Too busy to blog in recent days, and now I'm disappearing again. Back in a week or two. Meanwhile, I shall be all of a Twitter @Prodicuss.
If friends in #Egypt are reading this, you're in my heart. Look after yourselves - and your unique inheritance.
Both stronger men than me, obviously.
Put a sock in it, Balls. You cocked up, royally, and watching a street-fighter like you playing the dignified guru now is risible.
You have been kicked out and you are not going to be allowed back in. As far as political power and your reputation are concerned, you are pissing in the wind. Fucked. Find yourself a nice little job in an American University. Whatever, I couldn't care less. Just have the decency to take your horrible mug off my TV screen.
But you you won't, will you? You never give up, you vain, dangerous bastard. You're cleverer than all of us, right? And of course being Labour you are entitled to rule and you mean to get the top job, somehow, some time.
Dream on. We are not the memory-deficient thickos that you and your vain, Righteous friends believe us to be.
We remember everything that you said in government, Balls, and everything that you did, and everything that you trained Gordon Brown to say and do.
Brown was just an ambitious historian, an arrested-development inadequate, dreaming his pompous, deluded Labour dreams, and then he met you, the brilliant economist, the biggest brain in Westminster. A genius, with all the economic jargon he needed to make him look good, which fitted his dirigiste, Marxoid, statist dogmas perfectly, and together you got to work. And what a job you did.
From ConHome: "Ed Balls and Co spent like drunken sailors before the recession struck"
And then there are the eye-watering hundreds of billions of debt which you and Brown tried to hide from us in your little black PFI book.
Do you seriously think our memories are so short? Do you seriously believe we have forgotten all that - already? How can you imagine we will believe you (any more than we believe Brown) when you say that our plight is due to the financial sector crash which, of course, your socialist economic policies caused? I repeat, Balls: we are not fucking stupid.
We will blame you for the next thirty or forty years, even more than Brown, as we struggle to pay off your drunken sailor debts, living with a reduced quality of life because of you. You bastard. Oh, Brown's name was on all the IOUs and he was guilty as Hell but it was you who crafted the slash and burn equipment with which he laid about him.
You and your mates in the Labour hierarchy have all but ruined this country, with your economic insanity, your disgusting briefings and conspiracies, your lying, your warmongering and your traitorous, nation-destroying population replacement, FFS, and all to meet your twisted, anti-human, internationalist-Socialist ends.
And you did your damnedest to maintain yourselves in power by ensuring that our schools turned out cohorts of uneducated, entitlement-minded, Left-thinking, Newspeak-mouthing, politically supine, state-dependent, unemployable Labour ballot-box fodder and it's to them that you're preaching now. The joke's on you, mate. Even they know you're lying, and why.
Forget it. You lost, and we the people won. You don't get another go.
But do go on. We're all ears. Well, actually, no. We're not.
___
UPDATE: The first picture above is crying out for a caption. Thinking... "Enjoy your moment, son. I can wait."
Ed Miliband went on television to say that "there are questions about David Cameron's judgement", which is French for: "Oh no, he has shot my fox."
HM Treasury's eagerly awaited (yeah, right) dossier on reforming the UK's banking regulations (yeah, right) bears the title Project Merlin.
Any relation to that other wizard wheeze, the disastrously dysfunctional and accident-prone software system used by Conservative Campaign HQ for its electoral campaigns? That was - and is - also called Merlin.
I am informed that the elder Merlin is now much better, sitting up and taking a little light nourishment. Let us hope for proof of its battlefield viability during pre-election April.
In some surveys, the results of which are in the public domain, a majority of British-based Muslims have expressed approval of the killing of non-Muslim men and women by Muslims, here and abroad.
Hard-line Saudi/Wahabi-funded mosques are springing up in British city boroughs and towns up and down the country in which the preachers - and their honoured guests - teach their congregations to despise British people, and occasionally to at least try to kill some of them. They state their intention to replace our religion with theirs. They propose that we submit our highly-developed system of civil law and custom to their unreformed, unmodernised seventh-century, desert-tribal, patriarchal, rape-victim executing, lover-stoning, female-mutilating cult of death and violence - which they imagine they can justify by appeal to 'honour' - and they offer us (with the assiduous support of the Labour Party and all those to the Left of it) the distressing prospect of the irreversible alteration by them of our society, with the tragic obliteration of our history, memory and freely chosen way of life.
Whether we like it or not. Funnily enough, we don't. And call us old-fashioned, but we are are especially iffy about people trying to murder us. Bombs, daggers... we don't really like either of them that much. Actually, not at all. Picky, but there you are.
Which is a touch inconvenient for the Islamist preachers in those mosques, and for their friends on the Hard Left who applaud them and support them politically, because they share their hatred and general contempt for British (especially English) people, British (especially English) history and British (especially English) society.
And the Right Honourable Lady Warsi, peace be upon her, for I have no doubt that she rejects all the above and is a shining example of Christian charity humanity, Lady Warsi patronisingly, gallingly, accuses the British people of 'Islamophobia'. She implores us to remember Christian teaching and so be good neighbours to the Muslims among us. She urges non-Muslim British people not to distinguish groups of her coreligionists as either 'moderate' or 'extremist'.
Very well, your ladyship. Whatever you say, your ladyship. But for the record, if that is indeed what now happens, which is to say, if people do indeed cease to distinguish between 'extremist' and 'moderate' Muslims, remember that it was you who demanded precisely that.
Just for interest, has Lady Warsi heard any Christian ministers' sermons about Muslims, lately? Has she heard the sermons about Christians at the East London Mosque, lately? (Lord Tebbit wonders the same thing.)
But doubtless the good Lady Warsi makes major speeches, just as heavily trailed as today's speech, telling her coreligionists that they must make tremendous efforts to be good neighbours to the people of the country in which they have chosen to live and whose taxes house their families, give grants of money to support their mosques, educate their children and heal their sick. Somehow I have missed the wall to wall newspaper coverage of all those major speeches of hers.
Lady Warsi, most of us grew up hearing and taking to heart the parable of the Good Samaritan and other admonitions like it in the Hebrew Bible. Most of us are good to our neighbours and try to live peaceful lives and to go about our business quietly, and working to improve our neighbourhoods. Most of us. And we require no patronising lectures from you about how to live and how to treat our neighbours, whatever their religion, thank you very much.
Kindly look to your coreligionists, especially its ill-informed, hate-filled and militant (I must not say 'extremist') adherents. They are the ones with the daggers and the bombs. They are the ones who sincerely believe that we, the (culturally or pious) Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha'is, pagans, agnostics and atheists, are all untermenschen.
But - what the fucking fuck? Dave, why this insult from the chairman of my party? Tell me, do.
Silence.
I see. Well, then, pausing only to dismiss the ridiculous notion of a retraction, to recall myself to my Christian duty, and to remind the noble baroness that a phobia is an irrational and groundless fear of something which need not be feared, I head for the bloody drinks cabinet.
I was going to blog about the heavily-trailed and spectacularly dumb speech still to be made (at the time of writing, anyway) by the increasingly ludicrous Baroness Warsi.
No need. Everything that needs to be said is here:
Warsi asked to explain why Dubai locks you up for having a shag.
Between 2009-10 and 2015-16, nominal expenditures are projected to rise from £669bn to £757bn. I know this is a cut in real terms, but it hardly justifies Shriti’s comment or the shrieks of outrage. I think an increase of 13% over five years falls outside the commonsense definition of a cut.
A good read, which includes this lipsmacking gem:
My [advice to Labour] would be: confess. You got it wrong. I mean, the good thing in confessing that you got it wrong – you can throw Gordon in front of a bus, which I think will be pleasing. But the economic situation was not solely caused by global financial crisis, you were running a deficit from 2002 when the Global Financial Crisis was at least five, if not six years away from development. So admit that you got it wrong.
Hat tip to Mr Fawkes.
In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement.
Steyn again. Tragically percipient.
His article in the New Criterion is a bloody marvellous read. Have a strong drink first , though.
Thus the sainted Steyn:
The [Emmanuel College, Cambridge] Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material.The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”
In today's issue of his once-esteemed organ, renowned humorist, economist and tax expert Lord Gnome shyly permits himself a smidge of self-congratulation on his historic moral victory over allegedly tax-dodging Vodafone.
Thanks to the the Eye's revelations of the billions given away to Vodafone in settling a legal battle over its offshore tax avoidance [...] the National Audit Office has launched a "review of HMRC's procedures for resolving tax disputes".Oh, jolly well done, Lord Gnome, sir! Bastards. They don't like it up 'em, sir, do they?
[...] the England (cricket) team's patriotic sponsor, Brit Insurance [which] moved head office to, er, the Netherlands to reduce its tax bill on its offshore business!
Oh, hahahaha that's a good one, sir! So 'patriotic' that they've decamped to the Low Countries because they'll pay less tax there than in the UK. Hahahaha, my word, M'lord, but you're a caution! They don't get much past you, sir, do they, sir? Another shower of corporate bastards nailed by Lord Gnome! Oh, my aching sides!
Paul Goodman writes about Mr Speaker over at ConHome.
In office, Mr Bercow might have neutralised himself (so to speak) politically and in due course night have mollified most Tories. But he hasn't (yet) - and of course his loose-cannon wife does him no favours for which one can only pity him, wondering wickedly about their private conversations... but let's get on.
His gravest error, which he must surely now regret if he has any wit at all, was to disdain the regalia of his office which are there for a purpose: to show that the office is greater than the office-holder, as with court and judicial dress. Thus Mr Bercow made clear both his unedifying vanity and his intention to superimpose himself on the ancient office of Speaker. This was contemptuous, and probably fatal to his reputation and place in history, although I doubt he realised the enormity of his action at the time. The ridicule in which he is held by many may have caused the truth to begin to dawn... but probably not.
Traditions survive ─ when they do ─ for a reason, but the apostate-Tory Mr Bercow pointedly dismissed the very suggestion. And so he no longer enjoys the protection afforded by traditions which he so airily waved away in favour of his own egotistical, modernising urges. He may wish he had the warmth of the regalia around his shoulder when ordure-bearing Arctic winds start to blow in earnest. His pathetic, petulant, shouted demands for 'respect' will prove bootless: he has personally abolished the means to acquire the very respect he craves.
And so by his own hand he positions himself as the mere simulacrum of a Speaker, nothing more than an annoying lucky pole-vaulter beholden to the doomed, dishonest leaders of the most corrupt and incompetent governing party in the modern history of the House of Commons, at least half of whose Members despise him and wish him gone. He remains in the Speaker's Chair only because the House and the country have serious business to attend to and dealing with him as he deserves would be a distraction.
Madam Speaker Boothroyd, now. She was the real thing ─ and she has the measure of Mr Bercow.
I'm informed that your Tory-ish brother has been spotted having a fag, so to speak, at the back door of your old shop. Word is he's been brought in to bang a couple of fucking GIGANTIC heads together, one bald & insane due to I.V. goji berry juice, the other 4-eyed & wot me Guv I was upstairs collecting the fares at the time, honest. As in http://goo.gl/S9zMC
If true, can't wait for Bro's memoirs. They'll outsell yours, obviously. Flashman, Mannion & Team Popeye have got to make better copy than Nicola and fucking Glenn FFS.
Any idea when?
Up your sideways as always.
Couldn't remember where I'd put them, it's been so long. Reassuring to know I've still got a luvverly bunch of them. You never know when you're going to need one. Like today, for instance.
The perpetrator of this week's award-winner has probably got more of my nuts than he knows what to do with. Maybe if I run short he can sub me.
But enough about me. I refer you to him, in all his glory, and now with one of my nuts in his hands.
The entire membership being undercover officers is the only explanation I can come up with for the SWP.Chortle.
The Guardian remains economically illiterate as well as politically seditious. Its headline says:
Ed Miliband admits Labour were wrong over debt and need for cuts.
He and they both mean deficit, of course, but that carefully and oft-repeated lie is the core of what passes for politically-bankrupt Labour's strategy de nos jours.
The Graun goes on:
He is also to concede that the last Labour government must take some responsibility for the deficit to the extent that it did not do enough to regulate the banks
See what he did there? Linking the banks to the deficit.
Simple and repeated transposition of debt and deficit enables Labour's Big Lie. Throw in the banks and you've got your class war trope readymade for tomorrow's Mirror, Guardian and Today programme.
The taxpayers' money stumped up, or rather made available, to some (not all) banks (and not Barclays, y'hear?) will come back to the Treasury in due course, probably at a decent profit. It is neither there nor there. Nor are banker's bonuses.
The chanting of Labour's Brownian mantra ('banks-global-crash-blah-ommm') is the most massive, mendacious
in the current political debate. And the Mirror's screaming talk of bastard bank bonuses is so much Scotch mist conjured up by Left liars who have the welfare of Bob Crow closer to their hearts than the 'alarm clock' classes. Who, of course, are despicable anyway for they are Not Our People but swing-fucking-voters who vote for the Tories when it suits them, the bastards.
The need for cuts arose because of the continuous and rising budgetary deficit (which of course contributed massively to the debt) which was wholly Gordon Brown's fault, caused by his pathological addiction to massive state spending and, critically, to increasing the deficit even in times of high growth when he could have balanced the budget.
Brown was knowingly, criminally irresponsible. He never intended even to attempt to balance the budget. This was an entirely political scorched earth strategy designed to both inflate his own reputation and entrench the Labour Party's dogmas in the way the country is governed.
Brown knew he only had a few years, but that was fine. Anyway, he hated the job of Prime Minister even though he had lusted after it all his life. It wasn't the office he wanted. It was the power. He neither enjoyed the job, which both bored and challenged him, nor bothered to discharge it with anything like the appropriate grace and dignity. Such things did not interest him. He was a man on a mission and, with a time limit on what he could do, he moved far and fast. He racked up the biggest deficits in peacetime history, several multiples of the low deficits run by the post-war Attlee government when it was repairing a physically shattered nation and creating the welfare state.
Brown knows how the electoral cycle works and that he would not be in office when the time came to face the consequences of his profligacy. He was well aware that he could continue boasting of his 'investment' in the growth of the state machine until the cycle inevitably brought in a Conservative government who would be in power when his economic shit hit the fan, with the real possibility of such utterly catastrophic electoral consequences for his enemies that he would be able to sit back and enjoy what, in his personal terms, would be the most massive political orgasm, stimulated by the knowledge that he had made his bloated state establishment almost impervious to Tory 'rolling back' moves, and that he had laid political mines to destroy David Cameron's career and government.
And where are the Tories leadership in all this? Complicit. They let Brown get away with economic murder, being too preoccupied with internal Party manoeuvrings, and they rode on such plaudits as Brown was able to garner for 'investing' in the state machine and even promised to share the proceeds of his fake 'growth' which was, in fact, a fucking bubble.
The best that can be said of the Tory leadership at that time is that they were asleep at the wheel. Well, you're wide awake now, boys and girls, aren't you? Not a moment too fucking soon.
Now can we get on with some Conservative realism? Repealing much of Labour's crapulous, iniquitous legislation would be a good down payment. You know, a token of good faith to weigh against your conspiring against the British people with your mates in Brussels. Just a little something, for starters.
Hello? CCHQ? Number Ten? Anyone?
here
Frankly, [Cranmer] is dog-tired of this interminable EU-UK dog’s life. In all of his dog days in this dog-eat-dog world he has never understood why this dog-eared parliament, stuffed with dog-leg MPs with dog-end perspectives, surrendered its omnipotence to a dog-in-the-manger oligarchy such that the EU tail is now constantly wagging the UK dog and we’re all dogged with directives and dogma perpetuated by dogmatic dogsbodies who couldn’t give a damn about anything but their doggone careers. In case they haven’t noticed, they're all in the doghouse, and if something isn’t done soon to remedy this dog's breakfast the British people will let slip the dogs of war and a dogfight will ensue the likes of which we have not seen for three or four centuries.
"Our last Conservative branch meeting was dire. Bloody infighting took up most of the evening."
"I know what you mean. Bloody committees. Pint?"
"Yeah, thanks."
"There you go. It's always the same voices at our Labour branch meetings. Love to hear themselves speak. Cheers."
"Cheers."
"It's the bloody procedure-speak that drives me nuts. 'Through the Chair, Comrade N has seniority, Point of Order, Rule Ninety-Four Sub-Section Eleventy-Seven...' Know what I mean?"
"Hah. Not our style, thank God. We stick to the normal sort of committee behaviour but we don't use crapspeak - just get on with it and talk normally."
"Seriously? None of that Composite Submission Subject to Ratification sort of tedium?"
"Nope."
"It must be a sort of Left thing, then."
"Reckon so, mate. Comfort thing, maybe? Placating the Super-ego with punctiliousness?"
"Get stuffed. Anyway, you're being a bit bloody polite aren't you? You mean we Socialists are anal."
"Well, yeah."
"Hmff. Your round."
"Same again?"
"No, I'll have a Scotch this time. Ta."
If it's a fine starry night I like to sit in the garden with cigars and beer. There haven't been many of those for a while. Sometimes on fine days too. I have sat so still for so long that sparrows have perched on me. Mice have run right up to me and the look on their faces when I say 'Hello' is priceless.
Yes, the zombie Hard Left, the union rabble-rousers and (some of) the Labour Party nobility down from its North London village, are getting together with the rentamouth/rentahack fraternity to 'mobilise' and 'organise' (ah, nostalgia... good Marxist words back in vogue) a new generation of romantic, angry, logic-free, economically illiterate, useful-idiot cannon-fodder.
Marxoid agitprop-apparatchiks Community organisers are talking up a storm, rehearsing the old legends of the brethren (and let's not forget the sisterhood) smashing up Paris for a bit until de Gaulle put a stop to their destructions, and poking daffs up the business ends of rifles for the benefit of Jane Fonda's boyfriend's camera. Oh, and marching, of course. Ah, bliss was it...
Just look at this lot. And these. And these. Well, now. All those leftie nutjobs under one roof. Hm... no, mustn't.
The comrades are organising, people, led by Sunny Hundal and Auntie Polly. No, stop it. Please. Be serious. They are. They mean to cause trouble. They mean to bring down the government, if possible. And they're going to wreak havoc in the attempt because they do not intend to go down in history as yet another bunch of risible failures, oh no. This time, no Thatcher victory over them, brother. No sirree.
And all because Dave wants to spend as much of other people's hard-earned as Brown did in 2008. Not a penny less.
Oh, yes. Make no mistake. The utter, utter bastard* Cameron and the other bastard Osborne want to cut the rate of increase of state debt by a whole 3.5 per cent over the next four years.
Wait, there's more.
Two per cent of a total of seven million people who are currently paid by the taxpayer (300,000 of them) will have to move off the state payroll and into one of the one and half million jobs which the private sector will create over that time! Imagine that. Just imagine it. Oh, the horror.
The unspeakable, soulless brutality of those swivel-eyed, right-wing, fascist, baby-eating, mad axe-wielding, ConDem toff bastards must be opposed. Sunny Hundal and Will Straw say so. So does Maguire. And Lenny McCluskey. And all the usual suspects. (Ed Miliband, you say? Nope, no idea.)
Anyway, look out, Dave - Sunny's coming for ya. Tremble, Prime Minister, tremble.
_____
*Tories, you see, so bastards, obviously. And how dare the fucking Tories be in government? What the fuck gives them the right... oh, yeah... No, wait - I know! 'Vote Yes to AV'! Hahaha, that'll teach them. I voted for Ed Miliband you know. And my other T-shirt's got Che Guevara on it. Iconic, man, iconic.
Now, don't look, but try and guess the dominant colour on the website carrying these messages (my emphasis):
The independent Office for Budget Responsibility claims public sector job losses will not be as high as previously thought...
Amidst fears and cuts in the voluntary sector, union membership has increased as employees at voluntary organisations seek protection ...
Haha, no, not green, although I see your point. Try again. Yes, that's better.
Now (you didn't look, did you?) try and guess whose website it is.
No, not them. Have another go. Nope, not them either.
OK, now try and guess how much the boss of this outfit earns. Too difficult? Need more information? OK, couple of clues: not the minimum wage, and it's a trade union although they'd hate you to think of them that way. Oh -and you're already giving them £1.2 million a year through your taxes - see p24 of their accounts.)
