A cracking week for conspiracy theorists

Some of my favourite ‘conspiracy theories’ have received a much-needed breath of life over the last few days. They include:

The Princess Diana autocide

I’m one of those people who find it quite difficult to mourn the passing of someone whose annual frock bill would have kept the population of a small developing country in millet. However, I am interested in what it was she was about to announce before her unfortunate, erm, accident. Many people have been distracted with rumours of pregnancies and Muslim marriages. Personally, and if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on her planning to reveal an insight into what her ex husband does for fun and who he does it with, whether they are up for it or not. But I digress slightly.

Apparently, the much delayed investigation into the death of Princess Diana is proving to be ‘far more complex than any of us thought’ according to Lord Stevens, the former head of London’s Metropolitan Police, who acknowledged that some of the issues raised by Mohammed al Fayed were ‘right to be raised.’ He did not elaborate.

My personal favourite ‘complexities’ include

• The CCTV camera in the tunnel not working (presumably supplied by the same firm that equips London buses and tube trains)
• The tunnel being thoroughly cleaned before the blood had even dried
• The security guard in the car selectively losing all memory of what happened that night (my most favourite)
• The ambulance taking an hour to cover the 6km distance to the hospital
• The driver of the Mercedes apparently having enough carbon monoxide in his system to kill him

What I am not interested in is all those stories about enormous flashguns being used to incapacitate the driver, speculations about pregnancies and all that other cack that has been slung onto the Net to make anyone with questions about the death look like a nutcase.

I can’t wait for Lord Stevens report. I’m sure it will be very, very funny.

Hmmm

The Stockwell Shooting

Yet another unattributed leak about the Stockwell Shooting hit the newspapers last weekend. According to the News of the World

UNDERCOVER police forged vital surveillance evidence to cover up a crucial blunder that led to innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes being gunned down as a suspected Tube suicide bomber.

Given that

• the News of the World this is part of the kiss arse Murdoch-owned media group that looks after the interests of our current government
• the source is anonymous
• the story doesn’t even begin to offer an explanation for all the shenanigans that went on that day

you’ve just got to be suspicious. Unfortunately, the de Menezes family appears to have swallowed the bait and is running with this chunk of disinformation.

I suppose you could choose to believe that this revelation offers a complete explanation for what went wrong that day but then you’ve got to believe that…

The police only lied once and the investigation just happened to identify that solitary lie

Hmmm

The Iranian Nuclear Laptop story

The International Atomic Energy Agency has just been given some of the documents found on a laptop computer supposedly stolen from Iran by American intelligence last year. We are told that the data on the laptop is ‘strongly suggestive’ of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Sadly, we have been provided with no means of knowing whether this magic laptop is genuine or a fake, and given the recent truth track record of the US and UK governments you’ve just got to be just a teensy weensy bit suspicious.

And, as with the ‘Iraq is buying uranium from Niger story’ which is now proven to be fake, you’ve got to ask yourself who would be making up stuff like this and why. You have to ask for yourself because our media and governments aren’t

Hmmm

What else? Oh yes

The 7/7 Bombing enquiry

Yet another unattributed leak this weekend revealed that MI5 is at a complete dead end in its investigation of the 7/7 bombings

‘We know little about what three of the bombers did in Pakistan, when attack planning began, how and when the attackers were recruited, the extent of any external direction or assistance and the extent and role of any wider network.’

So, that extra 125m quid a year and those new MI5 offices in eight British cities is money well spent then.

Someone might want to give one of those new offices a call and suggest that they can’t find anything because they’re looking in the wrong place. Scratch that, they probably know that already.

One of the stronger ‘conspiracy theories’ that emerged after 7/7 was the suggestion that the four bombers were duped into thinking they were delivering drugs to London. I am always a little wary about thinking about alternate scenarios for these kind of events and find myself dwelling on the unanswered questions instead. That way you avoid flights of fancy and keep the focus on what’s not right about a story.

Having said that, my feeling has always been that these guys were duped in some way. All of the raw material in the media just pointed in that direction. The drugs mule scenario has been strengthened by the news that one of the bombers had a net estate worth £121,000. That’s some going for a 22-year-old bloke from Yorkshire. Of course, if these guys were duped that opens all sorts of potential suspects as being behind the attack. And if drugs were involved Islamic fundamentalists aren’t likely to be top of the list.

Hmmm

One throwaway observation is the peculiar nature of the codenames used by MI5 for the London Bombing investigations

The Investigation into 7/7 is called ‘Stepford’

The Investigation into 21/7 is called ‘Hat’

Type Stepford into the Google and it is pretty clear that the only conceivable significance of the word is a reference to the movie The Stepford Wives. You know, the robotically programmed ones. I suppose Operation Muppet Patsy would have been too much of give-away. The significance of ‘Hat’ is more subtle and not so easy to fathom. It is clear however that someone in MI5 has quite a dry sense of humour.

Murder pt2

A couple of people commented (thanks for that) on my last post about coverage of murders in London and the UK.

The gist of the comments was that all sorts of factors, not just race, decide whether a story is covered or not. ‘Routine’ murders of people in low income groups, whatever their racial background, score a lot lower than the news of someone higher up the social pecking order being done in. Particularly if there are some nice salacious details that appeal to the kind of people who stare morbidly at the aftermath of motor accidents, hoping to see a little juice on the streets.

This is all true and explains the level of coverage given to the bloke who was kicked to death at South Bank last year. Personally, I took an interest because the four kids who did the kicking lived in an estate round the corner from where I live. Lots of other people took an interest because the murderers videoed themselves doing it and because the man they killed had survived the Admiral Duncan bomb attack a few years before.

The moral of the story being that newspapers are more about entertainment than news and if you want your murder to make the six o’clock news there has to be a little something extra involved.

Having said that, my original post wasn’t really about the newspapers. It was more about the head of London’s police force and his bizarre take on violent crime in London.

Ian Blair is in a bit of a hole. He has been caught out telling untruths about the Stockwell shooting and hampering the investigation into the execution. Clearly, he thought the time had come to re-establish his street cred by claiming that the newspapers don’t care about Black people. The precise quote was

That death of the young lawyer was terrible, but an Asian man was dragged to his death, a woman was chopped up in Lewisham, a chap shot in the head in a Trident murder…

Blair was being too modest. The week the lawyer was killed, nine other people were murdered in London. And, pardon me for thinking this, having the chief of your police force complaining that the media spent far too much time covering one particular murder when there were so many others to choose from is pretty fucking outrageous.

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One of my favourite little sites, Anxiety Culture, makes the fair point that governments seek to enhance their power by encouraging people to be afraid of crime. The Problem-Reaction-Solution technique is a tried and tested one and the parallels with the War on Terror are there.

But…

There’s a fine balance that has to be achieved. If the Problem appears too great the public’s Reaction and Solution will not be to hand over more power to its existing leaders. The public will instead start thinking about finding some new leaders. That’s one of the reasons, just one, why we keep hearing so many fake terror alerts. That way, if and when something finally happens, the jerk-offs in charge can claim that they warned us all along and that they have managed to stop the majority of attacks and would be able to stop even more if only we just hand over more money and power.

A similar situation applies to crime. We have to be scared but not so scared that we realise the people in charge are rubbish at their jobs and going about them the wrong way.

I have no problem with believing that crime rates in quieter parts of the UK are falling but I have absolutely no doubt that violent and nasty crimes, the crimes that really matter, are on in the rise in our cities.

I’d be the first to admit that my view of things is skewed by the fact that I live in South London. No one is going to make a light romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant set on my side of the river. One of the key reasons why I was suspicious about the bombings and attempted bombings last July was that the bombers were supposedly planning to bomb Stockwell and The Oval. Not even the most retarded jihadist would contemplate that.

No one would notice.

I’ve lived in South London on and off for forty years and it’s always been pretty rough but my problem is that it is getting rougher, much rougher. I started a folder on Flickr last year for my growing collection of crime scene photographs but don’t contribute to it much these days. Not because of any lack of material but because it was getting just too bloody depressing.

Ditto for reading local newspapers. The newsfeeds from the South London Press are a tickertape of horror. Some weeks the unrelenting tide of misery is so full-on it’s funny.

Even Wikipedia gets in on the act. Type in ‘Peckham’, home of the cheeky loveable characters from Only Fools and Horses, and you’re treated to this priceless quote

Peckham is an area of great diversity: gang-related shootings, muggings and burglary characterise one picture whilst another emphasises the high population of artists and professionals.

Indeed. The high population of artists and professionals are amongst the people being mugged and burgled.

Murder pt1

Late one night a few days I caught a movie called Londinium on the tele. It has the smell of one the many films made four or five years ago when a generous government tax break meant that wealthy private investors could make a tidy return on putting money into films even if they weren’t very good, or even released. The films just had to be completed. A mini bonanza took place. Dozens and dozens of really awful movies were made with all the craftsmanship and care of a hastily prepared ham sandwich.

Many of them copied the successful Richard Curtis Four Weddings and a Notting Hill format. Take one foppish upper middle class leading man, add one American actress, leave to bake in a fantasy London where struggling young cellists with no visible means of financial support, live in a huge flats in Notting Hill or Highgate and are searching for bittersweet love with the support of various quirky posh friends who work in media and the arts.

All of these films are shit.

On every conceivable level

Londinium was no exception. At one point, the foppish, Hampshire born, leading man Colin Firth says something like

People never see the ugly side of London. I was born here and have spent my entire life here and I cannot understand why people who come to this city only see a romanticised view of the place

Whilst delivering this heartfelt dialogue Firth was sitting on a blanket, having a picnic in Hampstead Heath on a sunny day with a glass of wine in his hands. Hampstead Heath was probably the most gritty location used in the entire film.

I mention this because whilst I was watching this old toss I couldn’t help thinking about the murder of city lawyer Tom ap Rhys Price a couple of weeks ago. The papers were full of it. My girlfriend works in the same firm as he did and they held a minute’s silence for him. He was, by all accounts, a decent guy. But I confess to having been baffled at the time at the amount of coverage the murder was given. It wasn’t particularly different to dozens of other recent London murders I could name.

And, at the back of my head, the cynic in me was thinking ‘there’s a guy who probably watched Notting Hill once too often’. Much of London, including Kensal Green / Willesden where he lived, is nasty, and shit happens. Quite a lot of shit actually.

London can be a wonderful city particularly if, maybe only if, you are loaded or willing to spend money you don't have. London also eats people. As it has done for centuries.

And some of its residents take a fairly scornful approach to wide-eyed innocents new in town who labour under the bizarre misapprehension that everything is just peachy.

I remember a couple of years ago listening to a talk radio programme and an American student called in. She was very excited about moving into East London and was asking for an ‘insider’ tips on getting the most out of such a fabulous city. The first person to respond and call in suggested ‘Don’t go jogging in Victoria Park’.

——-

It seems that I wasn’t the only person surprised by the amount of coverage given to the Kensal Green stabbing. The Head of the Met, Ian Blair hit the papers yesterday, again, after commenting that

I believe that the media are guilty of institutional racism in the way they report deaths

This was in the context of making a serious point that the police do not concentrate resources on a case just because the newspapers elevate it above equally deserving cases but, come again? institutional racism?

I have no love for the news media but they are between a rock and a hard place on this one and the problem boils down to the treatment of race.

One of the golden rules of murder reporting in the UK is that, by implication, only White people are capable of race crimes. Which is itself a pretty racist suggestion

Accounts suggest that the guy killed in Kensal Green was stabbed to death after he had given his possessions up. So, what was that all about? Off the top of my head, and without having to resort to Google, I can think of many, very many, recent murders in London and the UK where White people were murdered by non Whites and where robbery was not the motive

• Richard Wheelan – stabbed on a bus in Holloway, August 2005
• Mark Briggs – killed with a machete in Peckham, August 2005
• Stuart Grant - chased and stabbed to death in Maida Vale, December 2005
• Chris Yates – kicked to death in Barking, November 2004
• Unnamed bloke – stabbed down the road from me last month and who didn’t even make the papers
• Nicholas Shepherd – stabbed in Toxteth, October 2005
• Gavin Hopley – kicked to death in Oldham, 2002
• Kriss Donald – burned to death in Glasgow, 2004

No doubt, other people could come up with a list of personal favourites

None of these cases have received anything like the coverage given to the racist murders of Stephen Lawrence and Anthony Walker, who both happened to be Black. Extremists like the British National Party are making much capital about the asymmetry of the coverage.

Even the never ending Damilola Taylor case may involve an element of racism. But, because it involved West Indian kids killing a Nigerian kid that element has been either played done or, fuck me, even excused …

But whoever murdered Damilola Taylor presumably did it by mistake - the murderers are probably horrified and terrified by what they have done. They slashed him and ran off, leaving him to hobble a few steps for help, in the sudden fountain of his own blood. If they hadn't happened to have hit a major artery, it might have been one brief paragraph in the local newspaper; or not even that.

I wonder if anyone would have had the cheek to write something like that about Stephen Lawrence’s murderers.

And no I’m not suggesting that there are hordes of non Whites marching around the place looking to commit racist murders, any more than I believe that there are hordes of Whites at it either. What I am suggesting is that the media is leery of stories that don’t correspond to a certain agenda. In that respect, ‘Institutional Racism’ can cut both ways.

So, does the national press and television over-represent Whites in their coverage of murders? Yes, sometimes. But does the media also take liberties at the expense of Whites in its coverage? That would be a yes, sometimes also

Peter Wingarde to stand against Ming Campbell

The profoundly groovy Peter Wyngarde

Further to my earlier post on the subject of the Liberal Democrat leadership election, it comes as shocking news that Simon Hughes, 54 year old bachelor Member of Parliament who comes across on television like a camp vicar, is gay.

Well, only a bit gay apparently.

Hughes has admitted to having had both hetero as well as homosexual relationships.

That’s a typical Liberal Democrat for you isn’t it.

Unlike his colleague Mark Oaten, at least unmarried Hughes cannot be accused of cheating on his wife. Though, apparently, he has "often" thought about getting married but had not been "as successful as I would have liked".

But then we’re told that Hughes didn’t come clean voluntarily but was outed by The Sun newspaper which had incontrovertible proof that Hughes had used a gay chatline called Man Talk

It’s just like a bloody nightmare isn’t it. It just gets worse and worse. Hughes is such a sad human being that no-one wants to go out him plus he sits at home whiling away the hours engaged in gay sex talk at a couple of quid a minute.

The technical term for Hughes current situation is, I believe, fucked.

The media is currently making great play of the bitter 1983 Bermondsey by-election when Hughes defeated Labour candidate Peter Tatchell. The campaign got quite nasty and Tatchell’s homosexuality was implicitly referred to in some of Hughes campaign literature. Without going over the history of that by-election is painful detail suffice to say I was around at the time and Tatchell lost because the majority of local people thought he was a tosser. The gay thing was incidental and was only played up then, and since, to mask some disgraceful behaviour on the part of the local Labour party. The fact that the leader of the national Labour Party, uber leftie Michael Foot, declared that he also thought that Tatchell was a tosser has been quietly forgotten. Tatchell’s subsequent career only confirms to the sound common sense of the South London electorate. Hughes has held onto what was historically a safe Labour seat for the last 23 years. He is seen as a good local MP. However, the charge of hypocrisy at the time of his first election does stick.

So, here we are with a Government busily assembling the framework of a police state and committing us to foreign wars that are patently against the interests of the majority of the British public. And what is happening to the only political party that has taken a stand against these issues?

Total implosion.

In the space of a couple of weeks the Liberal Democrats leadership has been exposed as a collection of sad alcoholics, so lacking in charisma that they have to pay for sex or masturbate whilst on the telephone. That kind of behaviour may be OK for the rest us but for the leadership of a political party?

*Bangs head against keyboard*

And it’s not just the Liberals is it? Labour MPs who have taken a stand against the War or erosion of civil liberties have the life expectancy of mayflies…

Mo Mowlem – dead

Robin Cook – dead

Tony Banks – dead

Claire Short – fucked

George Galloway – where, oh where, do you start?

Someone (The Sun newspaper) has dug out another embarrassing video clip of Galloway shaking hands with a mass murderer this week. Expect to see the footage repeated until the end of time and considerably more frequently than, oh I don’t know, Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand or Jack Straw cosying up to Robert Mugabe (‘it was dark’).

It comes as no surprise that today’s Simon Hughes story was printed by a Murdoch owned newspaper. A Murdoch owned newspaper whose editor is friends with the Blairs. That’s the British Press in 2006 for you. Totally crap at objective, critical comment on current events, rather good at taking public figures out of the picture, as and when the owners feel like it.

London Sushi fest - latest news

thanks for that Rahid

*sits back and waits for the BBC to get in touch*

Reasons to be cheerful pt3

I was chatting with a couple of customers in my brother’s cafe yesterday. The shutters were half down and my brother was winding up for the day. The radio was on and somebody on a news show was talking about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. I chipped in with something like ‘you know what this is all about don’t you?’

My brother replied with something along the lines of

‘It’s because the Iranians are starting to sell their oil in Euros instead of dollars’

I was pretty surprised. My brother works hard in a shop all day and certainly does not have time to browse through alternative new sources. I asked him…

‘Where did you get that from? Not from the newspapers surely?’

‘No, some old bloke phoned in and talked about it on a chat show on the radio a few days ago’

I laughed.

He had me going for a moment. For a second, I almost thought that the newspapers had been doing their job.

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Our media has been working hard on moulding public opinion on Iran for some time now. Last October we were being told about how those naughty Iranians had been supplying special bombs to Iraqi insurgents. Special bombs that were being used to kill and maim British troops in Basra.

Tony Blair and Jack straw made public speeches on the subject and explicitly accused elements of the Iranian government of being involved.

A few news sources even reported that British Intelligence was putting a dossier together. A dossier! Goody, we like those.

Per the Scotsman…

A TEAM of military specialists has been dispatched to Iraq to compile a comprehensive dossier of evidence that "Iranian elements" have been arming insurgents engaged in a brutal struggle with British forces around Basra.

The Foreign Office last night confirmed that experts were engaged in an intensive operation to back up growing concerns that Iran is "interfering" to deadly effect in efforts to pacify Iraq and restore democracy to the war-torn country.

The insistence that Britain is determined to prove Iran is providing sophisticated equipment to perpetrators of attacks that have claimed the lives of at least eight British soldiers in the past five months is a significant development in the escalating war of words between London and Tehran.

Now it turns out, per the Independent, that…

MPs and soldiers' families have demanded an explanation from the Government after a U-turn over claims that Iran was complicit in the killing of British soldiers in southern Iraq. Britain has dropped the charge of Iranian involvement after senior officials had repeatedly accused the Tehran regime of supplying sophisticated explosive devices to insurgents. Government officials now acknowledge that there is no evidence, or even reliable intelligence, connecting the Iranian government to the infra-red triggered bombs which have killed 10 British soldiers in the past eight months.

Naturally, the retraction of the accusation has been given a lot less coverage than the original accusation and there are countless saps out there still thinking that Iran was responsible for blowing up British squaddies.

The funniest part is that the special bombs in question were actually designed by the British security forces.

Hmmmm, intriguing

The special bomb story is just part of a wider pattern of misinformation and deceit. The public musings of the Iranian president have been given a tremendous amount of coverage and have been widely misreported. Every few days a story crops up somewhere that the Iranians are buying, building or fantasizing about nuclear missiles.

The sources are never clearly identified and no evidence presented.

And we are constantly being deceived about the motivations behind, significance of and progress of Iran’s civilian nuclear programme.

The papers keep printing this crap though.

And let’s not forget the recent upsurge in stories warning us that a new major terrorist attack is certain and possibly imminent. There has been a subtle but noticeable increase in output over the last few weeks. Fuck me, even Osama has come out of semi-retirement with a new webcast.

Well, we’re told it’s Osama, we’re told it’s new. The CIA says so and the CIA always tells the truth.

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The one hot Iranian story our media seems reluctant to talk about is that the Iranians are planning to sell their oil in Euros rather than dollars.

Given that the American government is eight trillion dollars in debt and printing money like there’s no tomorrow that could be a small problem for them.

Ensuring that people need to hold your currency to buy oil is a major prop to a currency and avoids actually having to produce anything yourself that people might want to buy.

The news that gold prices have hit a 25 year high as informed investors pile out of the dollar and dollar assets is, I’m sure, entirely coincidental

Of course, the last big oil exporter to switch oil trading from dollars to Euros was, erm, Iraq just before we blew the crap out of it.

There’s a subtle point here that has been deliberately withheld from most people. Oil itself is not necessarily the motivation for manufactured wars and foreign interventions. The currency used to buy that oil is arguably of much greater significance,

The Internet has been buzzing with the Iranian Oil Bourse story and the relevance it may or may not have to a potential attack on Iran. However, I’m mindful of the Iran-Contra affair when the Reagan administration was knowingly selling arms to Iran at a time when it was supposedly a mortal enemy. Who’s to say what is really going on right now?

But the point is our media is not even touching the bourse story and uncritically parroting any old crap our governments and unattributed sources feed them and right now everything is pointing towards an attack on Iran and possibly a justification for that attack in the form of a major terrorist incident.

So, what’s going on here? Are the people in charge and their mouthpieces stupid or wicked? Or maybe they’re wickedly stupid? As things stand we poor Muppets out there lose either way. Either we get involved in another war – and don’t forget the Russians and Chinese have interests in Iran, or we leave the Iranians alone, they fuck the dollar and our debt-ridden economies in the UK and US tip over like dominoes.

It’s looking like a no win situation from here.

2006 is definitely shaping up to be a red letter year

The Iranians start trading oil in Euros on the 20^th March.

Ooooh I love you, oh, you pay my rent

And the prize for Wally of the Week just has to go to ex Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Mark Oaten.

Of course, on hearing the news that Oaten, married with two children, had been spending time with a male prostitute, the obvious first question that all concerned citizens must ask themselves is ‘was Oaten the pitcher or the catcher?’. Well, that’s what I always ask myself.

Now I’d be the last person to criticise Oaten, or anybody else, for their lifestyle choices. I’m currently reading Matthew Parris’ biography where he eloquently writes about the problems of being a gay and seeking and holding political office. It doesn’t sound like fun. What makes Oaten such a colossal bell-end is that he chose to enter the Liberal Democratic leadership contest without first dealing with such an obvious skeleton in his, erm, closet…

Hummmm, let me see …I’ve been paying for sex with a man whore for the last six months and now I’m going to stand for election as leader of Britain’s third political party. Nope, no potential problems on the horizon there. Only the two of us know about it and he’s definitely not going to sell the story to the newspapers. No, I’m his special bitch…

Aside from the Oaten’s sheer stupidity, another aspect of the story that gets me is the obvious relish even such supposedly responsible organisations as the BBC have displayed in using the expression ‘rent boy’.

The boy in question is 23.

How old do you have to be before you get promoted to male prostitute?

I know, I know, rent boy is such an excellent term. Half of it rhymes with ‘bent’ and the other half adds a suggestion of paedophilia to the payload.

Rent boy

It just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?

What the fuck is it with our MPs anyway? Oaten’s resignation statement included the line ‘I would like to apologise for errors of judgement in my personal behaviour’. Former secretary of state for Wales and legendary cottager Ron 'moment of madness' Davies’ used the same language after being mugged whilst cruising on Clapham Common. What exactly is the error of judgement in question? I’m guessing that you don’t ‘judge’ that you’re into sex with strangers in public places so presumably the error is that he got caught doing it.

Actually my personal favourite Ron Davies line was his claim, after being photographed visiting a well-known cruising spot near a motorway lay by, that he was looking for badgers.

He fucks badgers?

You name it and there’ll be a Member of Parliament into it; from kiddy porn through to dressing up in lingerie and hanging yourself with an orange in your mouth.

So, what are the three surviving candidates for the Liberal party, the party of Jeremy Thorpe, leadership into? I must confess to having a soft spot for Simon Hughes. He was my local MP for twenty years until I moved into Lambeth from Southwark and he is revered by a large number of his constituents. Unlike many London MPs he is seen out and about his constituency and is always approachable. The last time I saw him he was drinking a can of lager in the crowd at a free Chas and Dave concert in Southwark Park a few months ago. However, political pundits consider him to be too fluffy and question his credentials to be a serious leadership contender.

gerbils?

My question is ‘what’s his bag?’

And what about the favourite candidate, Sir Menzies Campbell? What toots his flute?

autoerotic asphyxiation?

The really serious issue behind all of this is the power of the British newspapers and the handful of unelected people who own them. Our newspapers gave up serious investigative public interest journalism years ago but they remain the first port of call for any sleazy fucker with some dirt to sell. This means that the likes of Rupert Murdoch are the modern day equivalent of J Edgar Hoover; sitting there with files of information on an array of public figures. And they get to decide when to make the contents of those files public. Some stories remain unpublished for years until they’ve properly matured. Some don’t get reported at all. Just as well that major media moguls are such nice, honourable people isn’t it?

Beware the Eight Passion Proteins

Whilst browsing through Flickr the other day I came across a photo of the cover of Stanley ‘The Protein Man’ Green’s Eight Passion Proteins booklet.

Anyone over 30 who grew up in London will remember Stan as that 'special person' who was always walking up and down Oxford Street with a huge placard muttering about the dangers of eggs and flogging his homemade guide to dietary well-being for 12p a pop. The booklet was a classic printed, as it was, on a homemade press and with a font style vaguely remiscent of a hybrid cross between a ransom and a suicide note.

The full text of Stanley’s pamphlet is recorded for posterity here. As someone else said ‘reading it made Tolkein look like Doctor Seuss’. Stanley sold his last earthly booklet back in 1993, so remembering him is one of those things that separates ‘old’ Londoners, as in people who actually grew up here, from new Londoners who’ve been here for about five minutes, give or take.

I only mention this because coming across the picture made me all nostalgic about the London that once was. I won’t fart on like an old man about that now. I just wanted to blog the cover picture. It makes me smile.

Six months on...

From Bridget Dunne...

We remember Jean Charles de Menezes
7th January 1978 - 22 July 2005

Justice for Jean
Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign

Six months o­n, we still remember
No More Cover up
We demand Justice

Commemoration of the 6 month anniversary
of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes
Sunday 22nd January, 1pm
Stockwell Tube Station
London

RIP Fathers 4 Justice

So, Fathers 4 Justice is no more

I thought they were pretty much done for a few months ago when a couple of us strolled over to Green Park to photograph their latest protest march. It was a poorly attended and sombre affair, with the actual protestors comfortably outnumbered by police and photographers,

It’s unlikely that their three year campaign did anything to advance the cause of British fathers in the divorce courts. However, what they did achieve, astonishingly well, was to demonstrate the fallacy behind the increased security measures being imposed in this country, particularly in London.

Yup the sight of beer-bellied middle-aged men dressed as Zorro climbing up, and prancing around, some of the supposedly most secure buildings in the country was always guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye.

They made the people who run the police look like complete dickheads.

My personal favourite was that video clip of bloke dressed as Batman walking up the Buckingham Palace with a huge step ladder, propping it up against the railings in broad daylight then climbing up onto one of the front balconies

The cunning swine.

Given that they were doing such a good job of making police chiefs look like idiots it comes as no surprise to hear that the group was infiltrated by undercover anti-terrorist officers. There is also a vague whiff of suggestion of a suspicion that it may even have been one of those undercover officers who started the talk about kidnapping Tony Blair’s son. That would go some way to explaining why the police were so pissed off that the kidnap story broke earlier this week.

We wouldn’t want people to start thinking that our security forces employ agent provocateurs to stir up trouble in activist groups would we?

Even if the police weren’t behind the dastardly ‘kidnap plot’ it seems rather unlikely than anyone was being serious. At the very least our police seem to have trouble distinguishing between a genuine terrorist threat and the drunken ramblings of a few embittered fathers in the pub after a hard day in the divorce courts. Or is anyone suggesting that the threat was real? As the press release on the Father’s 4 Justice site says …

The group say that ex members have reportedly been in contact with the Anti-Terrorist Unit SO13 from Scotland Yard who said that activists would be shot on sight if engaged in any protests in Westminster.

You can just picture the headlines can’t you

Batman executed in abortive kidnap attempt!

Zorro killed in police shoot out! He was wearing a heavy cape… kind of suspicious for this of time year!

Superman not so super after all!

That would make for an interesting IPCC investigation wouldn’t it?