The latest Labour email propaganda missive
Just hit the inbox. From Jo Brand (remember her?). It begins thusly:
"Hello,
I'm Jo, a Labour supporter and you may have seen me on telly. Have you noticed the big news this week?
David Cameron (Dave to his friends), an old Etonian distantly related to the Queen, has been elected leader of the Conservative Party."
Would this be an email from the same Labour party whose own leader
went to the Scottish public school Fettes? The same Labour party whose leader's
old housemaster is David Cameron's old headmaster?
And would this be the same Jo Brand who went to the (now closed) fee-paying girls' school Beresford House in Sussex?
And, more importantly, would where any of these people went to school actually matter for shit?
Or would this merely be yet another attempt to use the tired tactic of stirring up class antagonisms and resentments in a desperate, hypocritical attempt to hang on to power?
People in glass houses etc...
Rejoice! There's a new Bribery consultation paper:
"The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Fiona Mactaggart): I am pleased to announce the publication today of the Government's consultation paper on reform of the laws of bribery.
Although the crime of bribery remains relatively rare in the UK, it is vital that we, through our actions and principles, remain vigilant and promote high standards of propriety at home and abroad."
Just as well we're so good at avoiding corruption, bribery and fraud in the UK, eh? No wonder these new laws are focussed on "bribery of foreign public officials" - nothing like that would ever happen with our own public officials, would it?
Oh, and it may be worth noting that these new (proposed) laws are now
eight years late...
(Links courtesy of Labour Watch's Labour Sleaze page - which I didn't even get halfway through in compiling that little lot...)
Polly Toynbee: moronic arse (part 5,687)
A quickie, because I've found a spare five minutes and keep forgetting how much of a fucking idiot Polly Toynbee is. Wait - CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia are, like, a Christian allegory? REALLY? Well there's something that no one's ever spotted in the 50 years since the books first started appearing. A fucking revelation, Polly, you twat.
Does that stop them from being damn good stories (well, apart from A Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle, obviously)? Of course not.
For the record, I despise all forms of religion, and find most religious types self-satisfied bores. But none are as bad as Toynbee, with her blatant attempts to rile the buggers while - seemingly - advising all true Guardian-reading liberal lefties to avoid what's sure to be one of the films of the month out of an anti-Christian bigotry which would, were it directed against Muslims or Jews, be the subject of yet another 2,000-word rant from the deranged hag hack of Farringdon, labelling anyone who even momentarily THOUGHT such abject rubbish only one step away from shoving people into gas chambers.
And so we enter into the age-old, tedious sixth-former anti-religion bullshit:
"Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?"
No, Polly, we didn't. THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT.
I would ago into a point-by-point demolition of the tired old "Tolkien and Lewis were racist and classist etc. etc." bollocks that poorly-read idiots who quickly trawl the internet for research always trot out as well (I've written a book on the fucking thing after all), but Toybee simply isn't worth the time or effort of anything more than violent insults.
Note to any Christians (Christian Voice, I'm looking at you) who have the misfortune of reading this particularly ill-thought-out, deliberately baiting piece of mindless, critically-deficient dross: ignore her and she'll go away. There's another article on Sure Start waiting for her just round the corner, and she'll have forgotten all about this by tea-time.
Note to the Guardian: if you want an actually intelligent, considered analysis of the relationship between the Narnia books, the new film, the Disney corporation, Christianity and the power the American religious right wield over Hollywood from someone who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about, my email's above.
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Looks like I've made the shortlist for "Best UK Blog" in the 2005 Weblog Awards. Hurrah. Damn tough field though - I'm up against the likes of Samuel Pepys, Londonist, and a wide range of the usual, far more popular suspects (as well as a few friendly faces), so I hold out little hope - my daily readership's less than a tenth of a lot of that lot's...
Still, if you fancy voting for me, click on the thingie below, and I'll whack something in the sidebar tomorrow, most likely. Apparently you can vote once every 24 hours, so vote early and vote often, etc. Ta and stuff.
