Nosemonkey's EUtopia

I mean, really – what sort of bollocks is this?

“The sky is dark. The terrorists seek mass casualties and are entirely indiscriminate…”

Yes, I know that it’s true (even the bit about the sky being dark, what with it being nearly winter and all). But what happened to policemen popping in with a reassuring “Evenin’ all – nothing to see here”? That seemed to work pretty well at keeping everyone calmly going about their daily lives during the Blitz, from pretty much all I’ve heard. Or were the Luftwaffe not after mass casualties? Were doodlebugs not totally indiscriminate?

*** WARNING – OVERDONE ANALOGY COMING UP ***

Your job, Sir Ian, is not to run around flapping your arms about and screaming like a little girl who’s been stung by a wasp for the first time, getting the rest of the children terrified in the process. It’s to calmly set up plastic bottles with some beer in the bottom to trap the buggers safely or, in worst case scenarios, get out your rolled-up newspaper to swat them (even though you know that doing so will only attract more of the mindless buzzing bastards).

Then your job is to reassure the kiddies who rely on you that the nasty wasps have all gone to calm them down, but warn them to keep a careful eye-out just in case. It is emphatically not to scream out and point to the giant nest in the bushes, because that not only sends the kids into a panic, but also makes them more likely to do something that will provoke the viciously pointless insects to attack them again. Such as, for example, support a motion that anything black and yellow (bees, sunflowers, JCB diggers, the remote, sparsely-populated desert planet of Tatooine etc. etc.) should be locked up for 90 days, just in case they turn out to be wasps.

*** OVERDONE ANALOGY ENDS ***

My advice? If you can’t tell us “we’ve caught some terrorists and have plenty of evidence to convict them – the trial starts in a week”, don’t say anything at all. Cheers.

Switzerland in rampant hypocrisy shocker!

“Police in Switzerland have seized a number of paintings belonging to the Pushkin state art museum in Moscow.

“The 25 paintings – part of a collection on loan to an exhibit in Martigny – were seized on behalf of a local firm which claims Russia owes it money.”

So this would be a different Switzerland to the one that’s still holding on to vast piles of gold, jewels, artworks and the like taken from victims of the Holocaust and deposited in Swiss banks by the Nazis, then? Or does this mean that the families of Holocaust victims whose posessions are in Swiss vaults now have the right to go and take them back?

A prime example of how locking people up without putting them on trial can lead to resentment, anger and alienation:

Arrested December 2003 and released without charge after six days, then re-arrested in August 2004 by request of the United States and held ever since without facing trial, today dear old Charles Clarke has decided to allow Babar Ahmad’s extradition even though a) British police failed to find enough evidence to bring him to trial, b) he may face the death penalty, and c) the US still refuses to agree to do the same for us. Hurrah!

Please note also a reminder that the “90 days” thing was not, despite claims, going to be enough for our lords and masters, no matter all the bullshit about not planning to bang people up longer down the line:

“Mr Clarke had an initial 60 days in which to approve or reject the judge’s decision, and was twice given two-month extensions because of the “complex representations made about the case”

Six months – twice the 90 days the government claimed was “all” they needed, and Charlie STILL didn’t have enough evidence to come to a decision… Admittedly he’s not the brightest of sparks, but nonetheless…

After much pondering, I have decided to drop the cloak of blogging semi-anonymity, step out from behind the curtain and reveal my real name. You won’t have heard of me, don’t worry, and with a little bit of link-following or intelligent Googling it was already possible to find out who I am, so this is hardly that exciting.

But bloggers who use their own names seem to be taken a tad more seriously and – I will admit this is the prime concern now that I’ve got a wife to support and stuff – appear to have more luck blagging paid work off the back of their online gubbins. So I reckon I might as well take the plunge. Even if doing it right after a piss-take post may not be the best time…

I shall most likely be following the Tim Ireland route of keeping the pseudonym at the bottom of posts (to prevent people who’ve got used to “Nosemonkey” being too confused) while revealing my actual name in the title bar. This will, of course, involve template fiddling, and shall be done later today.

In the meantime, in the real world and stuff I am James Clive Matthews, hack writer/editor, and known as Clive to pretty much everyone outside the family. You can buy some of my film criticism stuff here and here, should you be so inclined (or here and here for US readers). I’d prefer it, however, if you refrained from becoming a stalker.

Hopefully dropping the anonymity will not lead to a change in writing style, self-censorship or the like, nor make me feel the need to re-write everything on here to a more professional standard (as 95% of the posts here are first drafts, published as soon as I finish typing and not planned out in advance in any way – largely because I have neither the time nor the inclination to make too much effort for unpaid work). Time will tell if the lack of a mask leads to improvement or decline – fingers crossed that it works out OK, eh?

Using Blairite logic, if Tony doesn’t follow Thailand’s example and force us all to register our pay-as-you-go mobiles to ensure they can’t be used in a terrorist attack, he will have blood on his hands if, as I hope will never happen*, terrorists use such devices to detonate bombs (as, it should be noted, they did in Madrid).

* cliched and platitudinous phraseology courtesy of Kitty Ussher MP – and yes, yes I am still angry about that.

Sorry, busy – check out Soj’s superb (as usual) EuroPDB if you have a hankering for newsy stuff. Glad to see her forced blogging retirement ended up being short-lived.

I was going to do a “Peter Mandelson is a twat and so is France” round-up, but trade talks are simply too damn tedious. Thankfully the Curious Hamster has done it for me. Ta, boss.

Utterly predictable – I mean, OBVIOUSLY it’s the 15 people rounded up for a show trial who are guilty here, not the government forces who massacred hundreds of peaceful protestors…

“the judge… repeated many of the details of the government’s version of what happened…

“The UN commission on human rights has said in a statement that there have been serious inadequacies in the conduct of the trial, including inadequate definition of the crimes the 15 men were accused of…

“The fact that the defendants all confessed their guilt on the first day raised concerns that the confessions might have been obtained by torture.”

Hmmm… Judges going along with what they’re told to by the government? Inadequate definitions of crimes? “Might have been obtained by torture”? Apart from the fact these poor bastards actually got some kind of trial, it could almost be Blair’s ideal Britain.

Following the Blair camp’s “the police know best” line on the whole 90 days thing, should we follow the (alleged) example of this former senior policeman? Is Tony going to propose new legislation to make us all fuck children? At least one senior policeman seems to think it’s a good idea – and think of the reduction in the number of paedophilia cases, court costs and the like if it was made legal…

I’d never heard of her before, but this load of abject bollocks (though entirely expected) earns her a place on my Commons cunts list:

“I very much hope that we will never have another terrorist atrocity in Britain. But if we do, and if it happens because the police have not had sufficient time to accumulate enough evidence to charge the perpetrators, then the Tories, the Lib Dems and our own rebels will have blood on their hands.”

And would you look at that? During the limited time she’s been in parliament she’s never rebelled, despite her protestations that “I started off sceptical about the proposal to detain people for up to 90 days without trial” (and please note that despite her claims that she “went into politics to sort out health and education, not to strengthen the long hand of the law”, from her voting record she’s voted only 3 times on education/welfare issues, as opposed to 42 on other subjects – mostly appearing to be backing Blair to the hilt on the Terrorism Bill and ID Cards, while only signing two Early Day Motions that could in any way be seen to be related to these two professed core obsessions – and even though on her website she claims her priorities instead to be “jobs and housing”, though in parliament she’s shown no interest in these at all).

Now this kind of blind loyalty would have made sense for a new, young, female Labour MP back in 1997. But how much of a political cretin must this woman be to continue sucking up to Blair in the twilight years of his premiership? The way to get noticed these days is not the unthinking, drone-like flocking to the correct lobby, but making a principled stand to secure a place at the forefront of Labour’s next generation.

OK, yes – she’s MP for Burnley, which has had a fair few problems with the likes of the BNP (who have won over 10% of the vote in the last two General Elections there). Voting in favour of whacking brown people in dingy cells for months on end is likely to go down fairly well with some of her constituents.

But you’d surely think that someone representing a constituency with a very recent history of violent racial problems would take a slightly more sensitive approach to legislation which could so easily stir up more race-based resentment.

How silly of me, though. No one in Burnley’s interested: “there’s a strong vocal Muslim population in my constituency of Burnley and not one of them felt strongly enough about this to bother contacting me on the subject. In fact, overall, we’ve only had one email before the vote from anyone at all.” Perhaps it would help if she made more of an effort to build a dialogue with constituents or get up an active website (the link to the “news” section gives only a link to an index page, last updated at the start of August…)

So as a public service to Ms Ussher’s Muslim constituents – and any others who wish to express their opinions on this or any other issue, one way or the other – here’s her email addresses: kitty@burnleylabour.org.uk / ussherk@parliament.uk and you could always try the invaluable Write to Them or Fax Your MP. Don’t expect a reply though…

At the end of her ill-considered comment piece, Ms Ussher repeats that “in the horrific event of a crisis that I hope will never happen, it’ll be their fault, not mine.” Fine. In the event of another series of race riots in Burnley caused by a local dark-skinned person being interred without trial, which I hope will never happen, it will be YOUR fault, Kitty, not that of those more sensible, principled MPs who you seek to blame for the actions of psychotic nutters.

Update: First, I thought I ought to make clear that “sensible” and “principled” for those MPs who voted against applies purely to their actions on this particular issue. After all, the list includes the likes of Ian Paisley and George Galloway, rabid maniacs both. Also, I’d forgotten the fall-out from the idiotic blog-world’s similar claims of “blood on their hands” bullshit – amply ridiculed by Jarndyce and Jim Bliss.

Update 2: I’d forgotten D-Notice was based in Burnley… As one of Ussher’s constituents he wrote in, and has had a response from an underling as follows:

“Kitty is your elected representative and will try to represent your views whenever she can. However given poll after poll after poll showed the public overwhelmingly supported the measure, which side of the argument would you have her take other than the one supported by the police, the public and the party under which she was elected?”

Erm… Perhaps that side supported by her constituents, the people she was elected to represent. The selfsame constituents she seemingly, by her own admission in that Guardian article, failed to consult on this issue. Failed to consult despite Tony Blair’s call the weekend before the vote for MPs to go and speak to their constituents about it.

Update 3: Oooh! Talk Politics is rather good on Ms Ussher and all…

A tad late for Rembrance Sunday, this, but found the press release amongst the hundreds of emails awaiting me back at work. Channel Four and the Imperial War Museum have teamed up to launch a couple of websites which could well be of interest – first, a searchable database of names of those remembered on First World War Memorials, and second, the United Kingdom Inventory of war Memorials, taking in all types of remembrance sites from all conflicts commemorated in the UK. Good stuff.

From my news catch-up reading, nice to see that some things never change – Central Asia is still riddled with corruption and politically-motivated murder while facing economic crises – all of which are still being denied by these various near-psychotic dictatorial governments in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Meanwhile my new favourite country is going from strength to strength. Hurrah!