Tag Archives: politics

2020’s Plenty: It’s Been a Lung Year

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How we laughed at the turn of the year.

“Some mad wee Chinese guy has eaten a bat, and now the Chinese are cutting about looking like tribute acts to Michael Jackson and the Chemical Brothers. That’ll teach them for eating weird shit.” It could never happen to us, right?

How smug we were. How we gorged on schadenfreude. All the while comically blind to the fact that our diet consists mainly of terrified chickens bathed in the shits of their caged friends; cows fed on sheep’s brains; horses that have been secretly mulched into beef mince; turkeys tenderised by the baseball bats of bored Bernard Matthews’ workers, and – I wouldn’t be surprised to learn – the genetically modified arse cheeks of some vile abomination like the croco-penguin. Even still we heaved the wrecked, diabetes-ridden husks of our bodies from pub to pub, takeaway to takeaway, chewing chocolate bars through one side of our mouths while smoking three fags out the other, just managing to say, ‘I dunno, the shit those people put in their bodies’ before pouring a carafe of vodka down our throats.

And, while we were lost in our completely unwarranted sense of western superiority, we forgot about something else: planes. The Great Wall of China doesn’t encircle the entire population, hemming them all in. Millions of people from all over the world fly to thousands of places each and every day, doubtless many hundreds of thousands of them Chinese. [Side fact: if you got all of the Chinese people who travelled by air each day and got them to link hands along the Welsh coast, it would be completely and utterly pointless] Maybe we didn’t forget. Maybe we just sort of figured that if there was a highly infectious disease with the potential to bloom into a pandemic rampaging around the continent of Asia that the UK government would do something to block or control entry from those countries that had been affected. That was a bit silly of us, wasn’t it? Even though we didn’t really trust our beloved Boris all that much to begin with, I dare say we trust him now about as much as I trust a fart after a surprise horse vindaloo.

For the first few months of the outbreak we decided to play a nationwide game of Supermarket Sweep, with the ghost of Dale Winton shouting encouragement at us from the clouds: “Fasta fasta, grab all the pasta!”

And, of course, booming out the show’s famous slogan: “Next time you’re at the checkout and you hear the beep, think of the old woman who now can’t wipe her arse, you inconsiderate freak.” Why toilet paper? In case we needed to wipe our lungs? What would we have stockpiled if the WHO had warned us of an impending diarrhoea outbreak? Halls Soothers?

The first lockdown confined most of us to our homes with the option of one hour’s outdoor exercise per day. We were essentially prisoners, but with worse diets and even greater substance-abuse problems. Subsequent lockdowns kept some shops and amenities open but essentially stopped people from socialising, prevented them from going to pubs and for nights out, and pretty much compelled them to stay at home feeling miserable and grumpy, thereby turning large sections of the population into, well… me before the coronavirus.

Refuses to wear a mask, but for some reason he’s down with safety specs.

The arrival of the Track and Trace system made rebels and doomsayers of a large swathe of the country’s intellectually challenged. ‘Slip siding into a fascist state, are we?’ they cried, though perhaps not as articulately as that. ‘We’ll see about that! If those hired goons at McDonalds think they’re going to write down MY name and address at the door, like the fucking Stazi, they’ve got another thing coming… oh, McDonalds is doing an on-line promotion where you can win free Big Macs for a year?! Hold on, I’ll just type in my name and address…’

I understand being wary of governments and corporations in our digital age. It’s perfectly possible that the ostensibly innocent gathering of information in our – thus far – only mildly corrupt society (see Analytica, Cambridge et al) could one day be turned against us should the right (or possibly wrong) person or organisation take the reins. That’s why I admire that rare breed of zealot who dedicates himself to a life off the grid, living in a shack, or up a tree, in the wilderness, roaming naked or in rags, eating wild potatoes (much more dangerous than the domesticated version), shitting in a hole in the ground, and teaching badgers how to do basic CPR should they one day go down from a heart attack. But as for the rank and file? Those who participate in modern life while at the same time decrying it? If you’re going to holler ‘Invasion of privacy! Infringement of civil liberties! What’s next: a microchip??’ it’s best not to walk around all day with a hand-held device that contains an actual micro-chip. Your phone knows where you are and what you’re doing at all times of the day and night, and any gaps in its knowledge can be helpfully filled in by you voluntarily narrating every movement of your excruciatingly pointless existence – even your bowel movements. If this technology had been around in the 30s and 40s we’d all be reading ‘Anne Frank’s Instagram Feed’ instead of her diary, and it would feature just one picture: a selfie of her in the loft with a caption reading, ‘I’m in this loft, but, shhhhh, don’t tell the Germans #secretloft #loftnights #letmebeFrank’.’

Masks, too, were another source of upset, with angry people – whose only source of news was the digestion of headlines on anonymous blogs posted in a Facebook group called WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, SHEEPLE – spluttering that masks had no proven track record of preventing harmful microbes or virus-laden effluent from passing through them, much to the shock of surgeons and SARS-blighted Asians everywhere, who’d happily worn the efficacious face-panties for years.

On a side note, the Tories have appointed a ‘Minister for Loneliness’. The Tories. The party of ‘every man for himself, pip pip, if you slack or fall it’s your fault, bally ho, no such thing as society’. This is like finding out that Ted Bundy was once appointed the minister for ‘Making Sure People Don’t Get Brutally Murdered by a Stranger’.

It’s got to the point now where millions of people would rather get their advice on the virus from David Icke, an ex-goalkeeper with big fish lips who believes that the Queen is quite literally a shape-shifting lizard from outer space, than from thousands of epidemiologists and scientists who’ve spent their lives studying and combating viruses.

It is, however, understandable that people have grown weary of restrictions and lockdowns, given that the guidelines sometimes seem like they’ve been made up by a bunch of heavy drug-users with type-writers.

“You can’t go into a textile shop wearing blue, unless it’s only on one leg, and you can’t go to the butchers’ unless your aunty Beryl is there with you, but only if she’s wearing her glasses down on the tip of her nose, and even then she’s only permitted to speak if she’s doing a David Attenborough impression. You can go swimming, but only in puddles, you can go to the cinema, but only if you’re blindfolded, you can go to the gym, but only if it’s on the roof of a council estate tower block, but, remember, Tuesday is opposites day, and every second Wednesday gives priority to Chihuahuas. In summary, then, don’t cross the streams, don’t feed them after midnight, don’t you forget about me, don’t blame it on the good times blame it on the boogie, don’t cry for me Argentina, and don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me. Don’t you.”

At core, though, if you read behind and between the lines of official communications, you’ll find this simple message: don’t be a dick. This is something that doesn’t appear to come naturally to us, in the same way as it does to people in South East Asian countries like Taiwan, who’ve pretty much got the virus licked. It’s a tragedy that we can’t bring ourselves to care more, because people are dying. Celebrities are dying, for Christ sake, this is serious! At the rate comedy double-acts were halved this year you’d have thought Thanos had snapped his fingers. Bobby Ball, Eddie Large, Barry Chuckle. All sadly gone. Perhaps the surviving members could form a triple act and call themselves ‘Little Chuckle Cannon’. I’ll just have to find a new nickname for my penis.

Regrettably, both Krankies have thus far survived.

And now, of course, we’ll be hoping that it’s all over by Christmas. Just like the Great War… You know, the one that lasted four years and was followed by the two-year-long Spanish Flu outbreak?

Happy Pandemukkah.

 

All Our Lives. Watching America.

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What has the US Presidential Election got to do with us here in the UK? Why should we care as much as we undoubtedly do? We seem better informed and more animated about the minutiae of our transatlantic cousins’ glitzy political battles than we do our own. Perhaps that glitziness has a lot to do with it. Our elections are quite drab in comparison. As Scottish comedian Joe Heenan so memorably put it: ‘You wouldn’t get this shite if the Americans did it the British way. Right now the President would be on a stage in a sports centre with a guy dressed as a squirrel standing behind him.’

In the US, politicians stroll out into vast arenas in the manner of WWE stars, with their own walk-on music booming unironically in their wake. One only needs to watch a highlight video of former PM Theresa May’s bizarre attempts to connect with the people of Great Britain through ‘dance’ to understand why we should never, ever, under any circumstances, abandon our reserved political discourse for the ratings-chasing, reality-TV-show grandstanding of the states. Whenever Theresa May – woman of the people – danced on camera she looked either like a drunk stork pretending to be a bear, or a shy Al Jolson trying his best to perform his act during an earthquake. Let’s stick to the drab, and let the Americans worry about the fab.

Donald Trump, of course, has turned the pomp and circumstance up to eleven. Even if the world had any choice in the matter, which it doesn’t thanks to Trump’s depressing ubiquity, it wouldn’t dare turn away from that fat car-crash in a suit for even a second: he’s got more plots than Stephen King, less shame than a back-street flasher in a face-mask, less scruples than Ted Bundy after Happy Hour, and more bullshit than a farmer’s field in spring-time. Some people out there have been watching too much television, and think they want a fictional character in charge of their country. But the qualities it’s easy to admire in an unpolished, rebellious, blue collar, tells-it-like-it-is character like Happy Gilmore, or an alpha-strongman like TV’s Tony Soprano, don’t necessarily make for a good president. Trump is a cartoon; a buffoon; a shark with legs; a great big bag of narcissistic contradictions; a circus ringmaster in Hell, who uses Twitter in place of a whip.

All of that, then, goes some way towards explaining why America has always been so grimly fascinating and strangely compelling to us, especially now, with yet another ‘celebrity’ in the hot-seat. But it doesn’t explain why we do – and why on earth we should – care so much. After all, Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden weren’t, aren’t and won’t be our presidents.

Perhaps it’s down to the Butterfly Effect. America is the heir to the British Empire’s dead hegemony. Its existence and actions have always affected us, and the world. But it’s definitely the case that how the US comports itself, and who it chooses as its figurehead, affects us now in a much more impactful, instant and targeted way than ever before, thanks to the unsleeping, unfiltered portal of the worldwide web. And what a wicked web we weave.

I remember from my youth a well-used refrain about America. It used to be said that whenever a societal trend, change or calamity took root across the pond, we should expect it to sweep our shores within six months or less. Fashions, pop-culture crazes, political skulduggery, crime-waves. We all watched the news with a sense of foreboding, wondering what would be expected of us in the seasons to come. We were powerless to prevent this tidal wave of transformation, even though we could see it coming. America was us, and we were America, bound by our shared history and language.

“Everyone in California is wearing assless chaps!” my grandmother shouted from her TV-chair one balmy summer evening*. My grandfather sighed and wandered into the kitchen to find a pair of scissors. “I’ll go get started on all my trousers,” he shouted back, before muttering to himself, “It’s going to be one cold ass winter.” But what could he do? America had spoken. *[that may or may not have actually happened]

I wonder how much of that misguided belief of ours was connected with how we felt about movies. There used to be a significant lag between a movie premiering in the states and it finally debuting here in the UK. About six months. While we waited we’d pine, speculate, get swept up in the hype and longing, before eventually – finally – getting a taste of the action.

Over the course of my lifetime the western world has become more dream-like, more cinematic, and more cravenly consumerist than it ever was; it therefore makes sense that back in the 80s and 90s we would readily conflate a six-month wait for a movie with the idea that six months after watching news reports from the US we’d be ushering in those same societal changes. American movies contained reflections of American life and thought and ideology, in which we, in turn, saw reflections of ourselves. And since all life was a movie, and we its stars, ipso facto movies and reality were interchangeable. The US electing an actor as its president went some way towards reinforcing that feeling.

Ultimately, though, we never imported all that much from America, besides the cosmetic. With the exception of the horror of Dunblane we never became a nation of school shooters. Our cities didn’t ring out with gun fire. We never abandoned our welfare state to private equity and insurance – at least not completely. In time we realised that as much as we admired and venerated and sought to emulate America, we would never be America – and that was okay. We didn’t want to be America. We didn’t need to be.

And then along came the internet, ushering in a new era of hyper-connectivity, and a new and immediate sense of round-the-clock globalism. The internet brings us together at the same time as it splinters us apart. We’re united in our disunity as never before. While the internet was initially a liberating and unifying force, it was soon weaponised by social media. Whatever power was displaced by the common man or woman having access to the world at their fingertips was soon clawed back by authoritarian governments like those of China and North Korea, or subtly redirected by shadowy organisations like Cambridge Analytica. Governments could interfere in the elections of other countries not by mobilising for war or sending spies on long-term undercover missions, but by employing a group of sun-shy tech experts to sit in a darkened room all day posing as zealots, or patriotic movers and shakers on Twitter and Facebook. Political rivals could sink an opponent not by setting a honey-trap, or paying a PI to rake through their bins looking for compromising letters and receipts, but by flooding the internet with memes of wildly fluctuating veracity, ranging from the sort-of-true-but-skewed to the risibly fantastical. The truth didn’t matter. Memes became missiles. And when you’re hit by one, the truth is a moot point.

The shadow Donald Trump casts across America falls over our land, too. His rallies and rantings and ravings don’t happen in a Stars-and-Stripes emblazoned vacuum. His opinions on race, his opposition to truth and reality, his economically-motivated scepticism on climate change and epidemiology, his aversion to culpability and compassion, have all seeped into and permeated our national discourse, and infected our cultural consciousness.

A great many of the memes we see spreading on-line – on Black Lives Matters, on the poor, on coronavirus, on the environment – carry Republican and pro-Trump stamps, and millions of Brits share them without knowing or caring that they’ve been infected by the political and ideological tussles of another country. A disturbing minority of Brits long for Trump, or someone more like him, to be our Prime Minister. Our politicians, too, have adopted the Teflon Don’s tactics of holding firm and denying objective reality just long enough for the news cycle to sweep past them onto something and someone else. Thanks to Trump’s leadership style of cult-leader cum CEO cum mad king, it’s harder than ever to hold people in power to account. We can see the effects of that even here in Scotland with the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier, a Westminster MP, who by all rights should’ve resigned after flouting coronavirus restrictions, the virtues of which she’d been busy extolling on behalf of her constituents. Ten, or even five, years ago she probably would have stood down immediately, but the lesson from America is clear: don’t listen to the media, don’t listen to the people. Tell them to go fuck themselves. Do what you like.

We care about the US Election, then, because it has consequences for us, even if we’re entirely powerless to control their direction. Like a meteor about to strike the earth. Hopefully when Joe Biden takes office a more measured ethos will radiate from the US, and spread some much needed calm across cyberspace and the world. We just have to hope that the fat, orange genie isn’t already too far out of the bottle.

Trump Campaign US Election 2020 Timetable

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Oct 26

Trump arrives at a WOMEN FOR TRUMP rally with Mike Pence, and looks genuinely happy.

“How did you manage to arrange this, Mikey? There’s a lot of them to get through. I’d better get started.”

“They’re here to support you, Donald. To support you.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, they’ll need to. I’m gonna be exhausted after fucking all these women.”

“Donald, I…”

“I knew I was right to have that fifth burger at breakfast this morning.”

“Donald, look, I really want you to start focusing on the election…”

“Don’t worry about that, Pencey, I’ll be fine. I scrunched up some Viagra into my burgers.”

“Donald, I said election, not….”

“OUTTA MY WAY! MAGA SHAGGA COMING THROUGH!”

Oct 27

  • Trump attends a rally in Wisconsin dressed as Jesus, and tells his supporters he’s got a lot in common with the Son of God, except he wouldn’t have been pussy enough to get himself crucified. Besides, Jesus wasn’t that great, because how many casinos did he manage to build? Yeah, exactly, you see? Loser. “Never trust a man who can’t afford proper shoes,” he tells the crowd.
  • Kanye West is hired to dress like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn and play the flute outside inner-city polling stations. He leads all black people not wearing MAGA hats into a holding area, whereupon an angry, hysterical white lady calls the police on them.
  • Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court. Six out of nine seats on the court are now occupied by hard-line Republican judges. Trump vows to kill the three Democrat judges by the end of the year and replace them with Dracula, Rasputin and a golden effigy of himself.

Oct 28

  • The Pope issues a rebuke to Trump following his previous day’s comments about Jesus. Various Republican and conservative Catholic organisations are furious with the President. Trump reminds them that Jesus is a total loser – who never even had his own condo in Palm Springs, can you believe it? – and they should have no Trump but Trump. If they vote for him he’ll ban abortion, keep allowing churches to flagrantly disregard coronavirus restrictions, and put as many Mexican kids in cages as he possibly can. The organisations release a joint statement that simply says: “USA, USA, USA!” eighteen-hundred times.
  • Trump holds a Super Spreader event on Jeffrey Epstein’s old island. Hopes to make it a regular thing. Mike Pence points out that, a) a super spreader isn’t a good thing and, b) that’s not the kind of spreading it refers to anyway. Trump responds by pointing out that, a) shut up Mike Pence and, b) when are we stopping for burgers?

Oct 29

  • A flotilla of screaming and naked Eastern European teenagers is discovered off the coast of Epstein Island. Trump orders a napalm strike to make sure there’s no risk of coronavirus contamination, and definitely not to ensure their silence. Trump says he’s just doing his bit to keep the country safe, and shouldn’t be considered a hero.
  • Trump orders 6,000,000 hats with HERO written on them.
  • Mail trucks carrying ballots are pulled over by Proud Boys soldiers. All ballots that smell  even a little bit socialist are destroyed.

Oct 30

  • Melania escapes.
  • Trump reveals that Elon Musk is building a space station for him and Vladimir Putin in orbit of the earth. Mike Pence apologises and says Trump stayed up all night watching Elysium. Trump orders surveillance on Matt Damon, “just in case that leftie bastard ruins everything.”

Oct 31

  • At a late-night rally, on the stroke of midnight, lightning explodes across the sky’s dark canvas, and a swarm of flies erupts from Mike Pence’s mouth. A disembodied voice can be heard shrieking ‘THE TIME OF THE EVIL ONE IS UPON US!’ as Pence shakes like a turkey on a washing machine. He later blames it on a combination of technical faults, the Democrats and the gays. “I’m definitely not Satan’s representative on Earth,” he tells Fox News. “We wouldn’t have minded, to be honest,” they admit.

Trump tells 15,000 supporters at a mega-rally in Virginia that coronavirus has been cured, and is angry when they don’t cheer.

“Why aren’t they cheering, Mikey?”

“They’re all dead from coronavirus, Donald.”

Nov 1

  • Melania is recaptured.
  • Trump is asked about his record on the environment. He says he’ll probably release it in time for Christmas. “And it’s gonna be the best song you ever heard,” he tells them.

Joe Biden takes the concept of social distancing at rallies to its logical conclusion and holds a rally on the moon. Trump orders NASA to deploy Neil Armstrong to capture him.

“Sir, Neil Armstrong died in 2012.”

“I said now, goddammit!”

Nov 2

  • Walls are built around polling stations in all southern states with high Latinx populations. Trump makes John Leguizamo pay for it.
  • Trump realises Melania hasn’t been recaptured at all, and he’s been having breakfast and attending rallies with a terrified Gloria from Modern Family. With some reluctance, Gloria is released.

Trump has projectiles hurled at him while attending a rally for all three of his black supporters.

“You shouldn’t have gone on stage wearing that, Donald,” Pence tells him.

“You told me to! You said I should do a rally in the hood!”

“DA hood, Donald. In DA hood.”

Nov 3

ELECTION DAY – All indications are that Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. Biden refuses to concede, because there are still millions of votes to count. Trump whips his cock out live on TV and says, “Count that, commie!” “Zero,” says Biden.

Nov 7

Mike Pence explodes into a fireball live on-stage during a press conference. When the flames die down everyone can see that his skin is a mottled red, and a tail now droops between his legs.

“Janice Grappily, CBNFHGS News. Mr Pence, are you the anti-Christ?”

Pence thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘No comment’, as a swarm of flesh-eating flies shoots out from his penis, and strips the flesh from Janice Grappily’s bones.

Nov 21

There are various legal challenges to counting in Republican-majority states, to which Trump responds angrily. “How can you challenge counting? One, two, five… see, it’s easy.”

Dec 8

Trump buys the Electoral College and renames it Trump University 2.

Dec 9

Trump University 2 goes bankrupt.

Dec 10

US government bails out Trump University 2 and changes its name back to the Electoral College

Dec 11

Mike Pence tries to explain to Trump that the Electoral College isn’t an actual college, and he shouldn’t really have been able to buy it.

Dec 12

Trump tries to buy the Electoral College again

Dec 13

Trump gives a joint press conference to address the issue of Mike Pence being the devil.

“I just want to say that I give Mike Pence my full support, and so should you. Why didn’t you tell me you were Beelzebub in disguise, Pencey?”

Pence looks down at his shoes. Well, at his cloven feet. “I thought you’d feel threatened by my dark lineage and powers.”

“Jealous of you, Pencey? There’s no-one more evil than me. I’m the evilest. I eat cats, for Christ’s sake.”

“Brad Fanachuk, FKWSG News. Mr President, did you just say that you’re evil and you eat cats?”

Trump points a finger. “You’re toxic.”

“Mr President, I heard you say it.”

“Get this guy out of here. Pence, squirt some flies out of your evil dick at this joker.”

“Carver Sweetchuck, CBBC News. We all heard you say it, sir.”

“Well maybe you’ll hear this: JOE BIDEN IS A PAEDOPHILE AND HE’S WORKING FOR IRAN. OKAY?”

Dec 14

  • Joe Biden is officially elected President, with Kamala Harris as his VP.
  • Trump changes the locks on the White House door.

Jan 3

  • Joe Biden knocks on the front door of the White House, and hears someone shouting, “No speaka de English, senor”, then a gunshot, then Trump screaming, “GODDAMIT, WHY DID YOU SHOOT ME?” and then someone saying, “Sorry, Mr President, I heard a Mexican voice and just acted instinctually.”

Jan 4

The Proud Boys take up fortifying positions around Trump buildings all across the US. Trump tower is engulfed by violence, gunfire, gambling, raucous noise, biker gangs and sleaze. Marty McFly arrives in the De Lorean to retrieve the Sports Almanac from Trump.

Jan 5

Civil War in America. It’s swiftly brought to an end when Ant Man shrinks himself down, flies up Donald Trump’s arsehole and disconnects his brain.

Jan 8

With the help of Mike Pence’s evil, Trump turns himself into the Lawnmower Man and takes over Twitter from the inside.

Jan 20

Donald Trump pretends to be Joe Biden at the inauguration and hopes nobody will notice. He gives himself away when he pats a woman on the pussy rather than her ass.

Feb 4

  • The White House gains a mysterious new and exceptionally ugly old dinner-lady called Desdemona Crump, who says she makes “the best rice pudding, world class, they don’t make rice pudding like I do.”
  • Joe Biden chokes to death on some rice pudding.

Feb 7

Mike Pence returns to Hell ‘for a bit of peace’.

Feb 8 

Melania becomes the 47th President of the United States

 

It’s Time TV Went to the Right

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Erroneous, or at least exaggerated, reports recently circulated claiming that the incoming Director General of the BBC was going to correct the BBC’s supposed long-standing left-wing bias. So let’s just imagine what it would be like if all of British TV shifted to the right. What sort of programmes could we look forward to?

The Radio Times

Pensioners in England reminisce about the better times when the only entertainment in the home was the radio. Bill in Surrey remembers: ‘My mam would listen to seven ‘ahs of Vera Lynn, then anover twelve ‘ahs of ‘er Majesty the Queen, and we never even ‘ad a fakking radio. She was just nuts, san. Still betta than all these bladdy TV shows full of foreigners and bladdy pooftahs these days.’ To be followed by our nostalgic look back at Thatcher’s glorious economic reign in the 1980s, The Only Way is A-Fax.

The Sooty Show

Britain’s most loveable bear makes a snowflake-defying comeback after his cancellation last year on the grounds that the word ‘sooty’ was‘a bit racist’. Sue’s out: there’s no room in our precious children’s minds for backdoor Chinese propaganda, thank you. And Sweep now speaks proper English. Focus groups felt that, you know, he’s been here long enough, he should speak the fucking language. Watch in delight as Sooty uses his magic wand to do things like remove free school meals and ‘get Brexit done’.

Come Whine With Me

A group of Brexit voters take turns to host each other for a fish and chip dinner, while having illuminating conversations about the Britain they remember.

‘Of course, in my day you could call them ***** ***** ******* without any of this PC nonsense.’

‘Yes, I remember that, you’d just shout, ‘***** ****** *******’ at one of them, and do you know what? They’d shoot you back a big happy smile.’

‘Oh, I know, I know. But never mind that, these days you can’t even call them a ******* ******* ****** ******, or a **** ******* ***** ****** ***** ****** ****** ******* ****** ***** without some leftie do-gooder jumping down your throat.’

‘I heard the other day they were going to ban flags. Or was it lettuce?’

‘They banned Wednesday last week. Too white apparently.’

‘Who banned it? Was it the *****, the ******, or the ******? I’ll bet it was the fucking *****s?’

‘I went into work the other week dressed like Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls movie, you know, with that Union Jack dress? And do you know what they did? Bloody sent me home.’

‘You don’t really have the hips for that though, Clive.’

‘Quick question on that subject: which toilet would you have used?’

‘Don’t get me started on that caper, I’ll choke on me bloody takeaway. Perverts.’

‘Course, you’re not allowed to say ‘takeaway’ anymore…’

 It’ll Be All White on the Reich

A studio audience, dressed in ‘All Lives Matter’ T-shirts, erupts with riotus laughter as they watch hilarious outtakes of unarmed black people in America being shot dead by police. Followed by a bit of old school comedy genius, with Matt Hancock’s Half Hour. This week, that classic episode, The Press Conference.

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

An hour of Ant and Dec watching repeats of themselves on TV as they enjoy a Chinese takeaway, which they repeatedly and unapologetically refer to as a ‘ch*nky’. Followed by another episode of White Van Man Der Valk in which the famous working-class British detective tracks down rogue immigrants by pointing at every non-white person he passes in his van and going, ‘There’s another one.’.

Undercover Racist

The white owner of a factory secretly joins his ethnic work-force on the shop-floor for a week, sharing their hardships and agonies, before tearfully announcing to them all on day seven how much he’d gladly send them all back home, if only he didn’t rely on their cheap labour so much.

‘But we’re all from Dudley,’ says the foreman.

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t understand anything you people say,’ he replies.

Followed by Corona Nation Street. Tonight the residents tear down a 5G mast and have an illegal street party to celebrate.

The BreX Factor

Simon Cowell introduces the singing talent show where every contestant has to sing the British national anthem, even though not a single one of them actually knows the words.

Doctor Red-White-and-Blue

This week the Doctor takes the Tardis on holiday to Benidorm, and decries the lack of any decent Bovril.

The Art of the Trump: A Deal for All Seasons

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“I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

Just as Ronald Reagan once plundered the toolkit of his former career – namely his screen presence and charisma – to power the presidency, so too has Donald Trump been plundering his toolkit, bringing to bear on the Oval Office a mixed bag of dirty tricks gleaned in the convergent worlds of the boardroom and the red carpet. Trump is renowned for – whether or not some or indeed all of it justifies the renown  – his business acumen, his big-balled risk taking, his chaotic and quixotic sex life, and especially for being a merciless, sociopathic, bullying ball-bag of a man; all of which made him a compelling TV star, precisely none of which qualifies him to safeguard the health, happiness and financial well-being of 327 million souls.

Trump may have been an entrepreneur, but he made his gambles knowing he had a multi-million dollar safety net behind him. Trump may have generated vast profits, but much of his success was built upon his aversion to paying tax and contractors – the real truth of his assets buried and obscured behind bank loans, off-shore accounts and IOUs.

I’ve read a lot of books about Donald Trump, but until recently I’d never read a book by Donald Trump. I plumped for the most famous and influential of them, the New York Times’ Best-selling The Art of the Deal, first published in 1987. However, it’s perhaps something of a stretch to say that it was written by Donald Trump. Anyone who’s ever read Trump’s Twitter feed or listened to his speeches knows that eloquence and coherence aren’t his strong points. Any book written by Trump and Trump alone would probably scan like a version of Jack Kerouak’s On The Road as penned by Narcissus after a massive head injury.

The Art of the Deal was ghost-written – aka simply written – by journalist Tony Schwartz. In 2016 Schwartz publicly lamented his part in helping to cement Trump in the public consciousness as some sort of munificent emperor, an image that, in concert with Trump’s appearances on The Apprentice, somehow convinced the American public that a dead-eyed orange cabbage was the best choice for Commander-in-Chief. I can well imagine the quantity of Prozak Schwartz would’ve needed to ingest to keep calm during those long months with Trump translating his grandiose, slogan-centric puffery into something palatable.

Trump’s distinct lack of empathy and rampant sense of self-righteousness and entitlement blinds him to the fact that he’s more redolent of Mr Burns and Biff Tannen than Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Let’s see if we can divine in his writing the man we see at work on the world-stage today, be it on the golf course, or tapping away on Twitter as he takes a shit.

I’ve tried to group my selected quotes into categories, with catty asides where appropriate.

The White House as boardroom and battlefield

“I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win. Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

Trump’s certainly taken that insight with him to the White House, only remove the bit that says ‘within legal bounds’.

“I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky.”

And doesn’t America know it.

“Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”

Yep. Still seems to be his signature style as president. A sort of nonchalant dictatorship.

On the Trump Organisation: “With so many regulators and regulations to satisfy, we had one major advantage: the fact that we are not a bureaucracy. In most large public corporations, getting an answer to a question requires going through seven layers of executives, most of whom are superfluous in the first place. In our organisation, anyone with a question could bring it directly to me and get an answer immediately. That’s precisely why I’ve been able to act so much faster than my competitors on so many deals.”

“I’ve never had any great moral problems with gambling because most of the objections seem hypocritical to me. The New York Stock Exchange happens to be the biggest casino in the world. The only thing that makes it different from the average casino is that the players dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases. If you allow people to gamble in the stock market, where more money is made and lost than in all the casinos in the world put together, I see nothing terribly different about permitting people to bet on blackjack or craps or roulette.”

The NYSE is a casino, except for when Trump wants to claim he’s directly responsible for its robust performance.

Man of the People

Because he really is just like one of us, right?

“And while I can’t honestly say I need an eighty-foot living room, I do get a kick out of having one.”

“In the middle of 1985, I got an invitation from Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian and a billionaire at the time, to come to his apartment in Olympic Tower. I went, and while I didn’t particularly go for the apartment, I was impressed by the huge size of its rooms.”

Yes, that Khashoggi family. That dude was the uncle of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was butchered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Interesting connection there.

“I rarely go out, because mostly, it’s a waste of time.”

I guess when your house is the size of a city park, and you own scores of buildings, you don’t need to.

“For me the relevant issue isn’t what I report on the bottom line, it’s what I get to keep.”

Trump and the press

Trump knows the press, and has learned how to wield it as a weapon. It helps that he has Fox News and the Murdoch press on-side.

“First, the press thrives on confrontation. They also love stories about extremes, whether they’re great successes or terrible failures.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from dealing with politicians over the years, it’s that the only thing guaranteed to force them into action is the press – or, more specifically, fear of the press. You can apply all kinds of pressure, make all sorts of pleas and threats, contribute large sums of money to their campaigns, and generally it gets you nothing. But raise the possibility of bad press, even in an obscure publication, and most politicians will jump. Bad press translates into potential lost votes, and if a politician loses enough votes, he won’t get reelected. If that happens, he might have to go out and take a 9 to 5 job. That’s the last thing most politicians want to do.”

“Most reporters, I find, have very little interest in exploring the substance of a detailed proposal for a development. They look instead for the sensational angle. In this case, that may have worked to my advantage. I was prepared for questions about density and traffic and the mix of housing on the site, but, instead, all the reporters wanted to talk about was the world’s tallest building. It gave the project an instant mystique. When I got home that night, I switched on the CBS Evening News, expecting to hear news from the opening of the summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Dan Rather was in Geneva anchoring the program, but after summarising the day’s developments, suddenly he was saying: ‘In New York City, developer Donald Trump announced plans to build the world’s tallest building.’ It demonstrated how powerful and intoxicating a symbol I’d found for my project.”

Prescience with a dash of irony and a sprinkling of ‘Oooo, bet you regret saying that now, Trumpy’.

“I discovered, for the first time but not the last, that politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.”

On Mitterand: “It wasn’t just that he was a socialist, and that he began nationalising companies, it was also that he turned out to be a dangerous man. What can you say about a guy who goes around selling nuclear technology to the highest bidder?”

Yeah, Trump would never do anything like that. Too much integrity.

“Atlantic City’s reputation had also been hurt by corruption charges growing out of the FBI’s Abscam sting operation. In 1980, the vice-chairman of the Casino Control Commission, Kenneth MacDonald, resigned after admitting that he’d been in the room when a $100,000 bribe was passed to a local politician by potential investors looking for help in getting a casino license.”

Imagine being in a room when some dodgy deal, bribe or attempted extortion was going down. Trump would NEVER do anything like that.

On Conrad Hilton: “His son Barron joined the company in the 1950s, and of course it was only a matter of time before he took over. It had nothing to do with merit; it’s called birthright.”

Remind me just how many of your children are prominent figures in your administration?

“But Conrad believed very strongly this inherited wealth destroys moral character and motivation. I happen to agree that it often does.”

(cough cough)

“You can probably guess how much stock I put in polls.”

Yes. It very much depends upon how favourable they are to you.

“There is nothing to compare with family if they happen to be competent, because you can trust family in a way you can never trust anyone else.”

(cough cough, IRONIC, cough cough, MAFIA)

On Ed Koch: “He’s presided over an administration that is both pervasively corrupt and totally incompetent.”

(sound of someone taking a machine gun to a barrel of fish)

“Meanwhile, no fewer than a dozen Koch appointees and cohorts have been indicted on charges of bribery, perjury, and accepting kickbacks, or have been forced to resign in disgrace after admitting various ethical transgressions.”

Imagine that…

“The irony is that Koch made his reputation by boasting about his integrity and incorruptibility. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that if the people he appoints prove to be corrupt, then in the end he must take the responsibility.”

That sort of thing doesn’t occur to a lot of people, to be fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Donald?

Simply put: guy from the big house and the guy from the book? Same crook, different deal.

Jacob Rees-Mogg – By the Nanny Who Knows Him

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Jacob Rees-Mogg is without doubt the hippest man on the planet right now. Not only has he recently changed his name to Bae-Club Rees-Vlog, but next week he’s at the MOBOs performing his brand new hip-hop single ‘F*** YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’ (his song about the London Fire Brigade) I can just see him on stage now, twirling his sceptre, cocking his top-hat and drawling something devastatingly polite into the microphone: ‘You know, one is rather fond of severely inconveniencing them bitches, if you’ll permit me a momentary lapse in grammar, all you people out there who fiercely indulge in intercourse with the women who gave birth to you.’

But it wasn’t always thus. Believe it or not, Jacob used to be considered a little starchy.

I know, right?

And I know better than most. I was his nanny. I adored that be-spectacled little ubermensch so much that I decided to stay on in his service even from beyond the grave. I’m his ghost nanny, you see. The perfect nanny for the Rees-Mogg family, as it turns out, because they don’t have to pay me anything (Nanny McNo-Phee).

Jacob’s great-grandfather, Hogg-Lees Rees-Mogg

They’re a lovely bunch, the Moggies, despite the fact that it was Jacob’s great-grandfather who killed me. He’d been drinking French furniture polish and sniffing gunpowder all day, and said he could smell ‘the whiff of the pickaninny about me’ before beating me to death with a copper serving spoon. It was a rare lapse in etiquette for a man who usually comported himself with impeccable manners: he of all people should have known that it’s a grapefruit spoon for murdering servants.

Still, my brutal murder was at least in-keeping with Rees-Mogg family tradition. Jacob’s great-great grandfather blew my mother’s face off with a blunderbuss because she ‘looked at him a bit Chinese’ as she was making him a swan  sandwich. What a character! I just feel disgusted that I never had any kids of my own so that Jacob could one day employ them in some menial position before smashing them to death with a signed copy of the King James Bible.

I’ll never forget when little Jakey was born. His mum and dad were so over-joyed they could barely contain their lips from breaking into a tight, perfectly straight hyphen. Little Jakey slipped out of his mother’s clam-pit without any fuss at all, as nonchalant as a complete bastard of a politician lounging insouciantly on the front benches of the houses of parliament during a crucial debate. I’ve never seen a child look so absolutely, completely, utterly and adorably full of withering indignation and arrogant rage. A wee smasher! The man who would one day write the political best-seller “It’s HIS-Tory, not THEY/THEM-Socialists” was already there in that tiny, pale, baleful little creature.

Not fifteen seconds later, he spoke his first words; an Oscar Wilde quote: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’ Not moments later, his grand-father beat him half to death with a hickory stick for not having said it in ancient Hebrew.

Jakey was a delight growing up, he really was. It took him a long, long time to wean himself off breast-milk. Even now he still enjoys the odd suckle on my ghostly titties. And sometimes I like to soothe him by turning invisible and gobbling him off in the cabinet room. But that’s just what a good nanny does, by golly.

When Jakey was about six he used to burn ants with a magnifying glass, except instead of ants it was working class people, and instead of a magnifying glass it was a shotgun. Sometimes he’d give them a sporting chance and chase them across his private minefield, promising to let them live if they could guide themselves safely to the other side with the instructions he’d painted on the ground in Aramaic.

He was nice like that, you see. Always trying to better people. He couldn’t help himself. That’s why he became a conservative, of course. So that he could help people more fortunate than himself, so one day they’d help him become as fortunate as them. And then he could just help himself to, you know, whatever the fuck he liked.

I remember his first proper big boy’s bed was made from the pelts of endangered monkeys. Well, not strictly accurate. It was the entire monkeys it was made of, all of them still alive, bound together like a raft. He took great care to angle the monkey anuses away from his face, but if a monkey did happen to shit on him as he slept, he’d just wake up and throw it to the crocodiles. Sometimes the monkeys would get lucky, and the crocodiles wouldn’t eat them, because they were already full from eating too many Malaysian servants that day. Well, I say ‘get lucky’. If a monkey survived the croc pond little Jakey would chase it round the garden and smash its brains in with an ivory cane, before masturbating over its tiny little corpse. Even to this day I can’t take him to the zoo without drugging him first.

Most of the time, though, Jakey would put his erections to good use. Once a week he would get a servant to jerk him off with an antique oven-cosy into a tiny crepe pan, which he’d then order his pastry chef to make into a man-muck omelette for his ground-maintenance staff, reasoning that a little of his DNA in their nutritious snack might make them a bit smarter by-proxy, the self-abusing, crotch-sniffing bumpkins that they were.

I remember as he got older and became a more proficient wanker he started shouting out in Latin at the point of climax. Once he accidentally gibbered out an ancient gypsy curse which he unknowingly placed upon his pet horse, Titus Andronicus. It was a literal gypsy curse in that it turned his horse into an actual gypsy. It still looked like a horse, but you could just tell. Poor Jakey was distraught at having to put it down. Even still he was smart enough to use a harpoon gun so there wasn’t any risk of being contaminated by its filthy gypsy blood.

Well, Jacob is all grown up now, but if you go into his old room it’s exactly as he left it from his wild teenage years: posters of Jesus on the wall; the Turkish hookah filled with orphan’s tears; his extensive book collection, including Enoch Powell’s best-seller ‘Europe Can Suck My Bendy Banana’; his blow-up Maggie Thatcher doll, with stolen-milk stains around the anus; his flared knickerbockers; and his seed-encrusted copies of ‘Murdered Monkey Monthly’.

And, do you know, he’s never stopped making me proud. Just this week he said something that made me tingle with joy. ‘Nanny,’ he said, ‘If you weren’t already dead, I’d jolly well kill you with my priceless antique letter-opener that once belonged to Adolph Hitler.’

The big-hearted, sentimental fool that he is!

We’ve got the whole world in our hands…

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Our planet is dying. At the very least it’s got a bad case of human-themed septicaemia. This is no longer a matter of Hollywood disaster-movie conjecture; it’s demonstrable scientific fact, as much as the industrialists, billionaires and corporatists scheme to deny it (it’s almost as if they have an ulterior motive or something).

Companies and industries only seem to work to reduce their carbon footprints when doing so will open up lucrative new revenue streams, or when they’re compelled to do so by an unbribable branch of authority. If every company with a potentially deleterious output had been trusted to undertake a cost-benefit analysis weighing the damage they cause to the planet against the maximum number of Bentleys and golden sceptres their shareholders could buy with the proceeds of their unbridled capitalist greed, then the human race today would be coughing up its scarred and blackened lungs, and then eating them to stay alive. There would be nothing else left to eat, presumably because all plant and animal life had been wiped out, Lorax-style, by Bob Dudley’s Need for Sneeds Emporium.

Thanks to a modicum of checks and balances, we’re coughing up our lungs, sure, but we haven’t yet been forced to eat them. We’re heading that way, though. We’re like frogs being brought to a boil in a pot, or turkeys counting down the days to Christmas.

Which begs the question…

Why haven’t we gone full French on the world’s ass? Why aren’t we pulling industrialists out of their gas-guzzling limos, stringing up CEOs of country-stripping companies from the ends of eco-friendly lamp-posts, or storming parliaments dressed as armed trees to demand action and change? I’m not advocating that we do any of these things, Mister MI5 and Senior CIA, and I’m certainly too lily-livered and self-involved to spearhead such movements. I’m just saying that, historically-speaking, for shit to get done in this world, someone usually has to get, well… done.

The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the US Civil War, the Russian Revolution: the run-up to these seismic events involved very little in the way of amusing placards or people marching the streets in floral-patterned cagoules. And the stakes weren’t as high then, because they’ve literally never been higher: the earth is dying.

Human beings the world over are being poisoned to death on a hitherto unimaginable scale by dick-swinging, money-amassing destroyers of worlds, who sail around in their million-pound yachts as beneath them sink the corpses of a billion dead fish and an embarrassment of bubble-wrapped whales. Donald Trump, as both a president and a (supposedly inert) CEO, is representative of this fatally-escalating trend towards greed and mass-death. It’s hard to imagine a person like Trump ever, ever, ever, ever stopping doing what he’s doing. Even once the planet is dead, hard-nosed industrialists and financiers like him will doubtless be selling oxygen canisters and pots of cress to our mutant ancestors at a million pounds a time.

Tough-talking, populist politicians, of the variety that are sweeping the globe right now, are more likely to be corrupt, callous and power-hungry; vessels with rich backers who have no time for nuance or nurturing. They want to get shit done. They don’t care about red-tape or the environment. They just want to make money, money, money, and won’t allow anything to get in the way of that impulse, even the death of literally everything on earth. The voters these populists attract are more likely to be angry, uneducated and malleable. It’s all too easy for the string-pullers to encourage the angry mob to turn a blind eye to their leaders’ corruption, contradiction and propensity for planet-raping by promising them that their enemies will be crushed: enemies that unscrupulous idealogues in the media will be all too happy to hold up for closer inspection, or simply invent; totem-poles to the rage of the underclass.

So what the hell can we do about all this? How can we save ourselves?

We can march, of course, (cagoules optional) substituting obstruction and media coverage for blood. We can block the roads and city centres with demonstrations comprising hordes of determined do-gooders. Unfortunately, head-line grabbing demos like the ones carried out by Extinction Rebellion don’t tend to generate much in the way of positive media coverage. Hardly surprising, really, since media companies tend to be owned by millionaires and billionaires, and thus are spectacularly unlikely to provide coverage that might compromise, or create agitation around, the activities and profits of power companies and major arms’ manufacturers in which their owners and their pals might have an interest (except, perhaps, where it might embarrass or disgrace an economic or political rival).

The largely one-sided nature of the media discourse has the rather perverse effect of placing millions of ordinary Joes and Joannes shoulder to shoulder with the very bastards who’d happily watch them burn to death if the situation demanded it. Or even just for a laugh. Thus, while a lot of blue- and -white collar workers may broadly support the aim of Extinction Rebellion – i.e. the aim of making sure that we don’t all choke to death on our own soot-flavoured, carcinogenic phlegm – they won’t necessarily tolerate any disruption to their daily lives in order to achieve it.

In one sense, this is laughably bizarre. It’s like over-hearing a peasant during the French Revolution moaning about the push towards democracy making him late for work: ‘I can hardly bloody move in this town for the angry, liberated masses hunting down the royal family to punish them for their autocratic, imperialist excesses. If I don’t get this bloody cart-load of turnips to Le Havre by 5 o’clock I’ll never be home in time for my evening class, ‘Cooking with Rats.’’

In another sense, I can completely understand the ordinary citizen’s irritation and cynicism. People have to get to work. They have families to feed, people to help, hospital appointments to attend. So a town being brought to a halt might rather piss them off, whatever the supposed stakes. And the people most responsible for the earth’s destruction – the aforementioned billionaires and industrialists – are also those least likely to be affected by an Extinction Rebellion protest: ‘Oh no, they’ve blocked some roads in Sidcup and Hull. That’s really going to make it difficult for me to reach the arms expo in my sonic helicopter.’

Plus, even if we do manage to bring our barons of industry to heel and get them to clean up their acts, won’t the world still be doomed if we can’t control the carbon emissions coming from economic power-houses like the US and China, or from emerging industrial economies like India and Brazil? It’s about as hopelessly futile as diligently tidying and sweeping your garden every day when your next-door neighbour has taken to burning six-tonnes of plastic every day in theirs.

No-one said changing the paradigm would be easy. Protests and demonstrations don’t change the world over-night. They weave themselves into the public consciousness, into magazines, documentaries, books and movies. We’re all connected in this new digital age, so lessons learned in this country are easily imparted to peoples the world over. Well, maybe not the peoples suffering under the iron rule of brutal, totalitarian regimes who won’t even let them switch the internet on, but, hey: not even brutal, totalitarian regimes last forever. Movements, empires, peoples, and cultures are all eventually swept aside by the glacially-paced, inexorable force of history. At one point the people of the US thought that slavery was an indispensable plank of their economy and culture. Hopefully one day we’ll view pollution and climate change in the same way.

In the here and now we have to push things towards tipping point, piece by piece, through grass-roots movements, education, music, movies and peaceful – though occasionally obstructive – collective action. I say ‘we’. My collective action pretty much begins and ends with this article, and in the cross I choose to put on the ballot-paper once every two to four years. Oh, and I’ve noticed that saving the world appears to involve my wife being able to shout at me for a wider range of things than ever before. ‘Don’t buy the plastic-wrapped bananas, are you trying to choke a whale to death? Turn that light off, you’ll melt an ice-cap!’ It often feels futile, but it’s all about the tipping point, baby. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, as I sit in my house, next to perhaps one of the biggest gas and petro-chemical refineries in the country. Recycle, Jamie. Don’t spray that deodorant for too long. Don’t idle the car engine…

I salute those with the drive, gumption, vision and free time to save the world, even if it’s only in installments. The only problem might be that we’re already too late. That the world is already in stage four, and there’s no stage five. In that case, all is still not lost. Human history is littered with examples of human ingenuity and genius changing and saving the world, just at the right time. We only have to hope that we’ll do it again, that some era-defining invention or scientific discovery will emerge, for which he don’t yet have a frame of reference or the means to be able to anticipate or predict.

Three hundred years ago we ran around with swords and muskets, routinely dying of the littlest of maladies. Now we orbit the earth, build robots and terraform deserts. I’m hopeful that we can pull ourselves back from the brink.

Hopeful. But still ferociously sceptical.

Riot gear and gas masks on stand-by.

The Race for PM: Brexy’s Midnight Runners

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There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer holds such a deep grudge against Mo that his senses are hijacked to the point where everything he sees, everything he says and everything he hears is ‘Mo’.

That’s how most of us have come to feel about Brexit.

Brexit is everywhere. Brexit will always be with us, and it’s always been here. Brexit is infinite and eternal. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the Domesday book. It’s in the Bible. It’s there standing next to Jack Nicholson in the photograph at the end of The Shining. It’s in our brains. It’s on our lips. It’s all over social media.

It’s been around for so long that I’m actually starting to form sexual neuroses around it. I heard some European lady on radio 4 recently trying to sum it all up, and found myself getting turned on: ‘Wha kine of Brexeet you wan, baybee?’ she asked me, and me alone. ‘You wan a soff Brexeet, baybee? Or har’ Brexeet?’

By this point, of course, I was fervently masturbating as I shouted indescribable filth out of the window, catching some funny looks from the rest of the people in the traffic jam: “Yeah, that’s it, restrict my movement, baby, oh yeah, yeah, I’ve been a bad voter, I’ve been a bad, bad, MISINFORMED voter, take away my rights, yeah, make me feel worthless, defund me, DEFUND ME, give me your sexy Brexit, HARD, come on, HARD, don’t stop, don’t STOP… BREXIT THE EVER-LOVING SHIT OUT OF ME, YOU DIRTY WEE COW!”

Brexit’s on the radio, it’s on the TV: every channel, no matter the programme.

‘Will sparrows need a visa after Brexit?’

‘Tell me, you’re a headteacher: after Brexit, will maths still exist?’

‘Reverend, if Jesus were here today, would he… be fucking sick of hearing about Brexit too?’

I swear David Attenborough’s even released a Netflix special called: Life After Brexit.

“There’s… nothing to eat here, so the poor… have started… to eat the rich. The very rich have… already left, migrated to Monaco, and Switzerland, leaving… just the middle classes. A group of young council estate lads have seen the crest of Phillip from the tennis club’s Pringle jumper, and they head off in pursuit, eventually catching him round the back of Lidl and tearing him apart like a chicken. It’s probably the first time that anyone in this group has ever eaten anything fresh… or free-range. Clive from the squash club will soon be round the corner in his… Nissan Navara, but by then… it’ll be too late for Phillip. This… is what Brexit Means Brexit… really means.”

We reached the point of critical Brexit fatigue a long time ago, but we might very well find ourselves looking back on these days with great fondness once we’re loping round a smog-clouded Hell-scape chewing the heads off rats, and aiding in the summary executions of anyone we suspect can speak French even to primary school level; once our kids are standing up in school assembly and making their daily pledge to President Katie Hopkins to hate foreigners in all their hideous forms, as their teachers watch on with machine guns.

Poor Theresa May. It seems like only last week she was begrudgingly commenting on inner-city knife crime, with a look on her face that seemed to say “What’s this got to do with fucking Brexit? Why am I being asked to comment on something that ISN’T Brexit? Ask a local councillor or Piers Morgan about this inconsequential nincompoopery: I’m a god damned board-certified Brexitologist!”

Ironically, one of the main reasons she had to stand down this week – besides finally realising how tragic and ineffectual she was as a leader – was due to the sheer number of times she’d been stabbed in the back by the squad of Machiavellian hypocrites lurking behind her in the shady, murky undergrowth of the party.

There’s now a gaping hole in the Tory leadership, which admittedly isn’t anything new. At least ten Tories have expressed interest in taking over as PM – Brexy’s Midnight Runners, as I like to call them – and there isn’t one among them that doesn’t send a shiver of terror or wave disgust down the spine. They range from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the ‘Eewwww!’ to the ‘who?’, and a multitude of possibly illegal swear words in between. I’m afraid that only the least favourite crisps are left at the bottom of the multi-pack, and all of them are Evil Flavour.

Welcome to the next phase of the Brexpocalypse. It’s going to get worse before it gets… well, an awful lot worse. The UK, already isolated from its friends by a coterie of abusive, power-hungry psychopaths, is now about to be gang-raped. And all we can do is stand by and watch. On the BBC, as it happens. Good old BBC.

Brexy’s Midnight Runners

One of the few Tory big-hitters not to come out swinging is Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is a shame, because that might have been very funny. It’s easy to see why they left the Dark Lord on the bench. Rees-Mogg’s voice is suggestive of a Persian cat who just woke up after a nice long sleep by the fire, but an evil Persian cat – one who kills baby mice. He’s a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy who only speaks Latin; he’s a demonic pinky-finger; he’s Hitler’s butler; he’s a harvester of children’s tears who likes to relax by downing a refreshing pint of homeless man’s blood. But, strangely, he’s not considered quite depraved enough to throw his top-hat into the ring.

So who have we got? There’s Michael Gove, the man who finally answers the question: ‘But what if Rick Moranis was an oily right-wing bastard?’ (I could just as easily have used ‘Pob’ instead of ‘Rick Moranis’. Or a hollowed-out wank potato with glasses.) It’s not widely known, but Gove was the world’s first successful recipient of a full Scottishectomy. All vestiges of Scottishness were removed from his mind and body in 2005 – which unfortunately has raised his life expectancy by 20 years.

There’s Boris Johnson, naturally. He’s the favourite. Imagine if the Honey Monster had sex with both the Dulux dog and a naughty school-boy character from the Beano: Boris would probably masturbate to that, right? Still, he’d make a good prime minister because his buffoonery was mildly amusing on Have I Got News For You a few years ago, eh? Once he’s in the top seat maybe we can appoint Andy Parsons as the Home Secretary and Gina Yashere as the Business Secretary? Yeah? YEAH!!?! (suddenly remembers we live in a world where Donald Trump is president in the US and a stand-up comedian was elected as the president of Ukraine)

Ah, and there’s Jeremy Hunt. People have milked so much comedy from Jeremy Hunt’s wonderfully rhymeable name over the years that there’s nothing original left to say, so I can probably just dispense with the witty wordplay and come right out and say what an absolute c**t he is. What an absolute c**t he is.

Barring her views on fox-hunting and Brexit, Andrea Leadsom is actually quite progressive for a Tory, which is a bit like singling BTK out for praise in a group of serial killers because he’s quite good at pottery.

Then there’s Sajid Javid, a brutal little man who looks like the aborted attempt of a small child to draw The Rock’s face onto an egg. He’s Doctor Evil, but thrice as evil, and about as popular in Scotland right now as the idea of Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Hill being brought back from the dead so they can be installed in Edinburgh Castle to rule as King and Queen. Good luck, you little fucker.

Rory Stewart has the resigned, vaguely apologetic gaze of an archbishop who’s just been snapped by the paparazzi coming out of a brothel. For the eighth time. He looks like the end result of someone getting a jigsaw of Steve Buscemi’s face mixed up with a jigsaw of Wilhem Dafoe’s face.

There’s Dominic Raab, a grinning thumb with the face of Buzz Lightyear and the soul of Alan B’stard. There’s Matt Hancock and Kit Malthouse, who aren’t even real people, but two detectives from a cop show set in 1970s New York. And there’s James Cleverley, Esther McVey, Mark Har…oh, fuck this, I’m falling asleep (but also still oddly terrified).

To quote the tagline for Alien vs Predator: Whoever wins, we lose.

Even Ken Clarke’s had enough

The Tories shouldn’t be allowed to install a new prime minister without a general election, and the general public should never have been allowed to weigh in on such a complex, multi-layered issue as membership of the European Union, at least not without years of preparation, education and honest campaigning.

This is what the average man and woman on the street make of Brexit:

“What is this Brexit thing?”

“It’s somethin’ to do with pomegranates or something, too many pomegranates coming in to the country.”

“Pomegranates?”

“Aye, and bananas too. They’re too bendy or they’re no bendy enough or somethin. Oh, and they’re worried about some door-stop in Ireland.”

“A door-stop?”

“Aye, they want to put one in, so Ireland doesn’t close or something.”

“That’s a bloody big door-stop.”

“Aye, but it’ll keep the foreigners out. SOMETHING SOMETHING FOREIGNERS! GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!”

They’re the lucky ones. Imagine living in blissful ignorance of this almighty cluster-fuck. Mind you, half the people brokering it don’t know what the fuck it’s all about either. It’s like when you say a word or phrase so many times that it starts to lose all meaning. ‘Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Workers rights, workers rights, workers right, workers rights, workers rights.’ You see? Totally meaningless.

So, in summary: we’re all fucked.

Except for us lucky blighters up here in Scotland, who might yet manage to avoid Brexit with the aid of a swift and timely Ukexit. That’s if Donald Trump doesn’t declare war on us and nuke us out of existence for not letting him turn the highlands into a giant golf course or something.

If we have to endure a No Deal Brexit with Boris Johnson at the helm, a nuking might start to seem like a small mercy.

Remembrance of Brexit Days Past

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I think Brexit Day always seems a lot more magical when you’re a child. You know, it’s a real family occasion: the celebrations, the procession, the executions, all of that.

I remember one of the early ones, I must have been seven, eight. Can’t remember precisely, but it was the first Brexit Day my parents thought I was old enough to take part in the ‘After Dinner Death Match’. The prize that year was the last chocolate in the box, well, the only chocolate in the box. And it wasn’t a box, it was a piece of toilet paper. And it wasn’t a chocolate, it was some rat shit. But anyway, it was my turn to fight that year, and I drew my gran’s name out of the hat. Sounds like an easy win, but it wasn’t. She was tough as old boots, my gran. As a fighter and as a meal. Food was scarce, you see, so whoever lost got eaten.

Mum made gran into a curry, or maybe it was a Balti – it was definitely something hot and spicy – to mask the taste of that leathery old skin of hers. Dad wasn’t happy. ‘A curry?’ he said. ‘A bloody curry? What’s wrong with good old British faggots, or a fry up? You’ll get us marched off by the Lizzie Lynch Mob yet, Cynthia!’

Even with all the spices, gran tasted worse than my cousin Bill, and that’s saying something, because Bill was a big old fat guy with hundreds of moles and welts and psoriasis and smegma and everything. Still, waste not, want not, and each to their own. I think smegma is vile, but my mum always said it was an acquired taste, like blue cheese – whatever that is.

My gran on the campaign trail for UKIP, in happier times

Gran’s last words to me as she bled out under the dining room table were, ‘I hope you choke on my tough old tits, you weak little shit-bag.’ For some reason those words have always stuck with me… There was a funny little moment too, just as she slipped away, when my Dad shouted back at her, ‘Brexit MEANS Brexit, Brenda,’ and we all laughed. Even gran cracked a smile. Gran was like that, though, always up for the banter.

I remember being very sad that day. Very, very sad. Not because of gran, you see. My dad was right, Brexit DOES mean Brexit, that’s just the way it is. No, because my pet – and best pal – Russell, had died the day before. Oh, I was devastated. Absolutely devastated. You look at any picture from my childhood, and it’s me and Russell. I’d take him walks, we’d sleep in the same bed, we’d stay up late and watch movies together. Mum tried to console me as best she could on Brexit Day morning, because she could see how upset I was. She said: ‘We’ll get you another carrier bag, son, maybe a John Lewis one this time,’ and I just lost it, because Russell wasn’t just any old carrier bag. He was an M&S carrier bag.

Mum and dad told me about the times just before I was born, before Brexit, when people kept cats and dogs and things like that as pets; my parents had a pet, too. A little Bichon Frize called Steven. But when the economy crashed that first time, and money didn’t exist anymore, nobody could buy food, so they rounded up everybody’s pets and ate them. It went into law, actually. There were big barbecues and cook-outs in the street. Dad said it really brought communities together and it was like the Royal Jubilee, only with more of an emphasis on dog eating. My parents said it was hard to eat Steven, but only because he was so dry. ‘A little bowl of smegma,’ mum said, ‘That’s the secret.’

Dad loved flame-grilled spaniels best, but mum always had dangerously exotic tastes, so she preferred things like spicy cat-arse kebabs. One time a next-door neighbour of theirs brought some garden snails to a cook-out, and they shot him, because snails were too French, you see. He should’ve known better. The rules were clear. You weren’t even allowed to call small things ‘wee’ anymore, just in case anyone thought you were  a French agent.

A few Brexit Days after that – I can’t remember the year exactly, but it was around about the time they moved the capital city to Bolton, and dissolved Wales… not the assembly or anything, they just dissolved the whole country – I lost an uncle. What was his name? Ah, Uncle Simon, that’s right. It was good riddance anyway.  He’d had a bit too much to drink, and I remember him sitting there, wearing his Union Jack paper-hat , and he just shook his head with a little smile and said, ‘Ah, Brexit. What was that all about, eh?’ My mum snuck off to the kitchen to use the phone. I could see my Dad was trying hard not to lose his temper.  Ten minutes later these six big guys, all dressed like the Queen – with matching handbags and everything – marched in and carted him off. Uncle Simon was terrified, you know, he was screaming and everything. ‘I’m a loyal subject! I’m a loyal subject! No! No!!! Listen to me, just listen: send ‘em back; too bloody cold for ‘em; they tried to straighten our bananas. See??? I’m one of you!! I’M ONE OF YOU! I’M A BREXITEEEEEERRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr!’

I don’t think I can do justice to the amazing atmosphere at the Brexit Day processions. You know, there would be the big bus with the ‘£350 million’ sticker on it, and it would go past and peep and everyone would wave; there would be people dressed in top-hats and monocles carrying gilded canes around, just like King Rees-Mogg (peace-be-upon-him). There would be a guy dressed as Churchill kicking blacked-up homeless people up and down the street as someone played God Save the Queen on a lute. Sometimes Nigel Farage would drop in and stoat about with a pint of piss, grinning at everyone. Oh, it was wonderful.

One Brexit Day, though – I think it was around about the year that King Rees-Mogg first announced the building of the sea-wall in the ocean between Dover and Calais – they had to evacuate our street because one of the kids in the neighbourhood found an old time capsule someone had buried in 2006, and there were apparently pictures of people smiling and eating food and going to hospital and stuff like that, so they did a controlled explosion of the time capsule. And of the little kid who found it, just to be safe.

The procession always ended with a big bonfire in the village green, where they’d do the ‘Burning of the Obama’ –  he was a French muslim, you know – and they’d round up anyone who looked a bit like Jeremy Corbyn and hurl them in, too. That was how they got my other gran. We warned her to use the Remington.

I really liked the arena combat, where people fought against horses, but my favourite was always the ‘Annual Execution of a Remainer’. There was always so much excitement around it. They’d choose the executioner from one of the local primary schools. They picked Graham McPhail from my class one year, I was so bloody jealous. I think that was the year they finally abolished Scotland and renamed it ‘England the Second.’ Anyway, for weeks afterwards people would run up to Graham in the playground, and ask to touch his strong and stable trigger-finger.

Graham went on to become a member of the Lizzy Lynch Squad, you know, those guys that dress up as the Queen and take people away to be shot for treason. Years later, he was the one who killed my mum. Someone had overheard her saying that she liked ‘smegma pasta’, and of course Italian food is unpatriotic, so off she went. That was that. I didn’t hold a grudge against Graham, I really didn’t. He was just doing his job. Brexit means Brexit, after all.

Anyway. What did you say the half-life of nuclear radiation was? It’s a bit stuffy in this bunker. I’d like to get out for some fresh air, maybe wave a few flags around for old time’s sake. Actually, there’s a thought. I could use my Union Jack to waft away the radiation… What a great idea. That’ll definitely work. It is the most powerful flag in the world, after all. BRITAIN SAVES THE DAY AGAIN! GOD SAVE THE QUEEN! GOD SAVE THE UNITED KINGDOM!

Jamie’s Digest (2): Cool Bits From Books

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Whenever I’m reading I always like to highlight phrases and passages that strike a chord with me, either because they’re emotionally or intellectually resonant, or because they’re exceptionally relevant to something that’s happening in the world today. I’d like to continue to share some of the these excerpts with you.

Catholic Tastes

In light of both the ascension of the DUP to the role of king-makers, and Germany’s recent parliamentary vote in favour of legalising gay marriage, I thought the below was exceptionally relevant. It’s an extract from a piece published in a gay newsletter in Southampton the late 1970s by a man named Paul, a volunteer for the Solent Gay switchboard. A copy of the full text (which speaks of his sorrow at the extent of anti-gay discrimination in the country), as well as appearing in the newsletter, was also sent to the Rev. Ian Paisley, Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse, a trio he felt had lent credence to those who would level violence and abuse at gay people.

“Many heterosexuals like to remark that if everyone were homosexual, the human race would come to an end. (The human race would suffer the same fate if the entire male population became Roman Catholic priests, but God in his infinite and unfailing wisdom ensures that only about 5% of us are homosexual and that even fewer are Roman Catholic priests.) In view of the acknowledged importance of sex in perpetuating the human race, it is strange that there are still those who regard it as something shameful, embarrassing or rather awkwardly special.”

Amazon link: Ban This Filth by Ben Thompson (p.347 – 349)

The Bondage of Work

The below extract is for those of us (most of us) who are unlucky enough to work for ‘da man’ in any of his multifarious guises.

“Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship. Nowhere else is freedom of speech for the citizens of free societies so curtailed. They can abuse their political leaders in print or on radio, television and the Web as outrageously as they wish, and the secret service will never come for them. They can say that their country’s leader is a lunatic, their police force is composed of sadists and their judiciary is corrupt. Nothing happens, even on those occasions when their allegations are gibberish. The leniency of free societies is only proper. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to spout clap-trap, as regular surfers of the Web know. If employees criticise their employers in public, however, they will face a punishment as hard as a prison sentence, maybe harder: the loss of their career, their pension, and perhaps their means of making a livelihood.”

Amazon link: You Can’t Read This Book by Nick Cohen (p.149)

Mo’ Men, Mo’ Problems

As a humanist an atheist and a secularist (sometimes we all walk into a bar) I’m appalled at the prejudice frequently levelled at my fellow human beings on account of their skin-colour, country of origin or set of beliefs; I’m further appalled by the foreign policy measures and media hyperbole that has inflamed hatred in this country and abroad. However, I’m also appalled at the way in which our freedom to criticise religion, in all of its forms, is slowly being eroded, mostly – it has to be said – through fear: fear of violent reprisals, and also fear of being on the same side of the argument – albeit for vastly different reasons – as the nation’s execrable clan of right-wing racists. That being said, however incompatible I consider organised religion to be with a measured, rational view of the world, and however strongly I may wish mankind to move beyond the infantile and supernatural, it’s always a good idea to seek out differing and (especially) opposing views; to be as well-informed and educated as possible on the history, structure and practice of religions.

Below is an extract about the history of Islam that you may find surprising (or perhaps not).

“The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were afforded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segregation and veiling for the Prophet’s wives, but there is nothing in the Quran that requires the veiling of all women or their seclusion in a separate part of the house. These customs were adopted some three or four generations after the Prophet’s death. Muslims at the time were copying the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who had ong veiled and segregated their women in this manner; they also appropriated some of their Christian misogyny. The Quran makes men and women partners before God, with identical duties and responsibilities. The Quran also came to permit polygamy; at a time when Muslims were being killed in the wars against Mecca, and women were left without protectors, men were permitted to have up to four wives provided that they treat them all with absolute equality and show no signs of favouring one rather than the others. The women of the first ummah in Medina took full part in its public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside the men in battle. They did not seem to have experienced Islam as an oppressive religion , though later, as happened in Christianity, men would hijack the faith and bring it into line with the prevailing patriarchy.”

Amazon Link: Islam – A Short History by Karen Armstrong (p.14)

Brazil Nut

Nemesis – an account of the rise of an ordinary man in one of Rio’s most infamous favelas and his rise to the rank of don of the criminal under(and over)world – is a wonderful book: fast-paced, exciting, shocking, thoughtful, well-written and meticulously researched.

The extracts below give shape to the idea that tackling poverty and inequality through state and welfare policies/spending is not only an essential component of our common humanity, but also makes sound long-term economic sense. Effective social policies and less poverty equals a society that has greater stability, greater contentment, less crime, less unrest and less violence across the board.

“After decades of dictatorship and chaotic transition, renewal and optimism were surging out from the federal capital, Brasilia, towards the furthest reaches of the country’s body politic. Whole regions and classes were reviving after a long period of neglect and deprivation. The sudden arrival of a period of prosperity that saw unemployment fall to record levels and personal spending increase significantly is crucial in explaining why Rio was becoming less violent. Young men in the favelas were turning away from weapons and drugs in favour of education and settled employment.”

…

“While China was lauded for pulling some 100 million citizens out of poverty from the mid 1980s, fewer noticed Brazil’s more monumental achievement flowing from [socially democratic political moves and social policies designed to eradicate the chronic, crushing poverty experienced by a significant proportion of Brazil’s citizens). In Brazil, 30-40 million people managed to cross the poverty line. Given the much smaller population of Brazil, this was an even greater feat than the Sino equivalent.

The consequences of this golden era for Brazil’s political personalities were immense. The primary beneficiaries were the poor, not least those who lived in the favelas of the south. This was especially true of Rochina. Its isolation from other favelas and its now well-established tradition as a large market, both for the residents and for those coming from outside looking for a bargain, enabled it to ride the wave of economic confidence with a swagger. This growth spurt offered alternative employment to its younger men and women, and so the drugs trade became a somewhat less attractive career path.”

What was the biggest obstacle to political reform? Well, surprise, surprise: “The vested interests of Brazil’s powerful, if numerically small, economic elite proved deft in constructing numerous barriers.”

Amazon Link: Nemesis by Mischa Glenny

Read books, motherfuckers. Read books.

General Election 2017: Use your vote, but use it wisely

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In the run-up to the council elections earlier this year Ruth Davidson posed on a mobility scooter, presumably as part of her campaign to raise awareness about how underdeveloped the Tory party’s sense of irony is. Really, Ruth? That’s like Thatcher trying to win over the working class by posing for the 1985 Socialist Worker’s calendar, lounging across a pit entrance, and naked except for a miner’s helmet and a puff of coal-dust on each cheek.

The Tory party – in both Westminster and Holyrood – is working hard to channel the spirit of an apparently remorseful abusive partner, swearing with all of its might that ‘this time things will be different’.  In the grip of delusional desperation in Scotland – and owing to a sense of sinister, Voldermortian assurance in England – the Tories are busy positioning themselves as the party of the disabled, the disenfranchised, the poor, the NHS, the working man. ‘I’ve changed, honestly I have, you’ll see, I love you, I don’t want to lose you. I promise that this time I won’t beat the absolute fuck out of you, and then cheat on you with the posh bit of stuff up the street.’

I can understand why the guy with the monocle from Monopoly would vote Conservative, but why has the party enjoyed such an upsurge in popularity among the working class? Why are people who rely upon the NHS, a healthy welfare state and a large swathe of well-funded, publicly-run services (particularly in the care sector) essentially voting for their own destruction by embracing a party that is, at root, ideologically opposed to all of these things?

Our predominantly right-wing media is partly responsible for this state of affairs, of course, that steady drip-feed of lies, hysteria and manipulation masquerading as news and comment. Look on in envy, Kaiser Soze, because yours is no longer the greatest trick ever pulled, son: tabloid newspapers are owned by billionaires and staffed by middle-class urban professionals, but somehow the working class is convinced that they speak for them. This same mentality runs rampant in America, as evidenced by its people hailing a heartless, ruthless billionaire, who built his billions on the broken backs of millions, as a man of the people (It’s not even clear that Donald Trump is a person, much less a man).

It also seems to me that the thunderous orchestra of social and political issues that makes up the soundtrack to our dizzyingly complex and hectic lives has been reduced to one single, deafening scream: BLOODY FOREIGNERS! “I don’t want these bloody Poles and P***s using our bloody NHS!” Well, take heart, my frightened, reactionary friend. You keep voting like this and the NHS won’t exist anyway. Who knows, maybe that’s been the agenda/evil plan all along.

As a little aside, it also amazes me that most of the British nationalists and unionists I’ve encountered – the ones with streaks of racism in them so prominent they’re actually visible from space – have also been, almost unfailingly, great admirers of the Queen.

“LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!” “FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY!” “I BLOODY LOVE THAT WOMAN!” Ah, a violent, semi-literate alcoholic skinhead with a hair-trigger temper. I’m sure the Queen will be inviting you round to the palace for tea and cucumber sandwiches any day now. Again, she’s a billionaire who sits on a throne and wears a crown. I don’t know what part of that makes Davey from Possil imagine that their love and respect is somehow mutual. The Queen probably wouldn’t piss on most of us if we were on fire.

Our charred corpses, on the other hand…

“Well,” people in Scotland might say, “I need to vote Tory to keep that wee dwarf Sturgeon out. She only cares about making Scotland independent!”

It seems a bit churlish to lambast the leader of what is ultimately the ‘We’re Committed to this Very Specific Thing’ Party for being committed to a very specific thing. Spoiler alert: yes, the SNP is pretty keen on Scottish independence, primarily because it’s our last, best hope to conduct and manage our affairs in line with our political, economic and social needs and aspirations. But the SNP isn’t a one-trick pony. Its manifesto also embraces civicism with a heavy smattering of socialism, something most people would know if they ever had occasion to hear Nicola Sturgeon talk without some arsehole shouting ‘BUT WHAT ABOUT INDEPENDENCE, DWARF?!’ at her every three seconds (I don’t think poor Nicola finish her breakfast without somebody asking her if she intends to grant self-determination to her cornflakes).

Do you really want to vote for Theresa May: a wobble-voiced Thatcher-lite who looks like she’s trying to regurgitate an albatross each time she laughs? Or Ruth Davidson, a passionless politician with the soul of a middle-manager?

The old saying goes that the longer we live the more right-wing our views become: we start off as idealists, and crusaders for justice, but evolve into bitter, jaded cynics as we come to the painful realisation that the world is a great, immutable sink-hole of unfairness, indifference and cruelty (In fact, wait, isn’t that actually a line from the Tory manifesto?).

So if a leftist is capable of transitioning from left to right, then what the hell kind of moral journey does a Tory undertake as he or she advances into their twilight years? How much more ‘right’ can ‘right’ get?

Do you really want to find out?

England: vote for Corbyn, come what May.

Scotland: Be Ruthless.

**Hey, wait a minute. It’s finished? But what about Scottish Labour? Well, exactly.

Donald Trump: The Apocalypse’s Casus Bellend

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I have to keep reminding myself that Donald Trump has held office for a little over a month. It feels like his cartoon duck mouth has been issuing terrifyingly hilarious proclamations since before America was even discovered; as if the vortex of evil that propelled him to prominence is so powerful that it has bent not just reality, but also time and space to its will. “I was there at the creation of the universe. The ‘let there be light’ thing. That was my idea. And God was very appreciative, said my idea was the greatest. And when that light went on? No dinosaurs, people. FAKE. You know I’m right.”

I can’t envisage a single day in the next four years when I won’t see or hear the onomatopoeiac fart of his name. Being president must be doing wonders to stoke the fires of his pomposity, paranoia and narcissism: the entire world really is talking about him. Incessantly. Every hour of every day. Trump would have you believe that our obsession with him is due to a giant, media-fuelled conspiracy, or sour grapes on the part of the losing side, but it’s clear that Trump is a megalomaniacal ratings chaser who will stop at nothing to keep himself in the limelight, even if that means inventing terrorist attacks, banning journalists from his briefings, or labelling reality ‘fake’. We shouldn’t be too concerned about our attentions being hijacked by Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric: what should concern us is what would happen if we all chose to ignore him. He’d probably nuke Belgium, or declare war on Lidl.

Many people have been quick to point out the societal similarities between modern-day America and Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. There’s definitely some weight to that comparison, however there is one crucial, towering difference between Donald Trump and Hitler: Hitler was a good orator. If evil must have a face and a voice, then it’s a pity that this time around it’s got the face and voice of a malfunctioning android stuck in a six-phrase feedback loop, or a racist, half-mad taxi driver who’s been ripped from his cab, pushed behind a presidential podium and handed a scrap of paper that’s got ‘Everyone except you is an asshole’ scrawled on it in blood. When Trump talks he sounds like a man who’s being continually interrupted and fed lines by an invisible hologram only he can see, who’s also a complete fucking idiot. “Ziggy says there’s a 40 per cent chance that wall, wall, muslim, muslim, wall, wall, America, great, America, dude, wall, bad guys, bad dudes, enemies, bad dudes, wall.” “…What the fuck?” “Just say it, Sam! Just say it!”

Feel free to insert your own crude mustache.

Each day the world wakes up, switches on the TV and stares at the orange man with the nest of half-dissolved, beshitted candy-floss on his head, and thinks: how the fuck did this happen? The man has all the grace and articulacy of the giant man-baby who’s forced to fight Mel Gibson in Mad Max 3. His face vacillates between that of a man who’s sneering with disgust at the whiff of a particularly foul fart, and then smirking a little cause he realises it’s his own, and he likes it. He possesses all the charm of a bogey-soaked tissue bobbing in a warm flute of piss, and all the compassion of a malnourished tiger let loose in an orphanage. You wouldn’t trust him to be in charge of a tombola stall at the church fete, much less place a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Seriously. How did this happen? Let’s rewind the tape, because somebody’s very clearly edited out a crucial sequence from this movie. Where’s the arc here? There’s no arc. It’s just: world is sane: world is crazy. Someone’s deleted the middle: the bit that explains this clusterfuck.

Within the space of a few short weeks, Trump has put a climate-change denier in charge of protecting the environment; placed a brain-damaged billionaire who struggles to comprehend basic facts in charge of education; classified dissenting (for dissenting read ‘truth-seeking’) journalists as enemies of the state; tried to erect an invisible wall to ban Muslims from entering his country; proposed to erect an actual wall around the border of another country; signaled that he’s ready to accept Vladimir Putin as his best-bro and role model; re-branded a smorgasbord of bare-faced lies as ‘alternative truths’; and harried, bullied, threatened, cajoled and alienated just about every section of society, with the exception of prickly white billionaires and the sort of alt-right, flag-waving, gun-toting tit-wanks that share both his disdain for reality and hatred for ‘the other’, whoever that ‘other’ happens to be in any given week. Never before has Orwell’s ‘1984’ been so successfully re-appropriated as a manifesto.

If you evaluate success in terms of capitalist excess, then Trump’s been a winner all his life. This is something, true or not, that seems to have struck a chord with many Americans, for whom Trump is the living embodiment of the American dream. If you’re rich and powerful, you must have worked for it, earned it. You must be smart, strong. You must deserve it, else you wouldn’t have got it. His supporters don’t necessarily think that Trump’s just like them, but believe that one day, with a little bit of graft and a lot less foreigners, blacks and socialists running around, they could be just like him. They admire his directness, his toughness, the way that his world-view hasn’t been corrupted by science, truth, nuance or articulacy. I’d maintain that just because you enjoy watching fictional sociopaths like Tony Soprano and Cersei Lannister ruling their empires with an iron fist, doesn’t mean that it’s a particularly good idea to elect a real-life sociopath to the most powerful office on Earth.

He looks like Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

You probably haven’t heard anything in the media about Trump’s financial successes. He tends to hide his light under a bushel, but if you listen really, really carefully to his speeches, you may occasionally, every so often, once in a blue moon, hear him mention it. Who am I kidding? No one’s better at telling people he’s better than people than Trump. His self-categorisation is, however, something of a hollow boast, given that he was born into his fortune. Look at it this way: if you happened to be born with a 6000cc engine in your back, and high-performance wheels instead of legs, then it would be rather churlish to berate your fellow competitors in the 100m sprint for failing to beat you with their shitty normal legs. Trump’s inherited wealth has always insulated him from failure, and gone a long way towards helping him construct and maintain the Death-star of his ego. The Art of the Deal, the most famous book Trump’s ever not-actually-written, only really needed one page, with the following written on it in big, bold letters: Be born a billionaire.

Given his arrogance and privilege it’s little wonder that Trump’s such a stranger to reality; his life must be like a virtual-reality tycoon simulator with cheat mode enabled. Trump was free to run his businesseses with a cold heart and an iron fist, pushing his employees around, conning his customers, eliminating competitors with the dead-eyed zeal of a Nazi death-camp commandant, and generally treating people like dog-dirt quesadillas, and people would applaud him for his tough-talking, get-results-damn-it, business acumen; and if they didn’t, or if one business or a thousand businesses imploded in a shock-wave of lawsuits, bad PR and bankruptcy, then who cared, right? Blame the government, blame the media, blame the Chinese, lie, lie, and thrice lie, pick up another bundle of dollars, clean the slate, and start again. Unfortunately, if you take the same set of principles necessary to succeed as a ruthless CEO with an infinite supply of inheritance behind you, and apply these to government, then what you are is a dictator.

Trump is reminiscent of a vengeful Scientologist, or the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who famously appeared on camera with a fleet of American tanks behind him to claim that there wasn’t a fleet of American tanks behind him. Lying is such an integral part of Trump’s strategy and defence mechanism that it’s difficult to believe anything that he says. Even his fortune is up for debate, given the amount of businesses he’s allegedly sent to the grave. But it doesn’t matter. Some evil supercomputer has calculated Trump’s ground-base of support down to a man, and told him what TV stations they watch, which news outlets they read in print and on-line, and what size of shoe they take. All he has to do is keep preaching to the converted, telling as many outrageous and egregious lies as he likes, and they’ll always be lapped up, and never cross-referenced. “Ostriches are green. Japanese TVs electrocute people. Barack Obama once killed a penguin with a hole-punch. I’ve never met Vladimir Putin… who is he again? I’m so smart. My hands are the size of frying pans. Mexicans are responsible for ISIS. I cured AIDS.”

If Trump really believed his rhetoric, then his best weapon against his critics would be the steady, patient unveiling of his vision to Make America Great Again, piece by piece, encouraging transparent democratic debate every step along the way. After all, if a man was lying bleeding on the street, and I could help him, but between me and that man was another man, who was shouting out vicious slurs about my motivation and intentions, then I’d still move forward and help the bleeding man. I wouldn’t thunder off in a fit of rage, and proceed to hold scores of press conferences in which I angrily discredited the shouting man, as the other man – the one I was supposed to be saving – died in the street.

I guess it begs the question: who, or what, does Donald Trump want to make great? Because it sure as shit doesn’t seem to be America.

Frustration? I can’t be arsed.

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cheWhen I worked for the Scottish Court Service I joined the union and became a representative for my office, primarily because I liked the thought of officially sanctioned time away from my desk, and indeed the entire building. It helped that most days out on union business consisted of 5 per cent conferencing to 95 per cent drinking.

Whilst installed as the office representative I became adept at asking meaningless yet persistent questions at conferences in a bid to justify my presence in the union flock. I’d say something like, “A few people in the office were asking if they could get some free pens. Well, can they?” and then nod sagely. I once half-heartedly participated in a strike for better pay conditions. I spent an entire day standing at the picket line limply clutching a sign, chain-smoking and nodding silently at everyone as they walked past me. I think I muttered ‘scab’ under my breath a couple of times, just as my hero Che Guevara would’ve done. A manager eventually brought me out a cup of coffee and a sandwich, which I accepted without hesitation. I think you’ll find that the Communist Manifesto has quite a lot to say about the importance of balancing worker solidarity with the delicious necessity of free cheese sandwiches, even if they do come from the hands of your bastard enemies.

Sometime during the steely reign of my short stewardship, our national executive issued a memo urging us to boycott Coca Cola. Coca Cola was accused of turning a blind eye to the plight of workers at its many sub-contracted South American bottling plants. Right-wing paramilitary groups – allegedly in collusion with the plants’ owners – were murdering, or otherwise ‘disappearing’, workers for the crime of organising unions. The workers were only trying to ameliorate their poor working conditions and make a better life for themselves and their families.  Coca Cola’s silence and inaction in the face of this horrific systemic homicide was taken as tacit approval of the paramilitaries’ methods. “COCA COLA? …Death-o… Cola… more like,” I’d mutter quietly to myself, before taking another sip of Coca Cola.

coke

My personal boycott lasted less than four hours. 9am until lunchtime. Vive le revolution! I loved Coca Cola back then, you see. Drank it every day. Came to depend upon it. It was my fizzy heroin in a can; my daily hangover cure. “Why can’t they be killing workers at Dr Pepper factories instead?” I lamented. “I fucking hate Dr Pepper.” I was ashamed of my weakness. There were men in the world who would give up blood, freedom, family and oxygen for their principles, and I couldn’t even kick Coca Cola for four fucking hours. Thankfully, I’ve long since abandoned the drink. Not for any ideological reasons. I’ve simply arrived at the conclusion that Coca Cola is a black broth of tooth-taking, penny-polishing, pancreas-punishing arse-juice that leaves your heart flopping about like a fish in a bucket. And that’s a Scotsman saying that.

When something I own breaks, I tend not to fix it, but instead force myself to adapt to the new reality of its brokenness. I once had a TV that could only be switched on if the power button at the front of the unit was pressed in as far as it could go and held there at a constant pressure. Naturally, instead of mending or replacing the TV, I pressed the button in as far as it would go, and then used a rook from my chess set and a roll of masking tape to hold it in place. I then left it like that for three years. Check mate, TV. Check mate!

When the locks in my old Fiesta started to fail one by one, rather than have it mended I simply allowed my method of entering the car to evolve naturally. When the lock on the driver’s side seized, I clambered in to the car through the passenger side. When the passenger side failed, I went in through the back seats. When all of the locks had failed, I climbed in through the boot. Every time I entered my car it looked like I was either a) participating in an all-cripple version of It’s a Knockout, or b) in the process of breaking into it. Thankfully, in the part of town in which I lived, car-jacking wasn’t an unusual occurrence, allowing me to fit in as ‘one of the lads’.

I don’t think I suffer from apathy per se, or at least not all of the time. I have an incredibly low tolerance for frustration that co-exists with a fear of failure, an expectation of failure and a rage at the world for not doing what I want it to do. If I sometimes take the easy route, or hit the button for the ejector seat, it’s less about laziness and more about saving myself an exhausting, four-letter-word-fuelled explosive meltdown.

My mum said I cried and wailed at the age of four because I couldn’t write functional computer programs on the ZX Spectrum. When I was twelve, a faulty dot-matrix printer made me so angry that I snapped a fountain pen in half, leaving me with a big blue face that took an hour to scrub clean. If I hadn’t been wearing specs I probably would’ve been blinded, no doubt learning in the process some biblical lesson about the cost of anger: a pen for a printer makes the wee fanny blind, perhaps.

When my step-sister and I linked our Gameboys together and she beat me at two-player Tetris, I headbutted my Gameboy, smashing the screen to smithereens. I hid the evidence at the bottom of a toy hamper, and waited for the heat to die down. For more on this subject, have a read of this:  http://www.denofgeek.com/games/videogames/31783/frustrating-games-in-videogame-history ).

Don’t ask me to fix finicky things, or build up intricate items of furniture from Ikea. I’ll only end up hurling them out of a window. Or standing around with a big red face promising to murder myself in a series of increasingly ludicrous ways. “If this piece doesn’t fit I swear I’m going to puncture my lung with a toothbrush, and spend my dying minutes cracking my fucking skull open by beating it against my own knee! I MEAN IT, I REALLY MEAN IT, I FUC… oh, it fits. Excellent.” (strides off whistling)

If I’m stuck in traffic, I’ll swing the car around in a cloud of f’s and c’s and take a ten-mile detour in the wrong direction rather than confront the heart-pumping frustration of a very mildly inconvenient traffic jam. The modern world makes a Hulk out of me. I’ve almost ripped worlds apart trying to open tins of corned beef.

corned-beef-fail

In my early twenties my GP referred me to a Stress Management group, which comprised a gaggle of cripplingly shy and shaky-handed people, including one old hippy guy who was in a state of terror because he thought we were all going to invite ourselves en masse to his house after the meeting. I don’t belong here with these fucking mental cases, I thought to myself, rather uncharitably, and wholly unrealistically.

Still, I thought it would be smart to keep going, in a bid to better understand my stinking thinking, and how to counteract it. Week two arrived, and I was cooking some chicken in the oven before group. I was starving, and running late. The chicken had been packaged in some sort of plastic tub, which in retrospect I don’t think should’ve been placed in the oven. The plastic warped with the heat, and when I tried to retrieve it it wobbled and wilted in my hands, sending globs of burning hot sauce all over my hands, and raining chunks of chicken down upon the kitchen floor. I hurled the floppy, half-empty tub across the room and aimed a hard kick at the oven. “THAT’S… IT!” I shouted, standing there with my arms hanging down at my waste, my fists balled in rage. “I’M TOO STRESSED OUT TO GO TO THIS STUPID FUCKING STRESS MANAGEMENT GROUP!” The delicious irony of this angry ejaculation caused me to laugh like a madman, my anger gone as quickly as it had arrived. I never made it back to the group… although I did try to break into the hippy’s house a few times.

asdasd

The independence referendum in 2014 shook me out of my apathy a little. I genuinely cared about the political process again, and desperately wanted to do my bit to bring about change, even if my bit was just talking twaddle with strangers and signing an ‘X’ on a little piece of paper. I have friends who felt moved to canvass and campaign for their parties of choice in the wake of Scotland’s political re-awakening. I thought about it. And then realised I couldn’t be arsed. Oh, there’s a town meeting tonight. Right, I’d really better get along and… actually Monday’s not a good time for me. It’s Game of Thrones night. There’s one on Wednesday, too? Hmmm. I’ll probably be a bit tired by then… OH WHAT’S THE POINT, WE’LL ALL JUST GET CRUSHED UNDER THE WHEELS OF THE MACHINE, FREE WILL IS AN ILLUSION, THE ILLUMINATI CONTROL EVERYTHING ANYWAY. Plus I’ve got to take my missus to the bingo.

Yes, I’m crazy. But I think to campaign for things – to dedicate your life to an ideal – is its own form of craziness. I’m the wrong kind of crazy to change the world. I wish I could harness my rage and frustration and point it in the direction of a worthwhile cause, but I can’t (unless it directly involves my family’s health, happiness or safety, I’m not really interested). Thankfully, there are passionate people out there with the zeal of psychopathic stamp collectors who can fly the flag on my behalf across a whole range of issues. I salute those fucking lunatics, I really do. Half-heartedly, of course.

When I can be bothered raising my arm.

PS: I started writing this in February.

No means No? Yes… For now.

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dead_unicornWe live in a peaceful democracy, which is why the will of the majority will be accepted – however reluctantly – without calls for people’s heads on sticks, fights or riots. Emotionally, we on the YES side will take stock and move on; we will continue to battle for a better future for our children, and to participate fully in whatever comes next.

But the suggestion from some quarters that YES voters should ‘get over it’, ‘stop spitting out the dummy’ or ‘get back in their box’ is as insulting as it is disgusting. I voted YES because I believe in the tenets of free healthcare, free education and free childcare – among many other things – which was and is within the power of an independent Scotland to be delivered, protected and guaranteed. I voted against nuclear missiles, the callous indifference of Westminster, policies that widen the wage gap and create and prolong poverty, the resurgence of the Tories and their ideological opposition to the things I believe are crucial to a fair and decent society, and the rise of UKIP and the far right in the south. I believe Scotland possesses the will and the resources for full autonomy over its own affairs, for a better and richer society – both materially and spiritually – for its people.

Today, what has not been taken from me, is under threat of being taken. I cannot help but feel disappointed and angry.

Remember how often those heading the Better Together campaign told us that Independence was a one-way street; that there would be no going back from it? Well, I hope a lot of people wake up today and realise that the same might prove equally true of deciding to remain in the union. Let’s see what happens next.

For all of our sakes, let’s hope that the faith of the NO voters is rewarded, and something good comes out of this result; that the extra powers promised don’t turn out to be as substantial as mist and ghosts. Let’s hope that we don’t find ourselves forgotten or sidelined in the call for more powers for other parts of the UK; that we don’t find ourselves bent over the oil barrel and fucked into submission.

The coarse, gleeful laughter from the NO campaign headquarters last night is still ringing in my ears. I can’t shake the feeling that many in this country cast their vote in a spirit of ‘I’m alright, Jack.’

Well, my infant son’s called Jack. He’s going to remember you said that.

This isn’t over.

Cunt of the Week (17th April 2013) by Jonny Seaton

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t1I’m going to set my stall out straight away: I hate the Tories. I can’t stand them, in fact, but my first memory of them was a positive one. In 1975 I remember Margaret Thatcher being elected as the first female leader of a political party, and thinking, as a 6 year old, ‘That’s good.’ My main female role model at that time was my mum, and she was brilliant, a really positive influence on me.

Perhaps it was my doctor father’s left-wing leanings, or perhaps it was the 80’s and the height of political comedy with Ben Elton and Spitting Image vying for our attention at putting down those in power; either way, I realised that the Conservative Party were not the party of the people….unless of course the people you were referring to were ‘society’s elite,’ a phrase that was something of an oxymoron in the 80’s, as Thatcher had denounced society, and claimed that it didn’t exist. As she put it: ‘There’s no such thing as society.’ (‘Elite’ is also open to interpretation: by elite I mean the rich, or the wannabe rich.)

Major: like an old Clark Kent, minus the Superman.

Major: like an old Clark Kent, minus the Superman.

But after introducing the poll tax, the vicious attacks on the unions and strikers, the denationalisation of once great industries, the initial steps in privatisation of the Health Service and so on, Thatcher was eventually deposed by her own party. There followed a slight move from extreme right-wing, blue politics to closer-to-centre, grey politics with seven years of John Major – a man so dull that not even the later revelation that he had had an affair with Edwina Currie could liven up his image. And it was image that the next PM, Tony Blair, was all about. Tony will be remembered for a few things, most notably an illegal war; a war that I totally agree with, if I am honest. Saddam Hussein was a bad man who committed genocide against the Iraqi Kurds, and if that was the reason for the invasion there would have been a lot less of an issue. The official reason was Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), but none were ever found – they were never going to be found. What Iraq did, and does, have in abundance is oil; and with the USA calling the shots, we were always going to war.

Gordon Brown squeezing an imaginary Tony Blair heart.

Gordon Brown squeezing an imaginary Tony Blair heart.

The collapse of the financial services led to Labour’s downfall, despite a couple of years of a good man, Gordon Brown, whose biggest problem was timing. Blair’s legacy was that the next Prime Minister was going to be a Tory. A big reason for this was the collapse of the financial services and the plunging of the UK into recession; interestingly enough a collapse that can be accurately traced back to the US policies of Reagan, which had been copied by Margaret Thatcher in the 80’s: greed, self and money; a man mind thyself attitude.

David Cameron: even his own shadow thinks he's a cunt.

David Cameron: even his own shadow thinks he’s a cunt.

So on 11 May 2010 the public went to the polls, and nearly 30 million turned out to vote, which is a great turnout (about 65% of those eligible). The Tories won 308 seats, which wasn’t enough for a majority unless combined with the seats of the Liberals – and don’t get me started on that! Many saw this as a protest vote, but whatever the reasons the Conservatives were back in power.

So 13 years since we last had a Conservative Government we had another, and the ‘everything now’ society in which we live caused people to forget how bad it was the last time. There is a feeling amongst the electorate that all the parties are much of a muchness. The bland politics of Major and Blair did nothing to dispel that. They are wrong: Cameron is very much one of Thatcher’s children. He has been in power for less than 3 years, and what have we seen?

  • Cuts to the armed forces and an end to the Scottish Regiments, replacing them with one cheaper Scottish Regiment. In the best traditions of Thatcher, this is a Scottish-only thing.
  • An end to the separate Scottish Police Forces, being replaced by one force…. another Scottish thing
  • Cameron is continuing the gradual erosion of the NHS
  • Cameron is undoing all of the good that came from the Beveridge Report, which fought the ‘five giant evils’ of Ignorance (Education), Idleness (Work & Pensions) and Disease (NHS)
  • Iain Duncan-Smith claiming he could surive on £57 per week
  • The introduction of a Bedroom Tax, potentially forcing the most vulnerable in society to take in unknown lodgers
  • The phone hacking scandal, and Cameron’s disclosed closeness to Rebekah Brooks, the editor at the height of the scandal. She is set to go on trial in September this year but I doubt anything will come of that. Am I cynical, perhaps?
Thatcher's coffin being led to the ground by the BNP, who won the competitive bid to run her funeral.

Thatcher’s coffin being led to the ground by the BNP, who won the competitive bid to run her funeral.

So on this, the day that Margaret Thatcher is buried, you would think that my cunt of the week is the Conservative Party. Well, I am afraid you are wrong. Yes, I despise them; I hate everything they stand for and wish they did not exist. However, what they stand for is well documented: they are the party on the right; they are the party of money; and the party that likes to keep that money circulating amongst themselves….

My cunt of the week is… well it could be you? Did you vote? No. Do you complain about the Government? You do? Well, it is you then. Voting is the right of every free person over the age of 18 in the UK. It is a democratic right, and one that if you forego then you forego the right to complain that this party – which has always been composed of cunts – continue to do what they have always done.

Jonny Seaton

Jonny Seaton

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Jonny Seaton is fast becoming a regular and favourite on the Scottish stand-up circuit. Last month he reached the grand finale of Radio Forth’s Big Comedy Audition, and received great praise from the judges. Outside of comedy, Jonny works as a fluffer for the animals on David Attenborough documentaries. ‘When David Attenborough wants to see two elks fucking, then David Attenborough GETS to see two elks fucking,’ explains Jonny. ‘But sometimes they’re not in the mood. David won’t accept this. He’ll say things to me like, “I didn’t fly all the way to Africa and trek through bloody jungles and across deserts getting my arse bitten off by mosquitos just so that these two lazy cunts could ruin my money shot.” Oh, he can be quite brutal sometimes. That’s where I come in. Sometimes you need to be tough, with a vice-like grip, sometimes gentle, like you’re shaking hands with a brittle-boned Oompa Loompa. Yes, I love my job, but it can be challenging. You try wanking off a tiger.’

The cost of failure can be high. On one occasion Jonny failed to excite two apathetic rhinos into having sex, and so Attenborough ordered Jonny to put on a rhino costume, and fucked him himself.

Jonny once went to France. He liked it.

Not all of this biography is true… Jonny fucking hated France.

FOLLOW JONNY ON TWITTER: @BalernoDad

 

Jamie’s Guide to Politics Pt2: The Labour Party

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It took a while for Al Jolson to get it right.

Broadly and historically speaking, the Labour party is the party of the working class. Unfortunately, there’s no longer a working class. All of the coal-miners and their descendants are now working for Scottish Power, working eighteen hours a day in cramped conditions down t’call centre, just waiting for George Orwell to write a book about them.

That’s if they work at all. Now that the steel, maritime, coal and gas industries have gone the way of the Dodo, Labour’s traditional supporters – people with tattoos who enjoy cheese sandwiches, swearing in polite company and beating their wives – are now mostly to be found signing on the dole, or having their bollocks shot off in Afghanistan.

'The next woman who takes me out is gonna light up like a pinball machine, and pay out in silver dollars.'

That’s why Labour was forced to advance and embrace the ideology of New Labour, which merged Thatcherism with a commitment to giving free money to work-shy scumbags who wanted operations for nothing, White Lightning, drugs and fags. Tony Blair was the first face of this brave new way of thinking. He was posh enough to appeal to Tories, but he called people ‘mate’ and had an ugly wife.

If John Smith was still alive, he’d definitely be bitter. Ed Milliband is the next generation of Labour leader. He was created in a laboratory by splicing the DNA of a 12 year old boy with one of those psychic aliens from Star Trek with the gigantic throbbing skulls. His vocal and oratorical capabilities were modelled on Sylvester the Cat after a horrific brain injury.

The Future

There’s been a radical re-think in recent years. Most labour supporters want to go ‘more literal.’ That’s why the existing politicians and councillors will be replaced by women who are actually in the process of child labour. Work has already been commissioned to fit hundreds of stirrups into the parliament building in Westminster.

‘Yes, the entire Labour Party will consist of women, and specifically women who are just about to give birth,’ said some guy who I think said his name was Andy, ‘This will ensure that we remain a fresh political force with a constant stream of new ideas and policies, because once one of our MPs actually gives birth, it’s out the back door and another one gets wheeled in. By a smiling Eric Joyce.’

Cherie Blair lending her support to the new initiative.

The new leader of the opposition, who will be a different person every 3 – 36 hours, will spend her time in parliament screaming abuse at the Prime Minister, and demanding morphine. ‘Do you think David Cameron will be so keen to come out with his usual smart-alec remarks when the grip of just one of these deeply hormonal, pain-ravaged women would be enough to crush the neck bones of a rhinoceros?’

Prime Minister’s Questions will now involve the speaker sitting ashen-white with terror as the hundreds of women surrounding him wail like dying animals; ‘THIS IS YOUR FUCKING FAULT YOU BASTARD DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME – ESPECIALLY YOU, ED BALLS!’, the only phrase decipherable through the tumultuous din.

Jamie’s Guide to Politics: The BNP

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In his high-school yearbook, Nick Griffin was voted ‘Most Likely to Make a Career Out of Racism’

At root, all the BNP wants to do is make sure that people ‘get back to their home’, which is why the organisation is so popular with taxi drivers.

Nick Griffin is the party’s current leader. When he’s not indulging in his favourite hobby of racism, Nick likes to enter look-a-like contests, and has recently come first-place in a variety of different competitions: most like Morn from Deep Space 9; most like Greenback from Inspector Gadget after a stroke; and most like David Cameron after an over-eating disorder and a motor-bike accident.

Aryan Family Guy

The BNP attracted a lot of media interest last year when it took over production of the American animated series ‘Family Guy’, and substituted Nick Griffin for Peter Griffin.

‘This is how we’ll reach the kids with our message,’ said Griffin. ‘Speak to them through popular culture; let them see me as the Fuhrer…em, the father. Like the time Hitler put himself into Mickey Mouse cartoons.’ {roll sketch}

A memo Nick Griffin sent to the production team, intercepted by news teams, spelled out the new direction he felt the show should take:

‘I’m not having a Jewish wife. Get rid of her. The baby, too. Nick Griffin doesn’t father fags. And I’m not happy about the daughter, Meg. She’s obviously a lesbian communist. Have my character send them off to camp, if you know what I mean. On the plus side, my son is a big, dumb blonde and the dog is white. I’m digging that. A final word on the neighbourhood. That neighbour of mine, the one in the wheelchair? Make it clear he was wounded in combat, or in the line of duty. If he was born that way it wouldn’t be realistic to have him survive to adulthood. As for my black neighbour and supposed best friend, Cleveland? Either kill the family off, or give them their own spin-off show to get rid of them.’

Controversy

‘Das balustrades are a fucking disgrace.’

The future of the BNP now looks uncertain. A German historian, Herr Grosse Busen, has discovered that Hitler, the party’s hero, wasn’t a racist, genocidal maniac after all.

‘The Fuhrer was actually a decorator hired by the Reichstag to brighten the place up,’ explains Busen. ‘and he was a lovely wee bloke. We know what caused the confusion. Hitler was in the main chambers, surrounded by politicians, and shouted out: “I’m going to fill all the interior spaces with colour, and widen out the mews.” But everyone thought he said: “I’m going to kill all the inferior races and coloureds, and wipe out the Jews,” and they were well up for it. Hitler only started WWII because he was too embarrassed to point out their mistake.’

Breakdown

Floella Benjamin

Nick Griffin’s nervous breakdown may serve as the final nail in the party’s coffin. He appeared on ITV’s Loose Women, and sobbed into the breasts of Floella Benjamin. As Floella stroked Griffin’s head, gently rocking him back and forth and saying, ‘Shhhhh, baby, it’s okay, it’s okay’, Griffin apologised for being a meanie and admitted that ‘he actually quite liked black people and muslims.’

Griffin is set to relaunch the BNP as the ‘Be Nice to Pakistanis’ party.

Do it the George Gallo-Way

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What’s the difference between Tony Soprano and George Galloway?

One’s a tough-talking, narcissistic, sociopathic, cigar-smoking adulterer, and the other one’s from New Jersey.

There’s a scene in ‘The Weight’, a season 4 episode of HBO’s The Sopranos, in which mob boss Tony Soprano covertly directs one half of a telephone conversation between Ralph Ciffaretto, one of his underlings, and Johnny Sack, a New York mob family underboss. Tony wants to make sure Ralph says the right things – and avoids saying the wrong things – to prevent further escalation of hostilities. Tensions are high between Ralph and Johnny: Ralph made a crack about the size of Johnny’s wife’s ass; somebody told Johnny; and now Johnny’s looking for blood.

Ralph: sorry seems to be the easiest word

Tony counsels Ralph to deny the allegations vehemently, and warns him that under no circumstances should he apologise. Ralph ignores Tony’s advice and, while still protesting his innocence, decides to apologise to Johnny in the interests of harmony and goodwill. That decision sets Ralph and Johnny on a course that puts both of them in mortal danger, and risks losing Tony a lot of money.

The moral is clear: never apologise. It’s weak, and makes you look guilty: especially if you are. This simple strategy worked for Tony Soprano, and it’s certainly doing the trick for ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway. One stray ‘I’m sorry’ from the lips of the Teflon Don-donian at any point throughout the last few decades could have sunk his entire career.

'SPUNK LOVING SLUTS!'

Galloway knows that the world loves a larger-than-life character; a fighter; a righteous rebel. Where Winston Churchill – another famous cigar smoker with attitude – held two palm-facing fingers aloft to symbolise peace, Galloway prefers them flipped around to spell out ‘Fuck you’ with his fingernails. A large part of his appeal – and strength – is in his utter refusal to back down from any opponent, to answer for his actions or to show any contrition whatsoever for his apparent misdeeds.

And, let’s not forget, Galloway is the only politician ever to have uttered the words ‘spunk-loving sluts’ in parliament, and for that alone I will love him forever. Go on, Google it. Youtube it.

They say that great men become great by standing on the shoulders of giants. Galloway’s managed to keep himself astride the world of politics by standing on the shoulders of the underdogs. First, he spoke for the working class masses of Glasgow, then he gave a voice to those affected, both ethically and actually, by the occupation of Iraq, and now he’s championing the UK’s arab and muslim minorities. Galloway denies that he’s a demagogue, but it’s hard not to view him as Dundee’s answer to Gaius Baltar, a man ready to shed or cultivate any allegiance that will secure him power and a public platform with which to showcase his tub-thumping.

That being said, I’ve got something of a soft-spot for the little firebrand, and I even find myself agreeing with him from time to time…

And I’m not going to apologise for that. But, then, neither am I going to apologise for this:

GALLOWAY FUN FACTS

1) Galloway smokes a cigar. This makes him cool by default, because Winston Churchill, Tony Soprano and Che Guevara all smoked cigars, too, right? Wrong. Jimmy Saville also smoked cigars.

 

 

2) Galloway’s support for the Palestinian cause was lent extra credibility through his ability to look the arab world in the face and proclaim: ‘Of course I’m pro-Palestinian. I’m fucking one, aren’t I?’

 

 

3) Eric Joyce looks at George Galloway with envy. ‘Galloway’s shagged his way through just about every nationality on earth, cheated on his pregnant wife and enjoyed cavorting with younger women. If only I hadn’t apologised for MY behaviour I could have bounced back like him.’ When Eric Joyce thinks this way about Galloway, he gets much the same feeling as Gary Glitter gets when he thinks about Michael Jackson. In a nutshell, Glitter thinks he’d be on T4 if he’d fucked boys and danced better.

 

4) Born in Dundee, George Galloway is a big fan of The Broons.

 

 

 

5) George Galloway went on Celebrity Big Brother to teach Britain’s youth about politics, which he successfully achieved by pretending to be a robot and licking invisible cream from Rula Lenska’s fist.

 

 

6) On the same programme, George Galloway championed the great British underdog Michael Barrymore by harnessing all his powers of rhetoric and being right mean an’ that about the entertainer’s alcoholism and mental illness. Barrymore’s not bitter, though. He’s still invited Galloway to his ‘CBB 2012 Reunion Pool Party’.

 

7) Galloway’s represented the Hillhead constituency in Glasgow, campaigned and conquered in Bradford, and toured the war-torn, bomb-savaged Middle East, and he still hasn’t found anywhere as shit as Dundee.

 

 

8 ) Galloway has his own show on TalkSport, where he can reach that all-important demographic of medicated housewives, racist taxi-drivers and truck-driving serial killers.

 

 

9) Galloway said the address he made saluting Saddam Hussein’s ‘indefatigability’ was taken out of context. ‘It’s like when two lorry drivers from the same haulage firm pass each other and toot on the motorway. It’s respect. I wasn’t saluting HIS indefatigability, but the indefatigability of his smashing moustache.’ Galloway claims that only one other moustache on earth has moved him in this way: that belonging to Denny-born comedian Bob Graham.

 

10) George Galloway has eleven testicles.

 

 

 

 

11) Galloway vowed he would ‘never become a Conservative’ because ‘their birds are well ugly.’

 

 

 

12) The only nationality of woman that Galloway has never slept with is an Eskimo. And he’s working on that.

 

 

 

13) Galloway was born and raised a Roman Catholic, but his last few wives – and weddings – have been Muslim. So which is he? On the one hand, he’s a sex-obsessed hyopcrite. On the other hand, he’s a complete bastard to women. I guess he’s both. 

 

 

14) George Galloway thinks the relationship between Tony Soprano and this article was incredibly tenuous. I’m sorry about that.

 

 

 

Vote for the Dinner Party

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'More jelly and ice-cream, Sir Rich Cunt?'

So, a rich, elitist politician in a corrupt capitalist society offers rich CEOs and horrid right-wing sister-fuckers the chance to influence governmental policy for money? The only thing surprising about the recent Cam-for-Cash revelations is our surprise.

Here we have David Cameron, a man whose face tells the story of a weird genetic experiment to meld Buzz Lightyear with a posh monkey-nut, preaching about the Big Society at the same time as he does his utmost to dismantle it. Well, the peasant part of it, anyway.

Goodbye, NHS. It’s OK. Poor people don’t need hearts or kidneys, anyway. That’s a scientific fact. Cheerio, provisions for the old and skint. Want to keep warm, working-class OAPs? Why not make a fire and burn all of your old copies of ‘The Socialist Worker’? You’ll be feeling your fingers and toes again in no time. Auf weidersehen, rights of disabled people on benefits. I know one thing that will help your broken back and crippling depression: a little stint stocking shelves for free down at Tesco, your local, friendly greengrocer.

'Gonnae nonny nonny no dae that?'

Cameron’s been robbing from the poor to give to the rich (and extorting the rich to make the rich richer) from the start. This Cash-for-Goujons debacle is the least of the coalition’s misdeeds. You know a regime’s got a problem with image when its antics begin to make Tory-punching, problem-drinking, schoolgirl-shagging, nutcase’s-nutcase Eric Joyce look like a folk hero by comparison. And, worst of all, I’ve just imagined Eric Joyce decked out in green tights prancing around a forest.

What will we, the people, do? I know what they’d do in France: start burning sheep until Cameron stepped down. But not here. We are the sheep, and we’ve not the wit to realise that the whiff of lamby barbecue in the air drifts from our own scorched backs. We’ll forget this story, and the next one, and the one after that. That’s if we’re watching at all. Isn’t Eastenders on?

That's the smell of you being fucked.

We live in a country where vile politicians who trade in misery are re-elected time and again, while the people who play baddies in soaps get soup cans hurled at them in the street by angry old women years after their career has ended. ‘How could you cheat on oor wee Deirdre, ya animal!’

Politicians have the power to decide how we live and die, but we all find it… well, pretty bloody boring. Certainly not as exciting as the prospect of a nutty slut getting her jubblies out on the next series of Big Brother. But keep an eye on live updates from the Big Brother house in Westminster. Once those old men and women in suits are certain that the TV viewers have fallen into a tedium-sponsored coma, they’ll stop talking about agricultural quotas and caps on this, that and the other, and they’ll turn their attentions to the REAL order of business: building a Death Star.