Catwoman: hostile, yet global

The "hostile environment" policy is a straightforwardly awful idea from straightforwardly awful people with straightforwardly awful consequences for the designated victims. But it also seems to form part of a wider agenda which is also awful, but not in quite such a straightforward way.

Exhibit A: 2012: Theresa "Catwoman" May "chooses her words with feline delicacy" as she tells her adoring Telegraph fanbase that "We're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception":

Exhibit B: The sidebar of immigration stories which appears next to that same Telegraph interview. Nestling in among the stories about migrants rioting in Calais, swamping the country, stealing our jobs by working too hard, or being gypsies, there's an intriguing article headlined "New VIP visa service for wealthy foreigners", next to another pic of the kitten-heeled dominatrix:

Taken together, the two articles make very interesting reading:

...soon, she insists, [net migration] figures will fall, as restrictions on student and working visas are reflected in the statistics. “We are seeing the number of visas issued going down, but there is a lag between those and feeding through into the net migration figures...”

...Today though, her focus is on those who are in Britain illegally, and her language becomes uncharacteristically vivid. “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration,” she declares....

...Ministers are creating a new visa system for global business leaders amid concerns that moves to tighten immigration rules are deterring “high-value” individuals from overseas.

Around 100 wealthy foreigners will initially be invited to join a new “bespoke” visa service which the Home Office said will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth.”

Members of the “GREAT Club” will get a personal “account manager” at the UK Visas and Immigration service to deal with their travel plans. The manager will arrange visa services “tailored to each individual’s needs at no extra cost”, the Home Office said.

Personal account managers for oligarchs, a Kafka-style bureaucratic nightmare for the "lower value individuals" from the Windrush and the EU who settled here under the mistaken impression that this was a country ruled by decency and fair play, rather than a private club where the rich and powerful get to shove everybody else aside as they push their way to the front of the queue.

If you ever wondered what sort of hybrid abomination will emerge from the apparently contradictary goals of creating a "global Britain"* which is simultaneously a "hostile environment" for those guilty of being insufficiently British, and insufficiently rich, these two articles paint a vivid picture.




*Again, sorry Northern Ireland - blame the people who came up with the phrase "global Britain." Although it looks as if you'll be getting your revenge on the "global Britain" mob, as their misty-eyed Empire 2.0 fantasies are shredded on contact with your border with the Irish Republic. It's a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology". Or, as sombody once tweeted, rather magnificently, "there are unicorns as far as the eye can see. And many of them are eating cake":

“That’s not my Brexit! Its trade is too encumbered by tariffs.” pic.twitter.com/Fc1HssMZ3X

— Mike K (@mpk) 19 April 2018

Wake me up...

... I'm having this really disturbing dream where Ukip have turned the whole UK into a creepily unfunny, racist 1970s sitcom and put Jim Davidson in charge of the Foreign Office:

UK government guide advises people being deported to Jamaica to fake Caribbean accent to avoid attention

Wait a minute ... that was no dream...

The Windrush scandal is Theresa May’s creation, borne of an innate inability to equate ‘immigrant’ with ‘person’. It’s a hefty accusation, I know, but it makes sense of almost everything she’s done since 2010. Lying about a cat; Go Home vans; subsuming Ukip; EU citizens as cards.

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) April 17, 2018

Welcome to my nightmare.

The respect he deserves

Here's the United Kindom's excuse for a foreign secretary, showing how to suck up to a racist, authoritarian anti-Semitic bully:

Congratulations to Fidesz and Viktor Orban on winning the elections in Hungary. We look forward to working with our Hungarian friends to further develop our close partnership. #UKandHungary

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) 9 April 2018

And here's Jean-Claude Juncker demostrating the correct diplomatic protocol:


Well played, Jean-Claude. If you need a list of other people overdue for a bit of disrespect and a good slap, I've got a few names here. The list, of course, starts with Boris:

The foreign secretary joins Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Matteo Salvini, Beatrix von Storch, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini in sending his congratulations to Viktor Orban. https://t.co/vw0Jgxh6FQ

— Peter Foster (@pmdfoster) 9 April 2018

Boris Johnson to blame for the Skripal poisonings?

Oh, hi Boris Johnson's lawyers, how are you doing? No, I most certainly wasn't accusing your client of doing anything untoward - "just asking questions", as they say.

What do you mean Betteridge's Law is no defence in a case of libel?

OK, I would like to state, for the record, that I do not believe your client, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, capable of poisoning the Skripals. Assuming that the Skripals were the intended targets of the unknown poisoner (which I do), I believe that this attack was planned and carried out by professionals. If somebody had tasked a brilliant amateur like Boris Johnson with carrying out the hit, I believe that the targets would have escaped unscathed, although Boris would most likely have ended up accidentally poisoning half of the Salisbury Cathedral choir. He is Boris, after all, and getting into "hilarious" scrapes it what he does.

So what am I saying? I'm just floating the hypothesis that, if I belonged to the intelligence service of a hostile power and I was thinking about doing something shockingly illegal in the United Kingdom, I might look at the person appointed to the post of UK Foreign Secretary and think "These people cannot be serious - I'm totally not frightened of messing with them."

Whatever talents Boris Johnson may have - writing moderately amusing (if factually-challenged and occasionally racist) opinion pieces, quoting Cicero and saying "cripes" a lot when in character as an entertaining upper-class eccentric - it's obvious to even the dimmest observer that diplomacy, discretion and mastering his brief are not among them. His addiction to blurting out memorable sound bites at every possible opportunity, with no thought for the accuracy of what he says, or for who might be offended is as close to an anti-qualification for the post of Foreign Secretary as I can think of.

After all this time, it still beggars belief that Boris is the public face the UK presents to the world. Making him so implies contempt for the people the UK is dealing with. It's the equivalent of turning up late to your best friend's wedding half-cut and unshaven, wearing trackky bottoms and a mucky T-shirt. It implies a total lack of respect both for the occasion and for yourself. OK, a few people might have a laugh at the wacky funster throwing convention to the winds, but most of the people invested in the process will be rightly mortified.

And it makes the UK look weak. It implies a barely-keeping-it-together administration, too absorbed in the psychodrama of its own self-inflicted crisis to care about impressing the outside world. An administration that looks at a man who could, maybe, be allowed to make an ass of himself at, say, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport without doing too much damage and thinks "Let him play at being a world statesman for a bit - he's obviously going to shoot his mouth off at every opportunity and infuriate every nation on the planet, but right now we've got more important things to worry about than what the rest of the world thinks, like not having an actual punch-up round the Cabinet table."

Why wouldn't your hostile foreign power take one look at what we, as a country, are doing and assume that we're a bunch of powerless, clueless diplomatic pygmies who can be ignored and flouted with impunity? What would a careless bluffer like Boris do to protect a couple of foreigners, when he can't even look after the interest of UK nationals (your foot in mouth helped to double Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's sentence, Boris, but we're still waiting for you to get her out of that Iranian jail)?

Boris is the symptom of a national self-absorption that puts winning petty squabbles within the Westminster/UK press bubble ahead of presenting any semblance of credibility or competence to the outside world. It would be no wonder if some hostile power* thought "Is that the best you've got?" and proceeded to do as it damn well pleased. If so, some of the blame belongs to Theresa May for offering, and to Boris Johnson for accepting, an important job which, deep down, even he must have realised he would be terrible at.





*Probably Russia. Richard North overstates the doubts when he goes off on one about other people being idiots for jumping to that conclusion (to be fair, he usually blogs about Brexit, a target-rich environment for idiot hunters, so he's probably a bit trigger-happy). He makes great game of people for saying "Russia", when the nerve agent was originally developed in the Soviet Union (specifically, Uzbekistan).

Which is all very well, but Russia is the suspect with the obvious motive and probable means to attack the Skripals. OK, the nerve agent was developed in another former Soviet state, but let's do a fun WMD quiz. When the Soviet Union broke up, which of its constituent countries got all the nukes? Clue: it wasn't Uzbekistan. And which bit of the former Soviet Union do you think was most likely to get first dibs on any other nasty stuff that was hanging around? Clue: probably the same place that got all the nukes.

Of course it might be somebody else - the Uzbeks (why?), or surprisingly well-resourced non-state actors, or a false flag operation by MI5, in the hope of drumming up more counter-terrorism resources, or part of a US deep state anti-Trump plot , or Mossad, or Hilary Clinton while she was taking time off from running a paedophile ring out of a pizza joint ... if you want to jump down the rabbit hole into any of the above conspiracy wonderlands, be my guest, but it's still probably Russia.

__________________________

Update - if you thought I was exaggerating about those conspiracy theories, feast your eyes on this little beauty:

"MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The assassination attempt against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom may be perceived as a plot to derail Brexit negotiations and use Russia’s alleged threat as a pretext to keep the country with the European Union, Richard Wood, a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), told Sputnik on Wednesday."

Wood told Sputnik that he thought the Skripal poisonings were "staged." I fought Poe's Law and the law won...

Bonus fact - "Sputnik" is Russian for "one on the same path (with someone)", or more succinctly, "fellow traveller."

Bonus bonus fact - Ukip's Richard Wood was - purely coincidentally - one of the delegates on a Moscow-sponsored jolly to Crimea last March. In a statement to Sputnik, Wood gushed:

"I wanted to see the situation in Crimea and I was absolutely delighted. I saw the people wanting to be a part of the Russian Federation. That is what came over to me strongly. I never heard of anybody saying that they have been put down, they were repressed or had difficulties with the Russian authorities. For a very long time now the West has had a very shortsighted policy towards Russia. When I was in Crimea, I have never seen a policeman on streets, I have never seen a soldier, no civil disorder, nothing of that sort," 

Make of that what you will...

Ukip - probably worth less than nothing + VAT

Back in September, Ukip's latest ex-leader, Henry Whatsisname, boasted that the party had avoided becoming the "UK Nazi Party" by astutely electing him, instead of the candidate who'd run promising a Final Solution™ to the Muslim Question.

Poor Henry

Sadly, we didn't have long to get to know Henry. If he had any interesting policy positions, beyond being anti-Nazi and pro-badger strangling, we didn't have time to find out before his tenure ended prematurely, not with a whimper, but with a bang, when he was caught banging a glamour model who was into experimenting with policy positions at some uncomfortable distance from anti-Nazism.

“I was working as a racist in a cocktail bar, when I met you” pic.twitter.com/1iRlBaLh4b

— Scott Ballantyne (@Moosedog23) January 18, 2018

A new leader has yet to be elected, but given the new acting leader's keen interest in the Muslim Question and fondness for "I'm not anti-Semitic, just anti-Soros" dog-whistles, it sounds as if Henry's warning about the "UK Nazi party" wasn't too far from the truth. According to some of the lovely people at Kipper Central, a Gerard Batten-led Ukip could quickly become a Nazi tribute act, even attracting its own cadre of ex-Friekorps types, in the shape of entryists from something called Veterans Against Terrorism (VAT):

Veterans Against Terrorism held a march in Newcastle yesterday and below is a report on that march. Significantly for UKIP they also praise our new interim leader, Gerard Batten as a “working class man of the people” who will “transform the Party”.

They pledge to join the Party en masse and take part in that transformation as committed activists as per our previous report that they will join in their thousands and set UKIP on track to consign the Labour Party to the “dustbin of history”. 

Angry veterans on the streets. That usually goes well...

Are these the new Stormtroopers who'll take to the streets to intimidate the traitors, the enemies of the people, the Jews and the Reds who'll be accused of stabbing the Fatherland in the back, once Brexit inevitably delivers hardship and humiliation, instead of the promised victory?

Actually, I'm not yet that worried. The most significant problem is that Ukip seems to be bust - they couldn't even afford to pay their last leader a salary, they're on the hook for £200k as a result of the Jane Collins libel case and the consensus is that they probably don't have enough left in the kitty to fund the forthcoming leadership election.

And they don't have that many members - about 34,000 as of December 2016, a number which has almost certainly reduced, given their poor showing in the last election and comically inept post-Farage leadership. Even if VAT march to the Kippers' rescue, they have a maximum of 8,500 members (that figure came from the Express, so should be treated as being as unreliably exaggerated as the paper's hyperventilating weather warnings). In which case Ukip + VAT = fewer members than the Green Party. And our first past the post system is rarely kind to third parties, let alone sixth* parties without any money or a single sitting MP.

Without funding, I think that any Fascists hoping for the resurgence of an even more alt-right-ist Ukip will be disappointed. As will some leftists and Remainers - let's face it, standing up to Nazis sounds badass cool.

Unfortunately, our most powerful enemies are a lot less impressively evil -  the hapless, broken automaton otherwise known as the Prime Minister, those badly-drawn P G Wodehouse caricatures, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, David Davis, who looks like an elderly uncle who's the only one in the family not to realise he's losing the plot, Liam Fox, who never had the plot in the first place, and the various faceless policy wonks and empty suits inhabiting the spiders' web of obscurely-funded right-wing think tanks and lobby groups without which terrible ideas like Brexit would never happen.






*In sixth place, by membership, behind Labour, the Conservatives (I assume, although they don't publish membership data in their annual accounts), the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Greens.

"Unfortunately I'm too much of a weed to punch a woman..."

"... that's why I have a little man to do it for me."

Yesterday evening that good friend of the violent and racist far-right, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, spoke at University of the West of England Law Society. During the meeting one of his supporters punched a woman in an unprovoked attack. A video clip that shows the Rees-Mogg supporter attacking a woman is here: Rees-Mogg supporter’s punch.

Jacob Rees-Mogg - what a gent.

A less impeccably well-mannered chap would probably have slipped the fellow a few guineas to horsewhip the impertinent harridan. There's breeding for you.

__________________

Update - we seem to have a possible ID on the gallant pugilist who took it upon himself to defend our weedy overlord from the monstrous regement of women. The assailant's photograph seems to resemble one Paul Townsley, "a martial arts instructor from the Bristol area who has shared his support for Rees-Mogg in a change.org petition to have Rees-Mogg replace Theresa May as PM":

Interesting, if true. Whether or not the identification proves to be correct, I have no doubt the ever-chivalrous Mr Rees-Mogg will be swift to condemn the white-shirted ruffian who turned a peaceful, if boisterous, disagreement into a vulgar brawl by raising his hand to a lady in anger.

__________________

Update 2 - It seems that Rees-Mogg superfan Paul Townsley was the agent provocateur responsible for the scuffle. The only detail still unresolved is whether Townsley lashed out in a purely private capacity, or whether the Milksop for North East Somerset had engaged Mr Townsley's services as a bodyguard, in order to protect himself from being challenged by nasty women and other horrid proles who might make him blub. 

Come to think of it, there is another mystery here. Namely, why the Prime Minister is allowing herself to be pushed around by a self-declared weed like Rees-Mogg. Go on, Theresa, you could take him, easy. Here, I'll hold your coat. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

The seigneur of sark

I just wrote a slightly sarky post about Ukip's current leadership difficulties, but I'm just an amateur, only in it for the LOLs, and to let off steam. Matthew Norman, though, gets paid for writing this stuff and it shows in the superior quality of his sarcasm. Watch and learn as he fillets those Kippers like a Michelin-starred chef:

"The never-ending saga of the Ukip leadership continues with 'anti-far right' Henry Bolton in a pickle after his girlfriend turned out to be a bit racist

...In the most shocking political development since the last time Theresa May insisted she has been “very clear” about some piece of incomprehensibly opaque drivel, Ukip is on the verge of needing a new leader.

Certainly, the incumbent has earned a rest after a marathon stint. It’s almost three and a half months since Henry Bolton, a blazer-clad ex-copper, assumed the mantle...

...If and when Bolton departs to create another vacancy, he can leave feeling satisfied about a job well done. Running as a virtual unknown, he won by highlighting his enmity to all forms of extremism, but especially the “infiltration” of Ukip by the far right.

Since exposing racism under deep cover was his goal, here’s one political career that will not end in failure. Thanks to Bolton, a Ukip member has been suspended for racism of sufficient blatancy to earn an invitation to serve at the pleasure of the US President.

If there is a down side to his triumph, it feels almost too trivial to mention. But the suspended member is Bolton’s girlfriend, Jo Marney. Or his “mistress” as the Mail on Sunday quaintly prefers it when splashing today with her trenchant thoughts on Meghan Markle and matters of race.

For the record, the 54-year-old Bolton left his wife Tatiana for Marney, estimates of whose age vary from 25 to 29, just before Christmas. While that is a particularly cruel time for the mother of two tiny children to learn of her replacement by a much younger woman, at least Bolton broke the news with the chivalrous sensitivity expected of the holder of his office. He ended the marriage by text.

...After [Marney] launched a recent Facebook exchange with “I wouldn’t with a negro”, her correspondent’s “What’s wrong with black people?” allowed her to illustrate a gift for brevity. “Ugly,” she wrote, before segueing into a staccato riff on the approaching nuptials. “Harry’s marrying. God! Wet as a scrubber. Awful. A royal yank. Yuk.”

She then assuaged fears that her objections lay in Markle’s nationality, though not without raising fresh concerns about her understanding of reproductive biology. Markle’s “seed”, she wrote, will “taint our royal family … Tiny brain. She’s black. A dumb little ‘actress’ that no one has heard of.”

There may be the germ of an irony in that last remark. Marney describes herself as an “actress”, but without apparently having starred in seven seasons of Suits, or in fact having a credited in any production at all. Among the other careers she lists on Twitter are “music journalist”, “presenter” and “model”. The evidence available supports solely the latter, and only then in the sub-category of modelling prefixed by “glamour”.


Anyway, as the Socratic dialogue drew to its close on Facebook, Marney maintained her pithy form with: “Just don’t like her. She’s a black American … Next will be a Muslim PM. And a black king.”

...It is quite possible, after all, that Bolton, who was elected after warning that the wrong leader risked Ukip becoming the “UK Nazi party”, knew nothing of her opinions until today’s papers...

...While wishing him well in his next endeavour, it is probably too early to speculate about which of Ukip’s countless other anti-racism warriors will inherit the crown. One assumes Farage will be driven by near-poverty and that minor addiction to the spotlight to launch another positively final comeback tour...

...In the meantime, the thoughts turn to David Cameron. It was to neutralise the terrible menace of Ukip that he called his kamikaze referendum on EU membership. How he must surge with pride whenever he beholds the awesome might of the enemy he was prepared to sacrifice his country to defeat."

Savour the whole thing in its sarcastic magnificence here.

Henry and Wallis

Henry Whatsisname's leadership of Ukip continues to go from strength to strength. After a strong start, when Henry built his reputation as a very stable genius on that impressive boast that he could strangle a badger with his bare hands, Henry went on to demonstrate his family-friendly credentials by cheating on his wife and kids with a foxy Ukip groupie 25 years his junior.

As any fule kno, there's nothing the public love more than a celebrity romance (just look at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle), so I'm sure that by showing his human side, Henry has astutely burnished the glamour of his führerschaft to an even more impressive sheen. I confidently expect bunting and street parties to follow the announcement that Henry and Jo Marney are now an item.

The happy couple

Already Henry's new companion and soulmate is helping the great leader in his stated mission of leading the party towards definitely-not-racist respectability:

UKIP has suspended the girlfriend of party leader Henry Bolton after she apparently made racist remarks about Prince Harry's fiancee Meghan Markle.

The Mail on Sunday has published a series of messages sent by Jo Marney.

In them, the 25-year-old model said Ms Markle would "taint" the Royal Family, that she had a "tiny brain" and that black people were ugly.

Ms Marney apologised and said her messages had been taken out of context.

Henry didn't want to comment. What will Henry do, if forced to choose between his duty and the woman he loves? It's all very Edward and Mrs Simpson.

"fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists", as somebody once said...

Although, to be fair to Henry's Wallis, she may be a contemptible racist, but she isn't any more racist than the current President of the United States, or the UK's Foreign Secretary. Interesting times.





*Update and afterthought - Ms Marney contends that her remarks have been taken "out of context." Other than as a satirical parody of the sort of things you might hear a racist muppet say - which I assume wasn't her intention - can anybody explain what sort of context might excuse such remarks? Help me out, I'm struggling here.

The special relationship

Racist pillock who called Africans "piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles" supports racist pillock who called African countries "shitholes."

The USA and the UK. Two countries divided by a common outrage.

Henry hits the headlines

Since becoming party leader last September, Henry Whatsisname has notably failed to give Ukip the sort of dynamic, charismatic, Faragist führerschaft that hard-core Kippers crave. He managed a few headlines when he said something bonkers about strangling badgers, but apart from that, low-energy Henry's profile has been lower than a snake's belly, leaving ex-leader, Nigel Farage as the de facto face of the Ukip brand.

But not any more. With the new year comes a new burst of energy. Henry is finally reaching out to the youth. Specifically, he's reaching out to a blonde glamour model 25 years his junior. According to Henry, his Russian* wife, and mother of his two children, is "fully aware" of his latest youth outreach activities.

"Is that a 2.5m hose and tool kit in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

Usually, I'd say "so what?" and move on. People, and their relationships, are complicated, even people in the public eye have the right to a private life and, in any case, it's his politics, not his domestic arrangements, that matter. But then the Mirror published a photo of Henry's new squeeze flipping the bird while posing in front of a Confederate flag and I thought, "You know what, normalising this sort of garbage is political."

Of course, in itself the photo doesn't, in itself, prove that Jo Marney is some sort of fascist. Maybe she has an unaccountable fondness for The Dukes of Hazzard, although she looks too young (both for Henry, and to be into some cheesy 1980s TV show about good 'ol boys). Maybe she's just too stupid or ignorant to know what America's equivalent of the swastika stands for (although being a fascist and being an ignorant dumbass are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories).

But as she's gone onto social media, venting rubbish that's too unpleasant even for the S*n,** I'm disinclined to give her the benefit of the doubt:

"THE topless model lover of married UKIP leader Henry Bolton branded Grenfell Tower a 'nest of illegal immigrants' in a vile social media rant.

Jo Marney, 29, labelled the decision to offer permanent residency to survivors of the tragedy "disgusting" on Facebook."

I know she's a quarter century younger than Henry, but 29 is way too old have the excuse of being a hormonal teen who doesn't know any better. And as for Henry, and the party he represents, they're clearly the same bunch of two-faced Nazi-lovers who came up with the infamous Goebbels-style "breaking point" propaganda campaign back in 2016. The personal, in this case, looks very political and the political looks very nasty. As Ukip is a small, fringe party with a failing leadership, this shouldn't matter much. But now that the UK's political class (with a few, too timid, exceptions) has tied itself to realising Ukip's insane project, it does.






*What is it with Ukip and the Russians? Try as I might to keep Hanlon's Razor sharp, there's Henry's Russian presumably-soon-to-be-ex Missus, Arron Banks's Russian wife,  Farage's links with RT (formerly Russia Today) and his open hero-worship of Vladimir Putin - even Henry's leadership rival, flying aircraft carrier and interstellar colony ship enthusiast Aidan Powlesland, promised that "in a symbolic gesture of friendship he would also make it easier for Russian tourists to travel to the UK." The idea of collusion still looks too conspiracy theory-ish, but if there's nothing illicit going on with the Kippers, then they're either trolling us, or disturbingly obsessed with a chillingly authoritarian regime.

**Not something I'd normally link to, but when something's too vile even for the S*n, citation's needed.

Virtue-signalling? Seriously?

"Hypocrisy" said François de La Rochefoucauld "is a tribute vice pays to virtue." Nobody talks about virtue much these days, except for a few media types who never tire of scolding others for the modern sin of "virtue-signalling."

When somebody  complains about virtue-signalling, the odds are quite high that the complainer hasn't got anything very interesting to say, but has simply found a more impressive-sounding way to call somebody else a prig. As David Shariatmadari pointed out last year, the phrase might have a technical, social sciencey sound, but it doesn't amount to much more than saying "I bet you didn't really mean that good thing you just said":

1. Bill is saying something right-on
2. Virtue-signalling is when you say something right-on just to sound good
3. Therefore Bill is virtue-signalling

But 3. is not justified by 1. and 2. You can argue for something that happens to make you look virtuous because you genuinely think it is the best solution. That’s the case, for example, with most religious beliefs. Do we really think the pope is just virtue-signalling?

According to David Shariatmadari, the phrase was first popularised by the Spectator's James Bartholomew in April 2015, so if it ever had any specific meaning, (apart from being a longer, more pretentious way to call somebody a prig), it should have meant something back then.

And maybe it did. In 2015, just before the Brexit-Trump inflecton point, the economic and political elite was still trying to justify its hegemony with token gestures towards equality and diversity,  rather than just appealing to the post-2016 values of zero-sum nationalism and authoritarian xenophobia. In that specific historical context, the idea of empty "virtue-signalling" by an elite that wanted to look inclusive, while jealously guarding its exclusivity did actually make some sense, as this article suggests:

At the core of this ethos were ideals of “diversity,” women’s “empowerment,” and LGBTQ rights; post-racialism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. These ideals were interpreted in a specific, limited way that was fully compatible with the Goldman Sachsification of the U.S. economy. Protecting the environment meant carbon trading. Promoting home ownership meant subprime loans bundled together and resold as mortgage-backed securities. Equality meant meritocracy.

The reduction of equality to meritocracy was especially fateful. The progressive-neoliberal program for a just status order did not aim to abolish social hierarchy but to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top. And that ideal was inherently class specific: geared to ensuring that “deserving” individuals from “underrepresented groups” could attain positions and pay on a par with the straight white men of their own class. The feminist variant is telling but, sadly, not unique. Focused on “leaning in” and “cracking the glass ceiling,” its principal beneficiaries could only be those already in possession of the requisite social, cultural, and economic capital. Everyone else would be stuck in the basement.

If you'd said that David Cameron was "virtue-signalling", back in 2006, when he had himself photographed cycling to work (while his briefcase was being chauffeured to work in the car behind), you'd have actually made a specific point about token gestures.

But that progressive neoliberal moment is over. When Donald Trump wanted to distract attention from the fact that his much-vaunted tax reforms were going to do squat for the folk on Main Street, while handing him and his billionaire buddies tax breaks on their private jets, he didn't have himself photographed cycling to work, or hugging a husky.

Instead, he retweeted some hateful nonsense being circulated by a bunch of neo-Nazis, so his base were too delighted, and everybody else too horrified, to notice what was really going on.

Apparently, vice no longer sees why it needs to pay virtue anything.

What took him so long?

Crypto-fascist strongman stiffs his allies, cuts deal with fellow crypto-fascist strongman.

With a sort of tragic inevitabilty,  the only good thing to come out of the Syrian tragedy is being strangled at birth.

Remember this flag. It's what hope used to look like.

"Goodbye, Mr Bond"

After Steve Mnuchin and his wife posed with a sheet of newly printed money for that photo, a few people commented that the couple looked like Bond villains. Was the multimillionaire former banker and hedgie embarrassed?  Of course not:

“I guess I should take that as a compliment that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie,” the treasury secretary told Fox News on Sunday.

Two things:

1. Who said anything about all Bond films being "great" or "successful"? Clearly, somebody's never seen Octopussy.

2. Talking of "successful", even the dimmest movie goer should have worked out by now that the salient feature of Bond villains is their total lack of success. Ever since Dr No in 1962, Bond villains have been reliably failing to realise their fiendish plots and coming to sticky ends, generally a few minutes before or after 007 destroys their life's work in a series of massive explosions.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld is the closest thing to not-a-complete-failure in the Bond-villain-verse, having at least survived several defeats. In his eight film incarnations to date, he has, however, lost comprehensively to Bond on at least seven occasions.

If you were being insanely generous, you could could call the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, when Blofeld manages to assassinate Bond's new wife, a score draw. But, as Bond has just comprehensively destroyed Blofeld's world domination plan, along with his supervillain base, this looks less like a draw to me and more like some sore loser knocking over the Scrabble table in a fit of pique.

I guess that when you've worked in a Wall Street that crashed the global economy, then for a guy who couldn't successfully make a profit out of the suckers queueing up to lose their money at casinos, your idea of a "successful" role model must be a little bit odd.

Weirdly, not a Daily Mash headline

" Estate agent says London's millennials should stop buying sandwiches, holidays and splashing cash on nights out in order to afford a house"

Top trolling from some gleefully callous sociopath at estate agents Strutt and Parker. Bonus points for mocking the victims of the Great British Housing Rip-Off with a virtuoso display of finger-wagging condescension.

I'm sure that millennials will just love being on the receiving end of an improving sermon from the bloodsucking  cheerleaders of the UK's dismally unproductive rentier economy:

According to the Resolution Foundation, homeowners born in the 1940s and 1950s gained an unearned windfall of £80,000 between 1993 and 2014 alone. In the early 2000s, house price growth was so great that 17% of working-age adults earned more from their house than from their job...

...As house prices have continued to increase and the gap between house prices and earnings has grown larger, the cost of homeownership has become increasingly prohibitive. Whereas in the mid-1990s low and middle income households could afford a first time buyer deposit after saving for around 3 years, today it takes the same households 20 years to save for a deposit. Many have increasingly found themselves with little choice but to rent privately. For those stuck in the private rental market, the proportion of income spent on housing costs has risen from around 10% in 1980 to 36% today. Unlike homeowners, there is no asset wealth to draw on to fund new cars or holidays.

Laurie Macfarlane

John Redwood sells out - tells investors "Don't invest in UK."

This is what Brexiteer John Redwood says in public:

'We'll be fine!' John Redwood issues fiery riposte to Brexit 'no-deal' doom-mongers

This is his private advice to anybody thinking of investing in the UK:

Redwood’s advice to investors is to flee the UK before the credit crunch bites:

I sold out of the general share ETFs in the UK after their great performance for the year from early July 2016 when I saw the last Budget and heard the BoE’s credit warnings. The money could be better put to work in places where the authorities are allowing credit to expand a bit, to permit faster growth.

Sounds sensible, doesn’t it?

No. It is an absolute disgrace for this man to give such advice.

You see, the Rt. Hon. John Redwood MP – to give him his full title – is a lawmaker. He is an elected member of the House of Commons. And not just any lawmaker. He is a senior member of the Conservative Party, which is currently in government and making a total hash of the Brexit negotiations. He is also a former Cabinet Minister and a member of the Privy Council.

This senior lawmaker is advising investors to stop investing in his country.

Frances Coppola

Words fail me.

Update - although words apparently don't fail John Redwood. He actually said this:

"'All they ever do is run the UK down' Tory SLAMS Labour attempts to release Brexit pappers [sic]"

What a piece of work.

The untouchables

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."

Donald Trump, January 2016.

"I could stand in the middle of Westminster and shoot somebody and Theresa wouldn't sack me."

Boris Johnson, now.

In fact, I just made that second quote up. But I'll bet that's what he's thinking, as he watches the rogue minister who isn't a white male old Etonian being summoned back to the headmistress's office to be given a stern dressing down, before probably being expelled.

The spoiled brat of Brexit tweets

The U.K. Electoral Commission said Wednesday it had opened an investigation into whether millionaire U.K. Independence Party donor Aaron Banks breached campaign finance rules during the 2016 Brexit referendum.

In a statement issued by the commission, investigators said they would try to determine whether Better for the Country Limited, a company that lists Banks as a director was “the true source of donations” made to Leave campaigners in its name, “or if it was acting as an agent.” It will also examine whether Banks, who was also Leave.EU chairman, was the “true source of loans reported by a referendum campaigner in his name.”

In response to the investigation, Banks tweeted: “Gosh I’m terrified.”

Politico 

Three possible explanations for Banks' bravado occur to me - take your pick:

1. The self-proclaimed "bad boy of Brexit" is really a good boy and totally innocent of any wrongdoing (don't laugh, that one's just hypothetical).

2. He's guilty, but he's got a well-founded confidence that people can break the electoral rules pretty much with impunity.

3. He's guilty but he's got a well-founded confidence that people like him, who belong to an entitled elite, are routinely indulged and allowed to get away with a lifetime of the sort of rule-breaking that would ruin the lives of less privileged miscreants:

At 13 he was sent to a “third-rate” boarding school, Crookham Court in Berkshire ... getting expelled for an “accumulation of offences” that included selling lead filched from the roofs of school buildings. He accepts that his expulsion was entirely justified. It would have happened much earlier, he says, except that the struggling institution needed his fees...

With an education like that, why wouldn't he think he can get away with anything?

Only the little people follow the rules

Have you been mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance? Maybe you should check your old loan, or mortgage, statements to be sure. If you don't have the paperwork, could you use a credit report to track down who lent you what, when? If you did have PPI, can you honestly remember whether, many years ago, you were told that the PPI was optional, or about the terms, conditions and exclusions? Can you even remember whether or not you had it at all?

Wouldn't it all be a lot simpler if the people who mis-sold the insurance just came right out and admitted they'd bent the rules, taken everybody for mugs and sold them a pup, because nobody could be bothered to stop them?

Have you been mis-sold a Brexit that's going to cost you a lot, but deliver nothing? In this case, it's way easier to work out that you were scammed, because the scammer's been boasting about how he outwitted the regulators in the national newspapers:

 ...“We were just cleverer than the regulators and the politicians. Of course we were.”

He [millionaire insurance salesman and Brexit Backer, Arron Banks] didn’t break the law, he says. He “pushed the boundary of everything, right to the edge. It was war.” And later: “You’re looking for a smoking gun but there’s a smoking gun on every table! And no one cares. No one cares!”

And the number of shits officially given about him subverting our democracy really does seem to be zero, even when "pushing the boundary" of the law crossed over into outright criminality:

Newsnight's evidence suggests that at least some of the political energy running up to Brexit appears to have been paid for unlawfully...

...about 20 car insurance salespeople employed by Mr Banks at Catbrain Lane, Bristol - the hub of his Eldon vehicle insurance empire - were paid to travel to Rochester, in Kent.

They then drove elderly UKIP voters to the polls, before staying the night at a Premier Inn and making the return journey the following day...

...[Mr Gavin Millar QC] said: "It was unlawful on the part of the third party who organised the concerted assistance; Mr Banks in this case.

"If they did it and incurred those costs without the authority of the agent, as it appears they may have done, that's called an illegal practice and it's a criminal offence."...

...It is very unlikely that any action will be taken against UKIP, Mr Reckless, his agent or Mr Banks because a criminal investigation must start within a year of any possible offence.

And what about all the cash Banks ploughed into Brexit? Nobody has definitively proved that any of it came from Russia but, then again, nobody really knows where any of it came from:

In September 2013, the man who bought Brexit – Arron Banks – was in trouble.

For the past two years, financial regulators in Gibraltar had been scrutinising his insurance under-writer, Southern Rock. They had discovered it was keeping reserves far below what was needed.

This was a serious problem. Banks claimed he had already provided £40 million to plug the hole. He also told the regulator he would step down as a director, but has since been required to find an eye-watering £60 million in extra funding.

A year later, these financial worries seem to have completely evaporated. Banks had begun buying diamond mines, investing millions into chemical companies and wealth management firms, setting up loss-making political consultancies, and most famous of all – funding the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

One question remains though. If Banks was in such a tight spot in September 2013, how did he manage to be so generous the following year?

Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell looked at the publicly available records, but the source of the money behind Brexit remains secret. Maybe the ultimate source is some mystery donor(s)/investor(s) whose identity has been laundered into invisibility. Perhaps it's a house of cards built on theoretical  money which looks real, thanks to some feat of creative accounting or financial engineering.

At this stage I don't know, you don't know, nobody seems to know. All we do know is to take Arron Banks's word with an entire cellarful of salt, given that the insurance salesman (who's not currently permitted to run his own insurance company) has a distinctly Paul Nuttall-style approach to CV writing:

It is here the cracks in Banks’ biography start to appear. Banks has claimed he was promoted and rose to lead his own sales team at Norwich Union – now part of Aviva. However, Aviva say they have no record of Banks ever having worked for Norwich Union. He has also claimed to have worked for Warren Buffett around this point in his career. We asked Buffett about this. He replied. "I have no memory of ever hearing of the name Arron Fraser Andrew Banks. He certainly never worked for me." Further checks across the Berkshire Hathaway group, made by Buffett’s office, yielded no evidence he had ever worked for any of his subsidiaries. In a letter delivered by his lawyers, Banks declined to comment on either of these points.

Wherever Banks's Brexit funding came from, the level of official incuriosity over how our politics is paid for is staggering. Far from being a "popular revolution", the Brexit coup looks increasingly like another game played by wealthy members of a political elite who know that they're born to rule and to flout the rules that govern the lives of lesser people like you and me. There are a couple of details from that New Statesman interview with Banks that now seem prophetic, both of Banks's entitled sense that he could break rules the little people live by with impunity, and of his conviction that it was perfectly OK for people like him to con people into acting against their own interests:

At 13 he was sent to a “third-rate” boarding school, Crookham Court in Berkshire ... getting expelled for an “accumulation of offences” that included selling lead filched from the roofs of school buildings. He accepts that his expulsion was entirely justified. It would have happened much earlier, he says, except that the struggling institution needed his fees...

...His “lack of educational attainment” ruled out university, so he returned to Basingstoke, where he sold paintings, then vacuum cleaners, then houses. “I was quite good at persuading people to buy things they didn’t want to buy,” he says.

We were warned, nobody with any official clout cared, and now he's screwed the whole country.

Such poor leadership ability by low-energy Henry. Sad!

As I wrote yesterday, Nigel Farage's "journalistic" assignation with Julian Assange might look suspicious, but in the absence of a smoking gun, I still imagine that, like the journalist in Humbert Wolfe's poem, he didn't need any external inducement to behave horribly:

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.

But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.

But right now, there's a bigger question hanging over Nigel. Namely, how is he still a thing? He's just another relatively new ex-party leader, yet he still makes more headlines than David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Tim Farron put together.

One answer is that, like Trump, he's an able performer and a relentless self-publicist who's really taken the "no publicity is bad publicity" ball and run with it. And he's still being talked about because the people who've succeeded to the Ukip crown just can't follow his act.

Not all of this is down to the personal failings of his successors. It was always going to be a tough gig to lead a single-issue party once that single issue had been won, was being delivered by somebody else and had turned out to be a lot more problematic than you'd been telling everybody. The same issues would have still been problems for Farage if he'd stayed on, rather than letting the poisoned chalice pass to Paul Nuttall, then to that other bloke.

But there's also blame aplenty. Farage was a plausible enough bullshitter to fool some of the people most of the time, but Paul Nuttall's easily disproved attempts to fool people about being a former professional footballer with a PhD who'd lost a host of imaginary friends in the Hillsborough disaster just made him look like a joke.

And as for the present guy, Henry Whatsisname... Well, he looks and sounds sort of professional-ish, almost respectable. Certainly less extreme and batty than some of his rivals for the leadership, like the fanatical anti-Islam crusader, Anne Marie Waters, or the "gay donkey raped my horse" bloke, or the guy who promised asteroid mining, flying aircraft carriers and interstellar colony ships. But if your brand is all about being edgy, anti-establishment and courting offence, along with the free publicity that comes with it, then "respectable" probably won't cut it. Farage likes to be known as one of the bad boys of Brexit. Henry Thingy is more like The Boring Bugger of Brexit.

Not that he hasn't tried, bless him. Because I'd not noticed him generating any headlines recently, I just googled Henry to see what he'd been up to. And, to be fair, he has been gamely trying to get that 'ol 'kipper mojo back with a classically bizarre boast about being able to kill a badger with his bare hands. But the thing is, I had to search for it. In Ukip's glory days, this would have been at the top of everybody's news feed. So far, even The Daily Mash can't be bothered to take the piss.* Nobody seems to care.

There's a vanishingly small intersection in the Ukip / Oscar Wilde Venn diagram, populated mostly by the phrase "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." And everybody seems to have more interesting things to talk about than Henry.

Poor Henry.

Trying to put on a brave face.

*Correct at the time of writing, (three days after the Badgergate story broke without trace).

Legitimate concern trolls

We hear a lot about the "legitimate concerns" of "ordinary people" about immigration.  But we hear very little about how those concerns have been deliberately inflamed by an elite clique of well-funded, well-connected propagandists, close to the heart of government.

Here's a brief portrait of the British establishment's favourite concern trolls from the Ducksoap blog:

“We [the Migration Watch pressure group] are an independent, non political body which is concerned about the present scale of immigration into the UK.”

Civil servant Andrew Green created Migration Watch as a tool to be used by governments to help the latter justify anti-immigrant policy. Thus, the words “independent” and “non political” in the think-tank’s declaration are vital to ensure the government can claim, falsely, to be advised by a separate unbiased entity. Green’s assistance to successive governments’ anti-immigration policies was rewarded with a peerage in 2014.

Migration Watch focuses on blaming immigration for all of Britain’s economic woes and consequential issues with the NHS, housing, employment etc. It is standard misdirection, accompanied by comical abuse of statistics.

It is, by now, a bit late to point out that scapegoating minorities for political advantage never ends well, but it's only fair that professional migrant-bashers like Andrew Green at least take their share of the blame for the outbreak of xenophobic self-harm currently paralysing the UK.