While I was out...

In the weeks before the election it was suggested that the reason for my long silence was that I had been 'identified' and subsequently crucified by party enforcers or perhaps even by the blackshirts themselves.

That's not unreasonable considering the way I've criticised the behaviour of the party leadership and Gordon Brown in particular. But alas, as so often in real life, the true reason is much more mundane and boring...

I've been busy.

One of the problems associated with this little 'hobby' of mine is the deceptively large amount of time it can consume. It's all very well thinking I'll just dash off a quick post about whatever happens to have caught my attention, but where politics are concerned that quick post can easily turn into a multiple page missive.

Keeping it to a reasonable size and/or paring it down afterwards takes time. Ensuring that the shorter version says what I want it to without too much danger of being accidentally misinterpreted takes even more time and suddenly it's not a quick post any longer.

Naturally I could 'make' time for this but then it wouldn't be fun anymore and as I've mentioned before, I do this mostly for my own amusement.


This means that I missed the opportunity to comment on such gems as Gordon Brown's appalling behaviour at the Cenotaph. The well deserved ear-bashing he got from Mrs Janes and his pathetic attempts to deflect criticism of his fiscal mismanagement by pointing the finger at Spain and claiming that the UK was not the only member of the G20 still in recession.

As the more politically aware will already know. Spain is not and has never been a member of the G20, regardless of whatever that deranged Scots git may or may not have convinced himself and some of his ‘colleagues’ of - although in their case it was more likely to have been the blackshirts who did the ‘convincing’. To then call them an 'unofficial' member when challenged on this fact merely served to further highlight his increasing inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.


And then of course, there was Jim Devine's 'inappropriate' behaviour towards Nadine Dorries.

I must admit this did not come as a surprise to me as Jim Devine is one of the very worse offenders who, drunk or sober, seems to be incapable of keeping his hands off any woman unfortunate enough to attract his attention.

Sadly however, Jim Devine is by no means the only one guilty of this sort of misconduct which is far too common amongst MPs, some of whom seem to see this as a perk of the job rather than a criminal assault.


Finally I tip my hat in respect to a very senior member of the BBC, who on being told that Chris Evans had been chosen to replace Sir Terry Wogan as the presenter of the Radio 2 breakfast show because “he’s popular with the 15 to 24 age group" remarked

"So are venereal diseases but you wouldn't employ one to present an early morning radio show!"

Give me my pills! Quickly! I need my pills!

It seems that Gordon Brown's instinct for self-preservation is still working despite his rapidly disintegrating mental state - or he is no longer capable of telling the truth - judging by the way he lied when Andrew Marr asked him if he was taking pills to 'help him get through'.

One thing is for certain. His expression when Marr asked the question followed by his not-so-private temper tantrum afterwards will only fuel further speculation.

Don't forget your lifejacket Gordon.

There's a rumour going round that Gordon Brown is preparing to jump ship ahead of the general election.

This is quite an 'about-face' for Brown who has always maintained that he "wasn't going anywhere" and was recently telling people that he'd have to be "carried out feet first". Naturally there is a long list of people who would be only too willing to help him achieve the latter ambition sooner rather than later.

However it's very unlikely to be true as it would also mean he would have to accept the reality of the forthcoming election defeat. Something he has clearly demonstrated over and over again he is incapable of doing.

I suspect what actually happened is that the blackshirts are so desperately trying to find bolt-holes for themselves to hide in, they forgot to keep an eye on whoever is making post-defeat arrangements for Brown and the rest of the cabinet.

Please keep your hands where I can see them Mr. Brown

I can't say I was surprised to hear that U.S. president Barak Obama had become the latest in a long line of foreign politicians who want nothing more to do with Gordon Brown.

I suspect that Obama, like most of the others, is concerned about the damage to his reputation and his own chances of re-election should he be perceived as being too closely associated with Brown.

Of course, the U.S. Secret Service expressing concerns about the state of Gordon Brown's mental health and his increasingly erratic behaviour may have also have been taken into consideration.

Another Campbell Classic?

Alastair Campbell made the first move in what could be a bold plan to protect Gordon Brown as he clings desperately to the post of Prime Minister - and possibly his continuation as an MP if he ever agrees to return to the back benches - when he told MPs at a special Speakers Conference that MPs detained under the Mental Health Act should not automatically lose their seats.

Campbell said that many MPs including members of Tony Blair's government had mental problems but were afraid to admit it in case it was used against them.

However his most revealing statement was

"I completely accept that somebody could become so severely mentally ill for such a sustained period of time that they just could not do an important public position."

To which he added that such a case could be dealt with by party leaders and whips in the same way other problems were handled.

With Campbell having suffered from depression himself in the past, it would be easy to view this as a genuine attempt to eliminate what is arguably a form of discrimination.

Were it not for the simple fact that no MP has ever been excluded from Parliament for this reason.


End 'sectioned' MP ban - Campbell

One Party, One Reich.

Shortly after the local election results were announced I was told that Brown and Mandelson had discussed temporarily suspending elections during a private meeting.

I didn't believe it of course. While Brown is undoubtedly deranged enough to suggest it and self obsessed enough to believe he can get away with it, Peter Mandelson is neither. Nor is he stupid enough to believe that news of such a discussion wouldn't leak.

However having just finished reading some of Brown's 'suggestions' for electoral reform I'm no longer quite so sure that it isn't true.

Quite frankly these 'suggestions' amount to nothing more than a desperate attempt to rig the system by a throughly deranged individual who is obviously no longer in full control of his faculties.

Which rather begs the question. Who's pulling his strings? Who did these ideas really come from?

They are certainly not Gordon Brown's. Brown has clearly demonstrated both publicly and privately that he is psychologically incapable of accepting the fact that neither he nor the Labour party have a snowball's chance in hell of winning a general election.

The most obvious candidate is Mandelson. Yet Mandelson is apparently quite happy with the current system which allows the leadership to dictate who can stand for election. It also allows them to control MPs and PPCs by threatening to withhold their support as Brown's blackshirts did recently to shore up his rapidly failing support within the PLP. With so many Labour MPs up to their necks in it over their expenses, they are not in a position to risk refusing their support.

Naturally it is possible that the whole thing is meant as nothing more than a means of distracting attention from the expenses fiasco. If so then it has been partially successful with some of the debate now having shifted to how MPs are elected instead of what they do once elected and how to stop them when they inevitably get caught.

It's even marginally possible that having been caught out so badly by the expenses fiasco, whoever is pulling Brown's strings has decided to capitalise on the situation by making things look so bad that voters will be desperate for change, any change, as they were in 1997. And out of that desperation they will support the creation of what is in effect a one party state with a Labour/Lib-Dem coalition permanently being re-elected under an Alternative Vote system.

With the Lib-Dems being long term proponents of a proportional representation system similar to that used for the European Parliament - and which allows vermin like the BNP and other extremists to gain seats despite having actually lost some of their support. It's likely that they would support this as their only means of getting some influence over whoever is holding the reins.

Our current first past the post system isn't perfect and has often been criticised for not representing the entire electorate amongst other things, but it actually works quite well and far better than any of the proposed alternatives.

However the real issue is and always has been the lack of a suitable mechanism for dealing with MPs who abuse their position and despite Brown's announcement this afternoon of tougher sanctions for MPs guilty of 'misconduct', there is still no definition of what will constitute misconduct and no intention of applying sanctions to the current crop of thieving toerags other than the existing sacrificial scapegoats.

Until that is properly resolved with those involved being permanently banned from holding any public or corporate office and, where appropriate, prosecuted for fraud, misconduct in a public office etc. everything else is just window dressing.

An Unmitigated Disaster.

Well, the European election results were every bit as bad as predicted and even worse in some regions with the party being beaten into fifth place by the Greens in the South-East and South-West, and sixth place in Cornwall by the Cornish Nationalists of all people.

How we managed overall third is something of a mystery and can only be attributed to the 'my da voted Labour and his da afore him' mentality which make it so difficult for alternatives such as the UKIP, the Greens and BNP to gain a foothold. Not entirely a bad thing in the case of the last two.

The only real surprise was the BNP gaining two seats. If nothing else this clearly demonstrates the problems of a proportional representation system such as that used in the European elections or that proposed by the Lib-Dems. They may sound good and even look good on paper, but in practice a party can actually lose support and still win seats as the BNP did in Yorkshire where their share of the vote actually fell but was still enough to gain one of the region's six seats.

Of course, the idiots who admitted to voting for the lunatic fringe such as the Christian Alliance because they "couldn't find UKIP" on the ballot paper didn't help.

Another thing it demonstrates is the notorious unreliability of polls which is usually ignored and in this case suggested the BNP would be unlikely to get more than 5% of the vote. Due no doubt to the many who lied when asked which party they would be voting for in order to avoid being seen as a racist.

But what was truly shocking was that deranged Scots git's reaction to the news that the party had suffered it's worse election defeat since the second world war.

He shrugged his shoulders and said it didn't matter. That he was going to carry on regardless and anyone who refused to support him would be "out on their arse".

Which leaves me in no doubt now that he is mentally ill and clearly has been for some time. He is now quite obviously displaying many, if not all of the classic symptoms of a narcissistic personality disorder - a grandiose sense of self-importance, an unshakeable belief that he is special and that others envy him. He is arrogant, exploitive and lacks empathy. He often becomes enraged when people disagree with him or fail to accord him the special treatment to which he feels entitled.

And yet even NPD doesn't seem quite able to explain all of his recent behaviour. Perhaps he's decided that as he cannot go down in history as a great Labour Prime Minister - not that there was ever any chance of that - he'll settle for being the last Labour Prime Minister.

The only other possible explanation I can see is that he's a tory mole recruited to destroy the party from within. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher will finally get to see that day she once expressed a desire for, when there are only two major political parties in the UK and neither of them is the Labour Party.

Away with the fairies

Well the apologies started in earnest this morning with Gordo jumping on the bandwagon at the Royal College of Nursing conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire with the following lacklustre effort.

"I want to apologise on behalf of politicians on behalf of all parties for what has happened in the events of the last few days."

Fairly bland 'I'm sorry we got caught' nonsense of the sort one would expect from the socially retarded and not the Prime Minister of a modern democracy, but not totally unexpected of course. However he soon followed it up with this.

"We must show that, where mistakes have been made and errors have been discovered, where wrongs have to be righted, that it is done so immediately."

Mistakes? Errors? Is he totally deranged?

With everything which has been made public so far, it's difficult to comprehend how Gordo could still believe he can gloss any of this over as a mistake or an error.

I suppose the most charitable explanation is that the strain has finally pushed him over the edge and he is now living in some deluded fantasy where people still believe what he says.

Brown apology over MPs' expenses

Waccy-Baccy 'outs' Gordo

It looks like that "significantly better advice" Gordo seemed to be getting is limited entirely to 'new media' if the photograph accompanying the following article from the BBC is anything to go by.

Brown 'right' man for UK - Smith

Naturally this comes as no surprise to those of us who have always suspected that Gordo's true political affiliations were somewhat further to the right than he is prepared to admit.

Ironically, one of Gordo's highly expensive PR team is former BBC producer Nicola Burdett who was hired precisely to prevent this sort of thing. A task in which she is obviously having rather mixed results.

Honest guv, it just broke

Scattered amongst the usual rubbish in my mailbox this morning were a number of emails saying the e-petition I mentioned on Friday telling Gordo to 'get lost' was unavailable yesterday.

It's back now but it was an interesting time to have a computer failure don't you think?

With hindsight I suppose I should have expected something like this but I must admit, not being a technically minded person, the thought of what was almost certainly a deliberately induced breakdown simply didn't occur to me.

I have no doubt that Gordo would have simply ignored the e-petition no matter how many people had 'signed' it but a sufficiently large number would have been rather embarrassing to say the least. So by heading off the initial morning surge of people doing 'anything but work' in this way, the number can be kept down as the vast majority simply won't bother trying again.

This suggests that Gordo is getting significantly better advice on 'new media' than he was previously and judging by his past performance, it certainly isn't coming from Damian McBride.

You tell him. No, YOU tell him.

Gordo may be in danger of being hung with his own 'web'-ing if an online e-petition started by Kalvis Jansons is successful. The petition's message is clear and simple.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to resign

I suspect that few if any seriously expect it to have the slightest effect, particularly as the whole e-petitions thing is a part of the same nonsense as LabourList. Not surprisingly, it's proving very popular and in the few hours it's been available, it's gained more than 3000 'signatures' putting it in the top 50 and the front page of the open petitions list.

Yes, I know. A drop in the ocean. But it would be rather ironic if the instrument of Gordo's demise was the very same 'new media' he was so desperate to manipulate and which back-fired so badly costing him one of his most trusted hatchet-men.

Whatever the outcome, the petition's very existence is almost certain to provoke a paroxysm of rage and I fully expect some of his staff will be sporting fresh bruises in the morning.


The Register's original article inviting Gordo to "Pick a Window!" is here or alternatively, you can just go straight to the petition here.

The Order of the Boot?

The Guido Fawkes Blog is reporting that members of the Finchley and Golders Green CLP are to vote on McBride's expulsion from the party on May 11th with the group's recommendations going to the General Committee on the 27th.

Quite frankly I think they're taking a hell of a risk. McBride is one of Gordo's 'blackshirts' and if recent 'revelations' are anything to go by, anyone supporting a motion to expel him could very well end up as their next target.

Furthermore, even if the CLP were to vote for a recommendation to expel him and the committee accepted that recommendation, it is unlikely to be permanent and could in fact be no more than a token gesture, a 'slap-on-the-wrist' for getting caught.

In any event, this would have little effect as expulsion from the party won't prevent him from giving 'advice' to senior party members or the leadership. However he would not only have to learn the meaning of the word 'discretion', but actually start practising it as well.

Myths and Legends

As if Jacqui Smith didn't have enough trouble with her "idiot husband" and his 'inappropriate behaviour', there is now a rumour going round that she and Gordon Brown have been having an illicit affair.

This is complete and utter nonsense of course. Gordon Brown may be many things but stupid is certainly not one of them. Even now with some signs that his mental abilities may starting to deteriorate due to stress he would not get involved in something which could only end very, very badly.

Coming Soon: Skunk - The Movie

Another piece of stupidity which came into effect yesterday was the re-classification of cannabis as a Class B drug. Something which Ms Waccy-Baccy has been pursuing for some time now despite incontrovertible evidence that cannabis is considerably less harmful than alcohol and that it's use has actually fallen since being downgraded to Class C by David Blunkett in 2004.

And once again we are being told that this is for our own good. That skunk cannabis - whatever the hell that is - is "lethal".

Hmm... This must be some alternative definition of the word 'lethal' which has not reached this part of England yet. I thought a lethal substance was something which brought about death when ingested yet I've not been able to find a single case, verifiable or otherwise, of anyone dying of a cannabis overdose. Not even this 'skunk' which Gordo seems so frightened of.

In fact, when I broached the subject to a senior physician of my acquaintance he was rather amused by it and suggested that next time I should try reading the research for myself. In short, cannabis does not kill!

Now a real skunk, that truly is something to be frightened of. It won't kill you either but as a former colleague of mine from the US once remarked "You're gonna wish it had." Apparently it's a bit like the old Mal-de-mer in that respect.

Still, at least the local dealers can look forward to a more prosperous year since it is absolutely certain that re-classification will stimulate demand and as a Class B drug, it will also command a higher price than before.

But then, that was the whole point wasn't it?

American Puritanism in the United Kingdom

The American Puritanism in the United Kingdom Act - or as it's more commonly known, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (s63-66) - is due to come into force on Monday. This leaves those with an interest in what has been euphemistically referred to as 'an Alternative Lifestyle' with just two more days of freedom in which to enjoy that interest before they are re-classified as 'violent sex offenders'.

Yet despite the huge number of people who will be affected, very few are prepared to speak out for fear of being victimised as some members of the Consenting Adult Action Network have been.

One of those who has is Baroness Miller who said - amongst other things - that "No legislation should leave law-abiding citizens criminalised for private sexual behaviour which harms no one."

I have to agree with her on this one. They're certainly not harming me in any way and in the words of Lady Nancy Astor - a very upright and proper Victorian - "I don't care what they do providing they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."

Naturally the government does not agree and some of the legislation's less charitable opponents have suggested that this is what you must expect from a government led first by a Catholic, then by a Puritanical Scot. While this is a bit unfair to both Catholics and Scots, the majority of whom are fairly decent people, I have to admit they do have a point. The 'equivalent' legislation proposed north of the border - where the Catholic Church has a much greater influence and there are many Puritanical Scots - goes much, much further and may eventually lead to the criminalisation of perfectly normal sexual activities. The fact that Gordo's father was a Minister of the Church of Scotland only adds weight to their argument.

As usual with such controversial legislation, the government has changed it's tune several times since the bill was introduced in an increasingly desperate struggle to justify it. This - the government claims - is for our own good. First it was to protect us from the evils of sex, erm... I mean ah, pornography, um... extreme pornography. Then it was to protect our children from the sort of pornography which very few are ever likely to see even as adults.

Now it seems that it's because terrorists are using digital images and video of 'extreme pornography' to hide messages.

Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous?

Well, yes I have actually. The often repeated claims by media and software industry associations that copyright piracy funds drug trafficking and terrorism. But that's another story.

As any halfway competent police officer could tell you, the key to running a successful criminal operation is NOT to draw attention to yourself. Hiding secret information in 'extreme pornography' would be like hiding diamonds inside blocks of cocaine. The cocaine is far more likely to attract unwanted attention than the diamonds ever would.

A much safer method would be to use those old photographs of Aunt Mable and her kids, but you'd better hurry up before the government bans those as well. Why? Because they're images of fully clothed children with their mother of course!

Amusing as that may seem let's not lose sight of the fact that most schools have already banned all forms of photography at school events on the instructions of the education authorities.

However the ban on 'extreme pornography' is not an isolated case but simply another step along the road to American style Puritanism and all the evils which go with it.

In 2006, despite openly admitting that they had no evidence pornography caused harm, the government made last minute changes to the Safeguarding Vulnerable Persons Act which made it possible to bar individuals from 'regulated jobs' simply for possessing pornography depicting 'violence'. No evidence of misconduct required. A simple accusation will suffice.

The next step is already on it's way in the recently published Coroners and Justice Bill (s58) which amends the Public Order Act 1986 by removing 29AJ which permits "discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices."

In English, this means that anyone talking about or criticising any form of sexual behaviour outside a private dwelling is committing a criminal offence which can carry up to seven years imprisonment!

And it doesn't stop there. Sources inside the party have indicated that the government intends to extend this into other areas including homosexuality. From there it's only a short step to re-criminalising it and once again we'll have packs of thugs hunting queers through the streets just like their fathers and their grandfathers did before them.

Potential victims can draw some small comfort from the fact that their pursuers won't be able to use dogs this time as Hunting with Dogs was banned by the Hunting Act 2004.