DEAD MAN WALKING : THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF NICK CLEGG!

About a year back in WALKING THE GREEN MILE, a post I wrote about Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, I hinted at the man’s political genius after some defeat or other saw the Liberal Democrats go down the drain. Today however I feel compelled, at the beginning of this new Post, to make a confession to my readers. It is that I utterly failed to understand the true brilliance of his new philosophy. A fact brought home to me in the last few days by the voting behaviour of countless millions of people who understood it far better than I. His deeply thought out, awesome political strategy is clearly THAT LOSING IS ACTUALLY WINNING and that the fewer people who vote for him the more successful he actually is! How else can you explain his self-satisfied face after the recent election result and that he never came out on television eating the humblest of pie?

To him the result was a victory! Thus the people of Essex, Kent, the West Country and the North of England who dropped the Lib-Dems like a hot potato really endorsed him and his policies over immigration and Europe after all. Yes, he martyred himself! Did and said the right thing to save us all! Joined in a wretched Coalition with the Tories to save the country. Stood up for EU membership over the interests of the British people as their true savior. So the fact that hardly anyone voted for them in the European election and they lost so many council seats in local government was a great victory! Yes, it was the Lib-Dems who were the Party of high minded political morality over common expediency. The Party who said and did the right thing!

Well actually, if you believe that about a man and his Party who lied about student fees and who’s lied about just about everything since you’ll believe just about anything!

So when the voters of Essex realised that voting for Nick Clegg would help build a new bus terminal for Romanian immigrants using British taxpayers’ money… or pay for thousands of Romanian gypsies to come to London and rob British people in Oxford Street… or support building two hundred thousand new houses for East Europeans to step straight into with full housing benefits soon as they arrived, they all decided to support his brilliant new philosophy that losing was really winning and went out and voted for Nigel Farage instead!

Such a clever fellow. And Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister no less!

Looked at another way the choice for the electorate was clear. What would they rather have? A pint of beer and a fag, something transparent, or a Cleggy style pasty, the contents of which you simply don’t know but is mainly vegetable when British people prefer real chunks of beef. With the Lib-Dems it’s always likely to be white wine and veggies or a cheesy on a stick whereas Nigel’s clearly a full English breakfast bloke.

Nick Clegg however won’t go. Why should he when he keeps on winning like this? Soon he’ll get another serious kicking at the Newark bye election but it won’t matter because all the smoked salmon grandees of his wretched Party will go on telling him what a great winner he is, and he believes it because of his new philosophy you see! Talk about delusional! I suppose that’s why the Tories love him so much. And why at the next General Election he’s toast!       

But okay. If you want to stay with the man in his bunker till the Russians arrive you’re welcome!

THE PHENOMENON OF CELEBRITY

The phenomenon of celebrity is complex, besides which it’s been around for a very long time. Longer in fact than most people can imagine. Roman Emperors had their favorite gladiators and chariot racers, as did the crowds who watched them perform in arenas all over the Empire. Like the modern celebrities of today they were essentially entertainers. The most famous and successful gladiators for example were widely acclaimed and became public figures in their own right. However as I’ve said the nature of celebrity itself is complex, particularly regarding what it actually is and who creates it. In the English speaking world today celebrity has become something far greater than a handful of individuals from the world of entertainment whether it be sport or popular music. It has taken on the character of a culture, uniquely individual and existing for its own sake as much as a vast public that supports its existence.

Celebrity is no longer a function of individuals with powerful and highly diverse talents, simply because it is not necessarily the talents of those who have them that make them celebrity figures. Celebrity is something that is made. Something created by others. It is an artificial construct created to make those individuals something much more than they actually are, turning them from solitary existence into public property. The essence of celebrity in some cases is that the qualities and talents of some individuals is universalized, whether it is appearance or ability of some form or both. In other cases however, if no qualities or talent exist, it is simply the appearance and name of the individual that is externalized for public consumption. Thus many celebrities have no other public function than to exist as public figures within the culture itself. They exist to live as celebrity in the public eye simply by virtue of their existence without any talent or ability of any kind. The best way to describe such a thing is self-created nothingness whose private life and public antics are cultivated to create public interest.

Such`people are a self-perpetuating phenomenon that would not exist without public interest giving it life. It’s public interest that is the oxygen for this rarified form of existence that from the point of view of any outsider must seem utterly alien. A kind of life form created by typeface or electrons! Fundamentally do nothing people creating an existence purely for public consumption. And there’s the contradiction really. Fundamentally non-existing people who large sections of the public are madly curious about and sell newspapers and magazines. Magazines entirely devoted to figures from a cult of nothingness! But then the question remains, who is it that actually creates this cult of celebrity? Surely not the nonentities themselves. In themselves they are only its vapid participants. Is it then the public, the millions who chew on the carefully contrived not so private lives of celebrity meat? Only in a passive sense, perhaps. As the vultures who feed on it.

No, the cult of celebrity just like its members are creations of a mass media. These are the providers, the institutions that create those individual candidates for cult membership. The first stage lies in ascertaining their potentiality and the second developing a story around them. Finally all that remains is communicating their existence. Creating a public interest situation as it were. Physical appearance is important but so too are specific attributes of personality. In this sense the mass media, whether newspapers or television, are vultures in a much more fundamental sense. They feed off the creatures they create and feed off the public who buy their creations. They are the pimps of a large slice of modern Western culture. But then in truth it is not really they who create the cult in the first place. They only take a lucrative cut on the adulation created, that is from the profit they make out of it. No, the real promoters, those who use the media as a facility are those who have the greatest political need for it because the cult of celebrity is in its essence a social and political distraction. Something given to the lower classes of society free of charge to gain their attention, occupy their thoughts and divert both from their own concrete circumstances of life.

Not that those chosen for this role are averse to its attractions of glamour, status and financial reward. Such people are not above pimping themselves. Using agents to help them strut their stuff publically and make full use of the role given to them just as much as they themselves are touted out and pimped by the media establishment. It is a lecherous blood-sucking relationship indeed with all parties in on the act and the public culturally seduced, bought and sold as a mass of people often incapable of diverting their attention to the real social and economic ills surrounding them in the society in which they live.

The cult of celebrity is mainly directed at young people. People with a chance to make a difference but who have become apathetic and soporific since the 1960s, the time of the last great political involvement of British youth subsequent to which they have mostly been apathetic. This cannot be simply excused by what political parties and politicians have become in recent decades and the vile nature of both; neither can it be excused by the appalling consequences of the Thatcherite philosophy of individualism, social greed and a general dumbing down of critical intelligence. Neither has this disconnection from the life of our society been a function of a growing drugs culture or the steady growth an unfettered culture of drinking and boozing created by New Labour’s Tony Blair. Both of which you can see on the streets of major British towns and cities most weekend nights. No, the malaise runs deeper and its cause lies in the purposeful created alienation of our youth from what they experience around them and diverting their attention elsewhere.

In the twentieth century the cult of celebrity took off from the 1920s and became an important feature of American and British society mainly in the sports and entertainment industries. Hollywood, theatre and baseball stars for example while in Britain it was football. It was relatively dormant during the forties and fifties, returned marginally in the sixties then took off spectacularly from the 1990s into the heated celebrity cult fervor we have with us today. In Britain a kind of footballer celebrity madness along with the pathetic character of popular music idols who are more often lyrically illiterate than not. It’s the same in America though in the latter substitute basketball for football. Many participants have certain ability if not talent but anything there is infinitely magnified and blown up out of all proportion for public consumption and the creation of celebrity status for public adulation. Others, whose celebrity is wondrously mysterious have little to nothing to offer but have celebrity status all the same.

In the latter case what seems mysterious to the critical eye is indeed a magical thing. People who have virtually nothing to offer, have almost no redeemable feature and quite frankly virtually nothing going for them are referred to as celebrities and have celebrity status given to them by such wretched prompters as the BBC Television  and Radio Services along with the Murdoch outfit, Sky Television. It is the BBC particularly that encourages the creation of celebrity. Something that is essentially a political act. But then as anyone with any intelligence knows, the BBC is the British Establishment’s highly political news media channel. A major force in British society for maintaining social order. However, having pointed to the recent historical appearance of individual celebrity and its recent generalised explosion into a cult, it is worth noting that apropos my argument of celebrity having the key function of creating distraction, its  appearance is always connected with times of economic depression. The 1920s and 30s for example and certainly the last two decades.

In the United States, where economic depression has run unchecked for three decades or more the cult of celebrity has turned into a major industry, incorporating sport but far more the mass media, particularly television. In the latter case, countless programs all with advertiser support promoting celebrity entertainment shows and drama. And along with it countless magazines featuring their participants. Indeed, there are specialist channels entirely given over to celebrity performers! In Britain we have popular entertainment programs in which celebrities are created, often out of political ghouls or media ghouls of one form or another and turned into creations for public adulation in programs such as Strictly Come Dancing. What actually possesses people to like such people and scenes says a lot about those who watch and their own problems, same as those who hook in to celebrity drama reality shows. These audiences are indeed comprised of people who bond with those they observe. People who live other lives from their armchairs! Choose their heroes or villains without having to do much let alone think!

Countless people in our society have the ability to become their own heroes. Heroes of their own action and care. Instead they sell their own life force and often their conscience to distraction, whether it’s in the form of garrulous, smart and smarmy television show presenters and their participants or the flimsy infantile creatures of popular music or worst of all, the mostly offensively useless celebrities of football whose performances are more often than not an affront to the eye. And yet it is entirely natural that these creepy-crawlies are among the most cultivated creatures of celebrity in our society. Cultivated since the 1930s for an industrial working class but now more than ever in recent decades for those who are left. A tribalised institution for tribalised working communities many of which have long gone has turned into a tabloid back page obsession.

Celebrity and its cult has been sold to a passive, mainly uncritical public by those who know about the buying and selling of people, but then the public more often than not has been only too willing to buy what’s on offer. Give themselves up willingly to those without any real individual worth or talent just to be entertained. But then that’s really the problem isn’t it? What kind of entertainment is being dished up by creatures like Jedward? What it might actually mean is that the intrinsic character of entertainment itself is changing into something coming at them from such a low level that they can no longer recognised it for the awfulness it is. It’s a frightening prospect. Anyone now under twenty-five no longer having the ability to appreciate any song, sound or music from three, four or five decades back because there’s nothing these days to compare it with! Their critical, analytical facility, something nurtured historically, has been castrated.    

Where for example is this critical facility in relation to the current wave of the last decade of modern pop music. There has been an almost complete abandonment of melody, lyrics and vocal delivery. Most compositions if you can call them that are reduced to a few words repeated over and over, neither clearly pronounced nor understood, often sandwiched between heavy electronic syncopation, emerging as little more than a rasping sound in an, at best, moronic tuneless indulgence. Rap music on the other hand is a kind of structured oral indulgence of supposedly meaningful lyrics which are often nothing more than culturally or sexually abusive, lauded because it is supposedly representative of black Caribbean culture. Both are soulless and lacking in harmony but they and their performers promoted as performing artists for British youth.

Fashion in creating celebrity status is everything. Never mind the awfulness of the music. Concentrate on the performer. In this way, what became known as boy and girl bands achieved huge celebrity status in recent decades from Bros to The Spice Girls. The carefully timed, carefully promoted so called musical releases of the latter achieved huge financial success for their financial backers while the girl group itself achieved almost iconic status for a song most of whose words repeated over and over, shall I tell you what I want what I really really want. Each Spice Girl was individually promoted by the media to an almost shameless degree and elevated to royal status in the world of popular music before their money making potential began to drain. The creation of celebrity in this case as in so many others in this kind of febrile world specifically designed to exploit youth was never anything more than a shameless money making device whose cast has always comprised the financial promoters, the media publicists and the untalented performers plucked out of nowhere to gain a brief carefully contrived moment of fame for being something instead of actually nothing.

There are examples of this shameless enough to make any intelligent person’s hair curl. Here I’m thinking of Michael Jackson.

Celebrity however is not limited to sport and popular music. One of the most iconic celebrities of recent times has been Princess Diana, she of the wretched marriage to Britain’s future monarch. You know him don’t you? The one who talks to flowers, believes in crackpot ideas like homeopathic medicine and thinks that President Putin behaved like a Nazi in the Ukraine. Well let me tell you Little Lord Fauntleroy that the Nazis brutally murdered five million Soviet civilians in the Ukraine between 1941 and 1944 including large numbers of Jews so I suggest that you shut your ugly gob. Furthermore Putin’s baby brother who he barely knew died in Leningrad while it was under siege by the Nazis in the Second World War. Altogether your remarks are not only insulting but damnably insensitive. Back to your celebrity wife who publically accused you of cheating on your marriage and ended up loathing you. Almost from the beginning the British media took hold of her in their best disgusting manner and refused to let go. The  relationship between Princess and news-pimps however was two way and grossly exploitative. Both fed off each other throughout. The media in its usual crawling, sycophantic manner of vampires who simply can’t help themselves, the Princess successfully using it to put herself about. It was they who propelled her into the fixed orbit of eternal public adoration where she still remains so long after her death. A celebrity still orbiting the hearts of millions of British across the whole social class structure.

There’s celebrity and celebrity. Diana was someone who had no special talent going for her, but then she didn’t need to. She was married to royalty but came down to Earth to be the public’s Princess. Came down from heaven to Earth to be one of us and returned there to shine there immortal. Only Michael Jackson currently comes near to having that kind of status.

What then is celebrity when all’s said and done? What do large groups of people perceive in individuals that captures their attention, their imagination, their interest, their fascination and even more fundamental, their devotion? Is it some kind of emotional or spiritual bond? Something that connects what they perceive, some quality or ability, to themselves? If that is indeed the case then it’s a quality or ability that switches on the same perception in many. This leads to the conclusion that whatever it is, many groups of people have that same something within them, never mind whether it’s for a footballer, popular music performer or television personality, all of whom, by the way, whether Royal or not, are performers. The real question is, what is that something? To my mind it’s a combination of things. A need to worship something seemingly attractive and greater than themselves… a need to connect into a popular phenomenon like a political leader or group of musicians like a rock band. Why for example do huge numbers of youths and adults attend open air pop music concerts? It couldn’t be the music itself because the lyrics are convoluted and barely audible. No, it’s a case of being there and identifying with the group itself, in essence its celebrity.

Identification is the vehicle, but identification between what? Something within you and something in them! In you it’s a need. Understood by those who promote. In them it’s a facility to present. Your need and their offering! Interaction at a level of psyche. But then is this need to love and adore, if that’s what it actually is, in any way rational? Well actually it’s not and that’s the key to it all. It’s a basic personality disorder! Celebrity taps into an irrational need in so many people, something well understood by those who seek to manipulate, whether it’s the social media pimps who promote people like products or the barely hidden socio-political Establishment of power and wealth? It is they who exploit the generalised personality disorder within the general public. Entertainment, an essentially passive process, is activated for the purpose of participation, of bonding with the performer. You are removed from the reality of life to an emotional somewhere else. Temporarily or permanently damaged as a social actor.

Fine. Go on worshipping your Premier Star or Celebrity media performer trying to get out of somewhere or other. They live in mansions. You eat your fish and chips. And do you really care anymore anyway? That’s the real question. Are you still ABLE to care anymore, or has celebrity taken that away from you too?  

A BRIEF ELECTION MESSAGE FROM THE DON’T VOTE LIBERAL DEMOCRAT ELECTION CAMPAIGN

Herewith a sample of the sheer duplicity of the Liberal Democrats in their leaflet for the coming elections.

Banner Headlines

 

RIGHT. SIMPLE QUESTION. SO WHO HAVE YOU PEOPLE BEEN WORKING WITH SO CLOSELY IN COALITION GOVERNMENT OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS?

 

IF EVER THERE WAS A MORE WRETCHED EXAMPLE OF SHEER OPPORTUNISM IN BRITISH POLITICS TODAY THEN THIS IS IT.

 

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS WILL DO OR SAY ANYTHING FOR YOUR VOTE

 

REMEMBER THE FALSE PROMISES THEY MADE. REMEMBER THEIR LIES AND THEIR BULLSHIT.                             

 

DON’T GIVE IT TO THEM! DON’T VOTE LIBERAL DEMOCRAT!

NIGEL FARAGE : DARK KNIGHT RISING

In recent days we’ve experienced the dismal almost obscene spectacle of Nick Clegg accusing everyone thinking about voting anti-European in this week’s coming elections of being anti-British and unpatriotic. That’s unpatriotic! Get it? In other words if you don’t vote for what the Liberal Democrats want more than anything else, i.e. Britain staying in Europe, you are being unpatriotic. Yes you tell it to us Nick. If we don’t vote for you and your mob then we’re all being anti-British. Now you really need some nerve telling us that. Quite frankly it sounds like you and your Party are desperate, coming out with that kind of stunt on the eve of the elections. But then as most people know, having collaborated with the Tories for years, you and your Party are at rock bottom in the opinion polls and have every reason to be scared. Scared enough to threaten everyone with the unpatriotic tag if they turn their backs on you and your chums in Europe.

Well you know what they call that kind of thing Nick. Someone already said it before me. Thomas Carlyle if memory serves quite a while back. Patriotism he suggested was the last refuge of a scoundrel. Well patriotism has many faces. Some are good, others that go with plain political opportunism stink. In your case it’s the latter and most of the British electorate as you’ll find out next week will confirm!

The main focus of your attack is Euro-sceptic Dark Knight Rising Nigel Farage, the chief protagonist of the Get Out of Europe Campaign and enemy of just about everyone in the British political establishment right now. Whether it’s come from the left, right or center, he’s been a major target in recent weeks of those  seeking to cause him political or personal damage at every opportunity given. There’s been hardly a day when he hasn’t been under one kind of hammer or another. In the newspapers on a regular basis for something he’s supposed to have said or hasn’t. For making some kind of personal or political gaffe blown up out of all proportion and exaggerated into some kind of major mistake thereby demonstrating his ignorance or ineptitude, or even gleefully showing him being attacked with eggs on the BBC Establishment news channel. Everything carefully done to demean and harm the reputation of a man who has above all kept the major anti-European message of himself and his Party focused and sharp, steadfastly refusing to enter the smelly melee of the British political establishment and its endless dirty dealing.

It is this that has won him the enmity of all the main party politicians who’ve endlessly put out ambivalent or dodgy promises about their Party’s attitude to membership of the EU whereas Nigel Farage and UKIP are unequivocal. THEY WANT OUT OF EUROPE. There is a very real problem for these political leaders with such a message. They know that a very large number of the British people support it and that Farage and his Party could well emerge at the top or very close to it at these coming elections. Something that’s a very clear signal of where the electorate actually stands in its support for Europe! It’s a terrifying prospect for the Tory Party which actually wants to keep Britain in the EU and even more terrifying for Clegg and his Lib-Dem Collaborators who’ve built so much of their political message around wanting to keep Britain in! These people, already expecting a serious backlash for their years of opportunism, are now dreading an additional kick in the teeth for their endless litany of we love immigrants from Europe.  

Thus we have his desperate attack on everyone thinking of voting UKIP, Euro-sceptic and Nigel Farage. It’s unpatriotic he calls it when it’s actually the last refuge of a man in a cold sweat desperate to keep his Party falling off the edge of a cliff.

Well you and your mob are actually going to fall off the edge of a cliff with the electorate doing the pushing. And they’ll be pushing on behalf of Nigel Farage. He’s Britain’s new political dark knight rising. Attacked by the British National Party of all parties for being extremist and racist because he wants to reduce the general weight of immigration into this country, attacked by the Labour Party and Trades Unions for being extremist… in terms of social and economic policy not far from the mark… and attacked by the Tory Party as being someone who wants to take hold of their mantra from the hard right. Actually why no-one has yet compared him to Boris Johnson is something of a mystery. The main message from Farage though is Euro-sceptic and sharp whereas the rhetoric from Johnson is contortionist hard right bumbling bluster. Can you imagine the two working together?

Boris Johnson wants to be populist. Nigel Farage doesn’t have to. His message to the British people is deep rooted and fundamental. It’s based on everything they know and see about Europe today. Except when they’re on holiday there that is! Europeans are silly, different. In the south too often lazy. In the east, nasty. With the exception of the Germans, not very good at doing things. And the French are especially silly! The British on the other hand are a people apart. Living on an island fortress apart! We are we and they are a mixture of they. We really don’t dislike them at all but we just don’t want to be part of them when they all join up together and become THEM. That’s because we’re US. The Tories and Lib-Dems want to be part of THEM for the sake of business opportunity. Labour’s not viscerally sure, not absolutely convinced, but thinks it’s a good idea to stay where we are and mumbles a mixed message to that effect.

The message is economic or social but none of it is emotionally personal. Except that is the message of UKIP and its dark knight. Sure, there are elements of their message that are both, but fundamental and underlying it all is the message of difference. That we are British, living on an island off Europe. There have been times in the past when one way or another we’ve been connected to Europe but that was mainly for royal and dynastic purposes. Never, historically, for the fundamental interests of the British people. If we’re European in any way it’s at best secondary and we don’t want to be part of something that we’re actually NOT. It’s the visceral, emotional character of UKIP’s message that strikes home with such force and correspondence in the mind of the British electorate, particularly the English. It rings the bell of patriotism so very different to that pulled by Nick Clegg. He pulls it for IN for reasons economic, the dark knight pulls it for OUT for reasons emotional.

When the pasty-faced Clegg is attacked for political reasons, he looks pasty faced. When Farage is attacked face to face on television he’s clearly irritated but nonetheless robust in defence. The pressure though is clearly telling and recently his press spokesman piled in to the rescue. Not that his boss needed it. In fact you get the feeling that although seriously cheesed he’s more than capable of looking after himself. What clearly does irritate him if anything is the often pointless, sometimes clearly malicious, Establishment contrived nature of the these attacks. They’re all frightened of him so they all endlessly pile in on a well-calculated feeding frenzy carefully set up to do him in. It’s this that he so clearly resents. That the attacks are so often personal as much as political. He clearly has nothing but contempt for the Establishment, whether it’s political, the media or the State and this Establishment would like to do nothing more than do this major political new boy on the scene well and truly in, only they can’t! He’s irrepressible! The more tricks they try the more he comes bubbling up. His flotation devices the confidence he acquires from the public support of his message on Europe. This Dark Knight Rising has the electorate beneath him. His endless buoyant demeanor riding on a swelling tide of emotion from many millions. His message, their sentiment.

It won’t be long now as to whether we’ll see him fall off his horse.

Having made these observations however it is only fair to say that there is another whole side to the story of the British and Europe. UKIP and its leader draw the bulk of their support from the working and lower middle classes. Those who regularly visit Mediterranean, south European and Turkish resorts for package deal holidays. The disgusting alcohol fuelled drunken, obscene, lewd public behaviour of British youths aged 15-25 from these groups, often physically threatening and violent, is a regular feature of life in beach resorts and cities across Europe and is only tolerated because of the money they bring in to seriously impoverished regions like the Spanish Costas, the Black Sea resorts of Bulgaria and holiday destinations of Greece. The behaviour of these youths, both boys and girls, is offensive in the extreme and only tolerated because of the money they spend. However it has given the British a filthy reputation across Europe. Their adult peer groups alas do little to counter this and quite frankly if anything only enhance it with public displays of personal stupidity, cultural disrespect and gross insensitivity, all very loud and East Enders. You only need to hear them talking to want to get away from them fast.

True, with UKIP at their head they may be contemptuous of Europeans and Europe. True the continent produced a hatful of nasties last century and it took British courage to help sort it all out, but today things are different. As contemptuous as large numbers of British people are about Europeans and their institutions, so large numbers of Europeans really don’t like us at all. They don’t like the way British people behave in their country and they don’t like their loudness and drunken arrogance. Europe and Britain… it actually cuts both ways! A large part of our population doesn’t like them and many of them just don’t like us.

It’s a resentment fuelled over here by UKIP. Their view that so long as Britain remains within the EU family, this United Nations of Europe want to take away our independent sovereign power and subjugate us to their own order. They ask, why stay married at all? A very fair question! On a personal level there’s clearly not a lot of love lost. In terms of the Clegg-Lib-Dem argument of business and jobs, Europe provides a hatful of business opportunities that quite frankly might not last long. Working people and small business won’t get a lot out of it so if there’s mutual dislike and disrespect why bother at all?

That’s the real key to it all and next week the Dark Knight WON’T fall off his horse. Putting it simply we are beginning a time of dangerous days. Support for UKIP is being won on an anti-European stance through the issue of immigration, and it’s being won by a populist with social and economic policies that are definitely anti-working class. The Dark Knight needs the working class vote over Europe after which he’ll need the lower middle class vote in next year’s General Election. After next week all kinds of people will flock to his cause along with plenty of money. He’ll sharpen his act. Develop a powerful machine. Become someone the so called great and the good will all want to know! Especially the media. All reasoned protest against a fast incoming tide dumbed down. Hidden away. His well-guarded rallies growing larger and larger.

Just remember, you were there at the time. At the beginning. When it was all just a jovial popular man and a whisper. You liked the novelty of it all. Sat back and silently watched it all grow. And when you began to feel worried it was already too late. All those boys and girls in their uniforms so you weren’t able to say anything. It was so quiet, the way it all started. You thought the man was quite marvellous yourself. That dapper face. That velvet collar. That half pint of beer.

And now it’s come to this you still don’t know how it happened. Even though you were there at the time. Even though you were part of it all. It was you who let it happen. Don’t you remember? Don’t you honestly remember how you let it all happen? Because you didn’t want to make a difference you stayed silent. Just went along with it all when the Dark Knight became a focus for everyone’s troubles. That’s when the curtain came down and began the dark knight for us all.   

THE EURO-SICKENER SONG CONTEST OF 2014

Right, are you ready to puke? Well here goes! This year’s Eurovision Song Contest was clearly taken over by the gay community of Copenhagen with the vast majority of the audience clearly gay men. Indeed it could be argued that the contest was taken over across Europe by the gay and transvestite community because the clear winner was an Austrian transvestite Drag Queen with a beard made up in every way to look a woman with the name of Conchita. His song, or was it hers, Rise Like a Phoenix, wasn’t the best on offer but it was certainly the most sexually political and drew huge support across Europe.

Her appearance wasn’t really attractive at all. There was something deeply ambiguous, even repulsive, about a good looking woman with a beard but then she wasn’t a woman, just a man pretending to be one. In her victory speech Conchita claimed she’d won for all those who’d experienced discrimination! What Conchita?

Do you mean the vast majority of straight men as well who experienced your offering? True, no-one forced them to. They could have switched off! However my dear it wasn’t only your appearance and performance that was puke-worthy. That was only a small part of the overall offering last night. What I’m referring to was the whole wretched character of this pan-European pantomime of flashing lights, untalented pretty-boy dummies, ghastly lyrics and titty girls who pranced on stage like jerky puppets for their countries.

Transvestites and gays apart, the whole thing was camp to the n’th degree. A riot of glitzy outrageous camp that perfectly suited the vast, showy, out of the closet, supposedly liberated gay community of Europe who believes itself to be liberated, whatever that means. But in sober judgement, what it may in fact mean is that they are liberated from everything except their own prejudices and feel themselves to be free to be prejudiced against all those who do not share the same values. There was much the same awfulness about this year’s contest as there’s been in others before. It’s only the character that’s changed and from what was so visible from the Copenhagen audience it had indeed become a gay event.

The comments I immediately wrote down about some of the performances might prove interesting.

Montenegro

A female ice skater showing superb form under an extra-short skirt and lyrics that meant nothing to anyone else in Europe sung by a very respectable pop group.

Poland

Quaint girls in short national costume shouting incomprehensible words in a ludicrous language with agricultural motifs of cows and milk. Girls with big titties suggestively and erotically milking and churning! All done in best tart style.

Greece

Jumping pretty-boys twirling to a catchy tune and strutting around like tarts singing a lyric rap-style.

Austria

Drag act. Girl with beard. Nauseous appearance and song. Song of transsexual character cheered by most gay male audience. Performer sickening in appearance to my wife.

Germany

Female group. Catchy tune.

Sweden

Song, Undo, sung by prosaic blonde. Passionate face movement entirely artificial.

France

Catchy lively number sung by springy dancing male group strangely dressed. Good rhythm, zany silly performance. Typically zany-French.

Russia

Song, Shine, sung in English. Superb sky, cloud and stars lumination graphics. Lyrics unclear. Group endlessly booed by Copenhagen audience in clear disapproval of Russia’s perceived anti-gay policies.

Italy

Frenetic performance in Italian by female vocalist. Male group actively aggravating. Singer ends up lying on the floor shaking her legs.

Slovenia

Song entitled Round and Round. Female flautist singing in Slovenian, or was it English? Sounded horrible. The ultimate torture for Nigel Farage, being forced to listen to the Eurovision Song Contest!

Finland

Pretty-Boy band in silver jackets. Manic beat. Breakneck delivery of vocal. Endlessly blinding flashlights. A stupendous cacophony.

Spain

Dancing in the Rain. In Spanish. All in heavy simulated rain. Manically sung vocal. Facial movement of performer overtly sexual. 90% percent of words were dancing in the rain!

Hungary

Ghastly lyrics in English. Auto-erotic male-female performance. All seemed mighty peculiar.

San Marino

Maybe. Dreadful lyrics. Shouted rather than sung. A kind of nothing performance.

United Kingdom

Children of the Universe sung by Molly. Singing voice awful. Lyrics shouted. Some of the words such as a continual power to the people some kind of joke or so it seemed. Singer’s face ugly. Title words endlessly sung along with power to the people as a kind of ultra-silly radical refrain.

My final comment when all the performances were over would most definitely not have been in keeping with the sentiments of the audience… We want to see more of  those dirty cock-sucking Polish milk-maids.

 

And while we waited for the results from the voters of Europe our Danish hosts thought they would give us a real treat, a tour proudly given of Copenhagen’s European Song Contest Museum. This was something so utterly cringe making, so pathetic that it would have definitely given Nigel Farage heart failure had he witnessed its exhibits! A forced tour of this hateful memorial to a hateful institution that could only be constructed in Denmark! You know, the place where they kill giraffes in their zoos!

 

Finally as a spectacle it was once again worth watching for its sheer unmitigated awfulness. For men, to catch side of fleshy good looking girls. For gays, to take in the twirly pretty-boys. And for the British compere Graham Norton to give the audience here in Britain a long cynical laugh.

 

Europe, we like you on television three hours a year but apart from that you can stick it. That is, apart from those Polish milk-maids.

SICKIES OF THE WEEK

Sick jokes, I mean seriously sick jokes, don’t come any better than anything involving the Liberal Democrats. Quite frankly, just about anything connected in any way to this unrivalled gang of political shysters is enough to give anyone a belly laugh, that is unless you’re one of them yourself and you’re head’s so far up your own arse that you think that the whole world revolves you and your delusions let alone the gang of political rascals currently sitting in Coalition with the Tories.

Beg pardon! Did I call them shysters and a gang of political rascals? If so I’ve done everyone with any sense of honesty and decency a major injustice! These smelly little Jack-the Lads are far more stinky than that so let’s take a look. Fingers to your nose? Okay then. A few days back, opening the Liberal Democrats campaign for the May local elections, Party leader Nick Clegg urged his followers to shout their achievements in Coalition Government from the rooftops!

Bold as brass. Yeah, yell it from the rooftops. We’ve come down from the mountain and now we can tell it to the world… Okay, you tell it Nick but between me and you most people just don’t know what you’re talking about and if they think they do they’re even more deluded than everyone thinks! Voting Liberal Democrat for these people is a plain kind of sickness, much like the millions of turds straight out the sewers of Essex who repeatedly voted for Thatcher in the 1980’s.

The substance of these so called achievements that he and his gang of Coalition henchmen would like to have us consider important are all those things they claim to have prevented their nasty Tory allies from doing! Well if your partners in Coalition were so nasty then why the fuck did you join them? Oh yes, sorry I forgot. It was specially to prevent them doing those things! For example, like attacking the benefits system for disabled and needy people whose lives were already so badly damaged and stressed… like preventing people in prison being sent books to read… like reducing housing benefits for young people… like forcing people to take offers of zero hours work contracts or else lose their employment benefit… like ensuring that the scandal of undercover police operatives who had sexual relations with women they were spying on was swept under the carpet… like staying silent about every recent dirty act of British foreign policy…

Just a few of the many wretched acts of meanness and injustice with which you’ve collaborated, so pray tell us then Mister Clegg, exactly what have you and your Liberal Democrat colleagues in Coalition done that you can so proudly shout from the rooftops.  

Well I’ll mention a few of the things that you’ve actually done.  Firstly, when your friend Ed Davey took over as Secretary of State for Energy he set up an Energy Suppliers’ Cartel in his very own ministerial backyard with executives from the big six energy suppliers working there. The result of this has been that during your time in Coalition, people’s energy bills have skyrocketed! As for cheesy Ed who took over from jail-time Chris Huhne, he just keeps wringing his hands. Telling everyone that there’s nothing he can do! Alas, this kind of bull doesn’t work anymore, not with the huge profits the energy companies are making. Everyone knows that all this Liberal Democrat hand wringing is phony.

Next rascal up is dear old Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business. The man who promised to clean up the banks and their illegal practices, do away with the outrageous bonuses they pay their executives along with all the vast volume of filthy malpractice going on in the City. Yes, here he was. Mister Clean! Going to sort it all out and clean it all up! That said he took on the task of privatizing the Royal Mail. A liberal democrat doing the very thing done by his old enemy the Thatcher Government! So let’s take a look at how clean it all was. Firstly he hired Lazard Brothers, a powerful international bank to do the job. Secondly, he and the bank worked out the share price for the flotation on the London Stock Exchange. It was surprisingly low, in the mid three to four pounds range. Strange that! Immediately it came on the market huge blocks of shares were snapped up by powerful institutional investors including the bank managing the sale, Lazard Brothers! Well whoopee, and what do you know… well the share price shot up three quid or more within hours of the flotation and Lazard Brothers flogged off what it got hold of making itself a cozy eight million!

Nice one, but more was to come. For arranging the share sale for Vince the bank charged him, which means you and I the taxpayer, close to two million! Total profit out of the deal for Lazard Brothers around ten million. And the big question that needs to be asked is who was it who set the share price so low. The answer is clear, the indignantly Mister Clean of the Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable. Never mind that the staggeringly low share price cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions. Never mind that the bank he chose to fix it all fixed themselves with a nice little profit.

Yes Nick Clegg, you and your friends go shout your rotten privatization of the Royal Mail from the rooftops just like everything else you’ve been up to and claim it was a major success. TROUBLE IS NO-ONE BELIEVES YOU ANYMORE!

What you and your Coalition mates have actually done for the people of this country is NOTHING. Unless, that is, they started out rich. For the poor, the homeless, the needy, the low paid and the victims of police violence and misconduct you have done nothing. The British people know you and your party by now. They’ve heard you lie, bluster, make false promises and talk bullshit. They know that the Lib-Dems are the Party of unrestricted mass immigration from Europe and just about anywhere else.

So my first SICKIE OF THE WEEK is party leader Nick Clegg telling his followers to be proud of their party’s achievements in Government.

And if anyone still believes all that bullshit coming out of your mouth then they’ve got to be even thicker, even more deluded than you!

 

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Those who saw Jon Snow, the British media’s fawning Third World apologist-in-chief interviewing the petite Nigerian Minister of Finance all dolled up to the nines for the occasion in an utterly ridiculous pink and white ethnic get up would have laughed themselves silly then laughed even more at his crawling adulation for the little fat lady while expressing his concern that she and her colleagues in Government might have done more to rescue hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped by a gang of Islamic terrorists.

Oh dear, oh dear, to our Western listeners it seems that you just haven’t been doing enough and we’re all so very concerned. So very, very concerned…

Perhaps someone should have told arse-kisser Snow that the Nigerian Government and its President hadn’t done much because they didn’t want to do much! Didn’t you see it on the other news channels Jon? The hundreds of anguished mothers of the kidnapped girls along with their friends and campaign supporters had sent their representative to meet with the President’s wife to discuss the whole issue and after their meeting, well what do you think happened? The police were waiting outside, quickly arrested  the good lady and took her away to an unknown destination from which she’s so far failed to emerge!

The issue of the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls has now become a kind of international celebrity cause with  all kinds of people hot to get in on the act. Cheesy celebrity politicians like  Hilary Clinton, always hungry for a bit of easy publicity and then Gordon Brown, United Nations representative for something or other glaring at us straight out Nigeria and trying to look all benevolent. Well benevolent to the British people you never were mister so kindly get your sorry arse out of our faces because we don’t want to see you. Not after you and your banker friendly economic policies caused such damage to the lives of the poor. How is it that people like this can get jobs with the United Nations and cover themselves with respectability after all the dirty things that they’ve done?

Such political opportunists alas are just the beginning of the whole sickie show. Next comes Hollywood and  the world of pop music! All of them climbing in on the act from UN celebrity girl Angelina Jolie to Africa good causes star Celebrity Bob. Both naturally favorites with Channel Four! And now, not to be outdone by the Entertainment Mob comes the President’s wife Michelle Obama with a speech straight out the White House. Oh goody gumdrops Michelle. You so deeply concerned about the education of girls in West Africa and all! Pray tell us when you’re planning to leave your life of luxury and go live out there for a year in a mud hut so you can really know what it’s like?  

It’s a sickening sign of the times that Third World corruption,  political stupidity and greed becomes an  advantageous focal point for celebrity involvement and a cheery zest for do-gooding and meddling.

That said, there’s another side to the story of an Islamist terrorist kidnapping of children. With those big oil fields in the Niger Delta firmly in mind and President Obama already having expressed the necessary  outrage, the United States has worked fast to get in on the ground by sending political and military personnel. It must sound like a plateful of dollars to the ever greedy Nigerian political establishment, themselves responsible in the first place for failing to protect their female school pupils by tackling a major Islamic insurrection in the north of their country. It’s a kind of sick joke all round. Britain, former colonial masters with major oil development and export interests already established in the Delta initially had to stay quiet and keep its mouth shut about sending aid lest it be accused of any neo-colonialist shit. It meant leaving it all to the Americans and being fearful of any nasty oil deals once they’d got their feet in! Free the kidnapped girls then get their dabs on the oil. They did something similar to the British before in Saudi Arabia during the 1920’s! However now Obama’s sent his boys over, Wild Bill Hague’s finally opened his gob and promised likewise. Keep an eye out for the girls and likewise Shell, BP and the gushing black gold. Just think of the political power of the 250 virgins, Wild Bill!             

 

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Another sickie of the week relates to the recent imprisonment of celebrity publicist Max Clifford for sexual offences against women that occurred thirty years back. With his case having become such a major media event it is only fair to ask why this same media has been silent about the conduct of undercover policemen having sexual relationships with women with whom they’d formed liaisons for the purpose of political spying. In cases already documented, inherent in such relationships were promises of longevity by men who were already married and had families!  One therefore wonder whether these men, having adopted similar practices of pretension, false promise and trickery as in the case of Max Clifford, will be arrested for indecently exposing themselves to and penetrating the women they were spying on?

So far none of these police operatives have been prosecuted and are never likely to be. The reason is only too plain. The criminal justice system i.e. the State, regarded Max Clifford’s conduct as personal whereas they view the conduct of the police as political. Sexual activity is seen as part of their line of duty as political spies. Their sexual conduct served a political purpose so it wasn’t sexual misconduct at all! Its character was essentially political and therefore excusable by the political establishment and of course the Crown Prosecution Service who act on the advice of the police!

And yes, most of this filthy behaviour went on during the time of a Labour Government whose Home Secretaries gave it their blessing. Labour! A supposedly ethical Party! It’s a bit like turning a blind eye to John Prescott’s infamous sausage!

Now isn’t that a real sickie?

And here’s another! Your Coalition Government will allow the Inland Revenue to arbitrarily take money from your bank account in lieu of taxation they think you owe! Now this of course only refers to the general public with a handful of small business chucked in. Who it most definitely DOES NOT refer to are the tax avoiding multinational corporations, the seriously big financial operators who with good advice from the Inland Revenue itself are often able to reduce their tax liabilities to zilch. It’s a bit of a sickie you see. If the Coalition closed all the loopholes and dodges they’d be able to finance free higher education… do away with tuition fees just like the Liberal Democrats promised… give the desperately homeless homes to live in. All this and so much more. But no, none of these things. The multinationals are allowed to get away with blue murder, what with Danny Alexander being Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury and all!

It’s just another one of those sickeners so prevalent in our society today that so many just turn a blind eye to.  

 

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Once again, yet another celebrity children’s entertainer in the news. The oh so jokey, friendly face of Australia’s Rolf Harris, on trial for failing to tie his kangaroo down, may unlike policeman’s friend Jimmy Savile, knighted for services to child entertainment no less, find his hide hanging on the shed of the British penal system if everything the prosecution are alleging about him is accepted by the jury. Still, it’s nothing to what Savile himself and Liberal Democrat child molester Cyril Smith got away with simply by dying!

What is it with these entertainers who joke and strum their way through a media only too happy to promote their every publicity gimmick and song? What it actually is as a matter of fact is a marriage of opportunity, personal inclination and a fundamental lack of self-control. They make the most of opportunity when it arises, feeling they’re protected by their own status. It might have been the case in the Sixties and Seventies, a time when so many of these celebrity sexual misdeeds cases hark back to but not anymore. Not with the police trawling for high profile cases and the mass media perennially hot for celebrity dirt.

There’s a darkness coming over the face of the land and only those with naughty fingers will know what they’re possibly in for. It’s a sickener for celebrity dirt. A case of the vast morass of the socially unknown getting off on the misfortunes of those who made their money simply by sticking their heads out the top of the parapets and warbling. It’s a time for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to come calling… The Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Vampire Legal Profession and the Yellow End of Publicity!   

 

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Another sick joke for you. British so called space scientist Colin Pillinger has died. We all remember how this West Country Catweazle figure delighted us all in 2003 with his supervision of the landing on Mars of Britain’s Beagle Spacecraft. Indeed it was splendid entertainment for the millions who watched. With his death Pillinger has been hailed by BBC television as one of Britain’s special kind of do it yourself scientific immortals with that only too special British genius. Others however might venture a somewhat more caustic interpretation of his organisation of the Mars landing as a catastrophic cock up specially designed for national television geeks, royals and other fun lovers hot to get in on the act!

We all got it minute by minute with the Duke of York chucked in to give the proceedings respectability. Yes the royals were in on a glorious British achievement of science and technology with everything on track for the craft to make a famous world event success story. It had travelled millions of miles through space with Pillinger going for glory. With the tension revved up to fever pitch down it went for a momentous landing on Mars when suddenly, whoops, it disappeared! Never mind, it was just a momentary blip. The man in charge would soon find it again and all would be well! The seconds and minutes ran by with excuses being rolled out by Pillinger and his team of enthusiasts. Meanwhile faces were getting longer. It should have been down by now, all the systems were working and guidance control functioning, only it wasn’t. In fact nothing seemed to be working!

Twenty minutes, half an hour, then an hour passed. Not to worry! They’d pick up the signal again and find it all soon! Time ran by. After a couple of hours it became palpably clear that no-one knew anything or had any idea about what might have happened and what had first been rolled out as a mystery gradually evolved into something inexplicable and finally a loss! Faces grew redder and longer and the good old Duke of York eventually magically departed the scene. Duty elsewhere had called! It was a major oh dear situation with Pillinger refusing to give up until many hours later when the craft was officially declared LOST. In fact nobody knew where it was or what had happened to it and his great moment of triumph had turned into a sack of shit. All those months of science, technology and planning wasted let alone cost.

Oh dear, oh dear! The establishment television channel was forced to make the best of it with hopeful detection being made in the coming days, but the days came and went and Pillinger’s Beagle Spacecraft could have crashed landed just about anywhere, hard as that might have been to achieve! Neither the head of the project nor anyone else had a clue. Nonetheless the man toughed it all out. You know how these projects went… unforeseen circumstances and all that… the smallest something in a highly complex system malfunctioning and causing everything to go wrong! Excuses had to be found and the abject failure that it actually was massaged into something presentable. Meanwhile, a few weeks later with nothing found or known the whole thing slipped out of the news as another example of great British innovation and technical achievement not having quite made it but setting a glorious example for others to follow. You know how the BBC finds words to conjure up bullshit. It was a triumphant failure no less and Colin Catweazle Pillinger went down as one of those great eccentric geniuses of British science!

The whole televised process of an expected triumphant landing however, full of geekish Heath Robinson character, was important as a spectacle. We were all in on it so the awfulness of the failure had to be massaged away. There was no success, no orgasm of climax, just a big damp squib with Pillinger’s name all over it. From that time on he was never trusted with anything big in any space program ever again and his name disappeared out of the news. And along with his name and appearance, and the fact that the Beagle never was found, the word pillock silently accompanied his failure. He died eleven years later with the BBC still portraying him as the grey eminence of the British space program, a kind of funky Doctor Who without a police box. As for the Beagle itself it could be just about anywhere. In small pieces that is!

 

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Just one last sick joke for you to consider. Has anyone been prosecuted or taken to task by the Food Standards Agency over the Great British Horsemeat Scandal? Something that was the responsibility of Owen Patterson’s Department. You remember him don’t you… The Tory Party’s King Canute of the Somerset Levels!

No of course not. No-one’s been prosecuted for perpetrating that major fraud. No abattoirs, no meat processing plants, no supermarkets. No-one!

Okay, have any British bankers or banking executives been prosecuted for perpetrating the Libor bank rate fraud or for laundering drugs money for the Mexican drugs cartels?

No of course not! Don’t be a sickie!

Okay, has any policemen been convicted for their conduct during the Hillsborough Disaster?

No of course not! Don’t be a sickie!

Their behaviour was regarded as so impeccably decent that day that some of them have been promoted!

Has any policeman been prosecuted for shooting dead innocent unarmed civilians or been held responsible for causing the death of civilians in police custody?

No of course not! Don’t be a sickie!

Have any multinational corporations been prosecuted for tax avoidance?

Are you kidding?

NASTIES IN THE NEWS

There’s almost nothing the British people like reading about more than nasty folk in the news. People temporarily caught in the glare of national attention for doing some kind of serious wrong. They’re manna from heaven for a mass media that well understands an ugly truth, not so much about the wrongdoing itself but that stories about the misdeeds of others perversely makes people feel good about themselves. It’s this that sells newspapers and guarantees a goggle-eyed attention to television. And all the more so if the perpetrator just happens to be a celebrity. The downfall of celebrities is such sweet music in the ears of so many!

Some of my prime candidates for nasties in the news today however are not so much celebrities but the  nastiness itself, the first two of which are products of one of the prime arenas for abysmal conduct anywhere in the world today, namely the United States. In recent days a German teenager was shot dead in Montana for allegedly trespassing in someone’s garage. He wasn’t killed for stealing anything but shot with a rifle simply because he was there! The elderly oh so respectable killer has claimed that the laws of the state of Montana allowed him to take such action in the name of self defence and in this he may be correct! It may also be correct to say that the laws of so many states of this gun mad, shooting mad country allow its population to pump bullets into each other or just about anyone else they don’t like the look of. And alongside this their state and federal police have the lawful ability to do likewise.

The German father of the murdered teenager may have expressed outrage at his exchange student son’s killing, describing America as a cowboy society, but that’s looking at it from a European angle. One that is in theory more enlightened. However it’s all too easy for any American to swing round and point a deadly finger at Germany for its only too recent horrendous misdeeds. Time has moved on but the stain still remains. Even so Germany and its people have made magnificent strides and fully returned to the heart of civilisation. Can the same be said for a nation with such a record of military aggression as the United States over the last sixty years whose population, so perennially nervy and twitchy, is allowed to walk the streets of its cities legally carrying what may best be described as weapons of mass destruction?

It’s not so much that cowboy gun toting is serious big business in America. Far more important is the fact that gun owners believe that the law allows them to use deadly force whenever they like and will protect them from the consequences of such use. In other words they believe that it is within their own personal remit to interpret the law for their own benefit and act accordingly! That they themselves, as citizens, are the arbiters because the law itself gives them that right!

What we have here then is a nation of countless millions of potential killers on the loose and a very different kind of place to anywhere else, but then killing is a not uncommon phenomena in a society where the taking of life becomes commonplace. Here I refer to the issue of judicial execution, revered by so many states in America as their lawful right and practiced with such enthusiasm. The trouble here is that the cowboys of the American legal system have a nasty habit of overcomplicating their barbarous practice and keep on getting it wrong. It’s one of those delightful characteristics of the American Way to have a large stage managed audience watch a man die in a kind of Entertainment Macabre. However last week in America something went seriously wrong. The judicial execution of an inmate of the Oklahoma prison system by a flawed lethal injection of chemicals led to his prolonged, agonizing and traumatic death. The important thing about this is not the newsworthiness of such an appalling incident but the reaction to it of the President of the United States, the supposedly liberal Barak Obama, who described the death as “deeply troubling” and said he had conflicted feelings about the death penalty.

Deeply troubling… conflicted feelings… Is this the best that the leader of America can do? Be troubled and conflicted about such a barbarous death? If this is indeed the case and his views represent those of the American people it puts them centuries behind most other nations of the world with regard to the most fundamental of humanitarian of issues, that of life and death. That such a reaction should so typify the American character is quite frankly ghastly, but then we see such a flagrant ambivalence and disregard for human life reflected in the American mentality in so many ways. The gun laws and endless civilian killings for example or the unending use of military force by the United States over the last sixty years, mainly against civilian populations. This callous disregard for life has become an integral part of the American psyche and comes to us in yet another sharp manifestation of the botched execution last week.

Just as nasty and newsworthy and right here on our own doorstep has been the revelation of vile, hateful conduct of care staff towards elderly patients at private nursing homes. Verbal abuse, physical assault and deliberate neglect have been the order of the day for so many defenceless old people. To my mind it’s more than abuse, more than neglect, more than plain sickening. It’s the purposeful exercise of power over those perceived to be needy and helpless. A kind of inhuman act by those whose employment, looking after sick and old people, purposefully charges them to be human. To act in a human, compassionate manner. What kind of people then are those caught on camera who do this? What kind of sickness do they have in their heads that compels them to be harmful to others. This is not simply a matter of breach of trust. What it actually comes down to is Government laying down guidance and operational criteria for the employment of suitable people.

The ill treatment of elderly patients at care homes seems to make a regular round in the news. It’s been with us before only recently with secret filming. Arrests have been made, staff dismissed and assurances given by administrative staff and owners alike. Assurances, assurances! Now here it is dirty and smelly all over again for the nation to contemplate.

But then it’s okay! It’s ugly alright but nothing to do with me. Fair enough! Just wait to you are shoved away somewhere after a decent life of hard work and caring for others. Nasty people make nasty news.

Ever wondered what it feels like being a cannibal? Then consider how so many in the media establishment feel about dining out off the corpse of Max Clifford! Previously one of their own fraternity, a celebrity in his own right who dealt almost exclusively with celebrity interest stories, earning serious money from it, he’s now been kicked off his perch into an open dustbin where the rats of his profession will chew on his still living carcass. If it sounds like something nasty from straight out the insect world well it is.

But then so was his exploitative, opportunist sexual behaviour with regard to young women over a number of years. These misdeeds, currently magnified into monstrosities by a veritable legion of agencies and activists who seek to raise the issue and profile of sexual misdemeanor and abuse, may well, given the great wall of moral turpitude and indignation following his prosecution and conviction, be hung over many others in what might well become a vengeful angry climate.

A string of complaints recently made against high profile media and political figures failed to stand up in court and justify prosecution. The case made against Max Clifford succeeded, but in a framework unlike that of the others. Here was a man of the media in a highly specialized, exploitative relationship  to it. He cultivated it, using it for his own ends as an independent public relations entrepreneur making much money for his clients and taking a fair whack for himself. He cut a celebrity profile and was resented for it. Flashing bright and perky up on a perch he became a figure disliked by the Establishment and resented by the police. A prime candidate for being taken down and put back in a box. If his sexual misconduct occurred over so many years one might ask why it took so long to take him to task. Was it simply because the police failed to act or because, as some of his accusers maintained and the judge stressed in his summing up, they felt intimidated by his powerful position in the media and thought no-one would listen, besides which they felt emotionally and morally damaged.

Returning to Clifford, the personal resentment against him across most of the media in recent days, especially since his conviction has been powerful. He’s been accused of arrogance by many and contempt by some of his victims. Of having a contemptuous attitude inside and outside of court which went down like a lead balloon with the judge. News of his sentence and jailing has been accompanied by something akin to glee. There’s a palpable sense of sticking the knives in for a string of sexual offences which taken together smell of a personality disorder that became manifest at a much earlier time in his life, ceased thirty years back and were never repeated. In other words he’s paid for what he did a long time ago, after which, let it be said, he anonymously devoted a fair part of his life to charitable work for medical foundations.

Nonetheless, shame on you Mr Clifford for attempting to use your influence this way. It was all small, and needless, petty and nasty. You must have known it was wrong and carried on taking chances with kids when you might then have done bigger, better, more worthy things in your life. It was clearly a phase you went through. If you’d had a much bigger vision you might have cultivated an impulse altogether more grand rather than something self-indulgent and petty, and you wouldn’t be where you are now.

Someone else down to the nick in recent days was Her Honor no less, the Magistrate and part time Judge Constance Briscoe, Afro-Caribbean lady of the law now doing time after being found guilty of three counts of perjury after lying to the police when giving evidence for her good friend Vicky Pryce in the Chris Huhne penalty points case. You remember that little Liberal-Democrat spat don’t you? Mr Green Energy doing jail time with his good lady for telling porkies over a speeding offence!

Poor Constance! Sixteen months away and her so respectable and all. Passing sentence the judge left no doubt where his feelings lay. Oh dear oh dear, such a fall from grace! So respectable a career now in ruins.  For three counts of perjury no less he was giving her the minimum sentence possible!

What? Sixteen months for three counts of perjury? And out in eight for good behaviour. Some lucky lady. Some kindly judge! Her worship must have thought she had her arse in the jam. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d written a book openly accusing her mother of abusing her when she was a child. The lady had sued her daughter for libel and lost. It has now been suggested that some of the medical evidence Constance Briscoe presented against her mother was fabricated. Does all of this make her a newsworthy nasty? I think not. She’s too small, too much of an irritating triviality to get under anyone’s collar. Another stupid small timer who thought she could use her legal reputation to get away with misdeeds. She’ll make use of her time away writing a book, Jail Time by Constance Briscoe…then start thinking of a making new career. Possibly in public relations now there’s a vacancy. Given the relationship between the media fraternity and the British legal system, trust me Constance, you couldn’t go wrong!

Finally those with serious cred for being newsworthy nasties right now are the gang of nationalist-fascists operating in the Ukraine under the protection of their patrons, the American State Department and British Foreign Office. The sight of these axe and metal pipe wielding friendlies on television doing the business in the cities of the Eastern Ukraine on the heads of the Russian speaking civilian population certainly qualifies as nasty in the extreme and their conduct, despite the blatant outpouring of lies from so much of the media, a stain on the character of Government in Britain. Has anyone noticed the overwhelming silence coming from the Millipede and the British Labour Party and Trade Union movement about these fascist thugs operating under the auspices of the British Foreign Office? It’s a silence which allows the Tories and their Liberal Democrat Coalition partners to act as they please. So what about it Ed Miliband, social democrat son of a socialist father? Where are your anti-fascist principles these days my lad? Or have you too gone the way of the Daily Mail? Your silence and that of the whole Labour Movement stinks.