834 days ago
The former health secretary whose office handed a £26 million PPE contract to Matt’s best chum who owns his local boozer, has despite being thrice jabbed, caught covid for a second time. How come? Disraeli has the answer. Or maybe it was Charles James Fox.
1141 days ago
The BBC is today celebrating a milestone in a renaming process at Liverpool University. In response to student demands, the building, a hall of residence, is no longer named after William Ewart Gladstone. Instead, it is to be named after someone “linked to the theme of racial equality and Liverpool”. I cannot wait and nominate the late George Floyd who once listened to a Beatles LP. But, whether fed by the students or just ignorant in its own way, the BBC cannot help itself in lying about the grand old man of Liberal politics with two doses of fake news.
1319 days ago
David Hume was a great philosopher but, writing in 1753, he made remarks about black folks which even then were a tad offensive and today are viewed as utterly racist. Given that we now judge folks’ utterances and actions of 267 years ago by the mores of today, in the year of madness that is 2020, Hume was toast. A building named after him at Edinburgh University has been renamed. I suspect that there will be calls to remove A Treatise of Human Nature from the curriculum and so future generations will come to know the man, not as I did as a student, as a philosopher but as just another dead white racist male. So where next with the purge? Might I suggest Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns?
1408 days ago
We live in mad times. In the wider world I see that cartoon Police Dog Chase, from Paw Patrol, is about to go the way of Thomas Guy and Gladstone and become a non-person. On the stockmarket we see shares in companies that had said they are in a real mess, entering Chapter 11 in the USA, or talking to an administrator in the UK, roof it. This is all sheer madness and cannot last. I offer you two UK examples…
1415 days ago
I predicted earlier today that the purging of statues and street names associated with figures from the past with slaving links, however tenuous, would soon see the great Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone in trouble. It did not take long for bedwetters at Liverpool University to decide that their Gladstone Hall needed renaming.
1416 days ago
In stab City, the lawless moral cesspit that is the capital of Airstrip One, hapless Mayor Sadiq Khan has waded into the slavery row with predictable vigour.
2550 days ago
My godless, almost 16 year old, daughter Olaf calls me as her GCSE's start next week. Her school reports are glowing, she has already won a scholarship to the 6th form and I wish her luck but am confident that it will be A*s all round. We have agreed not to discuss grade inflation, I'm very proud of her anyway. Conversation then turns to the General Election where she says she is backing the Tories. Again I am proud of her. Her real anger is directed, however, not at her fellow Islington resident Comrade Corbyn, but at Tim Farron and the Lib Dems. She is furious at poor Mr Farron for his less than unequivocal support for LGBT rights. In Islington that is the sort of issue that really matters above all else.
3002 days ago
The BBC's Question Time was from Bradford last night and my heart sank as I looked out an audience comprised largely of fat people who pretty ssoon showed that they were also - almost to a person - just plain stupid. It was all too predictable what followed as a questionner asked whether George Osborne's pre-election talk about a Northern Powerhouse was just vote grabbing waffle.
A silly Labour MP said how some Government department had just been moved from Sheffield to the South and asked how this would help the Northern Powerhouse. The audience lapped it up. Shuffling desks in the great State apparatus has nothing to do with creating wealth and prosperity but that was a point no-one in the room seemed to appreciate.
A woman in the audience who appeared to have an almost negative IQ and thus boasted that she worked in local Government talked of savage cuts in her employer's budget and austerity and the rest of the audience wet themselves with joy.
The odious careerist Amber Rudd for the Tories talked about investing in trains in Manchester & Liverpool but that seemed only to irk the audience from the other side of the pennines even more. One assumes that Ms Rudd, like myself
3395 days ago
Naturally I am shocked over the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris by Islamofascist gunmen. It is an assault on free speech, it is sickening and it must be deplored but watching C4 coverage of the event last night the cowardice and duplicity of the Western Media was there for all to see.
First up were the range of voices singing the praises of the publication for daring to challenge cultural norms, standing up to religious intolerance and to racism for fighting for free speech and calling for the Front Nationale to be banned. Er…hang on a sec…
Personally I do not find some of the crude jibes made at all religions by this publication very clever, funny or brave. Let’s face it Jews and Christians are not going to react by hacking heads off in protest, that sort of behaviour is the preserve of the Islamofascists. However, amongst the trendy liberal elite it is deemed clever and almost the norm to mock those of any faith (but especially the Christian faith) as if they were some relic of a former age, like those who support fox hunting, hanging or who believe in a flat earth. I admire those with faith. I cannot believe but almost wish I did. I find the principles of Christianity as far more appealing than those of the chattering classes.
As such while I regard much of what Charlie Hebdo lampooned about the faith I’d like to have offensive, crude and not very clever. Sure, attack the Church where it fails (like in child abuse) but to attack folks just for having faith or the faith itself in a sneering manner – how very Islington.
But I defend its right to publish this bollocks because I believe in free speech. And that is why I am perplexed by how the liberal elite think that Charlie Hebdo trying to get the Front Nationale banned is worthy of praise. Okay it fits in with the modern liberal agenda but it is hardly in the Mill or Gladstone tradition of supporting free speech is it?
That I loathe and despise everything that the party of Le Pen stands for is a given. But
4056 days ago
Today the three party leaders will sit down and agree to ever tighter controls on the press. Assuming that he is not getting a blow job from a hooker at the time, Hugh Grant will then invoke the name of Milly Dowler and a 300 year tradition of a free press will draw to a close.
If you trust your politicians to behave with honesty and integrity that is perhaps fine. If you are happy for celebs like Grant to give you the hard sell on their latest movies or useless designer products without knowing why their public image is a sham that is again fine. If you are happy for scandals involving taxpayers cash being wasted, paedophile rings run within local councils and at the BBC to stay hidden and protected, then that is fine.
I suspect that none of us are happy that scandal and corruption will now become harder to expose. I am not.
The established press has done itself no favours. Phone hacking was a disgrace. It was also illegal under existing laws. There is no need for a new law to (in due course) get the collar of Piers Moron and others felt. And the press/Westminster cosy club
