Every now and again we get a day when we are treated to a suspicious plethora of news stories, all coming out at once, that seem to owe their coincidence more to design than to accident.
This kind of news management normally takes place on Thursdays. Not being in the news trade myself, I’m not 100% sure why but I suspect it is something to do with the following day being Poets Day when everyone is thinking about the weekend and that by the time the heavyweight Sunday newspapers are printed Thursday's stories seem a little old.
What intrigues me about last Thursday is which of the many stories on offer was the one being ‘managed’? Or were they all? - Tony Blair being interviewed by police as part of their cash for peerages investigation
- The announcement that the Serious Fraud Office has been instructed to drop its investigation into the multi-zillion pound Al Yamamah arms deals because, to quote the Attorney General "the wider public interest" … " had to be balanced against the rule of law"
- News that PFI liabilities have risen from £142bn to £156bn since March. Ouch
- Lord Stevens report into the death of Princess Diana concluding that no foul play was involved
- George Clooney and Don Cheadle negotiating a relief package for Darfur with the Egyptian government
OK, the George and Don thing arguably lies outside of the scope of the UK news cycle but it was pretty surreal and it made my laugh. And not in a nice way. The BBC covered the story in the Entertainment section of its news site because, as I'm sure everyone can all agree, the situation in Darfur is very entertaining...
Channel 4’s More4 news programme neatly dealt with the challenges presented by so many competing and significant news stories by the novel expedient of rattling through them very quickly, without favouring any single one over the others, then treating viewers to a nice long special feature on deer poaching in Cumbria instead.
That’s not exactly 100% fair. More4 News did bring on a psychology expert, the amusingly named Cary Cooper, for a couple of minutes to answer the question…
What is it about conspiracy theories that we all love so much? Many people will not be convinced that Diana's death was an accident. I've been talking to a psychologist about why many people would rather believe the conspiracy to the evidence.
Famous Psychologist
This is the same tired old, and heavily loaded question that is always trotted out at the end of any news item or documentary that claims to have put X, Y or Z ‘conspiracy theory’ to rest once and for all.
It’s all very Pavlovian
You like Pavlova You like Pavlova You like Pavlova...
And Mr Cooper didn’t disappoint ... ‘ya di ya di ya ya People cannot accept that some things happen by accident They need to believe that someone is controlling things ya di ya di ya ya’
There you go. Yet, again for the upteenth time, someone stuck a pseudo-scientist (so it must be true) on television to explain that anybody who suspects that politicians and the corporate media may be telling lies is mentally unwell.
And the difference between that and what they used to do in Soviet Russia is?
How about sticking someone on tele to explain the psychology of people who credulously accept everything they are told by proven liars because they can’t deal with even the slightest possibility that their lives are not their own and that they are actually controlled by a bunch of cunts?
Now that would be genuinely interesting and ground-breaking stuff.
Unsurprisingly, I’m one of those people who believes that the Stevens investigation into Diana’s death isn’t the end of the story; not because I’m mentally unwell but because the investigation was bollocks. And at £3.6m quite expensive bollocks at that.
Unlike the popular portrayal of ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the media there are a lot of people who have questions about events such a Diana’s death without having formulated fully-fleshed alternative accounts of what happened and why. They simply have questions about inconsistencies and irregularities in the mainstream account.
And, simply doing a hatchet job on a couple of selected alternative theories about what happened and why is not the same thing as answering inconsistencies and irregularities in the mainstream account.
Consequently, taking the Diana investigation as an example, whether she was pregnant or engaged is totally irrelevant. Even if she were that wouldn’t prove that there was foul play and certainly has no impact on the narrative of what was supposed to have happened on the night that she died. So why bother investigating it?
I haven’t read Lord Stevens' report yet but, based on the press coverage, I suspect that it has done relatively little to answer key questions about that night…
- Why is there no CCTV footage? (and I’m mindful of the absence of footage from 9/11, 7/7 and the Stockwell Shooting)
- Why was the tunnel cleaned straight after the crash?
- Why did Diana’s bodyguard let a supposedly pissed man drive? And incidentally what’s all that crap about him losing the ability to communicate in the short term after the crash and his memory in the long term?
- Why did it take over an hour for the ambulance to take Diana four miles to the hospital?
Plus special bonus questions that seem kind of relevant but outside the scope of any forensic examination of the night of the accident...- Who was leaking all the unattributed disinfo bullshit in the days after the crash and why – stuff about car speedos being frozen at high speed, horse shit like that?
- Why has it taken ten years for an inquest to be held?
- Why did the official coroner step down from the inquest?
- What was the important announcement Diana told friends she was going to make the next day?
- The aborted Burrell trial?!!
As it happens, I’m personally not too bothered if members of our ruling elite really are butchering each other. That’s one less Inbred, born to a life of undeserved, unearned privilege, as far as I’m concerned. What does concern me is that people cannot ask reasonable questions about what they are told without having corporate whores label them as being mentally defective.
There is also a lesson in all of this for people pressing for an inquiry into 7/7 and one that I think, in fairness, has already been learned by some. If something untoward really did take place on 7/7 the easiest way to piss in the pool would be to surreptitiously promote a whole mass of confusing and contradictory alternative accounts of what happened that day. And then a couple of years down the line it would be easy enough for a supposed independent inquiry into 7/7 to focus on a few of those bullshit theories rather than address the actual weakness (e.g. this little snippet) in the ‘Official Narrative’.
This is what happened with 9/11 and as US public scepticism of the official account of 9/11 has grown over the last five years, more and more bullshit has been fed into the mix.
And now that Lord Stevens has finally put all those conspiracy theories about Princess Diana to rest I presume he's available to head up the next fully independent inquiry that needs doing. Or maybe they'd get Lord Butler in. Or Lord Hutton..
The Hutton report.
I was walking in East London with a friend the other day when I spotted what appeared to be a couple of bouncers standing outside the disused public toilets in front of Christchurch on Commercial Street.
Only the toilets weren’t disused any more
And they really were bouncers
Yup, retail property prices have got so bad in London that people are opening pubs in derelict underground lavatories…
Avoid hefty West End prices - spend your Saturday nights out in a toilet!
Welcome to ‘Public Life’, a new concept in socialising
As one review puts it...
Hidden away beneath the streets of Shoreditch with only a tiny glass awning and steep flight of stairs alerting passers-by to its presence, the bar’s well-disguised location means you avoid the hefty queues and hefty prices of most West End venues. It is small inside and fairly basic in terms of decor but a varied music policy (there’s usually something to suit every taste) and friendly, intimate vibe make it a popular choice for laid back lovers of drinking, dancing and... toilets!
And as further evidence that London has become Bizarro World, where money is more common than sense and the beautiful people dance in khazis, on the other side of town somebody else has just spent several hundred thousand pounds building a luxury public convenience that costs punters £5 a dump. The cleverly named WC1 has just opened to paying guests -
"Whether shopping, polishing up after work or simply taking five minutes to relax between meetings, WC1 provides all that a woman needs to transform herself from the inside out at any time of day.”
Thinking back to some of the lunatic business ideas idiots were putting money into in the late 1980s, people drinking and dancing in toilets and spanking a fiver to take a crap in something that looks like a bright pink nuclear bunker are just the sort of things that happen when you don't have enough economic recessions. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried... and would you want to?
About seven or eight years ago we were driving around Cyprus and we bumped into, or rather came close to bumping into, a friendly old character called Joe. Like most of the Cypriots we met, Joe was an extremely hospitable guy and he spent a couple of hours showing us around his land and plying us with fresh fruit and the foulest tasting coffee I have ever drunk in my life.
It turned out that, even though he looked like someone who had spent his entire life in the fields, Joe had run a kebab house on the Hagley Road in Birmingham for donkeys’ years before retiring back home in Cyprus. He was a genuine, nice guy and a big fan of Britain.
Towards the end of the afternoon Joe motioned us into a tired little shed in a corner of his property, saying…
'Come in here I have something important to show you'
He followed us inside, closed the door behind him and turned on the light - a single bare bulb.
Every square inch of the interior was covered with pictures of Princess Diana – postcards, newspaper clippings, anything and everything Diana that he could get his hands on or that his friends and family had sent him.
It looked like something from Silence of the Lambs.
He turned to look at a wall of pictures. Then he turned back to look at us with a scowl on his face and whispered, or at least he started with a whisper...
'She was such a beautiful person and they killed her. THEY KILLED HER!!!'
Then he led us back outside and we had some more of his fucking awful Cypriot coffee.
Looking on the bright side of things for moment, there are some people willing to actively do their part to make our society just that little bit less fractured, just that little bit friendlier.
I am thinking specifically about Team Nice, the people handing out “Niceties Tokens" to London commuters they spot being polite to other people on public transport.
I am also thinking about the folks behind the “I’m up for a chat on the tube” campaign which involves wearing a “I’m up for a chat on the tube” badge and presumably engaging in cheerfully pointless dialogue with any stranger who consequently talks to you.
However tempting it might be to sport a “I’m up for a chat on the tube” badge then telling anyone who tries to strike up a conversation with you to fuck off, it would be churlish and small-minded to be overly cynical about these campaigns. The people behind them mean well, even if their efforts are supremely lame and destined to fizzle out and die a slow, quiet death.
Of course, I could be wrong and these ‘be nice to people’ badges and tokens could take off in a big way.
At which point everyone will want a badge and people will be throttling each other to grab hold of one to sell on ebay, as per the anti-bullying wristband fiasco a couple of years back.
Ah well, so much for my attempt at looking at the bright side of things.
I tried
Maybe it’s something to do with the weather…
More divisity?
The goings on at Gate Gourmet last year were a cracking, if barely discussed or explored, example of why corporate Britain loves mass migration so much. Gate Gourmet management’s action plan for improving company profitability basically boiled down to…
- Take one group of employees largely composed of people from established Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities working for shit money
- Provoke a bullshit industrial dispute
- Use the dispute as an excuse to sack the existing workforce and replace them with a bunch of fresh Eastern European immigrants on even shittier money and conditions.
Smooth.
And it worked too.
I witnessed another choice example of corporate attitudes towards migrants a few weeks ago. A spokesman for a business lobby group was on Newsnight extolling the virtues of unrestricted immigration and how great its effects were on suppressing salary inflation (presumably not his own). The presenter interrupted him and asked about the negative impact large numbers of migrants were having on the availability of affordable housing. His answer will stick with me for a long time…
‘Ah, but most of the recent migrants live five or six to a room so their impact on housing demand is minimal’
Cross my heart, that’s what he said. In 2006, after ten years of Labour Party rule, we’ve come to a state of affairs where someone feels comfortable saying something like that on national television.
'Habitable rooms' - no need to guess what kind of people are going to be packed into them...
Fuck it, why don’t we go the whole hog and reintroduce slavery? Wage inflation would be a thing of the past and you could pack the fuckers in twenty or thirty to a room.
Large-scale migration throws up a whole raft of issues. And it would be a capital idea if we all started dealing with them without succumbing to those trusty allies of politicians and the corporate media - Hate and Fear. The plain truth is that many of our new arrivals are here to stay and we have to face up to the associated problems as well as sharing in the benefits.
Alternatively, a growing number of people are just saying bollocks to it and voting with their feet. Britain, particularly the South East of Britain is haemorrhaging native-born people. The kind of people who cannot afford an insulated existence; living in twee neighbourhoods, paying for private healthcare and education for their kids, but who can afford to move somewhere where they don’t feel that they have to.
Like the migrants who are replacing them, they’re leaving home to look for a better life.
Which basically suggests that on some level London can be described as being a less desirable place to live in than Auckland, Sydney or Madrid but not as shit as Mogadishu or Bucharest.
Well, that's something to be proud of.
Having said all that, there’s one issue that I wouldn’t even think about putting on the list of stuff we have to face up to…
It’s the issue that Tony Blair came out with last week
As in…
You must conform to our tolerant society or leave…
"The reason we are having this debate is not generalised extremism. It is a new and virulent form of ideology associated with a minority of our Muslim community.”
Yes Tony, it’s getting to the point where you can’t even open your front door without half a dozen Muslim fanatics falling into your hallway trying to impose Sharia law at gun point. And what about all those hordes of Muslims roaming our streets, kicking down Christmas trees and ripping crucifixes from little old lady’s throats.
Definitely an issue to stick at the top of our list of national priorities.
Of all the challenges facing this country, of all the shit that’s going down, of all the issues that we need to address with as much honesty and decency as we can muster, those fuckers in the government and the press just keeping banging the same old hateful, divisive drum.
If this supposed problem is so pernicious and so widespread why do I only ever see the same handful of nutcases from al-Muhajiroun and old clips of Abu-Hamza on the TV, time and time again? In all my forty one years of living in this city for the life of me I cannot think of one single occasion where a Muslim has hassled me or anyone I know for not sharing an extreme version of his faith. I have seen an awful lot of all sorts of shit but never that.
And if anyone is dumb enough to fall for the ‘It’s only a minority of the Muslim community’ bullshit don’t forget that Blair and his buddies regularly trot out the ‘moderate British Muslims are not doing enough to tackle the problem of extremism in their communities’ line.
So, basically, they’re all to blame.
Expect lots more of the same divisive crap in the months and years to come, and not just targeted at Muslims
… lots more
I mentioned a couple of posts back that I come from an immigrant background. Admittedly a White European immigrant background, but immigrant nevertheless.
A few days ago I was chatting with a friend who came over as part of the exodus of Ugandan Asians back in the early 70s. Unlike me he wasn’t born here and his skin colour was a bit of a give-away. I was curious to know if he shared any of my concerns about the current level of migration into the UK and they way it is being handled.
To cut a long story short, we both agreed that we weren’t particularly comfortable about expressing concerns that might be misunderstood but that, yes, something is going wrong.
And it’s not that immigrants are coming to exploit 'Our' benefits system or to steal ‘Our’ jobs – a nice example of doublethink if ever there was one.
No, it’s something woollier, more difficult to define than that.
We both share a sense that somehow Britain, well our part of Britain at least, isn’t Britain any more. That somehow the framework of shared experience, shared culture, a sense of commonality with those around us is being eroded.
I think it used to be called ‘Society’.
You could rattle off a virtually endless list of reasons why that framework has been eroded, including…
- The fact that lots of things were wrong and needed fixing
- A government that really seems to get off on change for change’s sake
- A good dollop of white middle class cultural guilt that led to throwing out the baby with the bath water
- The impact of globalisation and corporatisation – a curious combination of too much choice in some areas and too little in others that has left a lot of people dazed, confused and, often, nihilistic
And many, many more
With all that already on our plate adding a few million immigrants into the mix, and we are talking millions, in a half-arsed way, in circumstances that virtually guarantee a significant level of associated criminality is begging for discord at some point down the line.
The issue boils down to simple numbers. How many people can we take on board at any one time without imploding the host society. Presumably there must be an upper limit. What is it? How near are we to reaching it?
And I am painfully aware that the Conservative Party fought and lost the last general election using very similar language.
I can only speak for my home city but…
- If London were a country compared to other European countries its levels of child poverty would be second only to Slovakia
- Something like half the kids in London primary schools and 40% of the kids in secondary schools don’t speak English as a first language
- Because so many of the migrants have had to come in illegally we have seen a boom in human trafficking, sex slavery and other forms of exploitation on a scale unseen here since Victorian times – Victorian? It’s fucking medieval.
- And let’s not forget the explosion in the drugs business - 300,000 people addict nationally to heroin alone and rising…
And, incidentally, a fair few of our new arrivals come from cultures that have absolutely fuck all experience of racial tolerance and diversity. The kind of countries where they slap pictures of severed Turks’ heads on beer bottles and think making monkey noises and gestures whenever they see Black people is really, really funny.
The migration issue isn’t about Left versus Right politics though a lot of people have been suckered into thinking it is. Which is how you can have knobs like this bloke and well-intentioned people on the Left both agreeing that everything is more or less peachy in London. The first because he’s a knob who measures the health of a society by the number of expensive restaurants he can eat in and the second because they believe that if they admit to a problem it would open the gates of racism.
The sad truth is that we’ve found it much easier to import poverty than to export wealth.
And contribute to the erosion of social cohesion in the process.
Social cohesion is important because successful welfare systems work because people believe that they are contributing to a system that will safeguard the welfare of people just like them. Not necessarily exactly the same colour or religion but people who share at least some basic, often intangible, things in common.
Social cohesion, at the risk of sounding a tad Marxist, also acts as a counterweight to the power of naked monopolistic capitalism - whilst companies are getting bigger and their power more concentrated our social groupings are doing the exact opposite
We're being chopped into little pieces and there are few good reasons to believe that it's not intentional.
Famous Psychologist
You like Pavlova You like Pavlova You like Pavlova...
The Hutton report.
