Standing up for the apathetic majority?

Nobody knows exactly how many people went on the 2011 anti-cuts rally in London, but the estimates range from from 250,000 to 500,000. The TUC, who organised the march, had an initial estimate of 250,000, which they later revised upwards. The Metropolitan Police didn't put out any alternative estimate. A police spokeswoman said the force only put out its own estimate of the numbers of people on a demonstration when it disagreed with the figures being given by the organisers.

The Taxpayers' Alliance made no comment about the numbers attendeding the anti-cuts protest. Today, the Taxpayers Alliance and chums have organised their own rally, on behalf of 'the silent majority who believe the cuts are needed.' The Metropolitan Police are expecting the turnout to be about 350. Those attending include bloggatarian ranter Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes, the terribly misunderstood Toby Young (if he's not too busy attending a children's pirate party), Ed West, fearless crusader against 'hysterical anti-government propaganda', former Lib Dem spokesman Mark Littlewood (now director of a free-market think tank) and Nigel Farage.

350 isn't exactly a lot of popular support, especially if you subtract the gaggle of high-profile right-wing hacks, think tankers and obsessive bloggatarians and leave only the representatives of Joe and Joanne Public who turn out. No wonder the Taxpayers' alliance were keeping so quiet about the size of the anti-cuts rally.

If these people really represent the majority, as they claim, then most people must be apathetic as well as silent. If they do stay at home, they could always tune in to the news and get the latest on how Osborne’s cuts are helping the UK economy to power ahead of its European rivals - not.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, Herr Kafka...

... now that you can 'breach an injunction innocently, by repeating information that one knows to be true but does not realise has been injuncted.'

Finland woefully unprepared to conquer Europe

With the Eurovision Song Contest 2011 looming, I predict that the Finns will soon be kicking themselves. The official Finnish entry seems to be something disappointingly safe called Da Da Dam, by some bloke called Paradise Oskar (not, I suspect, his real name). Lordi, he isn't. 95% pf people who listen to Da Da Dam will have forgotten it before Graham Norton and his pan-European colleagues have wrapped up this year's show.

As any fule with an Internet connection kno, the Finns should have entered Munamies. They are, after all, a nation with proud tradition of being completely mental to uphold. Munamies' song, Pomppufiilis, has been all over t'internet like a rash recently and, once seen, is impossible to forget (at least without an intensive course of electroconvulsive therapy). Click here if you've not already experienced the bouncing, squeaky-voiced mini-moomintroll who could so easily have conquered Europe, had more far-sighted counsels prevailed.


Via The Daily What, Miss Cellania and others to numerous to mention.

Full circle

Many original members of the future Social Democratic Party had been members of the Manifesto Group within the Labour Party. This group opposed what they saw as a leftward shift in Labour policy... The final straw for many in the Manifesto Group was the behaviour of former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey at a meeting with them during the Labour leadership campaign to replace James Callaghan. He bluntly told those assembled to vote for him and answered their questions uninformatively. At the end, one asked him why they should vote for him, and Healey answered "You have nowhere else to go"* (to stop the left-winger Michael Foot from winning). Healey's arrogance convinced many that their days as members of the Labour Party were now over. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King found five defectors who claimed to have voted for Foot in order to saddle Labour with an unelectable leader and make life easier in their new party. One defector, Mike Thomas, said he was tempted to send a telegraph to Healey reading "Have found somewhere else to go".

The birth of the SDP, according to Wikipedia. Thirty years on, with electoral reform as far off as ever, how's the realignment of British politics going?

Do the Lib Dems want to abandon the Coalition? If so, they have a death wish: any election in the near future would result in a near-total obliteration of their representation in the Commons.

The Telegraph, 11th May 2011

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.



*my italics

Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye?

Today, Kelvin MacKenzie told an interviewer on Radio 4's PM programme that he was pleased that the courts have thrown out 'that disgusting case by that disgusting man Mosley.'

Max Mosley isn't exactly my cup of tea, but being called 'disgusting' by Kelvin MacKenzie is bang out of order. It's like being ticked off by Gordon Ramsay for swearing.

Conspiracy theory of the day

After Commander-in Chief Obama OK'd the successful mission to get rid of America's Public Enemy no. 1, Donald Trump and the right-wing wingnuts who'd been obsessing about his birth certificate were left looking a bit foolish. On the whole, these don't seem like the sort of folk who change their opinions just because the facts change, so I was prepared for the standard conspiracy theories ("they didn't show us the pictures of Bin Laden with half his head blown off, so how do we know he's really dead?"). But I've just come across a new conspiracy theory that's so elaborately, ingeniously, bonkers that it almost counts as a work of art. It goes like this:

Obama was never really interested in killing or apprehending the world's most infamous mass murderer, (obviously, because there's noting a pinko liberal like Obama loves better than a authoritarian, reactionary fundamentalist). What Obama was interested in was disguising the shocking fact that he wasn't born in the USA. To do so, he hatched a cunning plan that just happened to involve killing Bin Laden.

First, after coming up with ridiculous excuses, (like being too busy doing more important stuff like running the USA), Obama eventually got round to showing Trump, and the world's media, a copy of his full birth certificate. The birth certificate was (of course) a fake. A lesser man would have tried to produce a convincing fake, but according to at least one eagle-eyed "birther", that tricky Obama may have deliberately littered the document with obvious anomalies, such as 'multiple layers, mis-matched fonts, hi-res scan of numbers clearly overlayed in juxtaposition to low-res scan numbers, etc'. These deliberate mistakes would have formed part of a fiendishly clever "sting" operation, primarily intended to make the birthers look like fools.  But for this diabolical plan to work, Obama needed to have Bin Laden killed.

Apparently 'Barack Obama was getting nearly weekly briefings on how George Bush's intelligence apparatus was closing in on Osama since the middle of March, 2011' (I love that detail - Obama's been siting in the White House as C in C since January 2009, but somehow, in 2011,  it's still 'George Bush's intelligence apparatus'). Obama could have signed the order to go get him any time since March, but deliberately chose not to send in the Navy SEALS until immediately after releasing his (deliberately) crudely faked birth certificate. He sent them in with cameras which, according to this theory, is highly suspicious, since, 'SEALs don't carry unnecessary equipment, they don't take photos like tourists at the National Mall.' The SEALS went in, killed Bin Laden, and, most crucially, took snaps of his dead body, which was then disposed of at sea.

The official cover story is that no photos of Bin Laden's body have been released because they would have only inflamed the situation and because the folks in White House thought the whole idea a bit gross. In fact, the reason they haven't been released lies at the heart of Obama's devilish plan to smear those brave truth-seekers who have called his birth certificate into question. Bin Laden, according to this theory, is unquestionably dead. By having photos taken of his dead body, then withholding them, Obama has cleverly managed to make anybody who questions his birth certificate look like a deluded idiot. Here's the reasoning in its full, glorious, pottyness:

Once the SEALS accomplished their mission and got the photos - and the photos were the real point of the whole mission - Obama then pulled the same trick with the photos that he had just spent several years playing with his birth certificate: "Yes, we had the body, but you can't see that. The fish are eating it. Yes, I have the photos, but you can't see them either. Everyone will say they are doctored. I have all the evidence, you don't get anything, you just have to take my word."


He intends to conflate people who still have legitimate questions about his birth certificate and his status as "natural born citizen" with the Elvis, Hitler and soon-to-be Osama sighters. Anyone who questions his version of the story on either subject is stonewalled. And his version of the story isn't exactly consistent. It's as if they are deliberately trying to confuse the truth.

To summarise, these folks might look like swivel-eyed conspiracy nuts to you and me, but that's only because the liberal establishment have engineered a a huge and elaborate disinformation operation to make them look like a bunch of gibbering fruitloops. I'm indebted to Steve Kellmeyer author of the reliably off-the-scale-bonkers Fifth Columm blog for blowing the whistle on this dastardly plan, braving the clear and present danger of being abducted by mysterious black helicopters.

Fantastic stuff, in every sense. Watch the skies, Steve...

Satisfyingly crunchy

Random observation for today. There's something deeply satisfying about the crunch of car tyres on gravel. There's a modest and fairly unattractive strip of gravel on our drive, alternating with equally unattractive slabs of poured concrete, but I love the sound it makes when I roll the car onto it. It's a cut-price version of shingle being clawed back to sea by a retreating wave, in much the same way that that the not-so-distant rumble of traffic on the M1 sounds a bit like the roar of distant surf in my Newport-Pagnell-on-Sea fantasy. Pop open a cold beer in the sun-drenched garden (now boasting a garden shed re-painted to look like a beach hut, in blue, with jaunty strawberry ice-cream pink stripes) and disbelief is is temporarily suspended.

Thank crunchie it's Friday.