The same old bullshit

I’d have a lot more time for Obama if he’d stop peddling the same old bullshit that his predecessor did.

Now that significant players like Dame Stella Rimmington and even our very own David Miliband have spoken out against all this Al Quaeda under the bed tosh, isn’t it time that the US started to scale down its ideas of organised terrorism?

Surely the thought of throwing $1 trillion at the current economic situation is terror enough?

The boyos are back in town

Well, something seems to be going right for the economy now that it seems ‘British jobs for British workers’ means something at last.

All those Fundamentalist Muslim terrorists can go and terrorise someone else now that our own boys are back on the job.

Yes, just when you thought that the Northern Ireland Peace Process was well underway, along comes a group of bastards who enjoy shooting people and blowing shit up to add their contribution to proceedings.

Maybe…just maybe, we’ve spent too much time looking for swarthy-faced people with rucksacks and too little looking for the really dangerous people.

After all, how many UK soldiers have been killed by Muslim terrorists on UK soil since 9/11?

I think you’ll find it’s zero…

More shit you couldn’t make up

Yes everything, including common sense, goes straight out the fucking window…

It’s not often that you read a story in the news that has it all – drama, slapstick, police forensic prodedures, terrorist attacks, Parliament, bathos, pathos, Aramis, d’Ar-fucking-tagnan – or that touches on the zeitgeist so readily – terror, paranoia, insecurity, health anxieties, delusion, folly – but  this one has it ALL.

Yes, that’s right:

Police hospitalised over HP sauce

Police officers rushed to hospital after a suspicious substance was thrown through a car window were released when it was identified as HP sauce.

The Metropolitan Police said officers responded to reports of an “unusual smell” coming from a car with a smashed window in Enfield, north London.

This raises several points.

Surely, when most people encounter a mystery brown substance they think it’s possibly, well…shit.

Having had children and various pets you get attuned to thinking that way.

You can’t help it.

Even now if one of the cats has something mysterious and brown on its coat I check it out.

In order to identify any suspicious brown substance  I prioritise the five senses that I possess.

First, sight.

OK, it’s brown but it doesn’t look easily identifiable.

A whole turd…well, no question about it.

But just a vague brown smudge or smear…well, that needs closer investigation…

So, then I use smell.

This is usually the clincher.

I’ve learned over the years what shit smells like and that if something smells like shit then it’s probably shit.

To my certain knowledge I’ve never gone on to use the three other senses I possess to identify shit.

Hearing is obviously a non-runner – except when it’s being produced, shit is totally silent.

(If you hear shit buzzing, that’s just flies.)

Touch is one that you sometimes can’t avoid – but it’s always accidental.

And taste…well, that’s a definite no-no.

I’d like to think that the police involved in this case did the same thing, and that having eliminated shit from their list of  dubious brown substances they moved on to consider what else it might be.

So, sight…

Brown, but that’s all.

Smell…

Hmmm…

Now, HP Sauce has a unique and historic recipe using many ingredients:

• Water
• Vinegar
• Dates
• Glucose-Fructose
• Black Strap Molasses
• Tomato Paste
• Modified Cornstarch
• Salt
• Orange Juice Concentrate
• Onion
• Spices
• Tamarind Extract
• Apple Juice Concentrate
• Garlic
• Chili Peppers
• Mustard Flour

And what does ‘HP’ stand for?

Bizarrely, yet somehow satisfyingly. for ‘Houses of Parliament’…

Personally, I hate the stuff but I do know what it smells like and ingredient numero two (the greatest ingredient after water) is the big clue.

Vinegar.

Now, that has a very distinctive smell.

Which leads us to a question that might well crack this case wide open.

If someone put HP Sauce over your car’s interior would you be able to smell vinegar?

I’d say so.

So, back to Plod, who’s looking at the car’s interior and seeing brown stuff which has zero odeur de merde.

He smells it and he smells vinegar.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d stop right there before I rushed off to hospital thinking that I was the victim of some evil joke, mailicious prank or some terrorist chemical attack.

Maybe I’m being unfair and the police’s reaction was just the result of being very cautious – but based on what supposition?

If it was a strange white powder may be you’d think it could be a terrorist Anthrax attack – but brown spooge?

The worst thing it could be (the way most people would react to it) would be shit and, in my experience, shit is harmless when seen and smelled although, admittedly, rather unpleasant.

The enigmatic substance had ‘an unusual smell’.

I’d question that and suggest that you’d probably find HP Sauce in every police station canteen up and down the country thus familiarising every policeman with its distinctive aroma.

Has brown stuff ever been used to attack people?

Should we be on our guard against something which looks like shit?

Most terrorists like shit which blows shit up – not shit which smells of vinegar.

I daresay that there have been practical jokes using real shit, but then you’d know it was shit by the smell.

Anyway, to conclude this rambling, the long and short of it is that the police have come out of all this with egg on their faces.

Maybe they’d like some brown sauce to go with it…

The real conspiracy

I’d like to start a fan club for Stella Rimington for stating publicly and plainly what many people – myself included – have thought for several years now:

“It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism – that we live in fear and under a police state.”

It’s not something she could have said, or needed to say, when she was head of MI5 but fair play to her now for coming out and highlighting this government’s terrible duplicity.

As many people have pointed out, following this recent interview, she is to be applauded for showing respect for our civil liberties and it is to be fervently hoped that whoever is in charge of our security services at present is of a similar frame of mind.

Indeed, it is the Home Office and the Police who seem to be the true villains of the piece – with 42 day detention proposed by the former and pushed by the latter being a good example – but the part of the House of Commons in all this is where the real danger lies.

We have a government with a small majority and the end of its current term in sight.

No-one in the Labour ranks has the cojones to rock the boat and possibly lose their job.

So, the Commons is now like any other place of work with its workers facing ‘redundancy’ – which is ironic, given the current and very real fear amongst the nation’s workforce of being out of work – afraid to speak out and intent on not making waves.

New balls, please.

Tony Blair – limbo champion?

Sitting, as most of us are, amongst a set of circumstances that one might rightly describe as ‘pretty fucked up’ it’s tempting to wonder how things have got to this stage.

Here we are suffering one of the most serious economic declines ever, witnessing child abuse of an unimaginable nature, watching all manner of people bomb, shoot, kill and maim each other from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and, for many of us, seeing a steady erosion of personal liberty in the name of immigration control and terrorist alerts.

I’m not going to begin to attempt any sort of all-encompassing explanation as to how we’ve got where we are today, but I do have a largely unanswered question that’s been troubling me for a while now that could shed some light on one of the chief problems facing us.

Did Tony Blair see economic decline coming before he left office and to what extent has he avoided any blame for it?

As far as I can ascertain, very few members of the UK’s or the world’s press or media have addressed this question.

So, now it’s my turn…

Putting aside the bitching, the agreements, the disagreements, the broken promises and the in camera meetings that Blair and his successor Brown indulged in, it became pretty clear that the plum job of PM that Brown coveted so fervently was, in fact, a poisoned apple and only a brief  ‘honeymoon’ period ensued before Brown found this out.

For most of Blair’s premiership the economic situation seemed to be very rosy.

Inflation was low, employment was relatively high and many ordinary people felt secure and reasonably prosperous.

That perception was at odds with the reality of the divide between rich and poor ever widening and what we now know to be a festering bubble of over-reliance on credit waiting to burst, but that’s sort of my point.

Many of us thought things were fine and no-one in government bothered to tell us that maybe it wasn’t after all.

Now, Brown was in charge of the economy as Chancellor from the landslide victory of Labour in 1997 to when he took over from Blair as PM so it’s tempting to blame him. I think we should. Whether he knew how serious things were becoming in the domestic and global economies over that 10 year period or whether he didn’t doesn’t really matter.

If he knew, then why didn’t he do something about it?

If he didn’t know, then why didn’t he know?

There’s a clear choice here between negligence and ignorance – neither of which are qualities you’d want in a junior accounts clerk, let alone the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

But, and here’s the crucial question, where was Blair whilst this was going on?

Did he simply let Gordon ‘get on with it’ or did he know from meetings with his Chancellor that there was trouble brewing?

Again, the choice is clear – ignorance or negligence – neither of which are qualities you’d want in a boy scout leader, let alone the Prime Minister.

So, to sum up the answer to the first part of my initial question – it doesn’t really matter whether or not he saw economic decline coming.

Either way he fucked up big time.

On to part two – to what extent has he avoided blame for catastrophic ignorance or negligence?

Well, it has to be said that Teflon Tony’s done a pretty thorough job of leaving No. 10 and finding suitable employment – he’s the UN’s Middle East envoy, he’s received a Yale University fellowship, consultancy jobs in two banks and is a potential candidate for the EC Presidency.

He’s believed to be earning about £7 million a year.

In an astonishing twist of irony, last week US President Bush awarded Blair with a Presidential medal for, amongst other things, his role in the War on Terror and, in the very same week, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband had an article published in the Guardian saying that the War on Terror was a mistake.

If that isn’t a fucked-up state of affairs, I don’t know what is.

It’s also an indirect criticism by Miliband of his old boss who supported Bush through all the WMD, 45 minute warning, and ‘Help, I’m living next door to a Muslim, get him out of here’ bollocks.

(I’m not even going to start tearing into the duplicity of Miliband who supported Blair’s decisions regarding the whole terrorist/Iraqi invasion issue and then suddenly had his recent ‘Damascus’ moment…)

Apart from this, however, where are the searching questions about Blair’s part in the downfall of the UK’s economy?

I don’t hear them coming from the very people who should be asking them – our journalists in the press and the media.

No, Tony’s got off scot-free with his future well sorted and his reputation, whilst not regarded with fondness by many, at least more or less intact.

There are many people in the UK today who won’t shed a single tear when Margaret Thatcher pops her clogs – she was responsible for the decline of our manufacturing sector which we’d die to have right now and she did her utmost to destroy our perception of society that gave it a certain cohesion that is lacking today.

Indeed there are many who’d queue to piss on her grave.

For what it’s worth I don’t think that Tony’s quite achieved that status yet.

However, I can only fervently hope that history will not be kind to him after he surfed into government like a golden boy on the waves of our hopes and dreams – after years of Tory malpractice – reneged on almost every Socialist principle people voted him in on and then buggered off after making a complete fuck-up of our economy whether through ignorance or negligence.

And as for Blair and the limbo, our Tony can get down so low that he can duck under anything.

Only time will tell whether he eventually goes down too low and ends up disappearing up his own arse.

I defy the guy to come up smelling of roses then…

Late addition…

I won’t say I’ve researched this very deeply but it seems clear after some cursory Googling that it was pretty clear from the way the US Federal Reserve started to slash its interest rates from early 2007 that all the signs of a US and hence an ensuing UK recession were all there well before Blair announced his forthcoming resignation.

Lest this be seen as letting Brown off the hook, George Soros – who’s been known to be right on many occasions – recommended that the Bank of England cut interest rates as early as January 2008.

I think it’s now pretty certain that we had over 18 months to get ready for the financial shitstorm that erupted in September 2008 but we appear to have done nothing about it. OK, maybe we couldn’t have avoided it altogether but maybe we could have been better situated to ride it out better than we are doing at present.

Tony…Gordon…you really fucked things up.

“War on Terror” is a mistake…where do you fucking start?

I wanted to blog about David Miliband’s recent declaration that the ‘war on terror’ was a mistake.

But I struggled…

…not so much with the concept of such a conflict or even with my own long-held opinion being vindicated that the idea of organised terrorism – as Bush, Blair and other people would have us accept – was fatally flawed, but with the way that he’s been allowed to slip this bombshell under the wire without the whole nation demanding that he be strung up by the bollocks along with every other New Labour rentboy who allowed themselves to be royally buttfucked by the US neo-cons – and fucking LOVED it – whilst dragging this world just that bit closer to madness than anyone of us would like.

(Wow…that’s a hell of a sentence – I hope you understood it.)

It’s now beyond all reasonable doubt that the British press has less bollocks than a neutered vole when, instead of FUCKING OUTRAGE at the sheer effrontery of this pronouncement, they just calmly report that a government minister thinks the whole Bin Laden/Al Queda/9-11/organised training camp in Pakistan/shoot the guy with the backpack/there’s a dodgy Muslim in my street package is a MISTAKE.

All this AFTER we’re introduced to the unparalleled intrusion into our private lives in the form of covert surveillance and the prospect of national databases – and we all know how FUCKING SECURITY CONSCIOUS our government is, so abso-fucking-lutely no problem there – and that will continue to be imposed on us in the future form of national ID cards as long as this shitty excuse for a government clings on to power like an alcoholic to his last can of white cider.

I am fucking ANGRY.

FUCK this tawdry excuse for a government and its CLUSTER FUCK politics.