All I can say is thank God it was Iceland’s banks that collapsed while holding British deposits and not, say, China’s. Imagine the statesmanlike strength and courage it took use anti-terrorism laws to freeze the assets of a country with a population of 320,000 and no standing army. RAAAARRR! How’s that for national pride reasserted? When do we invade?

Imagine the contortions and wriggling Brown would have done to avoid describing such a catastrophe happening somewhere big as ‘effectively illegal’ and ‘completely unacceptable’. He’s very fond of saying the financial apocalypse started in America but he’s yet to make a moral judgement out loud. Is there a parallel world somewhere where a Gordon Brown is saying ‘we are freezing the assets of American companies in the United Kingdom where we can’? Is there shite.

Isn’t that the very essence of New Labour? Pushing the little kids about while holding the big lad’s coat?

So, Sarah Palin is caught bang to rights:

The running mate of US Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been found guilty of an abuse of power, according to a state legislature probe.

An open and shut case. But what’s this…

“This was a partisan-led inquiry run by [Democratic candidate Barack] Obama supporters and the Palins were completely justified in their concern,” a McCain campaign spokesperson said.

A serious charge and something Republicans would never do, resorting to such low partisanship. Erm…

As Secretary of State for the State of Florida, [Katherine] Harris was a central figure in the contested 2000 US presidential election in Florida. There were allegations of conflicts of interest and partisan and unethical behavior during the 2000 campaign. Harris had been named as Bush’s Florida campaign co-chair the year before.

Harris certified that the Republican candidate, then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, had defeated the Democratic candidate, then-Vice President Al Gore, in the popular vote of Florida and thus certified the Republican slate of electors. Despite the fact that the margin separating Bush from Gore was only a few hundred votes, with thousands of votes remaining to be counted, Harris ordered a halt to the count, freezing Bush’s small margin in place.

Still, that’s ancient history and no real harm was done.

Good grief. My fellow… what?

(Via Tim who has more fist-gnawing US election links.)

Ha ha ha! Sorry, hang on a sec. Ha ha! Stop the press! Ha ha! Gordon Brown can recite piss poor jokes written for him by somebody else! Ha ha!

I know him raising a smile is pretty unusual - like a monkey that can bring you a beer - but I’m fairly sure yesterday wasn’t that slow a news day. I know his handlers are desperate to show that the Prime Minister is actually human in the face of all the evidence - I just wonder if showing how much he’s in his element right now and how much he’s enjoying himself while people’s jobs, savings, and houses are being flushed down the toilet is the way to do it. What next, sending him down to an orphanage on Mother’s Day to sing Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep?

Isn’t he unpopular enough? Or is he trying win over those of us who can’t afford houses, pensions and savings? Has his private polling shown him the size of the dirt poor schadenfreude vote, perhaps? I imagine that’s a big constituency right now.

I suppose it at least once again shows the low expectations and regard we have for Gordon Brown. But at least he’s trying, bless him. Look everyone! The Prime Minister can make a hand-picked audience of sycophants clap! He does have a rudimentary sense of humour! The poor, poor sod.

Is Bloglines knackered? My account hasn’t updated all day and it did the same yesterday.

Anybody recommend me another decent RSS reader (not Google Reader or Netvibes)? Ta.

It looks like all those billions New Labour poured into the NHS are beginning to pay off. Just look how they looked after Peter Mandelson…

Mr Mandelson, 54, began complaining of abdominal pain over the weekend. Yesterday, as he was having dinner with a friend at his £3.5 million Regent’s Park home, the pain worsened and he rang for medical help.

Two doctors arrived and, suspecting a serious problem, they called in Lord Darzi. The health minister drove Mr Mandelson to St Mary’s, where tests revealed he had a kidney stones.

Fantastic. I’m almost looking forward to being ill. Two doctors and a minister of state? Wow. That’s medical care you just can’t buy. I take it all back - New Labour really have made a difference. No wonder the NHS is the envy of the world. God bless it.

“In case you hadn’t already worked it out - the entire global financial system is predicated on the assumption that you’re an idiot.”

So, I see the undeserving poor are getting more hard-working taxpayers’ money . If that’s what you want to call them and it. I think we can take it that these people at the top with their hands out haven’t been and won’t be treated with the same level of high-handed contempt as those much further down the ladder also needing help.

Of course, the way the small time benefits scrounger is treated - the patronising, the vilification, the incompetence and the depressing - has the dual function of giving petty bureaucrats a frisson of sadistic power and, also, to teach said scrounger not to do anything as stupid and as careless as hit hard times through no fault of their own ever again.

So, here’s another idea for helping solve the global economic crisis. Let’s treat the leading banks just like unwashed dole scroungers. Don’t invite them to Downing Street for high-level talks. Make them walk a mile in the rain to a grubby office where they will be met by the distressingly surly indifference of a claims officer (if that claims officer isn’t off ’sick’). Make the bankers do this at the same time every two weeks. Don’t offer them any advice when they’re there or, if you do, make it ambiguous or just plain incorrect.

Hand the banks’ finances over to undertrained and demotivated staff in a government call centre. Make sure the system is as half-arsed as possible. Delay the payments to the banks for a day or two. When they phone up panicky and asking what’s happened to their much needed money treat them off-handedly. Make sure they know their place. If they can be reduced to tears so much the better. Stoke the crushing uncertainty of it all. Promise to phone back when you have more information but don’t. Send them a payment but make it smaller than promised. Make two payments just to unsettle them further. Insist they can keep the money and then write to them a week later demanding it back. Do it just before Christmas.

If after 18 months this situation isn’t sorted the banks should be handed over to a private sector agency charged with getting the banks working again by all means necessary. They will be paid by results and will receive their money when the banks are working again - whether the agency had a direct hand in helping or not. Again, make sure the staff are undertrained, bored and lacking in any empathy whatsoever. Leave it hanging over the bankers that they could lose their money at any minute.

Start a widespread campaign to plant in the public consciousness that banks and bankers are scum. Find out if any of them are foreign. Shame, shame and shame again. Sodding bankers sitting around leeching off the tax-payer. Add to their already towering misery as much as possible. Apply pressure from which they can’t escape. Make things ten times harder, more long-winded and as frustrating than they need to be. Break these scroungers, in other words. Compensate them by allowing them to get their anti-depressants for free.

The bastards won’t do it again.

Un-bloody-believable:

Alastair Campbell is to lecture university students on the Tony Blair years.

Do we have a law against corrupting the nation’s youth in this country? If not why not? Or is this like one of those things in America where they send drug dealers to speak to school children? ‘Don’t do what I done kids…’

What’s the title of the lecture, do you think? ‘Political depravity at the turn of the 21st Century’, perhaps. I wonder if there’ll be a module on how to drive whistleblowers to suicide.

To live to see such wondrous things, eh? Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of having a monkey that would bring me a beer?

I’d given up on ever realising my dream. I had to resign myself having kids instead. It’s a poor second, I can tell you.

There’s a real 1997 vibe in the air what with disgraced ex-ministers and war criminals welcomed back into the club with open arms. And here’s the venerable Austin Mitchell MP on Gordon Brown’s new economic offensive:

Gordon Brown’s speech at the Parliamentary Labour Party last night was powerful, effective and well received. He knows that’s right. And puts the blame where it lies: on the greedy, the speculators, the lack of effective control.

Now, it might have escaped Austin’s notice but his party have been in power for eleven bloody years. It’s not a new broom we’re talking about here; a new government sweeping up the wreckage of the previous raddled and corrupt regime.

Gordon Brown’s blaming ‘the greedy, the speculators, the lack of effective control’, is he? So who’s been in charge for the last decade while the greedy and the speculators filled their boots? Who been quite content with with less than ‘effective’ control?

I’ll give you a clue: he’s an miserable, unkempt, out of his depth Scotsman with a funny mouth. This latterday conversion to the iniquities of greed has nothing to do with wanting to join the lynching in the hope he’ll avoid being lynched himself, of course.

Gordon’s been more than happy for these bad puppies to crap on the rug these long years. Now he’s going to rub their noses in it? We had Peter Mandelson fondling the rich at the birth of the New Labour government and John Hutton stroking them at its death. Brown’s got a brass neck, frankly, the horrible old hypocrite.

Look who’s back. Alastair Campbell, blood still dripping from his hands returns once more to stink up British politics with his filth like a walking, talking dirty protest. Talk about rubbing our noses in it. Just one more reminder to thousands that we’ll never vote for this revolting bunch ever again.

Someone really should tell Gordon Brown that it’s not the political equivalent of The Beatles he’s putting back together here. New Labour’s greatest hits were on downtown Baghdad and Basra when their bombs were pulverising children. Bringing back Bomb Aimer (First Class) Campbell only reminds us of that, doesn’t it? Shall we run a book on who’ll be first to wander into the woods with their painkillers and pocketknife?

No, it’s not The Beatles Brown’s reforming. Far, far, far from it. It’s empty chancers 5ive he’s putting back together. When 5ive decided to reform, the glorious drawback was they could only get four of them, one having gone on to ‘better’ things. Lack of interest and poor new material meant the relaunch died on its arse. The sense that politics could imitate ‘art’ at any moment is tantalising.

Is anyone else noticing an upsurge in spam email purporting to be from your high street bank and asking you to verify your account details and PIN number? I suspect that these emails aren’t from third-party chancers at all but actually from the banks themselves hoping to trap the gullible into ponying up some much needed liquidity.

I see a delegation has been to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer overnight to ask for more cash. I seem to remember that the last large delegation to visit him asking him for a raise - representing teachers, nurses, and other key workers and public sector workers - were told to sod off in no uncertain terms.

Would the banks strike, do you think, if Alistair Darling fails to give in to their demands? Can we look forward to a Winter of Content as smug and patronising banking workers huddle around their braziers on picket lines outside your local branch?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Pope, with the kind of self-awareness we’ve come to expect…

The global financial crisis is proof that the pursuit of money and success is pointless, Pope Benedict XVI has told a meeting of bishops in Rome.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church said that the disappearance of money as banks collapsed showed that wealth meant “nothing”.

The Pope said that people should instead base their lives on God’s word.

Tell you what, Benedict? You first.

'You should see how much my
underpants cost,' said Benedict.

9:1 Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases.

9:3 And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece.

An email arrives from David Rees, creator of the mighty Get Your War On:

As of January 20, 2009 GYWO will cease to exist.

Shit.

Gone?

Gordon Brown has been warned not to force through plans to allow terror suspects to be held for up to 42 days before charge, the BBC understands.

The plan scraped through the Commons and is due before the Lords next week, where it is expected to be defeated.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson says the PM has been warned by ministers it would be “politically suicidal” to push it through by using the Parliament Act.

Will Gordon dare slide another brick from his Jenga tower of a premiership? The bastard in me says it’s time for a pro-42 days campaign.

About turn: The BBC webmonkeys, in their infinite wisdom and without a record of edits, have changed the story with the older version disappearing as if it had never existed. 42 days is very much still ‘on’ apparently.

Anyway, I think I have the answer. Today at noon, the Prime Minister should announce that this morning he sent teams of mobile car crushers into London’s Square Mile. Simultaneously, he should say, he dispatched Army artillery teams into the Home Counties broker belt.

If the FTSE share index is not up by 200 points at 1pm, he will promise, five upmarket cars will be chosen at random from underground car parks in the City and fed into the mobile car crushers. At the same time, the artillery teams will reduce five randomly chosen houses in the broker belt to rubble.

If the FTSE is not up by another 200 points by 2pm the process will begin again. And so forth. Across the world, presidents and prime ministers will make the same announcement to their own people. The townships of The Hamptons will ring to the sound of cannon fire. Cubed Lexuses will be stacked in the streets of Singapore.

The car crushers will continue to visibly prowl financial districts across the world, and the artillery flank the gated communities, for the foreseeable future as a continuing incentive for market optimism.

Anybody see a down side?

No, no, no. This won’t do at all…

Buried in the new Quarterly Report from the Pentagon is this statistic: 74% of Iraqis feel safe in their own neighborhoods, but only 37% feel safe outside their neighborhoods. Iraq has become a nation of ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, separated by 12 foot concrete barrier walls.

They’re not 12 foot concrete barrier walls, they’re Freedom Hedgerows. It’s not ethnic cleansing, it’s distributed community cohesion.

(Via Mike P)

Or is ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ the cliché we’re looking for here? I only ask because Mandelson’s apparently been rehabilitated to help clear up the wreckage of the credit crunch - a mess caused largely by moody mortgages. Who better to do that that a man who lied on his mortgage application?

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle buffs himself to a shine over the return of Peter Mandelson with the strangest of analogies…

Mandelson is, of course, no Churchill – the most he aspires to do is to save his party, not save the country. Nevertheless, both Labour and Tory strategists treat him with the same sort of awe that wartime Allied strategists thought of Rommel, a man who can change the game, a lucky general, an infinitely wily opponent.

Mandelson as… Rommel? That being the case, we all know what that makes Blair. And Alastair Campbell. I doubt, however, we’ll be reading Kettle’s purple prose about how ‘both Labour and Tory strategists treat Blair/Campbell with the same sort of awe that wartime Allied strategists thought of Hitler/Goebbels’.

Lucky? The man’s twice disgraced (and counting). Wily? Tell that to the people whose careers the bastard destroyed with a whispered briefing to a journalist (the kind of sly, anonymous, top secret briefing that fuels the likes of Kettle’s self-importance). Mandelson’s a preening, passive-aggressive coward with a moral compass like a propeller. What kind of deficiency of faculty does it take to regard his reappointment as a good thing? Or him as a Nazi hero?

Hello again Peter Mandelson. If the Prime Minister wants to invite back a divisive, conniving, back-stabbing, money-loving, petulant and twice-disgraced liar - the embodiment of everything that’s slippery and dishonest about New Labour - then that’s his business, I suppose.

It is indicative, however, of just how thin on the ground ‘talent’ is in the modern Labour Party when you have to turn to such characters. It’s worth noting that haughty war criminal Geoff Hoon also mystifyingly continues to prosper.

The masterstroke is putting Mandelson in the House of Lords rather than make him scrap for a seat in the House of Commons. It means Mandelson, sitting in one of the big chairs of government in a time of economic disaster, won’t have to face awkward questions and public scrutiny from MPs. How’s that for the primacy of the House of Commons?

Warren Ellis discovers the dream ticket:

It’s a much clearer message than some.

“It is a very black day for the constitutional position around policing,” said a Whitehall ’source’ about the resignation of Sir Ian Blair.

Shocking, just shocking. Those bloody Tories politicising the police? What a diabolical liberty. You’d never catch New Labour doing that - using the police for their own political ends - would you?

Of course not.

Matthew Norman’s column in The Independent today is all about how political careers are finished once they become targets of ridicule and humour.

He talks about Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey and her uncanny imitation of Sarah Palin. If you haven’t seen the clips here’s one…

There’s another here.

It’s brilliant stuff and full of genuine laughs and not just the ‘hmmm, very clever’ of a lot of satire.

And then Norman reminds us that Palin is ‘an actuarial 3-1 shot to become President’ and you realise that all the laughs in the world don’t put an upside on that.

Amnesty International have a petition against the planned extension of internment for suspected terrorists to 42 days.

A clever element of the petition is that signatories are sorted by post code and individual MPs will receive a version of the petition containing just their constituents who have signed.

Go and let your MP know you’re against 42 days internment. As Graham Linehan says, ‘42 days is not an interrogation. 42 days is a disappearance.’