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2020 Jun 13 - Mob Rule & Chaos on the Streets
In the space of a week and a half the reasonable protests of a man’s death have escalated rather quickly from a movement arguing simply for justice. Instead we’ve seen a series of marches, riots and angry demands extending from everything such as police reform to more fringe ideas like banning the tv show Thomas The Tank Engine and demanding that Scotland remove statues of Wallace The Bruce, on the spurious grounds that he was racist for not employing Africa-Americans in 13th century Scotland. Or maybe it's because they're confusing him with Mel Gibson.
Ladies and gentleman you may wish to call me Rod Serling for the next few minutes because we have crossed over into the Twilight Zone here. It’s a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind, wait in fact no it isn’t, it's not of mind, it’s a mindless rabble where a political and media class are too terrified of being seen as politically incorrect to tell people to go back to writing letters to the Morning Star or setting up a poll on Twitter. This isn't the idiots left in chart of the asylum, because at least then the problems would be mostly in the vicinity of the asylum. An asylum that would at the very least give us movies like Silence Of The Lambs or One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, rather than banning Gone With The Wind a film which in a twist of irony featured the first black Oscar winner but sure let's ban it until the Academy issues Oscar Statues in a rainbow of colours and not just gold. That film's whole plot is that the South loses the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln frees the slaves but this mob, these are the people that in London vandalised the Abraham Lincoln statue on the basis that he lived a long time ago so must have been a slaveowning racist and goodness knows what they'd have to say about actress Honor Blackman if they saw her surname.
To this day I’m still unsure as to what the protestors in London actually expect Boris Johnson to do with regards to police reform in America, it’s rather like demanding that your MP makes Apple go back to having USB ports on their laptops. Or picketing a branch of Tesco because your train tickets cost too much. At least i think that train tickets are still one of the things that Tesco doesn’t sell. I guess it’s probably somewhat more useful than protesting outside a corporate office due that’s empty because everyone’s working from home but as I said we’re in bizarro world territory here anyway, I was especially intrigued by furious demands to ban the children’s show Paw Patrol in which 3D puppies help solve problems and fix things, supposedly the rage is over the fact that one of the puppies dresses up as a emergency workers wears a little policeman's hat and badge. I’ve never seen the episode in which the fictional dog kills people or uses racial slurs, not even to the other different coloured dogs. Perhaps it’s on a DVD special and besides my kids are more into Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom so I’ve only seen a handful.
Let’s look at America though where they’ve been having a riot, literally. A 6 block section of Seattle is currently being run by a social commune where there are no rules and everyone solves thing in partnership, which in practice means it’s a borderline active warzone with looting, people unable to get food or clean water and scenes very much like something out of a Movie. At least I think it’s like a movie, it’s been months since I was able to go to the cinema. Either way very little is likely to happen now legally speaking with any good faith and public support for change now destroyed, much like a newly torched branch of Foot Locker or a mobile phone store robbed of all it's pretend demonstration phones in a crime presumably carried out by people in such a frenzy that they were probably stealing more of the phones advertised as 50% off. If protests had remained peaceful, they would have achieved some aims like police reform, or at the very least preventing the police unions from keeping convicted officers on the payroll. Instead it was transformed into a culture war where in an us-vs-them situation, most people will side with the people that don't want to ban Citizen Kane because it's described as black and white.
In the space of a week and a half the reasonable protests of a man’s death have escalated rather quickly from a movement arguing simply for justice. Instead we’ve seen a series of marches, riots and angry demands extending from everything such as police reform to more fringe ideas like banning the tv show Thomas The Tank Engine and demanding that Scotland remove statues of Wallace The Bruce, on the spurious grounds that he was racist for not employing Africa-Americans in 13th century Scotlan ......
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2019 Dec 01 - London Bridge Attack
Carnage this week in London, at least that's what a lot of Arsenal fans will be saying down the pub, after the sacking of Unai Emery after 18 months of abysmal managerial malaise that made Leanne Wood look like Queen Victoria. David Cameron hasn't made a comment on that story, though it's probably because he can't remember if that's one of the teams he claims to support or not.
But the big story of course this week was of course a different kind of arsenal, the kind that armed police carry on them; this was of course the 2nd London Bridge Attack, in which two members of the public were killed, 3 more injured, the terrorist himself was shot dead and thousands of Southern Rail commuters heading to London Bridge had to suffer delays and inhumane conditions although that was later reported to be unconnected with the attack and a company spokesman said that commuters affected by delays to the service would be compensated with a price hike in the new year.
It's at this point that of course anyone near a television camera started making the usual platitudes and comments about community engagement and suchlike. The public can normally be relied upon to be a bit more blunt in their vox-pops, calling him a complete idiot which is frankly a relief in so much as for a while it looked like he had a suicide vest on and it's obviously far better that he's a complete idiot than one where some pieces of him are missing, floating down river towards the Thames Estuary.
As I said though, it will be interesting to see how the leaders make the issue about themselves over the last 2 weeks of the campaign. Boris will make nods to promised security funding, the Lib Dems will blame the islamic attack on the white working class, the SNP will complain that the Media's relentless focus on London is purposefully designed to draw attention away from Scotland and Jeremy Corbyn will likely spend the rest of the campaign refusing to confirm or deny whether he would lay a wreath at the site on the bridge where the peaceful terrorist ultimately lost his life.
Carnage this week in London, at least that's what a lot of Arsenal fans will be saying down the pub, after the sacking of Unai Emery after 18 months of abysmal managerial malaise that made Leanne Wood look like Queen Victoria. David Cameron hasn't made a comment on that story, though it's probably because he can't remember if that's one of the teams he claims to support or not.
But the big story of course this week was of course a different kind of arsenal, the kind that armed police carry on t ......
2018 Apr 07 - London's Violent Crimewave
A number of years ago in London I saw a sign in the pub warning about thieves operating and after I was asked to pay £7 for a pint I realised that they were mostly standing behind the bar. However, this week saw a violent crime wave epidemic in London coming to world prominence as the city overtook New York's crime rate.
As with many other problems in London like the cost of living or the mostly lackluster performance of football clubs' the Champions League, there are lots of underlying causes. But (sticking to crime for now) anyone being interviewed about it will likely put it solely being down to too little money or too much immigration. Actually, a lot of football fans would probably use those two excuses as well. In the US London's crime wave is being portrayed as a 2nd amendment isssue with the underlying problem supposedly being that people are banned from literally bringing a gun to a knife fight.
Every advocacy group likes to give their own spin though, some members of the SNP will probably put the blame on there being too many English people and I'm guessing that in the coming days the green party will almost certainly produce a chart showing a perfect correlation between rising crime and rising levels of atmospheric carbon. Of course in London itself the Mayor is saying nothing because there's upcoming elections and he thinks that keeping out of the media spotlight will probably play better than admitting that he's presiding over the crime equivalent of a burst sewer main. For what it's worth I'd say take a look at Camden or perhaps Shadwell, both areas seem to have been unaffected by the the up-spike in violence crime in spite of having huge immigrant populations and less money to spend than one of the fools who got into Bitcoin at the wrong time.
Here's an idea, perhaps the problem can't be summed up in a soundbite cause it's actually slightly nuanced and quite complicated: it's like Oceans 11 rather than Jaws 11. Getting all the guns and knives off the street is like getting all the antisemitism out of the Labour party, it's not going to happen any time soon and certainly not while Sadiq Khan is too busy playing Candy Crush Saga rather than getting out and doing some work.
A number of years ago in London I saw a sign in the pub warning about thieves operating and after I was asked to pay £7 for a pint I realised that they were mostly standing behind the bar. However, this week saw a violent crime wave epidemic in London coming to world prominence as the city overtook New York's crime rate.
As with many other problems in London like the cost of living or the mostly lackluster performance of football clubs' the Champions League, there are lots of underlying causes ......
2018 Jan 13 - Trump and S***hole Countries
This week I'd initially planned to talk about Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle except that frankly the most visible change was that the various cabinet ministers changed their shirts and ties between day one and day two. The main news this week (of course) was from Washington DC where the president decided to draw attention to himself. Sure presidents love to steal the show, Bill Clinton famously carried a saxophone with him in order to outshine George Bush or Ross Perot should the situation arise, and there was rumours that he brought the saxophone to the Northern Ireland peace process after someone said that he was going there to support the Corrs. Geddit, support the Corrs? (That Irish band)
Ok, so back to President Trump. The Washington Post this week reported that he'd supposedly referred to the 3rd world using a word beginning with 'S' that was (to use the letter S) a synonym for stool, more severe than the word 'suspicious' and a simply silly suggestion to spout to the scribes. As with many of Trump's proclamations though, even if you do agree with his America First policy, he comes across as a hypocrite as quite lot of his staff at Mar A Lago in Florida happen to be migrants from impoverished parts of Latin America; perhaps he'd have had more success if he'd accompanied the gaffe with an announcement that the Trump organization would cease employing migrant labour and start paying $15/hour for long-term US residents. On the other hand, he did suggest that he wanted people from Norway, a fairly left wing place, to move to the US so that's perhaps as close an olive branch towards centrist politics as we're going to get.
Also, one take away is that if you find yourself living in an economically depressed post-industrial part of the UK, or France, Germany or well anywhere north of the Mediterranean then congratulations, according to president Trump, you're not living in a cesspool after all. It turns out that even if your shopping precinct was recently filmed as part of a video montage for a news report about urban decay, just be glad that you're lucky enough to not be beset by the sort of problems they have in Southern Asia with it's sun and its cheap lifestyle and it's 7% annual growth rates.
Anyway, a day later as part of an encore there was an announcement that the president will no longer be visiting London when the new US Embassy opens up in Battersea. In all honesty though and speaking as someone who used to live near Kings Cross, a lot of Londoners would probably agree with his decision to not venture south of the river.
This week I'd initially planned to talk about Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle except that frankly the most visible change was that the various cabinet ministers changed their shirts and ties between day one and day two. The main news this week (of course) was from Washington DC where the president decided to draw attention to himself. Sure presidents love to steal the show, Bill Clinton famously carried a saxophone with him in order to outshine George Bush or Ross Perot should the situation aris ......
2017 Dec 02 - Markles & Spencer & Flynn
One of the UK's most popular highstreet stores is Marks & Spencers and if you're a shareholder then you're probably hoping to benefit from the free advertising now offered by the new Royal couple-to-be: Markles and Spencer, also known as Harry and Meghan. I imagine that with those initials, the marketing team at highstreet rival, "H&M" will also be rubbing their hands. The wedding is set for next spring and hopefully won't coincide with the Grand National like when Prince Charles got married. So many questions though, who will design the dress? Will Meghan be able to bypass the immigration bureaucracy in time to get a British Passport? Will James Hewitt use the wedding as a path to obtain himself an American passport?
It's also unclear whether the UK will get a national holiday or time off work for it. Let's cut to the chase, a lot of us are primarily concerned about whether we too will be allowed to act like royalty, spend a weekday doing not very much work and knock back gin at 10 in the morning. Bear in mind folks that next year St Patrick's day falls on a Saturday so it would be nice if the couple could be decent, save the taxpayer a few quid and coordinate some kind of booze fuelled madness sponsored by the good people at Guinness.
The whole thing does also open up the curiously vague possibility though that a future child would be able to make a run for the US presidency and then later potentially inherit the British throne. Open your eyes people: the house of Windsor are in the process of running the longest con in history and the yanks are falling for it hook, line and sinker.
If they are planning on something along those lines they could do worse than ask Michael Flynn how not to go about things. News just in this week was that he's admitted to lying to the FBI about a meeting with the Russians. It's not really news of course, we've known about most of this since back in February and time will tell whether he implicates anyone in anything. I suspect if there was anything going on other than stupidity then a smoking gun would have come to light. I'd would like Trump haters to once and for all clarify where precisely they stand on things though: do they think president is [a] a moronic imbecile incapable of running a bath or [b] a Machiavellian genius scheming with the upper echelons of the KGB. As I said, time will tell.
One of the UK's most popular highstreet stores is Marks & Spencers and if you're a shareholder then you're probably hoping to benefit from the free advertising now offered by the new Royal couple-to-be: Markles and Spencer, also known as Harry and Meghan. I imagine that with those initials, the marketing team at highstreet rival, "H&M" will also be rubbing their hands. The wedding is set for next spring and hopefully won't coincide with the Grand National like when Prince Charles got married. So ......
2017 Nov 24 - Black Friday Brexit
If you’ve been near the high street recently you’ll have seen all the commercial Christmas tat back up. It’s still only November but it’s returned like a bad rash, and you’ll possibly be counting down the days until you can finally open that SmartTV you bought yourself, I mean that you bought for the family. Children are maybe drafting letters to Santa this weekend but in Downing Street, Theresa May’s hoping she’s been a good girl this year as she writes down what she wants and flies off to Europe once again to meet with the leaders of Belgium, Lithuania, Denmark as well as Donald Tusk.
I was going to make some kind of analogy here involving whatever the hot toy is this year that all the kids are after but that would of course imply that the Theresa’s cabinet had a united position on what they were after; right now the demands are something like a train set that comes with hair accessories and plays Nintendo games and costs somewhere between free and £40 billion at John Lewis. Still, it’s probably better than having negotiate the visa conditions for Tracy Island following Brexit or persuading Anthea Turner to come and show Theresa how to construct a Brexit agreement at home with stuff that’s just lying around.
In the mean time though, Angela Merkel won’t be taking part in any of this, she has her own problems at home following the failure to reach a coalition deal and elsewhere in Europe, Ireland’s government faces the similar threat of fresh new elections and the Spanish haven’t agreed on what Spain actually consists of. Perhaps the Christmas toy analogy I should have gone for would be a Rubik’s Cube, except it’s some kind of bizarre unsolvable a cube with 7 sides and Germany’s far right AfD party don’t 6 of the 7 sides. And I just remembered that St Nicolas was actually from Southern Turkey and I try to keep things short and succinct so let’s just leave this metaphor at least for now and we’ll wait and see what President Erdogan gets up to in the next few weeks.
If you’ve been near the high street recently you’ll have seen all the commercial Christmas tat back up. It’s still only November but it’s returned like a bad rash, and you’ll possibly be counting down the days until you can finally open that SmartTV you bought yourself, I mean that you bought for the family. Children are maybe drafting letters to Santa this weekend but in Downing Street, Theresa May’s hoping she’s been a good girl this year as she writes down what she wants and fli ......
2017 Jul 14 - Three Types of News
The talk of a leadership challenge against Theresa May seems to have quietened off a bit, at least for this week, as the government made another move with a big piece of Brexit legislation. In response a senior civil servant tried to get your average lager drinking, white van driving bloke on the street onside by making a Brexit analogy involving a cricket ball and went on to say that Brexit was falling apart like “a chocolate orange” which seemed odd given that if you’re already doing the cricket thing, at least follow through and say things will fall apart like an England test match innings, or use the chocolate metaphor from the start as another meaningless nonsense term to describe the supposed ‘softness’ of the perceived Brexit.
Elsewhere, across the Atlantic, there’s been more Russia allegations, this time involving Donald Trump’s eldest son meeting with a lawyer from Moscow. A lawyer who was actually barred from entering the US until Attorney General - and friend of the Clintons - Loretta Lynch personally stepped in to allow him to enter the US in a sign that the top echelon of all the political world there is on a dodginess rating that places it somewhere between a used car salesman on a stag do and a newspaper editor who’s discovered that both his mistress and mortgage payments are late.
And in North Korea, they’ve been very keen to show off their new ICBM. It’s very difficult to get Visa entry into the country but they’ve advised journalists that they should visit the West Coast of America if they want a close up look. Not that I’m questioning their technical skills but I’m guessing it’s so that the journalists can get to Los Angeles in order to board a cruise ship bound for the sea of Japan were the rocket is scheduled to land, several seconds after it takes off.
The talk of a leadership challenge against Theresa May seems to have quietened off a bit, at least for this week, as the government made another move with a big piece of Brexit legislation. In response a senior civil servant tried to get your average lager drinking, white van driving bloke on the street onside by making a Brexit analogy involving a cricket ball and went on to say that Brexit was falling apart like “a chocolate orange” which seemed odd given that if you’re already doing the ......
2017 Jul 07 - Politics and Wimbledon
This week has been fairly quiet in the UK, I guess most politicians have been too busy watching Wimbledon or submitting expenses. There have been ongoing questions about the Grenfell Tower fire and we’re not really going to know all the facts for years. We’ll likely have a public enquiry followed by demands for a second enquiry when some people disagree with the result, as with Brexit, and the press led by the BBC giving a free platform to all the conspiracy theorists.
But that’s life I suppose, politicians and activists devour peoples’ misfortune the way that John Prescott used to devour sticky buns and with the sort of perseverance that reminds me of someone trying to light a cigarette in the rain with a broken lighter.
But elsewhere in the world what’s been going on? Well in the Middle East, we have the growing tension between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And I could discuss the complicated issues about their ties to Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and the tribal nature of the region, including the involvement of Russia. But, at the end of the day, both Trump and Theresa May just signed off on a massive arms deal to the Saudis and there’s oil & gas involved so I suppose we’re going to just have to trust politicians and big business to do the right thing…
In the meantime, bread and circuses for the masses, as I said it’s Wimbledon so look away and focus on the tennis and the Pimms and the celebrities. My favourite joke this week would be, “What time did Sean Connery arrive at Wimbledon?” The answer is “Tennish.”
This week has been fairly quiet in the UK, I guess most politicians have been too busy watching Wimbledon or submitting expenses. There have been ongoing questions about the Grenfell Tower fire and we’re not really going to know all the facts for years. We’ll likely have a public enquiry followed by demands for a second enquiry when some people disagree with the result, as with Brexit, and the press led by the BBC giving a free platform to all the conspiracy theorists.
But that’s life I s ......
2017 Jun 21 - Bad Week for Theresa May
The last week or so has shambles of bad press management from the government. Not reallya good time to be a spin doctor at Downing Street: it must feel like you’ve taken controls of a burning plane and successfully landed it on an aircraft carrier that’s just been struck by a torpedo.
The Grenfell Tower fire was a genuine tragedy but in the days since Theresa May managed to come across as detached and unemotional, she was probably depicted worse in the press than the owner of the company that had illegally installed the highly flammable cladding in the first place. It’s a bit like if you watched a James Bond film where Bloefeld had come across as an entrepreneur and 007 was just a jerk who shot people and forgot to pay his bar tab
Jeremy Corbyn of course doesn’t have to follow through with anything he says now that the election’s over so he’s been suggesting all sorts of policy ideas on inequality and social housing and told everyone that under his watch we’d build a gazillion new council homes all made out of gold and everyone affected by the fire would get a free unicorn. And actually now I think about it gold has quite a low melting point so maybe make the houses out of gingerbread [?] because at this point it’s all academic anyway.
Then flash forward a few days and a nutter decided to drive a van into a crowd of muslims leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque as part of some insane revenge for the London Bridge attacks a few weeks ago. One of those attackers was wearing an arsenal shirt so perhaps when the trial starts he’ll claim that he’s not a racist, just a Tottenham supporter.
For now, if you see Theresa May’s eyes turning orange, don’t worry. Just give her a tap on the shoulder, then those eyes will turn to a flashing orange, then a flashing green, then solid green, and [boom!] the government will have restarted and gone back to normal.
The last week or so has shambles of bad press management from the government. Not reallya good time to be a spin doctor at Downing Street: it must feel like you’ve taken controls of a burning plane and successfully landed it on an aircraft carrier that’s just been struck by a torpedo.
The Grenfell Tower fire was a genuine tragedy but in the days since Theresa May managed to come across as detached and unemotional, she was probably depicted worse in the press than the owner of the company th ......
2017 May 30 - Election: 1 week to go
If you live in the UK, then there’s just one week to go until the election. That means 7 more sleepless nights until we find out whether Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott will be in charge of the UK’s anti-terrorism policy. It’s a scary thought and in all honesty, I’d place more trust in that tiger that ate a zookeeper over the weekend in Cambridgeshire. In an odd twist of events this weekend also saw police in Florida arrested Tiger Woods for drink-driving and for a while I briefly misunderstood what had happened.
But to clarify, Tiger Woods didn’t kill and eat anyone, although Jeremy Paxman did have a go at chewing over the party leaders in a series of interviews that frankly didn’t reveal a whole lot. Theresa May muddied the waters around about the so-called Dementia Tax and the Labour team continued to be vague about the IRA and whether Osama Bin Laden was a goodie or a baddie. Frankly, I wish Michael Howard was somehow involved in the campaign just so that Paxman could finally get to the bottom of whether he’d threatened to overrule Derek Lewis back in the mid-90s.
There are of course other parties though, the LibDems, UKIP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens and in Scotland, there’s also the SNP or as it’s more formally known, Her Majesty’s Nicola Sturgeon. So for now, keep your political wits about you because on June the 8th the nation decides. And as Vladimir Putin might add “and zat nation ees Russia!” Only joking of course, even he couldn’t make much of a dent in those poll numbers.
If you live in the UK, then there’s just one week to go until the election. That means 7 more sleepless nights until we find out whether Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott will be in charge of the UK’s anti-terrorism policy. It’s a scary thought and in all honesty, I’d place more trust in that tiger that ate a zookeeper over the weekend in Cambridgeshire. In an odd twist of events this weekend also saw police in Florida arrested Tiger Woods for drink-driving and for a while I briefly misun ......
2017 Mar 24 - @#%! of The Year
What a depressing week: an utter tosspot killed some folk in London, not normally news but it happened right outside parliament so it’ll be generating column inches for years to come. Just look at Guy Fawkes, he didn’t even succeed with his plot and the papers still mention him every year. As for the Westminster Bridge attack, it was actually a year to the day since the Brussels bombings where 32 people died, and it was lucky for many I suppose then that in comparison the British attempt was quaintly rubbish
On the other side of the spectrum, this week also saw the death of Irish terrorist mastermind and general human vermin Martin McGuinness. I’ve never visited Northern Ireland but I did live for many years in Glasgow which I suppose was like a sectarian version of visiting Euro Disney rather than travelling to Florida. Anyway, he’s in the ground now although the Queen was unable to attend the funeral, owing to being unable to find her dancing shoes.
A lot of folk now consider The Troubles to be something from a bygone era or something that happened far away across the Irish Sea. I’d suggest going on Google and look up images of the Bishopsgate Bomb that London experienced back in the 90s and people forget that the Gherkin skyscraper was only built because Martin McGuinness and his pals used a van filled with Semtex to destroy the old Baltic Exchange.
But fair enough, things have changed, let’s move on and think about the positives of Northern Ireland. It’s now a beautiful and peaceful place with good people, they gave us Bushmills and the DeLorean motor company and nowadays the only shooting is when they’re shooting Game Of Thrones.
What a depressing week: an utter tosspot killed some folk in London, not normally news but it happened right outside parliament so it’ll be generating column inches for years to come. Just look at Guy Fawkes, he didn’t even succeed with his plot and the papers still mention him every year. As for the Westminster Bridge attack, it was actually a year to the day since the Brussels bombings where 32 people died, and it was lucky for many I suppose then that in comparison the British attempt was ......
