gone 2D. Not only since it's retro,
when even silver screens aspire to ape
our dance through pliant space. When holograms
of dead rap stars play live at Coachella. You were never
even that real, Mr G: a big hollow man
with a fistful of sham, and a shitty line in titles.
Celsius 7/7? We're lucky, I guess,
that the only writing you'll be known for now
is the price tag sticker on your back
and the Property of Rupert Murdoch
which I guess someone from the NASUWT
has scribbled where your arse should be.
Anyway, my mission for today, as I say,
is to write to an object bereft
of consciousness, indeed, of conscience - you, in other words -
and, furthermore, to proffer both a fact
and some form of fruit. So, first, let me take you back
to 1989, a viaduct in Aberdeen, a young man
fuelled by commie rage and Tennent's,
detourning a piece of the state apparatus
- a traffic cone, to be exact -
forty feet from Union Street
into the path of traffic passing
on the road below, then finding himself
bundled in a police van. Did you call them pigs?
Because that was you, of course, when you were still 3D,
before you sat in committee rooms and labelled teachers Trots
for objecting to your choice of Commisar;
before your flatpack afterlife propped in the office cupboard,
where you rest now, waiting, patient, for the morning
when your underlings will drag you out, unnoticed.
Long time to wait. Would you like a banana?
No - fair point. Nothing to digest it with. No matter.
Tell you what. I'll leave the skin down here.
* * *
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write an epistolary poem - a poem in the form of a letter - to an inanimate object. Who better to write to, then, than Cardboard Gove, last seen in NaPoWriMo Poem Nine?
There were a number of other things the poem had to include: a song lyric (here taken from 'Big Hollow Man' by Danielle Dax); an 'oddball adjective-noun combination' (in this case, 'pliant space' - not that oddball, I know); a fruit (the banana); a street name and a measurement of distance ('forty feet from Union Street') and a historical fact - in this case Gove's arrest for chucking a traffic cone off a viaduct in Aberdeen back in 1989. I bet it really annoys him, that people keep bringing that up...
Showing posts with label the Tories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Tories. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Monday, 9 April 2012
NaPoWriMo Poem Nine: What We Talk About When We Talk About Gove
Nobody's noticed so far.
The Education Sec is sure of that.
His subordinates say he prefers to stand.
His silence is interpreted as pensive;
his pose as friendly, jocular, on-message.
His choosing to remain in Cabinet Rooms
even after Dave and Gideon leave
is seen as diligent, though there are whispers
that it shows he wants the top job.
Nobody wants to make a fuss though.
They all know he's Rupert's boy.
When sure the coast is clear,
the under-secretaries lift him up
and fold back his supports.
One takes the legs, the other holds the shoulders,
turned so that his glazed eyes face the fly
of a Dege & Skiner three-piece,
his plain white backing turned to face the world.
At close of play they prop him in the office.
The cleaner, mute, Nigerian - is she Nigerian?
Somewhere like that, anyway - bumps the Henry's nozzle
against his cardboard feet. Says nothing. No-one knows.
Nobody knows exactly when the real Gove disappeared, where he is.
And he looks convincing. Lifelike. Nothing's been said so far.
* * *
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem in another persona. Somehow, thinking through personalities to assume and write from, I thought of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary of Britain's unelected, mandate-less Tory-led Coalition Government. And then I remembered something I'd seen over the weekend. The NASUWT, Britain's largest teaching union, has been holding its conference this week, a conference traditionally visited by the Education Secretary. This year, Gove himself chickened out of going, and, deciding to compound his cowardice with a staggering degree of high-handed arrogance, he didn't send an underling from either his own Tory party, or the Liberal Democrats, very much the Richard Hammond to the Tories' Jeremy Clarkson.
It's usual for the General Secretary of the union to address the Education Secretary at conference. Sometimes this can be a jocular and friendly exchange, sometimes it can be more combative. Given that Gove's approach to Britain's education system seems to be that the way to improve it is to destroy it, it was pretty clear that this year Gove was going to have to sit there and take his lumps. The fact that the Secretary of Education couldn't take a telling-off from teacher gives you the measure of the man.
But this gave NASUWT General Secretary Chris Keates a problem. How could she deliver the address to Gove if he was too much of a scaredy-cat to show up? Fortunately, a solution was found. A cardboard cut-out of the Education Secretary was acquired, and Keates duly delivered her speech to this novelty Michael Gove standee.
This led me to wonder: what would it be like if the cardboard cut-out took over from Gove full-time? After all, in showing up to conference it had already shown considerably more courage than its real-life counterpart. And so...this is what resulted. I quite like the idea of Cardboard Gove in government. If nothing else, a 2D Education Secretary is unlikely to get any ideas about battling aliens.
The Education Sec is sure of that.
His subordinates say he prefers to stand.
His silence is interpreted as pensive;
his pose as friendly, jocular, on-message.
His choosing to remain in Cabinet Rooms
even after Dave and Gideon leave
is seen as diligent, though there are whispers
that it shows he wants the top job.
Nobody wants to make a fuss though.
They all know he's Rupert's boy.
When sure the coast is clear,
the under-secretaries lift him up
and fold back his supports.
One takes the legs, the other holds the shoulders,
turned so that his glazed eyes face the fly
of a Dege & Skiner three-piece,
his plain white backing turned to face the world.
At close of play they prop him in the office.
The cleaner, mute, Nigerian - is she Nigerian?
Somewhere like that, anyway - bumps the Henry's nozzle
against his cardboard feet. Says nothing. No-one knows.
Nobody knows exactly when the real Gove disappeared, where he is.
And he looks convincing. Lifelike. Nothing's been said so far.
* * *
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem in another persona. Somehow, thinking through personalities to assume and write from, I thought of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary of Britain's unelected, mandate-less Tory-led Coalition Government. And then I remembered something I'd seen over the weekend. The NASUWT, Britain's largest teaching union, has been holding its conference this week, a conference traditionally visited by the Education Secretary. This year, Gove himself chickened out of going, and, deciding to compound his cowardice with a staggering degree of high-handed arrogance, he didn't send an underling from either his own Tory party, or the Liberal Democrats, very much the Richard Hammond to the Tories' Jeremy Clarkson.
It's usual for the General Secretary of the union to address the Education Secretary at conference. Sometimes this can be a jocular and friendly exchange, sometimes it can be more combative. Given that Gove's approach to Britain's education system seems to be that the way to improve it is to destroy it, it was pretty clear that this year Gove was going to have to sit there and take his lumps. The fact that the Secretary of Education couldn't take a telling-off from teacher gives you the measure of the man.
But this gave NASUWT General Secretary Chris Keates a problem. How could she deliver the address to Gove if he was too much of a scaredy-cat to show up? Fortunately, a solution was found. A cardboard cut-out of the Education Secretary was acquired, and Keates duly delivered her speech to this novelty Michael Gove standee.
This led me to wonder: what would it be like if the cardboard cut-out took over from Gove full-time? After all, in showing up to conference it had already shown considerably more courage than its real-life counterpart. And so...this is what resulted. I quite like the idea of Cardboard Gove in government. If nothing else, a 2D Education Secretary is unlikely to get any ideas about battling aliens.
Saturday, 2 April 2011
The Curse of the Drinking Classes
This weekend I sent off a selection of poems to a publisher which might, just possibly, turn out to be my second pamphlet. If all goes well, said publication may see the light sometime in 2012, which would be exactly ten years after my first pamphlet was published. I like to keep to a tight, frenetic, some might even say punishing, publishing schedule. It's a curse.
The selection I put together - with the working title 'Singing Motorhead in the Voice of Dolores O'Riordan' (there's a story behind that which I'll explain some other day) - concentrates, naturally enough, on trans stuff, but, in the editing, I noticed that there are a lot of poems about work, too. Which had to be left out to preserve the thematic unity of the selection I came up with, and which now have me thinking along the lines of doing another selection taking work culture as a subject. Work and trans stuff tend to be the things I bang on about most on here and in my poetry, so that would make sense. Though I'd need to write a few more work poems to get a full selection together.
Maybe it's just that work culture is much on my mind lately. Only recently I finished reading Madeleine Bunting's Willing Slaves, which I can't recommend enough. And, of course, the BBC have recently done a series, 'The British at Work', telling a story about peoples' experiences of toiling for the man in this septic isle.
You'll notice that I say 'telling a story', and refuse to go quite so far as to call the show a documentary series. That's because documentaries, well, document something. And too often, The British at Work seemed less interested in documenting peoples' working lives than in shoehorning facts and events into a narrative which ends with everybody living fulfilled working lives in the happy-clappy new milennium. A narrative in which unions got in the way of social progress and the Thatcherite desolation of large parts of the UK was a historical inevitability. Watching the eighties episode, they did pay attention to joblessness (by showing a clip of Yosser Hughes) and they covered the Wapping Printers' Strike (though this segued into discussing how lovely the new newspaper offices, and indeed other office buildings, became in the eighties), but you could've blinked and missed one of the defining workplace conflicts of the eighties, the Miners' Strike. Too bad you couldn't say the same for the endless shots of yuppie fun and fawning interviews with post-downshifted yupsters about how much stress they'd been under, the poor dears.
There's a good dissection of what's wrong with the show's narrative about work at The Blog from 20,000 Fathoms, which says pretty much everything I'd've said if I'd found the time. But today, a week after the March for the Alternative, I find the BBC's dismissiveness about workplace organisation not just offensive but completely out of touch.
Last week I marched through the streets of London with 500,000 other people, most of them drawn from the trade unions, in a show of numbers organised by the TUC. The atmosphere, the noise, the numbers were incredible. But what was just as incredible was the fact that, for the first time in what seemed like ages, peoples jobs and livelihoods were the key political issue. The Tory-led government's cuts are having a massive impact on peoples' jobs, and, despite a few highly-publicised new projects, it seems highly unlikely that the private sector can provide enough jobs for highly-qualified people like librarians, teachers, nurses or social workers when their jobs are cut.
There's no economic justification for these cuts. The Tories are making them in furtherance of a mean-minded ideology which, in some respects, chimes all too easily with the dismissive, anti-union, anti-worker, 'we've never had it so good' attitude of The British at Work. The Tory approach is about 'making it easier for businesses' by getting rid of legislation which protects workers' rights. The British at Work bolsters this approach by saying that there's no need to protect workers' rights because we're all 'doing jobs we like' in beautiful, 'hotel-like' offices, feeling fulfilled and creative and self-actualising.
How could people in such utopian working environments begrudge making life easier for our new business overlords? Resistance to managerialism in The British at Work was associated, again and again, with negativity, in the form of closed shops, racism, or, at the top end of things, bowler-hatted bankers straight out of a Monty Python sketch. Whereas the workers who donated time free of charge to the risible 'I'm backing Britain' were presented as heroic, patriotic figures, though even Kirsty Young struggled not to laugh at the campaign's official single by the dodgily-moustached fame-chaser Bruce Forsyth. Y'know, Bruce Forsyth who thinks that people should 'get a sense of humour' about racial slurs. How could you object to a campaign fronted by a class act like that?
(Of course it's unfair to single out Brucie. The 'I'm Backing Britain' campaign was also supported by such moral stalwarts as Jimmy 'I invented zero tolerance' Saville, and Robert Maxwell. With people like that 'backing' the country, one does feel amazed that we actually still exist as a nation at all.)
The reality is that in the 21st century millions of people in Britain still toil at unfulfilling jobs for wages that are a joke. 'Gold-plated pensions' only exist for bankers like Fred Goodwin, and Tory MPs who can roll out of the House of Commons and straight into a do-nothing, fat-salaried executive directorship on a company they've helped out during their time in office. Where people do jobs that are above the McJob level, they constantly face an uphill battle to make their workplaces decent places to work and spend time in, and most of the things that are good about workplaces today were only won by scaring the bejesus out of bosses.
But of course if you think of things that way, then you might find yourself objecting to the Tory agenda. And we can't have that, can we?
The selection I put together - with the working title 'Singing Motorhead in the Voice of Dolores O'Riordan' (there's a story behind that which I'll explain some other day) - concentrates, naturally enough, on trans stuff, but, in the editing, I noticed that there are a lot of poems about work, too. Which had to be left out to preserve the thematic unity of the selection I came up with, and which now have me thinking along the lines of doing another selection taking work culture as a subject. Work and trans stuff tend to be the things I bang on about most on here and in my poetry, so that would make sense. Though I'd need to write a few more work poems to get a full selection together.
Maybe it's just that work culture is much on my mind lately. Only recently I finished reading Madeleine Bunting's Willing Slaves, which I can't recommend enough. And, of course, the BBC have recently done a series, 'The British at Work', telling a story about peoples' experiences of toiling for the man in this septic isle.
You'll notice that I say 'telling a story', and refuse to go quite so far as to call the show a documentary series. That's because documentaries, well, document something. And too often, The British at Work seemed less interested in documenting peoples' working lives than in shoehorning facts and events into a narrative which ends with everybody living fulfilled working lives in the happy-clappy new milennium. A narrative in which unions got in the way of social progress and the Thatcherite desolation of large parts of the UK was a historical inevitability. Watching the eighties episode, they did pay attention to joblessness (by showing a clip of Yosser Hughes) and they covered the Wapping Printers' Strike (though this segued into discussing how lovely the new newspaper offices, and indeed other office buildings, became in the eighties), but you could've blinked and missed one of the defining workplace conflicts of the eighties, the Miners' Strike. Too bad you couldn't say the same for the endless shots of yuppie fun and fawning interviews with post-downshifted yupsters about how much stress they'd been under, the poor dears.
There's a good dissection of what's wrong with the show's narrative about work at The Blog from 20,000 Fathoms, which says pretty much everything I'd've said if I'd found the time. But today, a week after the March for the Alternative, I find the BBC's dismissiveness about workplace organisation not just offensive but completely out of touch.
Last week I marched through the streets of London with 500,000 other people, most of them drawn from the trade unions, in a show of numbers organised by the TUC. The atmosphere, the noise, the numbers were incredible. But what was just as incredible was the fact that, for the first time in what seemed like ages, peoples jobs and livelihoods were the key political issue. The Tory-led government's cuts are having a massive impact on peoples' jobs, and, despite a few highly-publicised new projects, it seems highly unlikely that the private sector can provide enough jobs for highly-qualified people like librarians, teachers, nurses or social workers when their jobs are cut.
There's no economic justification for these cuts. The Tories are making them in furtherance of a mean-minded ideology which, in some respects, chimes all too easily with the dismissive, anti-union, anti-worker, 'we've never had it so good' attitude of The British at Work. The Tory approach is about 'making it easier for businesses' by getting rid of legislation which protects workers' rights. The British at Work bolsters this approach by saying that there's no need to protect workers' rights because we're all 'doing jobs we like' in beautiful, 'hotel-like' offices, feeling fulfilled and creative and self-actualising.
How could people in such utopian working environments begrudge making life easier for our new business overlords? Resistance to managerialism in The British at Work was associated, again and again, with negativity, in the form of closed shops, racism, or, at the top end of things, bowler-hatted bankers straight out of a Monty Python sketch. Whereas the workers who donated time free of charge to the risible 'I'm backing Britain' were presented as heroic, patriotic figures, though even Kirsty Young struggled not to laugh at the campaign's official single by the dodgily-moustached fame-chaser Bruce Forsyth. Y'know, Bruce Forsyth who thinks that people should 'get a sense of humour' about racial slurs. How could you object to a campaign fronted by a class act like that?
(Of course it's unfair to single out Brucie. The 'I'm Backing Britain' campaign was also supported by such moral stalwarts as Jimmy 'I invented zero tolerance' Saville, and Robert Maxwell. With people like that 'backing' the country, one does feel amazed that we actually still exist as a nation at all.)
The reality is that in the 21st century millions of people in Britain still toil at unfulfilling jobs for wages that are a joke. 'Gold-plated pensions' only exist for bankers like Fred Goodwin, and Tory MPs who can roll out of the House of Commons and straight into a do-nothing, fat-salaried executive directorship on a company they've helped out during their time in office. Where people do jobs that are above the McJob level, they constantly face an uphill battle to make their workplaces decent places to work and spend time in, and most of the things that are good about workplaces today were only won by scaring the bejesus out of bosses.
But of course if you think of things that way, then you might find yourself objecting to the Tory agenda. And we can't have that, can we?
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Politics Is Not Actually Wrestling...
...despite the silliness in my previous posts. A point which many might not think worth making, but which seems to have been lost on the crowd of Tea Party supporters who, in this video, decide to express their commitment to the ideals of America's Founding Fathers by beating up an innocent young woman.
This, it need hardly be said, is the action of a pack of scum. What makes it worse is that it turns out one of the people involved is a co-ordinator for Tea Party candidate Rand Paul's campaign. And it turns out this piece of across-the-pondlife was following the examples of some primate higher up the chain of command who jokes about liberals getting 'curb-stomped' (and I have to say, I always thought the word was 'kerb'...then again, these right-wing arseholes have never been great at the spelling).
The most worrying thing about this is that there are scum in this country who are trying to export this kind of politics to the UK. Today we've seen reports of US-style 'Christians' intimidating vulnerable women at abortion clinics; and, surprise, surprise, the nearest thing Britain has to a Tea Party Candidate, self-confessed liar Nadine Dorries, haswritten clagged together a simpering blogpost in support of these creeps.
I don't like the Tories, as anyone who's read this blog for any length of time will attest. But compared to Dorries, even someone like Michael Gove or George Osborne comes off well. The Tories may be lying about the justification for their cuts, but at least they don't lie about their lying by saying that when they were lying they were lying about lying in a forum which is only about 70% true anyway...and then expect you to take their views about a woman's bodily autonomy any more seriously than a man in a psychedelic kilt farting the national anthem through a kazoo.
What I'm saying is, most of the Tories respect us enough to try and run at least a half-decent con on us. Dorries genuinely believes we're naive enough that we'll fall for anything she says - and also believes that ignoring her critics proves that she's won the argument. Or, hey, if that doesn't work, she can always accuse people of stalking her.
I will cheerfully admit that every time I hear Margaret Thatcher has been admitted to hospital, I make a mental note to run out, get some champagne, and put it on ice; but Dorries and her ilk are a more virulent contagion than Thatcher ever was. And whatever side of the issues you come down on, it's a contagion we have to stop in its tracks. Because as much as we might sometimes want to knock our opponents' heads together none of us wants to knock their heads into the kerb. And that's the way it ought to stay.
This, it need hardly be said, is the action of a pack of scum. What makes it worse is that it turns out one of the people involved is a co-ordinator for Tea Party candidate Rand Paul's campaign. And it turns out this piece of across-the-pondlife was following the examples of some primate higher up the chain of command who jokes about liberals getting 'curb-stomped' (and I have to say, I always thought the word was 'kerb'...then again, these right-wing arseholes have never been great at the spelling).
The most worrying thing about this is that there are scum in this country who are trying to export this kind of politics to the UK. Today we've seen reports of US-style 'Christians' intimidating vulnerable women at abortion clinics; and, surprise, surprise, the nearest thing Britain has to a Tea Party Candidate, self-confessed liar Nadine Dorries, has
I don't like the Tories, as anyone who's read this blog for any length of time will attest. But compared to Dorries, even someone like Michael Gove or George Osborne comes off well. The Tories may be lying about the justification for their cuts, but at least they don't lie about their lying by saying that when they were lying they were lying about lying in a forum which is only about 70% true anyway...and then expect you to take their views about a woman's bodily autonomy any more seriously than a man in a psychedelic kilt farting the national anthem through a kazoo.
What I'm saying is, most of the Tories respect us enough to try and run at least a half-decent con on us. Dorries genuinely believes we're naive enough that we'll fall for anything she says - and also believes that ignoring her critics proves that she's won the argument. Or, hey, if that doesn't work, she can always accuse people of stalking her.
I will cheerfully admit that every time I hear Margaret Thatcher has been admitted to hospital, I make a mental note to run out, get some champagne, and put it on ice; but Dorries and her ilk are a more virulent contagion than Thatcher ever was. And whatever side of the issues you come down on, it's a contagion we have to stop in its tracks. Because as much as we might sometimes want to knock our opponents' heads together none of us wants to knock their heads into the kerb. And that's the way it ought to stay.
Monday, 25 October 2010
The Self-destruction of Nick Robinson
Further to yesterday's post comparing the operation of the Coalition to that of a wrestling promotion, it suddenly occurred to me that one of the Tories' pet journalists is beginning to display behaviour remarkably similar to that of one of the WWE's most troubled stars.
Don't believe me? Well, take a look at this classic example of former WWE champion the Ultimate Warrior on one of his trademark rampages around the backstage area.
Now, compare this video of former Young Conservative (and chief cheerleader in Dave Cameron's personal media Spirit Squad) Nick Robinson hulking out and destroying a peace protester's sign.
Now, alright, you may argue that, compared to the one-man rage-tsunami that is Warrior, Robinson's anger-gasm is kind of insipid and pointless, but that just shows you that the bland ecstasy induced by finally seeing your whey-faced poster-boy standing at the despatch box and repeatedly wittering on about the deficit will always be a poor substitute for the white-hot intensity brought on by years of steroid abuse and a rabid, sub-Nietzchean philosophy. The difference is one not of kind but of degree.
However, now that Robinson has opted to work the 'ranting scenery-destroyer' gimmick, he's going to have to try hard to stay in contention, especially now that political journalists with a much better workrate, such as Jo Coburn, are coming up the ranks by using the devious tactic of not allowing privilege-monger Michael Gove to mansplain all over them. I therefore suggest that, if Robinson wants to keep his spot, he shows up for his next piece-to-camera in neon face-paint, refers to everyone watching as 'all the little Robbiors out there', and repeatedly calls the anchor in the studio 'Mean Gene' regardless of whoever they may in fact be.
The baby-oil's in your court, Nick...
Don't believe me? Well, take a look at this classic example of former WWE champion the Ultimate Warrior on one of his trademark rampages around the backstage area.
Now, compare this video of former Young Conservative (and chief cheerleader in Dave Cameron's personal media Spirit Squad) Nick Robinson hulking out and destroying a peace protester's sign.
Now, alright, you may argue that, compared to the one-man rage-tsunami that is Warrior, Robinson's anger-gasm is kind of insipid and pointless, but that just shows you that the bland ecstasy induced by finally seeing your whey-faced poster-boy standing at the despatch box and repeatedly wittering on about the deficit will always be a poor substitute for the white-hot intensity brought on by years of steroid abuse and a rabid, sub-Nietzchean philosophy. The difference is one not of kind but of degree.
However, now that Robinson has opted to work the 'ranting scenery-destroyer' gimmick, he's going to have to try hard to stay in contention, especially now that political journalists with a much better workrate, such as Jo Coburn, are coming up the ranks by using the devious tactic of not allowing privilege-monger Michael Gove to mansplain all over them. I therefore suggest that, if Robinson wants to keep his spot, he shows up for his next piece-to-camera in neon face-paint, refers to everyone watching as 'all the little Robbiors out there', and repeatedly calls the anchor in the studio 'Mean Gene' regardless of whoever they may in fact be.
The baby-oil's in your court, Nick...
Sunday, 24 October 2010
The Politics of the Heel Turn: or, Nasty Nick and the Kayfabe Coalition
2010 has been a strange year for British politics. Perhaps the biggest shock of all is the speed with which Nick Clegg went from being the British Obama to being, essentially, a stooge for a government which, as we learned from the Spending Review this week, wants to cut housing benefit for the under-35s, throw people off disability benefit left, right and centre, make life harder for women and old people, condemn young trans people to even more years in the closet than they put up with at the moment, deprive people in care homes of mobility aids, kick thousands of public sector workers out of their jobs and generally reduce Britain to a condition of neo-Dickensian misery (I suppose we should be thankful that Henry Mayhew's guide to the kind of world in which we'll all soon live has been reissued).
Many people were shocked by this change in Clegg's persona - none more so, I imagine, than the quartet of bright, breezy, cheerful young Lib Dem girls who I saw perform an impromptu 'I agree with Nick!' song and dance routine at Newcastle's Greys Monument in the week after the first televised election debate. I have to admit that I was less shocked than many people were by the speed with which Clegg dropped his principles at the promise of a ministerial limo, largely because, growing up in the 1990s, I had a ready-made model which I could apply to the situation. I've written before about my affection for the garish pesudosport that is professional wrestling. And in wrestling, the transformation in Clegg's character would be what's referred to as a heel-turn.
Profesional wrestling is a narrative form with a very odd attitude to continuity. Week-to-week continuity is important, but continuity in the longer term is subject to near-Stalinist levels of revision. The longer a character has been a heel or a face, the less chance there is that their previous status will be referred to. It is simply the case that they have always been 'one of the bad guys'. Through constant repetition, a narrative is generated that the fans buy into, and booing the dastardly villain becomes as easy as it was to cheer for them six months ago, when they were the crowd-pleasing hero.
Interestingly enough, the way the coalition have approached the economy has pretty much followed the same process by which professional wrestling creates its alternate reality. In much the same way as the WWE pretends that it was never called anything else, that Madusa Miceli wasn't the same person as Alundra Blayze, or that there exists a specific place called 'Parts Unknown' (whose inhabitants have an unusual fondness for face-paint and heavy metal; if it did exist, it sounds like it would actually be kind of cool), so we've been spoon-fed a series of egregious lies by the Coalition (whose name actually even sounds like a heel wrestling stable, albeit a slightly crap one; I'd have more respect for our new overlords if they took a leaf straight out of the WWE's book and started calling themselves the Corporate Ministry).
We've been told Labour left the country with an unbelievable deficit - in fact, before the recession, we had the 2nd lowest level of debt of any of the G7 countries.
We've been told that George Osborne's savage cuts to the benefits system are needed to wipe out '£5bn of benefit fraud'. In fact, benefit fraud costs only £1bn.
We've been told that desperate measures of the kind announced by Osborne are needed to save the economy. In fact, economists all over the world believe the Coalition is on the wrong course, and statistics show that these measures will plunge us ever deeper into recession.
There are more - many more - myths about the deficit, the cuts and the economy which the Coalition want us to swallow as uncritically as the marks at a wrestling match who will chant 'U-S-A!' during a match between a Candian face and a Mexican heel, but fortunately there are sites like Liberal Conspiracy, who have posted a handy myth-busting guide to the economic arguments here, and there are a host of blogs regularly deconstructing the lies told by the Tories' friends in the media. The point I want to make is that, while I enjoy suspending my disbelief if all it involves is a bunch of people jumping around in silly spandex outfits, when it comes to politics I would rather see a little more focus on what one of George Bush's aides (disparagingly) referred to as the 'reality-based community.'
Alternatively, if we are going to live in a world where our politicians treat us like a bunch of marks, then I demand that, during the next Prime Minister's Question Time, someone runs in and hits a hurricanrana on David Cameron. We may as well get some entertainment out of this bullshit.
Many people were shocked by this change in Clegg's persona - none more so, I imagine, than the quartet of bright, breezy, cheerful young Lib Dem girls who I saw perform an impromptu 'I agree with Nick!' song and dance routine at Newcastle's Greys Monument in the week after the first televised election debate. I have to admit that I was less shocked than many people were by the speed with which Clegg dropped his principles at the promise of a ministerial limo, largely because, growing up in the 1990s, I had a ready-made model which I could apply to the situation. I've written before about my affection for the garish pesudosport that is professional wrestling. And in wrestling, the transformation in Clegg's character would be what's referred to as a heel-turn.
Profesional wrestling is a narrative form with a very odd attitude to continuity. Week-to-week continuity is important, but continuity in the longer term is subject to near-Stalinist levels of revision. The longer a character has been a heel or a face, the less chance there is that their previous status will be referred to. It is simply the case that they have always been 'one of the bad guys'. Through constant repetition, a narrative is generated that the fans buy into, and booing the dastardly villain becomes as easy as it was to cheer for them six months ago, when they were the crowd-pleasing hero.
Interestingly enough, the way the coalition have approached the economy has pretty much followed the same process by which professional wrestling creates its alternate reality. In much the same way as the WWE pretends that it was never called anything else, that Madusa Miceli wasn't the same person as Alundra Blayze, or that there exists a specific place called 'Parts Unknown' (whose inhabitants have an unusual fondness for face-paint and heavy metal; if it did exist, it sounds like it would actually be kind of cool), so we've been spoon-fed a series of egregious lies by the Coalition (whose name actually even sounds like a heel wrestling stable, albeit a slightly crap one; I'd have more respect for our new overlords if they took a leaf straight out of the WWE's book and started calling themselves the Corporate Ministry).
We've been told Labour left the country with an unbelievable deficit - in fact, before the recession, we had the 2nd lowest level of debt of any of the G7 countries.
We've been told that George Osborne's savage cuts to the benefits system are needed to wipe out '£5bn of benefit fraud'. In fact, benefit fraud costs only £1bn.
We've been told that desperate measures of the kind announced by Osborne are needed to save the economy. In fact, economists all over the world believe the Coalition is on the wrong course, and statistics show that these measures will plunge us ever deeper into recession.
There are more - many more - myths about the deficit, the cuts and the economy which the Coalition want us to swallow as uncritically as the marks at a wrestling match who will chant 'U-S-A!' during a match between a Candian face and a Mexican heel, but fortunately there are sites like Liberal Conspiracy, who have posted a handy myth-busting guide to the economic arguments here, and there are a host of blogs regularly deconstructing the lies told by the Tories' friends in the media. The point I want to make is that, while I enjoy suspending my disbelief if all it involves is a bunch of people jumping around in silly spandex outfits, when it comes to politics I would rather see a little more focus on what one of George Bush's aides (disparagingly) referred to as the 'reality-based community.'
Alternatively, if we are going to live in a world where our politicians treat us like a bunch of marks, then I demand that, during the next Prime Minister's Question Time, someone runs in and hits a hurricanrana on David Cameron. We may as well get some entertainment out of this bullshit.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
Major Misunderstanding Makes War on the Poor
A few months ago, I'm talking to a friend who works for a teaching union. Said friend tells me about an interesting call a friend of hers had received. The call was from the right-wing UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. At that time, the Telegraph - or the Torygraph, as many on the left call it - was riding high after exposing the MPs' expenses scandal, which - although many MPs from the opposition benches had also fiddled the system - inevitably hit the Labour government harder.
The man from the Telegraph had been asking about facility time allocations made by the Local Authority my union friend worked for. Facility time is something you may not know about. It's basically a system by which members of staff who are also union officials are able to work full-time on their union activities. The system is paid for by the unions, who pay to provide staff to cover for the officials while they go about their union work.
The system is paid for by the unions. Got that? The salaries of these workers - when they work in the public sector - are paid for by taxes - but the unions recompense the employers out of their own budgets. Facility time is paid for by the unions, to provide a vital service to union members, to ensure that practices and procedures at work are fair and conform to the correct legislation. Unions aren't bolshy, Citizen Smith operations - they're a vital check on employers, who make sure they treat their staff fairly. If you think a check like that isn't necessary, I would like to know which time tunnel you used to arrive here from the late middle ages, so I can kick you back down it to your world of feudal servitude.
Anyway. The Torygraph were snooping around trying to find out how much facility time various organisations were granting. My hunch was they planned to extend the MP's expenses furore to council level, giving their story a new angle and allowing them to run with it for a while longer. This would boost circulation and keep the Torygraph at the head of the news agenda - an odd position for it to occupy as, prior to the expenses scandal, the paper had pretty much been a joke, mocked for its fawning celebrity coverage and tendency to try and cover any story in such a way that it could be illustrated by a picture of a leggy upper class caucasian girl who (usually) would be surnamed Hurley or Goldsmith.
At the time I worked in a bookshop which sold newspapers, so was able to keep abreast of what the tabs and the broadsheets were covering without having to shell out any of my (limited) cash. I braced myself for a classic Telegraph 'retired colonel' piece all about bolshy unions and YOUR HARD-EARNED TAXES being used to pay for them and blah blah Tory fishcakes. And waited.
And waited. And waited.
And had actually almost forgotten about that little piece of info I'd been given until today, when the Torygraph suddenly decided to reveal all this information they'd been sitting on in this nasty litle article.
This delay in publishing is not an accident. In fact, it reveals something rather unnerving about the Coalition's agenda. We've been told that the public sector cuts being touted by the like of George Osborne are merely necessary because of the economic situation. We're told that these cuts have to be more swingeing than even the Tories promised before the election because it turns out the economy is in an even more parlous state than anybody realised. But as my little conversation six months ago reveals, the Telegraph have had this story in the bag for a looooong time, and they're only choosing to go with it now. Why is that?
It's because there is nothing necessary about these cuts. This is ideological. This, however much the Tories may deny it, is class war. Weakening the public sector is about making the vast bulk of ordinary people even more powerless to resist being placed on lower wages, being subject to discrimination by prejudiced employers, or being forced into poverty because their benefits have been cut. The unions, rightly, are campaigning to protect the public sector, and so protect the interests of ordinary people throughout the country. The Telegraph have sat on this story so they can use it as ammunition against the unions in this ideologically-driven war on the poor. And the fact that they sat on the information for six months shows that this war was being planned long before the election - at the very time that David Cameron was promising not to bring in swingeing public sector cuts.
The Telegraph will try to dress this up as a public interest investigation. But if that's really the case, why didn't they strike when the iron was hot - when the issue of expenses abuse was high on the agenda, and people were hungry for stories of corruption in high places? Because the Telegraph don't really care about the public - unless by 'public' you mean that tiny fraction of the body politic able to pay for a seat at one of David Cameron's dodgy dinner clubs. If the expenses scandal had been uncovered under this government, the Telegraph wouldn't have pursued it nearly as aggressively (indeed, the Telegraph have lagged far behind other broadsheets in covering metgate, a story with massive public interest implications which also happens to be massively damaging to the Tory party). The Torygraph deserves its nickname, because it's a propaganda organ of the Tory party - and their latest 'revelations' about facility time are disgusting, biased and sleazy - even for a propaganda rag. Frankly, I preferred the Telegraph when all its journalists were interested in looking up was Liz Hurley's skirt.
The man from the Telegraph had been asking about facility time allocations made by the Local Authority my union friend worked for. Facility time is something you may not know about. It's basically a system by which members of staff who are also union officials are able to work full-time on their union activities. The system is paid for by the unions, who pay to provide staff to cover for the officials while they go about their union work.
The system is paid for by the unions. Got that? The salaries of these workers - when they work in the public sector - are paid for by taxes - but the unions recompense the employers out of their own budgets. Facility time is paid for by the unions, to provide a vital service to union members, to ensure that practices and procedures at work are fair and conform to the correct legislation. Unions aren't bolshy, Citizen Smith operations - they're a vital check on employers, who make sure they treat their staff fairly. If you think a check like that isn't necessary, I would like to know which time tunnel you used to arrive here from the late middle ages, so I can kick you back down it to your world of feudal servitude.
Anyway. The Torygraph were snooping around trying to find out how much facility time various organisations were granting. My hunch was they planned to extend the MP's expenses furore to council level, giving their story a new angle and allowing them to run with it for a while longer. This would boost circulation and keep the Torygraph at the head of the news agenda - an odd position for it to occupy as, prior to the expenses scandal, the paper had pretty much been a joke, mocked for its fawning celebrity coverage and tendency to try and cover any story in such a way that it could be illustrated by a picture of a leggy upper class caucasian girl who (usually) would be surnamed Hurley or Goldsmith.
At the time I worked in a bookshop which sold newspapers, so was able to keep abreast of what the tabs and the broadsheets were covering without having to shell out any of my (limited) cash. I braced myself for a classic Telegraph 'retired colonel' piece all about bolshy unions and YOUR HARD-EARNED TAXES being used to pay for them and blah blah Tory fishcakes. And waited.
And waited. And waited.
And had actually almost forgotten about that little piece of info I'd been given until today, when the Torygraph suddenly decided to reveal all this information they'd been sitting on in this nasty litle article.
This delay in publishing is not an accident. In fact, it reveals something rather unnerving about the Coalition's agenda. We've been told that the public sector cuts being touted by the like of George Osborne are merely necessary because of the economic situation. We're told that these cuts have to be more swingeing than even the Tories promised before the election because it turns out the economy is in an even more parlous state than anybody realised. But as my little conversation six months ago reveals, the Telegraph have had this story in the bag for a looooong time, and they're only choosing to go with it now. Why is that?
It's because there is nothing necessary about these cuts. This is ideological. This, however much the Tories may deny it, is class war. Weakening the public sector is about making the vast bulk of ordinary people even more powerless to resist being placed on lower wages, being subject to discrimination by prejudiced employers, or being forced into poverty because their benefits have been cut. The unions, rightly, are campaigning to protect the public sector, and so protect the interests of ordinary people throughout the country. The Telegraph have sat on this story so they can use it as ammunition against the unions in this ideologically-driven war on the poor. And the fact that they sat on the information for six months shows that this war was being planned long before the election - at the very time that David Cameron was promising not to bring in swingeing public sector cuts.
The Telegraph will try to dress this up as a public interest investigation. But if that's really the case, why didn't they strike when the iron was hot - when the issue of expenses abuse was high on the agenda, and people were hungry for stories of corruption in high places? Because the Telegraph don't really care about the public - unless by 'public' you mean that tiny fraction of the body politic able to pay for a seat at one of David Cameron's dodgy dinner clubs. If the expenses scandal had been uncovered under this government, the Telegraph wouldn't have pursued it nearly as aggressively (indeed, the Telegraph have lagged far behind other broadsheets in covering metgate, a story with massive public interest implications which also happens to be massively damaging to the Tory party). The Torygraph deserves its nickname, because it's a propaganda organ of the Tory party - and their latest 'revelations' about facility time are disgusting, biased and sleazy - even for a propaganda rag. Frankly, I preferred the Telegraph when all its journalists were interested in looking up was Liz Hurley's skirt.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
A little bit of politics
Yesterday was an interesting, and perhaps a little dispiriting, day, politically. We had the decision from a high court judge to ban BA strikers from exercising their democratic right to withdraw their labour (TRIGGER WARNING: about halfway down that site there's a picture of Willie Walsh's pug-ugly face); more worryingly still, there was the bitter irony that, on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, when even police stations flew the rainbow banner, we had to put up with an administration that sees nothing wrong with employing someone as bigoted as Theresa May as Equalities Minister, no less, and appointing Philippa Stroud, sometime nemesis of this blog and, you will recall, a woman who, in the year 2010, still believes in demonic possession, as an advisor. To reiterate: we now live under a government happy to take advice from someone who believes that evil wee beasties crawl into people and make them do naughty things because the divil tells 'em to, (Mrs Stroud has yet to comment on how these beasties gain entrance to people, but this writer reckons it must be through the arse).
A lot has been written about how the Tories are repealing some of the more repressive measures introduced by Labour during the suck-up-to-Bush era (and let's be honest, a lot of the Cleggeron's repeals are made much easier by the fact that the US has a much more liberal Commander-in-Chief now, so illiberal measures can be scrapped safe in the knowledge that it won't damage the Special Relationship), but I have to admit it: I'm afraid. I think it's a trick, a ruse. I worry that in maybe a few years, tops, if this government is still in power, we'll see their true colours. We'll see them try to rein in all the great social changes of the last thirteen years as they shamelessly court the Daily Mail tendency. They'll try to reintroduce Section 28, make it harder for gay couples to have kids, eliminate protections for trans people and, oh yeah, all that stuff about 'efficiency savings' in the NHS? Three guesses where that axe is gonna fall...
But then I read something like what Penny Red wrote the other day, and I think: FUCKING YESSSS. Cameron hasn't won the election, and if he and his trolls pick a fight with everyone who's danced out of the closet since Thatcher and her ilk were given the boot - indeed, with all the people who fought to smash down the closet door during Thatcher's reign - he won't, and can't win. Because all the LGBT people who can live more openly since Tony Blair came into power won't be shoved back into the darkness, and the vast, progressive majority of people in this country who aren't gay, bi, lesbian or trans, but maybe have friends or relatives who are, or who just notice how much nicer the country seems now we aren't, Jan Moir aside, picking on minorities so openly and viciously anymore, won't stand for it either.
So, as worrying as it is to witness days like yesterday, and the fears they bring: let them bloody try. Because we'll try harder, and we'll stop them. And in that spirit, here's a poem I posted on Write Out Loud yesterday in an attempt to deal with these concerns. Remember, folks: we fight 'em 'til we can't.
A lot has been written about how the Tories are repealing some of the more repressive measures introduced by Labour during the suck-up-to-Bush era (and let's be honest, a lot of the Cleggeron's repeals are made much easier by the fact that the US has a much more liberal Commander-in-Chief now, so illiberal measures can be scrapped safe in the knowledge that it won't damage the Special Relationship), but I have to admit it: I'm afraid. I think it's a trick, a ruse. I worry that in maybe a few years, tops, if this government is still in power, we'll see their true colours. We'll see them try to rein in all the great social changes of the last thirteen years as they shamelessly court the Daily Mail tendency. They'll try to reintroduce Section 28, make it harder for gay couples to have kids, eliminate protections for trans people and, oh yeah, all that stuff about 'efficiency savings' in the NHS? Three guesses where that axe is gonna fall...
But then I read something like what Penny Red wrote the other day, and I think: FUCKING YESSSS. Cameron hasn't won the election, and if he and his trolls pick a fight with everyone who's danced out of the closet since Thatcher and her ilk were given the boot - indeed, with all the people who fought to smash down the closet door during Thatcher's reign - he won't, and can't win. Because all the LGBT people who can live more openly since Tony Blair came into power won't be shoved back into the darkness, and the vast, progressive majority of people in this country who aren't gay, bi, lesbian or trans, but maybe have friends or relatives who are, or who just notice how much nicer the country seems now we aren't, Jan Moir aside, picking on minorities so openly and viciously anymore, won't stand for it either.
So, as worrying as it is to witness days like yesterday, and the fears they bring: let them bloody try. Because we'll try harder, and we'll stop them. And in that spirit, here's a poem I posted on Write Out Loud yesterday in an attempt to deal with these concerns. Remember, folks: we fight 'em 'til we can't.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
I've given it a good hour and the rage has yet to subside. They did it. The Lib Dems have sold out to the Tories, and now we have to look forward to David Cameron as Chief Shitbag for...well, realistically another six months. But six minutes with that prick in charge is too fucking long.
There are crumbs of comfort. Stroud didn't get in; but the Darth Sidious to her pious little Anakin, Iain Duncan Smith, will get a place in the Cabinet, it seems. As will Michael Howard, architect of the fascist Criminal Justice Act and a vile piece of political scum I will hate with every fibre of my being until the day I die or he does. And William 'One Shandy' Hague, the bumptious, cringeworthy overgrown child. Scum. Beasts. Monsters. Bastards, every last filth-sucking one of them.
A bigger crumb is that the North pretty much categorically rejected the Tories, with the exception of a weird enclave in Carlisle who must surely, even now, be looking around them like those truck drivers who stopped during the LA Riots and thinking shitshitshitshit... Well done, the North. Especially Tynemouth. If there was one place I thought would go Tory, it was you. But you didn't. You kept the faith. Well done. I rag on the North East harder than pretty much anyone writing up here (and don't think I'm going to let up out of solidarity during the Cameron junta - if you bastards fuck up I will still call you on it), but it's only because I fucking love the place, and one of the things that makes me love it is that, despite all the propaganda in the Mail and the Sun, the people up here still have the good goddam sense to stick two fingers up to the Tories, and, while they're at it, to tell the BNP to fuck right off as well. Hats off to the Geordies - they are black and white, but they don't fight, except after ten pints on a Saturday night...*and while we're at it the Mackems, the Smoggies, the Monkey-hangers, Sand-dancers and everyone else. We'll keep the Red Flag flying here if we have to impale the fucking Tories on it.
And the biggest crumb is that with the Lib Dems surely not all intent on falling into line behind Clegg, and a tiny majority otherwise, and the Tory backbenches sure to rise up and fuck Cameron mightily where even Murdoch's Sun can't shine, and Europe looming to split the Tories as per, Cameron's leadership is going to be Hell for the Old Etonian scumbag. And that's before we even get to the fact that I and a lot of other people will be fighting him and his ilk every damn step of the way. He'll be out in six months and, far from being the 'heir to Blair' he'll be remembered as a worse PM than Major.
Welcome, David Cameron. Welcome to Hell. I only hope for your sake that it's a worse Hell for you than it is for the rest of us.
The rage continues.
* and caps doffed to Bill Bailey's 'Hats off to the Badgers' song, lovingly ripped off in the sentence preceding this footnote.
There are crumbs of comfort. Stroud didn't get in; but the Darth Sidious to her pious little Anakin, Iain Duncan Smith, will get a place in the Cabinet, it seems. As will Michael Howard, architect of the fascist Criminal Justice Act and a vile piece of political scum I will hate with every fibre of my being until the day I die or he does. And William 'One Shandy' Hague, the bumptious, cringeworthy overgrown child. Scum. Beasts. Monsters. Bastards, every last filth-sucking one of them.
A bigger crumb is that the North pretty much categorically rejected the Tories, with the exception of a weird enclave in Carlisle who must surely, even now, be looking around them like those truck drivers who stopped during the LA Riots and thinking shitshitshitshit... Well done, the North. Especially Tynemouth. If there was one place I thought would go Tory, it was you. But you didn't. You kept the faith. Well done. I rag on the North East harder than pretty much anyone writing up here (and don't think I'm going to let up out of solidarity during the Cameron junta - if you bastards fuck up I will still call you on it), but it's only because I fucking love the place, and one of the things that makes me love it is that, despite all the propaganda in the Mail and the Sun, the people up here still have the good goddam sense to stick two fingers up to the Tories, and, while they're at it, to tell the BNP to fuck right off as well. Hats off to the Geordies - they are black and white, but they don't fight, except after ten pints on a Saturday night...*and while we're at it the Mackems, the Smoggies, the Monkey-hangers, Sand-dancers and everyone else. We'll keep the Red Flag flying here if we have to impale the fucking Tories on it.
And the biggest crumb is that with the Lib Dems surely not all intent on falling into line behind Clegg, and a tiny majority otherwise, and the Tory backbenches sure to rise up and fuck Cameron mightily where even Murdoch's Sun can't shine, and Europe looming to split the Tories as per, Cameron's leadership is going to be Hell for the Old Etonian scumbag. And that's before we even get to the fact that I and a lot of other people will be fighting him and his ilk every damn step of the way. He'll be out in six months and, far from being the 'heir to Blair' he'll be remembered as a worse PM than Major.
Welcome, David Cameron. Welcome to Hell. I only hope for your sake that it's a worse Hell for you than it is for the rest of us.
The rage continues.
* and caps doffed to Bill Bailey's 'Hats off to the Badgers' song, lovingly ripped off in the sentence preceding this footnote.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Attack of the Big-nosed Sex-Fascists
To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, if the Tories are elected, I warn you not to be gay, not to be lesbian, bi, or a trans person. I warn you not to be polyamorous. I warn you not be kinky. I warn you, in fact, not to be at all sex-positive in any way whatsoever. In fact, I strongly advise you not to be anything but a rosary-clutching Christian librarian who self-flagellates after wiping their bum because they've 'defiled' themselves.
Why am I in such a doom-saying mood? Because of a woman. This woman, in fact:
* Admittedly I would be more likely to pay £150 for this kind of treatment, but let's leave that out of it, shall we?
** You may accuse me of dwelling a little too much on Stroud's nose, but, let's face it, it's big enough that I actually could dwell on it, literally, and raise a small herd of goats fed on her nasal hair into the bargain. So why not? ***
*** Also, I have to wonder what would happen if we got Philippa Stroud's nose and John Hatzistergos' chin into a room together. Would they breed and produce a race of giant-faced bigots, like an army of Easter Island statues giving Hitler salutes and burning crosses made of their own snot? I think this theory needs to be tested. Right fucking now.
Why am I in such a doom-saying mood? Because of a woman. This woman, in fact:
This woman, readers - though she may appear to be a cruel photoshop mock-up of Jennifer Aniston's hair and Ricky Hatton's nose - is in fact the very real Philippa Stroud, head of the Centre for Social Justice, the thinktank founded by Ian 'the quiet man is turning up the volume' Duncan Smith. These assclowns are the people who gave you the frankly pointless married person's tax credit - you know, the idea that battered women and closet-case husbands will immediately eschew the freedom of divorce when offered a measly £150 bribe. I can see that working. I can picture myself now, in an abusive relationship, flinching as my face is backhanded so hard my neck nearly snaps and punch after punch is driven into my stomach*, thinking to myself that if I just stand and take it I'll be sitting pretty on top of one-hundred-and-fifty extra pounds a year! Such wonder.
(Wheezes like this always strike me as weird coming from the right wing, as well. They constantly go on about how Labour has destroyed us all in the 'social experiment' of multiculturalism, but then what do they propose? A social experiment in seeing whether you can bribe people to stay married. Where's your faith in the free market, cretins? Well, alive and well if the client lists of London's top escort agencies are anything to go by, I reckon, but I digress...)
The fact is, though, we may all be looking back on the heady days of the marriage-bribe carrot as the golden age for our asses, because it seems the exorcism-stick is waiting 'round the corner. See, there's a lot more to Pippa Stroud than a good hairdresser, a set of Palin-lite policies, and a mediocre prizefighter's honker - she's also, according to reports in today's Observer, a crusader 'gainst the forces of Satan himself:
And it isn't just the homos. You won't be surprised to hear that Stroud's Terminators - er, I mean Ministers - also saw fit to try to pray the queer out of 'Abi, a teenage girl with transsexual issues'. Given the high rate of suicide among trans people, and the fact that many have severe problems with their self-esteem to begin with (this writer, for one, has been known to suffer severe ego-drops at the mere sight of hir five o-clock shadow), I have to question whether telling someone they're demonically posessed is the most useful form of intervention. Admittedly, someone telling the teenage me I was in league with Satan would have been greeted with a loud 'fuck YEAH!' and a \m/metal salute\m/, but there again I wasn't surrounded by evangelical Christians during my adolescence (I was instead surrounded by Catholics who, whatever the priesthood gets up to, tend to be more pragmatic about a teenage interest in the music of Guns 'n' Roses).
Still, Abi's suicide probably wouldn't be any skin off Stroud's brobdingnagian bogey-chute, given that she shrugged off the death of an alcoholic resident in a hostel she ran by saying ' we wondered whether God knew that she hadn't the will to stick with it and was calling her home.' Imagine how you'd feel if some holier-than-thou prick said that about your daughter.
These people are not the aberrations in Cameron's 'New Conservatives'. They're the norm. The party that gave you Section 28 and Operation Spanner is still as bigoted, homophobic, and generally fucked-up about sex as ever, and anyone whose sexuality isn't exactly in accord with that of Philippa Stroud and her hateful ilk has a duty to vote on May 6th to stop them gaining power, and to keep her mammoth nose out of our business**.
* Admittedly I would be more likely to pay £150 for this kind of treatment, but let's leave that out of it, shall we?
** You may accuse me of dwelling a little too much on Stroud's nose, but, let's face it, it's big enough that I actually could dwell on it, literally, and raise a small herd of goats fed on her nasal hair into the bargain. So why not? ***
*** Also, I have to wonder what would happen if we got Philippa Stroud's nose and John Hatzistergos' chin into a room together. Would they breed and produce a race of giant-faced bigots, like an army of Easter Island statues giving Hitler salutes and burning crosses made of their own snot? I think this theory needs to be tested. Right fucking now.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Bigotgate and the REAL 'political correctness' destroying Britain
So it seems they were right all along, those knuckle-dragging, phlegm-spitting, Littlejohn-regurgitating pricks at the end of the bar with bad hair and worse skin: there are things you can't say in Britain, because they won't let you. Who'da thunk it, eh?
Well, probably not the burps-n-BNP-bollocks tendency, because it actually turns out the things you can't say, and the people who won't let you, aren't the forces of 'political correctness' trying to stop us saying bad things about minorities. In fact it seems the one thing you can't say without people jumpin' dahn yer frote is that someone who, how to put this, comes across as a bit of a frickin' bigot is, well, a frickin' bigot.
Is she right? Is she wrong? Should he have left his chest-mike on? Who gives a rat's haemorrhoid? What is important about this affair is the way the right-wing media have jumped all over this. They're acting as if Brown roared like an enraged bull, pulled a steel folding chair out of his limo and dropped Gillian Duffy onto it with a tombstone pilderiver in his own personal tribute to veteran WWE Legend Mark 'The Undertaker' Calloway. In fact, Brown privately discussed strategy with his aide in a car, under the belief that his mike wasn't still on.
Do Sky News seriously expect us to believe Cameron doesn't come out with even worse when he thinks he's off the mike? I, for one, would be willing to bet that whenever he's finished bleating 'blah blah change rhubarb rhubarb big society blah fishcakes' and pressing the flesh after another meet-and-greet with the public, Cameron climbs into the back of his car and mewls like a newborn baby until his 109-year-old nanny can be persuaded to slip her nipple into his mouth for a calming spot of 'bitty' while the car speeds off to a top-secret biohazard shower in which Our Future Leader can be scrubbed raw until he 'gets their stench off him.'
Allegedly.
But even if Cameron were filmed tomorrow morning roasting children on an open fire while enjoying a hand-job from Robert Mugabe, you'd be hard-pressed to find mention of it in the media. It's already been well-documented that Cameron runs a party full of homophobes, backed by Christian fundamentalists who'd make Mary Whitehouse flinch, but the mainstream media don't concentrate on this because it doesn't fit their agenda.
And what is that agenda? It's one of dehumanising asylum seekers, spreading fear of anyone different, and propagating the lie that 'we can't have an honest discussion on immigration' because of the 'politically correct brigade'. I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here by way of example: rather, I'd point you in the direction of three excellent blogs: Tabloid Watch, Five Chinese Crackers, and Angry Mob, all of which do an amazing job ripping apart the daily diet of racist lies the tabs try to shove down our throats. But what I do want to talk about is the 'chilling effect' this constant repetition of racist crap has on discussion of immigration in this country. The whole reason Gordon Brown refused to call Gillian Duffy a bigot in public is because politicians are afraid to say anything that the Mail or the Sun could portray as being 'soft on immigration' or 'out of touch' with a bullshit 'national mood' that's entirely the creation of the tabloids and their constant lies.
And now, Gordon Brown's unguarded words in what he thought was his own private space and time are being used to further contribute to this climate of prejudice and misinformation, and the relentless, infantile, gossipy anti-Brown reporting is being deployed to try and ensure that Murdoch and Dacre's blue-eyed boy Cameron slimes his way into Downing Street.
Once there, Cameron will no longer have to worry about convincing us that he's an agent of change who really cares about us, and he can get on with turning Britain into a paradise for the kind of corporate 'leaders' who rallied to his side in the bold cause of rich people paying less tax, and Hell on Earth for ordinary British people: the very people the right-wing tabloids claim to be defending. People like you, people like me, people like Gillian Duffy.
Well, maybe not people like Gillian Duffy, who has, according to reports, been paid £50,000 for her story. Well, fair play to her. If she invests that carefully, she'll be able to enjoy a comfortable old age; maybe she can even pay some East Europeans to clean up after her. God knows, she'll need some home comforts after Cameron and his cronies have dismantled the welfare state.
Well, probably not the burps-n-BNP-bollocks tendency, because it actually turns out the things you can't say, and the people who won't let you, aren't the forces of 'political correctness' trying to stop us saying bad things about minorities. In fact it seems the one thing you can't say without people jumpin' dahn yer frote is that someone who, how to put this, comes across as a bit of a frickin' bigot is, well, a frickin' bigot.
Is she right? Is she wrong? Should he have left his chest-mike on? Who gives a rat's haemorrhoid? What is important about this affair is the way the right-wing media have jumped all over this. They're acting as if Brown roared like an enraged bull, pulled a steel folding chair out of his limo and dropped Gillian Duffy onto it with a tombstone pilderiver in his own personal tribute to veteran WWE Legend Mark 'The Undertaker' Calloway. In fact, Brown privately discussed strategy with his aide in a car, under the belief that his mike wasn't still on.
Do Sky News seriously expect us to believe Cameron doesn't come out with even worse when he thinks he's off the mike? I, for one, would be willing to bet that whenever he's finished bleating 'blah blah change rhubarb rhubarb big society blah fishcakes' and pressing the flesh after another meet-and-greet with the public, Cameron climbs into the back of his car and mewls like a newborn baby until his 109-year-old nanny can be persuaded to slip her nipple into his mouth for a calming spot of 'bitty' while the car speeds off to a top-secret biohazard shower in which Our Future Leader can be scrubbed raw until he 'gets their stench off him.'
Allegedly.
But even if Cameron were filmed tomorrow morning roasting children on an open fire while enjoying a hand-job from Robert Mugabe, you'd be hard-pressed to find mention of it in the media. It's already been well-documented that Cameron runs a party full of homophobes, backed by Christian fundamentalists who'd make Mary Whitehouse flinch, but the mainstream media don't concentrate on this because it doesn't fit their agenda.
And what is that agenda? It's one of dehumanising asylum seekers, spreading fear of anyone different, and propagating the lie that 'we can't have an honest discussion on immigration' because of the 'politically correct brigade'. I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here by way of example: rather, I'd point you in the direction of three excellent blogs: Tabloid Watch, Five Chinese Crackers, and Angry Mob, all of which do an amazing job ripping apart the daily diet of racist lies the tabs try to shove down our throats. But what I do want to talk about is the 'chilling effect' this constant repetition of racist crap has on discussion of immigration in this country. The whole reason Gordon Brown refused to call Gillian Duffy a bigot in public is because politicians are afraid to say anything that the Mail or the Sun could portray as being 'soft on immigration' or 'out of touch' with a bullshit 'national mood' that's entirely the creation of the tabloids and their constant lies.
And now, Gordon Brown's unguarded words in what he thought was his own private space and time are being used to further contribute to this climate of prejudice and misinformation, and the relentless, infantile, gossipy anti-Brown reporting is being deployed to try and ensure that Murdoch and Dacre's blue-eyed boy Cameron slimes his way into Downing Street.
Once there, Cameron will no longer have to worry about convincing us that he's an agent of change who really cares about us, and he can get on with turning Britain into a paradise for the kind of corporate 'leaders' who rallied to his side in the bold cause of rich people paying less tax, and Hell on Earth for ordinary British people: the very people the right-wing tabloids claim to be defending. People like you, people like me, people like Gillian Duffy.
Well, maybe not people like Gillian Duffy, who has, according to reports, been paid £50,000 for her story. Well, fair play to her. If she invests that carefully, she'll be able to enjoy a comfortable old age; maybe she can even pay some East Europeans to clean up after her. God knows, she'll need some home comforts after Cameron and his cronies have dismantled the welfare state.
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Vote Cameron, Get Torquemada
So we've all seen this, haven't we?
As I pointed out here recently, any idea that David Cameron has brought real change to the Tory party is wishful thinking. Cameron says 'change' every chance he gets because he feels such contempt for the electorate he thinks they'll look at him, hear the c-word and immediately be convinced that a pudgy-faced, badly-shaved toff is in fact Barack Obama, but the fact is the Tories are every bit as hateful and bigoted as they were when they introduced Section 28 in the 80s. Oh, sure: they suspended Philip Lardner, but only because he got caught. In the background, the same dark forces that drove Thatcher's government - one of the most homophobic, racist, misogynist and authoritarian governments in UK history - are awaiting their chance to come back.
In my first anti-Cameron post I invoked the work of Pat Mills and compared the Tories to the Fomorians, the villains in Mills' 'thinking man's Conan' series, Slaine. But I now think a more apt comparison to Cameron's supposedly 'changed' Tory party would be Torquemada, the right-wing, alien-hating religious fanatic from Mills' sci-fi series Nemesis the Warlock:
As I pointed out here recently, any idea that David Cameron has brought real change to the Tory party is wishful thinking. Cameron says 'change' every chance he gets because he feels such contempt for the electorate he thinks they'll look at him, hear the c-word and immediately be convinced that a pudgy-faced, badly-shaved toff is in fact Barack Obama, but the fact is the Tories are every bit as hateful and bigoted as they were when they introduced Section 28 in the 80s. Oh, sure: they suspended Philip Lardner, but only because he got caught. In the background, the same dark forces that drove Thatcher's government - one of the most homophobic, racist, misogynist and authoritarian governments in UK history - are awaiting their chance to come back.
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In my first anti-Cameron post I invoked the work of Pat Mills and compared the Tories to the Fomorians, the villains in Mills' 'thinking man's Conan' series, Slaine. But I now think a more apt comparison to Cameron's supposedly 'changed' Tory party would be Torquemada, the right-wing, alien-hating religious fanatic from Mills' sci-fi series Nemesis the Warlock:
If, like me, you're far from pure, then you'd be advised to be vigilant about David Cameron and his allies. And if they do win on May 7th, this deviant certainly plans to misbehave.
Sunday, 25 April 2010
Bringing the war to the drawing room
I've read far too little of Alan Sillitoe's work - only really extracts from his two best-known books, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - but in an odd way the fact that I haven't read a lot of Sillitoe and yet remained aware of him, and of his impact, testifies to his success.
'Social realism' was a concept I battled with for a long time as a writer. I saw it as grubby and lacking in aspiration. I wanted to create work that was fantastic and unusual and not like the boring surroundings I grew up in. For me, escape was revolution, and I devoted my time to imagining a better, more fabulous and glamourous life that the one I was living. It's only as I've grown older, and came up against the mundane obstacles that try to stop us creating worlds fab enough to live in, that I've came to appreciate the importance of social realism as a genre, and the multiplicity intrinsic to it.
Social realism emerged as a challenge to an orthodoxy in literature which said working class lives were unimportant. Playwrights like Joe Orton were writing against the tradition of drawing-room farce, novelists like Sillitoe were competing with the work of people like Waugh and Powell, to make the point that working class lives and experience counted for more than just comic relief in stories where the main characters were always drawn from the wealthy elites. Social realism wasn't restrictive: it was about creating more space for voices which weren't heard. It's little wonder that the first such expressions were howls of rage and pain.
Drawing the attention of the privileged to the lives they overlook or mock, and writing stories which reaffirm the experiences of those lives for those who live them, is the kind of thing all writers should be doing, whether the privilege they write against is straight, cis, male, abled, rich or white. Especially given that for the first time in years here in the UK, the Tories, a party which, more than anything else, stands for keeping the plebs/queers/cripples/darkies in their place, is actually looking like a serious electoral threat. Sillitoe would hate to see David Cameron smarm his way into government, because allowing the country to once again be ruled by a bunch of braying arseholes from Eton would represent the betrayal of his writing, and the triumph of all he'd been writing against.
Except that the Tories, just like every other privileged group, can never really triumph as long as people who don't belong to their insular little circle-jerk keep writing, and fighting, and going on, whether we get our stories onto a national stage and bring the war into the drawing room, or huddle round the fire and tell our stories to our own. There will always be voices raised in opposition to the dominant narrative, and we should honour those people who stick their heads above the parapet to draw attention to the lives that it leaves out. Alan Sillitoe was one such person and, whoever wins on May 6th, there will be many, many other British writers walking down the trail he blazed.
'Social realism' was a concept I battled with for a long time as a writer. I saw it as grubby and lacking in aspiration. I wanted to create work that was fantastic and unusual and not like the boring surroundings I grew up in. For me, escape was revolution, and I devoted my time to imagining a better, more fabulous and glamourous life that the one I was living. It's only as I've grown older, and came up against the mundane obstacles that try to stop us creating worlds fab enough to live in, that I've came to appreciate the importance of social realism as a genre, and the multiplicity intrinsic to it.
Social realism emerged as a challenge to an orthodoxy in literature which said working class lives were unimportant. Playwrights like Joe Orton were writing against the tradition of drawing-room farce, novelists like Sillitoe were competing with the work of people like Waugh and Powell, to make the point that working class lives and experience counted for more than just comic relief in stories where the main characters were always drawn from the wealthy elites. Social realism wasn't restrictive: it was about creating more space for voices which weren't heard. It's little wonder that the first such expressions were howls of rage and pain.
Drawing the attention of the privileged to the lives they overlook or mock, and writing stories which reaffirm the experiences of those lives for those who live them, is the kind of thing all writers should be doing, whether the privilege they write against is straight, cis, male, abled, rich or white. Especially given that for the first time in years here in the UK, the Tories, a party which, more than anything else, stands for keeping the plebs/queers/cripples/darkies in their place, is actually looking like a serious electoral threat. Sillitoe would hate to see David Cameron smarm his way into government, because allowing the country to once again be ruled by a bunch of braying arseholes from Eton would represent the betrayal of his writing, and the triumph of all he'd been writing against.
Except that the Tories, just like every other privileged group, can never really triumph as long as people who don't belong to their insular little circle-jerk keep writing, and fighting, and going on, whether we get our stories onto a national stage and bring the war into the drawing room, or huddle round the fire and tell our stories to our own. There will always be voices raised in opposition to the dominant narrative, and we should honour those people who stick their heads above the parapet to draw attention to the lives that it leaves out. Alan Sillitoe was one such person and, whoever wins on May 6th, there will be many, many other British writers walking down the trail he blazed.
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Kiss My Pencil
Pat Mills. Genius. Responsible for some of the greatest strips in the history of British comics (and Sex Warrior too), and also a guy with spot-on political views. Never better than in his landmark series Slaine, (basically a smarter version of the Conan meme)* in which the Pagans were the good guys, God was a woman, and - best of all - the baddies came from Tory Island. No accident, that: Slaine, like most of the other 2000AD classics, was written during the last period when this country was unfortunate enough to be saddled with a Conservative government. Mills was doing his patriotic duty to turn the geeks of the nation against the party then in government by linking them with a race of demons who oppressed the Celtic people and drank the tears of women. Some people might refer to this as allegory, but, as someone who grew up under the handbag of Thatcherite domination I feel it incumbent on me to remind younger folks reading this blog that this portrayal was in fact a matter of stark factual truth.
Winston Churchill famously said that if a man isn't a liberal before the age of thirty he had no heart, but that if he wasn't a conservative after the age of thirty he had no head. Sherry-sodden old buggers with a Churchill-fetish are fond of quoting that line, though they leave out the fact that Winston was probably all fucked-up on drugs when he said it. But like a lot of cliches it contains a kernel of truth: becoming a Tory is - unless you're some kind of freakish mutant - something that happens to you when you reach a certain age. It might not be thirty. It might not be forty. It might not even be fifty or sixty. But there comes a point in your life when it can happen. It doesn't mean that you've morphed from being a naieve innocent to being a hard-headed political realist, though. It means you've given up.
It's hard work, being good. It takes effort to commit yourself to trying to be a better person, not abusing your privilege and putting in the hours and time to defend the disadvantaged and create a world in which people are treated with equal respect regardless of skin colour, religion, sexuality, gender identity, or disability. Sometimes you want to give in to the hatred, to the fear, to the moral cowardice that tells you it's their fault: the asylum seekers, the Muslims, the gays. That it's people like you; normal people, not freaks, who are the real victims, and that it's about time you stopped fannying around with diversity initiatives and equality legislation and got down to the business of taking care of your own and fuck you, buddy. Sometimes you see the front cover of the Daily Mail and its icy talons of fear reach deep into your heart and you don't have the will to keep fighting it. You give in. And that's when you turn Tory.
The mainstream media are almost falling over themselves to tell us the Tories have changed, that it's all compassionate Conservatism and time for change and Dave's about to have a baby and SamCam - isn't she lovely? But this past week we've seen signs that the Tories aren't actualy as nice as all that. There's Chris Grayling, the Tory Shadow Home Secretary who chased the dragon of Mail-reader votes by supporting homophobic B&B owners. Here's Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the lesbian former Tory activist so disgusted by the party's homophobia she's telling the media she now plans to vote Labour. Who's this? It's Wirral Tory councillor Denis Knowles, who made comments on his Facebook page about 'limp-wristed' Labour activists (and, for a bonus point, also described them as 'definitely not local' - regional xenophobia and anti-gay bigotry in one tight little package? You stay classy, Councillor Knowles.)
Here's another Tory councillor, Eddie Wake, who reckons rape prevention campaigns are something to joke about - even if his 'jokes' leave a woman in tears. And here's Michael Kaminski, Call-me-Dave's ally in the European Reformists and Conservatives group in the European Parliament - a man who refuses to apologise for an anti-Semitic pogrom, uses slogans like 'Poland for the Poles', tells foreign workers to go home and calls his opponents 'faggots.' Lest you think that Mr Kaminski is one bad apple spoiling an otherwise respectable coalition, vada Valdemar Tomasevski, another 'Reformist Conservative' who voted for a homophobic hate law in Lithuania. Here's the evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is a vote against a woman's right to choose.
I could go on, but by now you get the point. Forget all the crap about the superfecundity of Samantha, or how Dave is so much more presentable than dour old Gordon. Forget all the business leaders supporting Tory economic plans - those businessmen are backing Dave because they know he's their gateway to a golden age of ripping off the little guy. If David Cameron announced plans to lower the age of consent to three, paedophiles would write letters to papers supporting him. If you're a captain of industry, a Russian oligarch or a member of the landed aristocracy, David Cameron's tax plans will benefit you. But few of us are. Lots of us are gay, though. Lots of us are members of ethnic minorities. Lots of us are disabled, and a hell of a lot of us are women. And even if you aren't, I'm pretty sure you know people who are. Your mum, for a start.
David Cameron: the man who hates your mum. Keep that in mind, when you go into the voting booth on May 6th. And count yourself lucky. Slaine had to swing a massive great axe to get rid of the misogynist slimebags from Tory Island: all you have to wield is a stubby little pencil. Use it wisely.
* Admittedly, Slaine did occassionally get a bit 'never again the BURNING TIMES!' on occassion, but it was still great and chock full of fantastic sword-wielding muscle-chicks so it still rules, okay?
Winston Churchill famously said that if a man isn't a liberal before the age of thirty he had no heart, but that if he wasn't a conservative after the age of thirty he had no head. Sherry-sodden old buggers with a Churchill-fetish are fond of quoting that line, though they leave out the fact that Winston was probably all fucked-up on drugs when he said it. But like a lot of cliches it contains a kernel of truth: becoming a Tory is - unless you're some kind of freakish mutant - something that happens to you when you reach a certain age. It might not be thirty. It might not be forty. It might not even be fifty or sixty. But there comes a point in your life when it can happen. It doesn't mean that you've morphed from being a naieve innocent to being a hard-headed political realist, though. It means you've given up.
It's hard work, being good. It takes effort to commit yourself to trying to be a better person, not abusing your privilege and putting in the hours and time to defend the disadvantaged and create a world in which people are treated with equal respect regardless of skin colour, religion, sexuality, gender identity, or disability. Sometimes you want to give in to the hatred, to the fear, to the moral cowardice that tells you it's their fault: the asylum seekers, the Muslims, the gays. That it's people like you; normal people, not freaks, who are the real victims, and that it's about time you stopped fannying around with diversity initiatives and equality legislation and got down to the business of taking care of your own and fuck you, buddy. Sometimes you see the front cover of the Daily Mail and its icy talons of fear reach deep into your heart and you don't have the will to keep fighting it. You give in. And that's when you turn Tory.
The mainstream media are almost falling over themselves to tell us the Tories have changed, that it's all compassionate Conservatism and time for change and Dave's about to have a baby and SamCam - isn't she lovely? But this past week we've seen signs that the Tories aren't actualy as nice as all that. There's Chris Grayling, the Tory Shadow Home Secretary who chased the dragon of Mail-reader votes by supporting homophobic B&B owners. Here's Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the lesbian former Tory activist so disgusted by the party's homophobia she's telling the media she now plans to vote Labour. Who's this? It's Wirral Tory councillor Denis Knowles, who made comments on his Facebook page about 'limp-wristed' Labour activists (and, for a bonus point, also described them as 'definitely not local' - regional xenophobia and anti-gay bigotry in one tight little package? You stay classy, Councillor Knowles.)
Here's another Tory councillor, Eddie Wake, who reckons rape prevention campaigns are something to joke about - even if his 'jokes' leave a woman in tears. And here's Michael Kaminski, Call-me-Dave's ally in the European Reformists and Conservatives group in the European Parliament - a man who refuses to apologise for an anti-Semitic pogrom, uses slogans like 'Poland for the Poles', tells foreign workers to go home and calls his opponents 'faggots.' Lest you think that Mr Kaminski is one bad apple spoiling an otherwise respectable coalition, vada Valdemar Tomasevski, another 'Reformist Conservative' who voted for a homophobic hate law in Lithuania. Here's the evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is a vote against a woman's right to choose.
I could go on, but by now you get the point. Forget all the crap about the superfecundity of Samantha, or how Dave is so much more presentable than dour old Gordon. Forget all the business leaders supporting Tory economic plans - those businessmen are backing Dave because they know he's their gateway to a golden age of ripping off the little guy. If David Cameron announced plans to lower the age of consent to three, paedophiles would write letters to papers supporting him. If you're a captain of industry, a Russian oligarch or a member of the landed aristocracy, David Cameron's tax plans will benefit you. But few of us are. Lots of us are gay, though. Lots of us are members of ethnic minorities. Lots of us are disabled, and a hell of a lot of us are women. And even if you aren't, I'm pretty sure you know people who are. Your mum, for a start.
David Cameron: the man who hates your mum. Keep that in mind, when you go into the voting booth on May 6th. And count yourself lucky. Slaine had to swing a massive great axe to get rid of the misogynist slimebags from Tory Island: all you have to wield is a stubby little pencil. Use it wisely.
* Admittedly, Slaine did occassionally get a bit 'never again the BURNING TIMES!' on occassion, but it was still great and chock full of fantastic sword-wielding muscle-chicks so it still rules, okay?
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