When politics get weird-the weird get going!

The big moment of the Republican Party Convention in Tampa Florida- the warm up act for candidate Romney-none other than Dirty Harry himself-Clint Eastwood!
Now some PR wonk in the bowels of the Republican political machine must have thought that a good idea.
82 year old movie actor famed for his tough guy roles to introduce the buttoned-up Mormon(maybe one too many 'm's there) and give the convention a touch of class.
Well it proved several things, Eastwood can only work off a script,and a monosyllabic one at that.Left to do his piece unscripted it was excruciating,mind you it will live for ever on You Tube as the ultimate in weird!
For not only did the strange old man ramble on fifteen minutes too long,forcing Romney to lose the end of his speech to the millions on TV-that was bad enough.
But Clint talked to an empty chair.
The poor delusional old guy thought he was talking to an invisible President Obama.
Perhaps he thought there was a six foot white rabbit called Harvey on stage with him,maybe he could see a six foot white rabbit!
That American politics is dysfunctional is an accepted fact, indeed a party that selects as the number two a numpty that believes rape victims have some sort of magical powers that can distinguish an evil rapists sperm from a benign lovers little fellows really is far from reality!
Imagine the un-fertilised hanging about in the womb seeing the wee tadpole wriggling towards it and turning to its fellow eggs:
"Don't touch this one girls-its a naughty rapists progeny!"
The politics of the surreal.
But its what you get in the absence of any ideology or theory or direction based on logical thinking.
It's as if the enlightenment has never happened and the world is consumed by brutish ignorant calibans with the crudest grasp on reality.
It's what happens when you allow sixteenth century religious beliefs come up against the rational.Increasingly the rational loses out to the emotionally stunted.
If I thought that it was only a feature of modern American society I would be worried but feel comforted by the thought that the enlightenment was a European concept and maybe the Atlantic is proving an obstacle.

But the great fear is that the world has gone backwards!
The founding fathers were rational men who wanted a state that was rational and whilst offering freedom for almost all, regarded the separation of church and state as essential.
John Adams,Tom Jefferson and the others were in favour of religious tolerance,after all many of the early settlers were fleeing religious persecution in Europe.But they also recognised the value of education,science and a democratic settlement.
Where on earth has it all gone wrong?
Presidential candidates who believe in blokes finding gold plates buried in fields outside New York that decreed that all adherents must wear dodgy underwear,and that was the promise of eternal salvation!

But their absurd and dangerous fundamentalism is just as daft and dangerous as every other sort of fundamentalism.There is in my mind no difference between the Taliban and the extreme Zionists in Israel and the Protestant extremists in Ulster and the Catholic dogmatists in the Vatican.
The brutal treatment of the Pussy Riot girls in Moscow is just one more sighting of the intolerance that seems everywhere.
And when we look at Britain, there is a growing trend of intolerance and bigotry.I have always assumed that the right of the spectrum have always held views rooted in pre-enlightenment days.But how can Liberal-Democrats buy into the new brutal-ism of the neocons in the coalition.
And finally the Labour Party, which long ago abandoned its socialist tolerance but now seems to have abandoned even its Methodist traditions too.listen to any recent Labour Home Secretary and you hear only the shallow rhetoric of the UKIP baroom.

Gordon Brown talked about his moral compass, he may well have had one,but in the rush to court the goodwill of the Daily Mail readership I think New Labour(because that's what it still is) has pawned the compass and bought a new blackjack!
So don't laugh too loudly comrades at Mitt and Clint and the other jackasses.
Think of the road New Labour has travelled, and think how often these days the fundamentalists in the cabinet can point to polices they are enacting and say:
"Not us guv, we inherited student fees,immigration controls,health service privatisation,welfare cuts ......"

Prince Harry has an arse- big deal!

So it would appear that Prince Harry has an arse
Hold the front page!
As a matter of fact not only has Prince Harry got an arse but he is an arse.
He is a highly privileged younger son of another arse  who has even fewer redeeming features.
Harry is an average arrogant satrap whom the popular press are portraying as 'just a high spirited young soldier'.
Well if the British Army is full of 'high spirited young soldiers'who can afford to blow £450 on a bottle of vodka and rent a hotel room in  Vegas for a couple of thousand a  night then clearly we are paying our soldiers far too much.
Get rid of the National Debt? Simples-cut back the salary of army officers for a few weeks.

The story,such that it is,should not be about a 27 year old posh boy flashing his bollocks or wresting with a blonde bimbo in his hotel suite.
A suite incidentally where along with his expensive armed police protection unit he was able to fit in another 25 merry pranksters guzzling his vodka and champagne.
Sorry I got that wrong, it was NOT his vodka and champagne it was OUR vodka and champagne.
Of course we will be told that the boy billiard player is of course using his money, the vast sums he earns as an army officer supplemented by what his Mum left him in his trust fund,plus what his Gran doles out in pocket money (except of course he appears to have no pockets).
But none of that is strictly true other than the wage he gets for being in the armed forces.Whatever he gets from his mothers trust fund was money that she got in her divorce settlement from Charles.
And where did he get his millions from?
Why the same place his Gran gets all her millions from-us!

An awful lot of decent people are taken in by the romance and grandeur of a bunch of minor German aristocrats.Look how hard the Saxe-Coberg-Gothas work is a frequent refrain.
Well if putting one foot in front of another,shaking a few hands and behaving as ifv the world owes them a living-I suppose you can call that working.

The mantra ofv the coalition is that we are all in this together!-well it would appear that some of us can jet off to the fleshpots of Vegas at the drop of a coronet and have a fine old time at our expense.

The royals are a collection of parasites that have no capacity to inspire,no capacity to lead and deserve oblivion not fawning and amazement that they each have an arse.

Every time the issue of the purpose of the monarchy is questioned the loyal subjects bleat that the alternative would be too awful to contemplate.What would happen if we had a President Putin, or worse a President Blair.
Well if we had a President at some time they would have to stand for election(unless of course you were Putin) and even the worst of them would pass on  eventually.(Unless it was the Kim Il dynasty of course)

But the Presidential model is not the only one available,it is probably a good thing to have a ceremonial head of state,a bit like the Mayor of a town,but it is not essential.It would be perfectly possible for a mature parliamentary democracy like this one to get by without a Lord High Heid Yin.

And if all else fails there is always the Speaker of the House of Commons-Bercow the First! 

We're all professionals now!
Time to return to the blog now the book is finished.
You can still read my now monthly column in the now weekly Chronicle & Echo,but its time again to put on my despairing hat and further depress myself.
In the current edition of the London Review of Books,the historian Ross McKibbin casts jaundiced eye over modern British politics,and shares a miserablist view similar to Jones in 'Chavs',a much more polemical  but no less gloomy prognosis.There was a time when I felt part of the 'half full tendency-but not for much longer.
McKibbin says,not totally originally that a factor that needs to be taken into account for the current state of affairs is:
"The first one,now a cliché,is the extreme professionalism of politics.Politics today is now dominated by a comparatively young elite for whom politics is all of life.And politics is less a matter of legislative achievement-though that still matters-than of electoral success,and that is won by those who are part of the system,even if it means flying to Queensland9as Blair did)to impress the arch mediaman himself.
Social-Democratic political parties are particularly vulnerable-and not only in Britain.As they abandoned socialism,however defined,and moved to a vague progressivism,a vacuum was created which has been partly validated by electoral success.Although the revelations of the last year have most embarrassed Cameron,himself very much a product of the system,it was the last Labour government that brought that system to perfection."
I grew up in a family and a generation where we never talked about 'politics'-that was an abstraction, a bourgeois notion that belonged to a different world.I grew up thinking about socialism- the creation of a new world order,a world of equality,justice,without poverty or great wealth.
Silly old ,or rather little,egalitarian me! I was taken to concerts by Paul Robeson, listened to records of Woody Guthrie,read the' Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' and 'How the Steel was Tempered', joined the YCL and CND  and argued long into the night about the British Road to Socialism.
We never talked about politics!
Growing up I had contempt for the careerists in the Labour Party,but at least recognised that many of them were working people trying to get out of their overalls and into a suit.
I'm not a prolecult dinosaur, I have always recognised that the creation of a socialist movement requires everyone to participate(with the possible exception of the Saxe-Coberg dynasty who had a special place reserved for them) and that we needed the workers,the middle class,the intelligentsia-there was even a place for lawyers!(Remember the Russian revolution nearly floundered because nobody could work the telephone exchange )
But the history of the Labour Party has shown that many of the representatives of the working class,once elected to parliament or even council were more reactionary than anyone else.
And even in parliament today those remnants of the working class have been seduced by the comforts of the surroundings.Even an old lefty warhorse like Dennis Skinner,who now has spent far longer on the green benches than down the pit,has become a pet of thye house.
And when did Alan Johnston last deliver a letter/Or John Prescott serve a drink?
But at least those parliamentarians had a vestage of some sort of ideology that was once class based.
Now the 'profession ' is politics, and they could go anywhere-Blair joined the Labour Party not out of socialist conviction but because a moribund party was a good place for an apolitical young barrister to start out.
New Labour destroyed any socialist ideology that remained and in the hollowed out shell that remains all that exists is young careerists with employment paths not dissimilar to those in the other two parties.
And please, if anyone tries to tell me that Gordon Brown was in any way left wing or a socialist-he was the bloody chancellor who kept New Labour on the Thatcherite flight plan.
The only argument that my old comrades have is that labour is better than the others!
hardly a ringing endorsement of a socialist alternative.

New Year-almost new blog

The last time I blogged was in April last year.Being elderly and lazy I have relied on my weekly column in the Chronicle & Echo(every Wednesday in case you didn;t know!) to convey my thoughts and ramblings.

However a new year,a new dawn,a new epoch ...enough of the new already.

I have decided to try and do a blog a week to supplement the Wednesday opinion forming experience.

It will also help whoever has taken to tapping into my thought processes.

Consider the following:

Last week my column was a consideration of the political shifts taking place in this country and in general I drew attention to the rise and rise of Alex Salmond and the SNP.

The SNP have reinvented themselves from twenty or thirty years ago when they were simply 'tartan tories', tartan clad eegits more concerned about knitting porridge and hanging about on grouse moors communing with their flying relatives.

Salmond and a determined left of centre caucus has changed them into a radical social democratic party that have moved firmly into the place that Labour used to occupy in Scottish politics.

I have never had much time for Scottish Labour, for decades they have been corrupt sectarian bastards who have sat in huge majorities and done fuck all squared for the people of Scotland.

They got a bit of a fright a few years ago when Tommy Sheridan and the SSP terrified the bejasus out of them with a string of election victories in the last MSP elections.

But the SSP was built on too many sulphurous tendencies and internal conflicts to survivelong (ever the fate of small left wing groups) and the SLP breathed again.

But never lost its machine politics core or its exclusive brethren tendency.

After all Labour has been seen for decades as a nursery for Westminster shoo-ins, after all if they couldn't win a central belt seat they must have been real numpties.

So Labour neglected its heartlands and its natural constituencies.

The SNP picked up quickly that Scotland would not be won in the Highlands and Islands,but rather in the great urban centres and the west of Scotland.Jim Sillars the former Labour MP from Ayrshire proved that to them decades ago.

So Scotland will progress to independence,or a at least to an independent nation in a federal structure.Scotland may remain in a lose federation with England,Wales and a united Ireland but it will in due course have its own membership of the EU,its own foreign policy and its own defence capability.

having written my warning to Millipede and given praise to Alex, low and behold -'The Times',the day before my column announces Salmond as their politician of the year!

Now this week, my column, yet unpublished,speculates that the Republican primary in Iowa,due tomorrow,might well throw up Rick Santorum,the mildly barmy evangelical as the front runner.

Now I'm the first to admit that Obama hasn't lived up to his promise, after all Guantanamo is still open-for Christ's sake! and there is always the danger if things get squeaky for him then a pre-emptive strike on Iran is not out of the question-but compared to the crazies running for the GOP, Obama is at least on this planet.

Never in the field of human conflict can so many misfits,social inadequate s,religious bigots, dim bigots and simply the last remnants of a mediocre food chain have gathered together.

The only common feature is that they are all very rich and most would prefer to eat poor folk than have them vote for them!

With that background,I suggested the rise of Santorum ,though just as mad as a box of frogs,might be seen as a stop Romney candidate

My old comrade Don from SF put these thoughts in my mind in a private e-mail.

So what do I find in today's Times?

A editorial piece by John Bolton suggesting that mad Rick might be the winner!

Now Bolton is the former Bush ambassador to the United Nations and is the spitting image of Mr Pastry(or Jim Harker) and has all the political skills of Mr Pastry-but it is spooky!

Now knowing that Murdoch owns the Times what is going on here?

Are they intercepting my copy as it does to the Chron?

Are they intercepting my thoughts as they emerge from the keyboard?

Or am I the world's first political psychic?

In which case, can I tell myself the next winner at Towcester?

Excitement at fever pitch-Guildhall quietly snoozes

Thursday was the night of a thousand dreams.Or at least it promised that-according to the Chronicle & Echo .If you didn't get there on time it would be difficult to get a seat.

Such was the hype for the Great Borough Council debate

.As it turned out there were many empty seats and most of those that were occupied were either local election candidates or their party groupies.

It was a well ordered and quite disciplined meeting, even the noxious BNP were listened to in sullen silence.

Their spokesman was so poor that the audience really couldn't be bothered to heckle him.They were probably mostly asleep,lulled into a comatose position by the speakers from the three main parties.

The report in Thursday's paper was painfully accurate.The three main parties were dreadful. Of the three 'leaders' only David Palethorpe of the Tories came across as anything like a human being.

The other two were as wooden and lifeless as most of the furniture in the Great Hall.Brian Hoare,the Lib-Dem leader was as stimulating and inspiring as an accountant explaining how the tax mechanism in medieval Sudan worked.

Lee Mason, the Labour leader had the world at her feet.She had nothing to lose and everything to gain.She could have inspired that audience to see a bright new future ahead for Northampton.

Unfortunately she sounded like the other half of Hoare's exposition of tax laws in medieval Sudan!

It was left to the Independent's-Tony Clarke,Malcolm Mildren and the others to inject some life into the whited sepulchre that was the debate about Northampton's future.

In essence it would appear that the Tories are going to sell off the housing stock,bring traffic to bits of Abington Street and talk to the Saints and the Cobblers quite soon!

Brian Hoare is going to continue dishing up more of the same,bearing in mind that the Con-Dem cuts would get bigger and bigger, oh and one day(someday) a brave new Grosvenor Centre would rise,and he'd talk to people.

Lee Mason promised that she too would talk to people,whether it was the same people that the other two might speak to was not made exactly clear.

My question to the platform was a simple one.Given NBC with cabinet is a one party state and scrutiny committees are also run by them,the only way for oppositions to operate is using the call in process.

How often over the last four years had the opposition groups used call in?

Palethorpe thought his group had invoked call in 3 times over four years.Lee Mason thought that her group had done about the same.

Malcolm Mildren said that the Independents had used call in about 8 times in eighteen months!

The comparison was stark and simple,the Tories don't need to use call in,they are simply waiting for control to fall in their lap.The Labour Party with only five members needed to use the council mechanisms to demonstrate their alternative-they have failed miserably!

So it was the tiny Independent group who showed the real strength of opposition for the last four years.

That was why on the night they shone as the individuals willing to challenge the vested interests on behalf ofv the people.

That's why for once an iIndependent,a Green, an SOS or a Socialist and TU is worth casting.

There were one or two other independents,notably Liam Costello who given half a chance would make a difference.

The Lib-Dems are always boasting that local elections are two horse races,this time there is a full field and not being a 'big' party is no handicap.

Wales wedding-excitement overwhelms me!

A week to go before Mr and Mrs Wales big lad Bill gets hitched.I'm so excited about knowing what the lovely Kate (call me Catherine from now on peasant!) will be wearing!

Gosh will it be white? Or puce ? Or a little gold lame number?

Perhaps it will be a modified polo shirt with wee horses and polo mints embroidered on in cute sequin patterns?

What of his military uniforms will the Wales boy be wearing, and what medals?

And then his father, with his vast array of service uniforms.Will he be pondering now ? Will I be a Field Marshal on Friday? Or a Lord High Admiral ? Or maybe it's time I gave the Marshal of the Royal Air Force kit a bit of an airing!

Then the Lord High Everything will have to choose his medals and sashes and stars so that they will all be colour coordinated.

I expect he will discuss with his siblings what medals and stuff they are bedecking themselves with,so that they don't all turn up with the same honours on show.

It must take hours for the Windsor's to get their christmas tree finery sorted out.

No such problem for their Mum however, as Liz of Guelph gave them all their baubles anyway.

She'll just wear the odd clutch of diamonds,the odd row or ten of pearls and probably enough gold to pay off the national debt!

Every newspaper this Sunday carried page after page of detail about the wedding.Diagrams of whose sitting where in the Abbey and what second each of them will appear.

What I find particularly nauseating is the collection of 'other royals' who are turning up to rattle their jewellery,from a bunch of nasty Arab potentates who will then hurry home to murder some more of their people to a selection box of assorted former European monarchs who languish in splendid villas in Monaco living on stolen loot.

What also causes some anguish is that this bunch of deadbeats should engender such interest and respect from citizens worldwide.

I simply do not buy into the notion that the unelected sons and daughters of old German nobility should have any place in modern society.

The Germans themselves have got rid of the numpties,so why are we still supporting them?

Oh I forgot, they are symbols of our history and are above the cut and thrust of political life.They are pure and untainted and beloved and excuse me while I gag!

Andrew York ? His ex-wife?His dopey young brother? His haughty sister/ and then there is Charles...

I almost feel sorry for young Wales, it must be hard to be the son of a beautiful but empty headed breeding machine and an ugly,empty headed self important ignoramus.

But then we know who is paternal grandfather is......enough said!

The Royals own far too much of our country,they are after all the richest landowners in the country.

They offer nothing but arrogance and vacuity-it's time they were pensioned off like their European cousins, and invited to live using their own skills and abilities.

it would be inrteresting to seehow the Guelph family got on !

To AV or not AV?

Three or four weeks ago I was absolutely sure that I would vote No in the great AV debate.

I can sense readers eyes starting to glaze over,but persevere, things as they say might get better!

I was willing to vote No simply because this silly little £480 million piece of froth was Clegg's price to obtain his red box and smirk-seat next to Cameron.It seemed too easy a target to give the dreadful little fart another good kicking-why?

"Because he deserves it!"

He still deserves a good kicking,but in truth the electorate on May 5th will give him the destruction of his political base that will set them back several decades.with a bit of luck back to the days when the entire Parliamentary Liberal party could fit into one taxi.

But then doubts started to fidget around in my brain.After all had I not always believed in proportional representation even before I had ever heard of Lib-Dems and seen the yellow of their little eyes!

Clegg was right when he called AV a squalid little compromise and it is still at best a halfway house.But it is possibly better than what we have now.

What exists today is the power and hegemony of the marketing manager and the fat chequebook.Wev saw that graphically in Northampton South when an absolutely useless Labour candidate who was not arsed about the town still managed to come second!

People voted for the brand and what was worse the power and influence of the telephone campaigns and the party political broadcasts.

What was of course even worse Binners won!Hardly first past the post more first past the plonker!!

My favourite form of democracy was the once powerful mass meeting.How enjoyable it used to be to see Jackie Dash speak to thousands of London dockers and then call for a show of hands:

"Right Brothers-how do you want to vote?"

Some of course always whined on about mass meetings being intimidatory in nature,but I always saw them as demonstrations of worker's solidarity and an affirmation of the power of the collective.

I'm sure there were some who would rather slink away and side with the bosses-but such meetings stiffened their resolve-that's for sure.

The day of the mass meeting is long gone,we have to work with what we have,and that is a pretty poor mess of pottage.

AV has one virtue and only one.It appears to annoy the Tories far more than anyone else.Most people really don't give a monkeys but it would seem the Tories are going berserk.

My old Dad always taught me that if a Tory says something's wrong, then invariably it's right!

Mind you he also said that the only good Tory was a dead Tory,that may however be a bit extreme.

So starting from a position of wanting to kick Clegg I have changed my strategic thinking and now feel even this dreary little adjustment may cause the Tories more grief , so on that profound balancing of all the sophisticated arguments that are raging about for me it comes down to the simple question.

Who do I dislike most?

And this time there is the added bonus that the objectionable toss-pot Lord Reid of Authoritarianism is on the Tory side too!

Put me down as a YES.