Of Mouse & Man.

Oh bugger.

I've got a mouse in my house.

It's a very cocky rodent and doesn't seem to mind scurrying righy past me when the lights are on. Oh well, I guess I'll have to buy one of those "catch them alive" mousetraps and release it near the home of someone I don't like.

What To Do With A Miliband?

Bearded europhile Timothy Garton Ash backs David Miliband to be the EU's new High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy aka the EU Foreign Minister on the grounds that Milipede has:

just delivered one of the most eloquent, forceful arguments for a European foreign policy I have read in a long time.

Meanwhile unbearded eurosceptic Irwin Stelzer backs David Miliband to be the EU's new High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy aka the EU Foreign Minister on the grounds that:

the force of the [Lisbon} treaty will depend on the quality of the key appointees, we should all be pleased if he does get the post.

Stelzer seems more convincing but wonder whether David Miliband's abilities would be better utilised leading the Labour Party after the next election.

Hidden Messages

Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I did this once, spelling a message out using the first letter of each line. The major difference is that I was in school when I did it rather than the governors mansion of California. It was in a geography class presentation. Oddly enough I can't remember what the geography presentation but I remember the subliminal message - HE IS A GIMP- which was directed at the teacher.

Bad Art & Fanaticism.

Before he became a war criminal, the former Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was a poet, in fact he even appeared on the BBC's arts programme Bookmark to discuss his poetry back in 1992 when they didn't do anything so vulgar as probe non-literary activities such as ethnic cleansing that philistines like me would have thought worth mentioning. It kind of puts last week's Question Time into perspective.

I don't speak Serbo-Croat but I'd be willing to guess that his poems were on a level with Saddam's novels and Hitler's paintings, which is to say crap. I don't say this out of simple prejudice or because I've internalised a kind of Halo Effect, in which I assume that someone dreadful couldn't possibly have redeeming qualities, but because of an observation made by Eric Hoffer more than 6 decades ago in The True Believer:

Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are outstanding examples of fanatics arising from the ranks of noncreative men of words. Peter Viereck points out that most of the Nazi bigwigs had artistic and literary ambitions which they could not realize. Hitler tried painting and architecture; Goebbels, drama, the novel and poetry; Rosenberg, architecture and philosophy; von Shirach, poetry; Funk, music; Streicher, painting. "Almost all were failures, not only by the usual vulgar criterion of success but by their own artistic criteria." Their artistic and literary ambitions "were originally far deeper than political ambitions: and were integral parts of their personalities."

The creative man of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement. He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies. So long as he is conscious of the creative flow within him, he will not find fulfillment in leading millions and in winning victories.

In other words fanaticism is a refuge for failure. I know some genuinely talented people have fanatical views, in fact extremism is often almost de rigour, but they don't actually take in the movement itself, they write a few words in support or wear a Sandinista tee-shirt they don't become key players in the movements.

Ism's Galore

I watched The Man With The Golden Gun at the weekend. Would it be possible to make a film that encompasses so many gratuitious 'isms nowadays? I mean there's sexism (Britt Ekland as the implausibly stupid blonde MI-6 agent Mary Goodnight who spends most of the film in a bikini), ethnic stereotyping ( Assorted East Asians ), more ethnic stereotyping (the Southern Sheriff) and of course heightism (the portrayal of midgets as comical yet sinister).

Roger Moore is doing penitence for his sins by having to appear in those godawful Post Office adverts.

Not Another F***ing BNP Post!

Last week Gary Younge blamed Jack Straw for the rise of the BNP, in this he probably got the right suspect for the wrong reason. Younge blames Jack Straw's statement that he asks Burqa wearing constituents to remove them when they come to see him. This is palpable nonsense as can easily be demonstrated by simply looking up when the BNP started winning council seats on a regular basis. They began to gain councillors in 2002 a good four years before Straw's comments about the Burqa. So unless his comments rippled backwards through time, perhaps with the help of the Large Hadron Collider, his remarks about the Burqa had little to do with the BNP.

In fact 2002 was even before the big surge in immigration following EU enlargement, although immigration had gone up to some extent after 1997, and the BNP's successes at that time occurred in areas not greatly affected by the recent increases in immigration levels.

Where Straw is to blame though is in the kind of attitudes he was propagating as Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001. Not simply his role in producing the infamous MacPherson Report, but his repeatedly reaffirmed belief that there is something inherently shameful about English culture. See for example:

• Referring to the English "propensity to violence" and as being "potentially very aggressive, very violent"
• Blaming football hooliganism on Englishness and claiming that England is particularly xenophobic, "There is a particular problem with some people's view of Englishness. There is a distorted, incomplete idea of what it is to be patriotic for those in England, which is different from that in Wales or Scotland or Ireland. We've had all the global baggage of the empire and a lot of jingoism here."
• And when he bacame Foreign Secretary he immediately started blaming Britain for much of the world's conflicts.

In other words Jack Straw spent much of his time pouring scorn on the country and emphasising self loathing and he wonders why the White Working Class have deserted Labour. Most of them haven't gone to the BNP mind you, they have simply stayed at home on election day. Obviously I'm not saying that large numbers of voters were carefully listening to all of Jack Straw's speeches and finding them objectionable but if a government despises them then sooner or later that message will seep through and they won't like it.


* Most of Straw's expressions of contempt for England are rooted in baseless assertions. For example he blames football hooliganism of English nationalism, but the most violent fixture in the Football League is probably the Cardiff-Swansea match. And football violence is endemic in countries that have never had empires like Uruguay and various Eastern European states. Similarly the idea that the English are unusually xenophobic can be shown to be complete nonsense simply by looking through international comparisons such as the World Values Survey, we are considerably less hostile to foreigners than most countries. Jack Straw's beliefs are not shaped by evidence but are axioms he fitted into his political worldview as a student leader in the 1970s.

Fake Charity Double Whammy?

From the Scotsman:

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, which has long campaigned on the issue, said there should be an extra hour of daylight all year round.

Brake, a UK road safety charity, said: "It is unacceptable so many families are torn apart by sudden, violent deaths and injuries on our roads. The government must take bold steps to stop these preventable casualties."

I'm not going to check their accounts, but I've never seen either of these outfits raising money so I'm guessing they are psuedo-charities.

Aids Denialism.

The Spectator's editor Fraser Nelson is flirting with HIV-Aids denialism which is unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly it means that Sunny Hundal is largely correct about something and secondly it gives credence to dangerous psuedo-science.

It is dangerous, several converts to Aids denialism have ended up dying because they refused treatment for their illness, denialism is understandably quite high among those infected with the HIV virus, as have the children of those who deny a causal link between HIV and Aids. When this crazy idea makes its way into public policy, as with Thabo Mbeki's South Africa, the results can be horrendous.

Furthermore in the case of the documentary Nelson is promoting, House of Numbers, there is enough information around to demonstrate the mendaciousness of the film.

It also instantly undermines anyone who has a serious point to make about Aids infection rates, for example those who point out that infection rates in Africa appear to have been wildly overstated.

A Plan Comes Together.

This is extraordinary if true:

Andrew Neather said the mass influx of migrant workers seen in recent years was not the result of a mistake or miscalculation, but rather a policy the party preferred not to reveal to its core voters.

He said the strategy was intended to fill gaps in the labour market and make the UK more multicultural at the same time as scoring political points against the Opposition.

Filling the gaps in the labour market is a legitimate reason for encouraging immigration, the other two are not. So multiculturalism wasn't simply a means to cope with large numbers of people from diverse background, it was an end in itself and large numbers of people from a diverse background were imported in order to allow multiculturalism to flourish. They weren't denouncing opponents of mass immigration in order to defend the new communities in Britain, they were bringing in new communities in order to be able to denounce their opponents.

So Labour not only deliberately encouraged mass immigration they simultaneous tried to ramp up racial tensions for political gain. I think we've managed to solve the great mystery as to how the BNP have managed to go from being a bunch of unpleasant weirdos who won a council seat every few years and then disappeared to being the most electorally successful racist movement Britain has had since at least the 1930s.

I think we've also discovered why Labour's core vote has been alienated-most studies of immigration show a small net economic benefit however the benefits are diffuse and the costs are concentrated among the poorest in society, in this case the working class voters who make up Labour's heartlands.

Update: I've just read Andrew Neather's original article, it isn't a mea culpa he is proud of all this! It sounds like a parody, but Neather is a real person so when he writes things like:

Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley - fascist au pair, anyone? Immigrants are everywhere and in all sorts of jobs, many of them skilled.

My family's east European former nannies, for example, are model migrants, going on to be a social worker and an accountant. They have integrated into London society.

But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London's attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.

It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it's pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.

He is being deadly serious.

Guess The Publication.

Without googling guess which publication this passage appears in:

I doubt there will be an American apology in my lifetime for the holocausts of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. I count them as atrocities, and don't buy the convenient line that they saved tens of thousands of American lives.

It's not the Morning Star or the Socialist Worker.

Quote Of The Day

Knowledge is bad:

The Information Commissioner’s ruling on Friday to release statistics on late term abortions carried out because of disability has alarming implications.

.......

It’s clear that the potential for this information to be misused to promote an anti-choice agenda and to restrict women’s reproductive freedom is strong.

-Dina Rickman at Liberal Conspiracy.

Who's The Daddy?

Over at ATW, David Vance points to his appearance on Northern Ireland's current affairs programme "Hearts & Minds" to debate the appearance of the BNP on Question Time, he and Guardian media columnist Roy Greenslade supported the BBC and a Paddy Meehan from a group called "Youth Against Racism" opposed the decision.

Is it me or does Paddy Meehan have an uncanny similarity in both looks and demeanor, not to mention politics, to the "Unite Against Fascism" leader Martin Smith, who was leading the mob trying to storm the BBC studio yesterday. Meehan is about 25 years younger than Smith. Could it possibly be that Martin Smith is the wild lothario of the self proclaimed anti-fascist movement and he has been spreading his seed far and wide for the last quarter of a century? Father and Son are pictured below:

Posties- A Warning.

On Wednesday afternoon I poster a letter and it really has to reach it's destination by midday Friday. If this doesn't happen, because of your strike on Thursday, then I am going to fill every letter box within a 25 mile radius with dog shit. Don't say I didn't warn you.

So,

Did anyone don a brown shirt and start smashing up Jewish owned businesses after Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time?

Personally I doubt that he won many converts but wasn't shown up either, the most interesting thing about it was the fact he is acknowledging that the BNP was a racist and antisemitic party in the past in order to defend the BNP of today. I don't how convincing voters will find that.

Very Boring Post On Election Methods.

I was for the introduction of US style primaries for British elections before I was against them. Actually I'm not wholly against them but think that they are overrated as a method of weakening the control of the political parties and encouraging voter engagement.

First of all our parties aren't going to completely open up, it's going to be a Henry Ford style choice- vote for any candidate you want as long as it is a Central Office approved drone. Secondly with low voter interest it would be quite easy to distort the process if a candidate has enough connections. Thirdly almost all of the benefits can and none of the downsides of primaries can be achieved in another way- by having a Single Transferable Vote system, as they have in Ireland, where you have multi member constituencies and ranked voting. This would create space for smaller parties to exist and offer a real choice, it would mean that you could still vote against a candidate even if you want to support their party and no one could say that their vote would be wasted.

Education Nooz.

Ostensibly this article is about a boy unfairly excluded from school. However the message is fairly clear but must remain as merely subtext because the family are the ones cooperating with the press. That message is "thank God that this bolshy chav family have been dealt with properly". The photographer has even persuaded them to pose in a manner to emphasise their thuggishness. Stand out quote:

Mr Walton said: 'The school sent a letter saying that I told Dan, "Kick the headteacher in the nuts if he kept you against your will".

'I think it's diabolical. My boy shouldn't be excluded for something I have said. I don't regret it.'

Meanwhile in other Daily Mail sourced news, read the heart rending tale of a boy whose life has been made a "misery" because of his name, Harry Potter.

Denis Macshane Achieves Rare Double Beclowning.

It's hard to know which is the greater example of Denis Macshane's oafishness in the last 24 hours.

Is it accusing the Tories of supporting the massacres of Jews during WWII (no really) or is it disastrous performance on Newsnight where he tried to defend his claim that there were 25000 trafficked women in the UK (21 minutes in) and his subsequent article in the Guardian defending his fact free position (over 80 comments so far and every single one is critical of Macshane).

He really is horrible, sort of a Labour equivalent of David Mellor hated by his opponents and loathed by his own side.

Three Times Is A Pattern.

Is it me or is there a pattern here?:

1. Government rebuked for using misleading figures to demonstrate the supposed gender pay gap.
   
2. Government rebuked for using misleading figures to demonstrate low rape conviction rates.
3. Government rebuked for using bogus figures to demonstrate the extent of sex trafficking.

In each case the government has politicised an issue and allowed a militant feminist grouping to issue bogus information. The false information is then used to create the impression of a crisis which can be used to attempt to push through laws which would be recognised as transparently unfair otherwise (compulsory 'equal pay' audits & lower standards of evidence in rape trials for example).