OUR PUSILLANIMOUS PRESS.


Some weeks ago I read - in The Guardian - a piece by an idiot journalist (another one) called Simon Hoggart to the effect that all those people who suggested that the death of Dr. David Kelly had something suspicious about it were either irritating trouble-makers or just drooling simpletons. That such an article, so insulting to many of the paper's readers and so categoric in its bland assuredness, should be printed in the Guardian tells us all we need to know about the slide in that paper's standards and of the unfathomable smugness of newspapers in general.
When Lord Hutton, in his enquiry into Dr. Kelly's death, stipulated that many of the facts be kept secret for 70 years, did Hoggart's eager news-hound's nose twitch in anticipation of another government cover-up? It did not. His reaction was instead to conclude that the noble lord must surely have his own very good reasons for this unprecedented piece of censorship and in any case who was he, a simple peasant journalist, to question the decisions of one who was so clearly his social superior. And when it became known that the knife Dr. Kelly supposedly used to kill himself with had no fingerprints on it - nor,perhaps even more weirdly, were there any fingerprints on his waterbottle - (this information only being dragged from the police using the Freedom of Information Act) did our excited hack - who knows a story when he sees one - pounce on these very curious facts with all of his scribbler's instincts tingling? He did not. He instead assured himself that Dr. Kelly, having taken his pills (nobody knows how many), Cut his wrist and lay down to wait for death, suddenly remembered to wipe his own fingerprints off the knife, and, to make things doubly sure, off his bottle of water. This is what the government tells us happened and therefore, to credulous boneheads like Hoggart, it must be so.
When several doctors eminent in this particular field declared that in their opinions the knife wound could not have resulted in Dr. Kelly's death, Hoggart presumably dismisses them as mistaken (he would know better, of course).
All his family and friends have declared that Kelly was not the suicidal type. He dealt with the KGB in Moscow, the Mossad in Israel and went to South Africa to advise the apartheid government on lethal chemicals. He was a tough nut and certainly not the genial family doctor type portrayed in the media. Even more certainly, he was not the sort of man to run away and top himself because some fat MP had been mildly rude to him.
There are other things. Kelly's own prediction that he might be found dead in the woods, the cancellation of the inquest into his death, and much more, all available on the internet at the click of a button. But Hoggart and his ilk are too lazy to check things out, prefering to sneer at readers who are more interested in the truth than they are. And The Guardian pays him (handsomely) to do it - perhaps they wish to accellerate the speed at which their readership is dwindling.
One might imagine that any of this information, let alone its totality, would make any normally inquisitive person want to know more - and it does. Everybody except our somnambulent press.

Allow me to put to you a hypothetical scheme. Say someone knocks on your front door and when you open it he sticks a gun in your face and tells you that he is taking possession of your house. You had better be out by the morning, he says, or I will kill you. Naturally, this shocks and alarms you, but you keep calm enough to ask him how he can believe that he has the right to do this, to which he casually replies that his ancestors lived on this very spot two thousand years ago and he has returned to reclaim what is, by any reasonable standards, his rightful property. Ultimately, he further adds, it is not really a legal matter because God gave him this house for him and his people to live in until the end of time. He then storms off, manifesting every indication of a surly annoyance that he and his property should be treated in such a cavalier manner.

Well, maybe he was just a passing lunatic,you think, and I'll never see him again, but just in case, I'd better report it to the police. So you do. Imagine your horror when they inform you that they know this man well and they have actually arranged for him to take possession of your house. The poor fellow has no house of his own, they say, and so we have given him yours. They then brazenly go on to admit that he has in fact many other houses but for religious and sentimental reasons he really likes this one so they thought it was only fair he should have it. Wait a minute, you say, either this guy is some religious lunatic or he is a thief attempting to rob me of my house, I can think of no third explanation - yet you are supporting him in this villainy. Backing him to the hilt, sir, they assure you, and if you return in an attempt to reclaim the property we will bring overwhelming force to bear on the situation, up to and including killing you.

Staggering out into the sunlight, you think the world has gone mad. And of course you are right. In fact, the world has never been other than mad, it's just that until this happened - that is, until it happened to you - you had never noticed.

I said at the beginning that this is a hypothetical situation and, in the case of your own home, hopefully it is. But it is exactly how, with the enthusiastic assistance of Great Britain, the USA and France, the state of Israel was created. It is furthermore exactly how Israel continues to behave, as its refusal to cease building houses for jews on arab land demonstrates.

During the days of the Cold War, I had always felt a natural disinclination to believe the wilder tales of totalitarian communist rule that came from the soviet bloc, thinking that surely an entire population cannot be micro-controlled to the extent reputed to occur there. Then the wall fell and the virtually unbelievable condition of Ceaucesceau's Romania became known to the world, with none of its people knowing anything other than what their government had told them. The comparitive level of brainwashing in Romania then and Israel now occured to me when I read of an Israeli woman who, when told of the world's disbelieving reaction to her government's version of their latest act of piracy and murder on the Gaza Aid flotilla, exclaiming 'but how could they not believe?' Perhaps she responded in the same way when the world repudiated Israel's denial of the dropping of phosphorous bombs on Gazan schools. But of course mental conditioning is always easier when the people want to believe what you are telling them in the first place.

Now much or all of the above may be a simplified version of history. It does not take into account the unrelentingly aggressive Arab stance towards a jewish state. But certainly since 1967 Israel has been robbing and killing arabs at whatever time and place it has deemed necessary or desirable. Its stance of indignant outrage when the arabs object and retaliate to this is risible, or it would be in less tragic circumatances. (At this stage of the game asking who began the cycle of violence really doesn't help anyone.)Nor can it go on indefinitely. You cannot keep the heel of your boot on someone's throat forever. Unfortunately, since the USA has thoughtfully provided them with a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs, when the day of reckoning comes the crazy bastards might just take the rest of us with them.

THE CHARACTER OF GORDON BROWN.


We have a General Election tomorrow and it should be the most interesting one for a very long time. Policies are, of course, the most important things to consider when deciding to cast your vote, but the personalities of the leaders of the parties are important too - and their characters are even more so. Policies, as we have so often seen in the past, can be ditched. Their characters they, and we, are stuck with.

With this in mind I think it would be interesting to examine the incident, and its consequences, between Gordon Brown and the Rochdale pensioner Gillian Duffy. The meeting was, of itself, a non-event, and had Mr. Brown reacted to it in a normal way nobody, by now, would even remember that it had taken place,whether the mike was on or off.

But his first response, to what he considered a disastrous encounter, was to blame his aide for ever allowing the woman anywhere near him. This was the behaviour of a coward and a bully, of someone who is so used to being pandered to that the idea that something could really be his fault doesn't even come up for consideration. Afterwards, on the radio with Jeremy Vine, he again blamed his staff before hastily retracting this and instead accused the media scrum of preventing him from answering her properly. This was a lie, for, as can clearly be seen on the video tape, he was under no pressure that would have stopped him answering Mrs. Duffy in any way he wanted to.

Afterwards, when the miked-up cat was out of the bag, and he had spent forty minutes in her house in an effort to control the damage (worrying question: to these people Mrs. duffy was just another face in the street, how did they get her private telephone number - and so quickly?) he emerged beaming his justly famous frighten-the-horses grin. To me, this was a shockingly incongruous attitude to strike considering the circumstances and yet another indication of Mr. Brown's dysfunctionality as a social human being.

All of this must be disquieting stuff for any potential Labour voter but even more perturbing is Gordon Brown's apparently total inability to assess, with even a particle of accuracy, an experience which he himself has been a party to. It was obvious to everybody present, and to anyone who has seen it on television, that this had been a completely innocuous meeting with a member of the public who had actually ended the conversation by assuring Brown that he had her vote. But Brown had afterwards got into his car convinced that there was the material in his chat with Mrs. Duffy for the media to take him apart. Do we want our Prime Minister emerging from talks with foreign leaders not having a damn clue what the actual purport of his conversation with them had been?

My assessment of Gordon Brown would not be a favourable one. He is weak, impressionable, a liar, a hypocrite and an incompetent. But even more worryingly we have a cabinet who are collectively so pusillanimous that they go in fear, even in awe, of such a man.

(None of this means that I am a supporter of Nick Clegg or David Cameron.)

WHY ARE WE NOT PROSECUTING MORE MPS?

The simple answer is because they won't let us. On the one hand, the hand of authority, it is - and I will risk your derision here with the use of the word - a conspiracy. It is the big conspiracy by the haves against the have-nots, by the people with money and power against the rest of us. These influential people may earnestly detest each other, and they do, but if ever one of their number is threatened they all circle the wagons to protect him/her - lest they be next.

You will notice in this country how rarely, if ever, anybody above a certain managerial level is prosecuted. An example of this occurred a couple of years back when three executive crooks were extradited to America for trial. The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Express and other rags masquerading as newspapers poured their bigoted antagonism on the Damn Yankees and on the traitorous government that could hand over decent (they must be, they were rich!) middle class englishmen into the hands of filthy foreigners. According to them Robin Hood, Little John and Will Scarlet had been abducted from among us in the dead of night and none of us could ever again sleep soundly in our beds. It turned out, of course, that all three -so comfortably safe from prosecution in Britain (though their crimes were committed here)- were, of course, as guilty as Hell.

And on the other hand we have an indifferent, listless majority who, so long as they have the TV, the football, the booze, etc., can be trusted never to rock the boat. As Juvenal said nineteen hundred years ago, panem et circences, baby, panem et circences.

But some of us have at least tried. I began by posting some things on an internet site called 38 Degrees, a sort of political lobbying group, a bunch of tossers who believe that all the country's ills can be solved by petitions. But after several unavailing efforts to convince them that petitions never solved anything anywhere and that a more direct approach was needed, I had to give up on them, the prosecution of a criminal being much too radical a move for these world-shakers.

I thought next to involve our brave crusading journalists, although my opinion of journalists is roughly equal to that shown by Aldous Huxley when he declared that he was giving up journalism to become a writer. People such as Marina Hyde of The Guardian, Henry Porter of The Observer and Francis Wheen who writes, intermittently I hope, for Private Eye. All received my letters without troubling themselves to reply, so the help they offered was about in line with my expectations, but their rudeness, I will admit, surprised me.

By then I realized I was on my own and so thought to bring a civil action, as a taxpayer, against an MP. I took legal advice on the the liklihood of a successful outcome and received an answer in which the words 'snowball' and 'Hell' featured prominently. This did not entirely surprise me. One cannot have the peasants suing their betters simply because they, the peasants, have been robbed by them. That way lies Madness, Anarchy, Chaos, or worse still, Democracy.

My increasing desperation may be discerned from my next move, I contacted the Crown Prosecution Service. I asked them if they might be interested in prosecuting some criminals and they told me that no, they weren't, really, at least not these particular criminals. But if I believed a crime had been committed I should report it to the police. So I did. The police were, rather to my surprise, very polite and decent about it but, of course, could not discuss anything where an ongoing investigation might, just might, be occurring. They said, however, that I could try reporting the matter to the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards. So I did. The person I spoke to there seemed almost bemused by my inquiry and - is Pontius Pilate the present Commissioner ? - recommended I talk to the Crown Prosecution Service or the police about it.

Now you don't have to tell me twice that I am being given the old run around. You have to tell me three times. And now that I had been told three times I was beginning to get the message. Nobody, particularly nobody in authority, let alone the lily-livered citizenry, wants to see Members of Parliament proscuted for the many crimes they have committed. Maybe it's just me, but I find this rather strange. It's our money they've stolen, for God's sake!

In my correspondence with the CPS, I had begun by concentrating on the case of the former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. I did this for two reasons. One, because he is a repulsive bullying thug, and two, because he is a sitting duck. In the publication known as the 'Green Book', which is the bible for MPs regarding their expenses, the most important injunction is that all 'allowances', as they prefer them to be called (for obvious reasons), must be "wholly, exclusively and necessarliy" incurred for the purpose of carrying out their parliamentary duties.

John Prescott had his house in Yorkshire mock-Tudorized and charged it to the taxpayer. There is not a person in the country, outside of the idiots in the fees office, who will believe that this bit of exterior decoration had anything whatever to do with his job as an MP. Yet the police have appearantly investigated him and passed him as clean. Shome mishtake, shurely!

But they have an explanation for this, too. I have had a short correspondence with Detective Superintendent Matthew Horne of the Specialist Crime Directorate at New Scotland Yard and he informs me that where the police decide that no effort has been made to deliberately decieve the fees office that case will not be pursued. This in spite off the many examples where the Fees Office has allowed claims that were clearly improper, such as the ludicrous floating duck house and the porn films, not to mention Prescott's mock-Tudorization. The police reaction to the Fees Office allowing a claim that contravenes the rules was to decide that somehow that claim then became a valid one, not that the Fees Office was wrong.

And there is another, scarcely less important, instruction in the 'Green Book'. It is that "Members are themselves responsible for ensuring that their use of allowances is above reproach", which of itself blows the excuse that "the Fees Office said it was okay" clean out of the water. Thus we see that the entire police investigation into MPs' expenses was based on a fallacy.

So what do we do? They seem, through hundreds of years of experience, to have closed all the loopholes, and the usual solution, to write to your MP about it, hardly seems appropriate. But we have an election looming, and with that an opportunity. It is true that many of these crooks will not be standing for re-election, but many more, probably hundreds, will. And since these people have no shame, we must shame the public into voting them out. The constituency offices of the worst offenders should be picketed with placards announcing "This man/woman is a thief. Do not vote for a thief." Such an obviously libellous, if it were untrue, statement has the distinct potential to attract media attention and could be disasterous for the MP concerned.

This might be our last chance to bring at least a little retribution down on the heads of the robbers who have for years been filling their pockets and their bellies at our expense. And it could be fun, too!

A Serious Proposal.

It can not have escaped the attention of any civilised person that one of our most revered and traditional industries has fallen on difficult times. (I call it an industry for by what other name can one now refer to what was once a sport when all joy and excitement has been removed from it; it is a business, no more.) Participants -of the right sort - are in ever shorter supply, foreign merchants call the market's tune and the engulfing blanket of political correctness smothers its noble delights. I refer, of course, to shooting. To the grand sport which above all others displays the human ascendancy over the competing species - by the simple expediency of killing them - and therefore establishes our Darwinian right to the captaincy of the vertebrates.
Many would protest that the knell of doom has already sounded, but I believe that, by linking a deficiency here with a surplus elsewhere, the sport may yet be saved, nay, brought to new heights of popularity and prosperity. The deer may have fled the moor, or have been 'humanely' culled by some curmudgeonly shekari - who in the days of glory would have been grateful to earn the minimum wage (tips included) as a part-time beater - and the grouse may be as rare as a cubic inch of tuna in a Japanese restaurant, but where one set of targets has failed, may not another be supplied?
Until very recently a certain type of person, commonly known as bankers, were ubiquitous in the lower middle classes of society. Indeed they became a great power in the world, dominating commerce and politics alike. Prominent people, of a base ilk, eagerly cultivated their acquaintance and for a while these self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe did indeed bestride the narrow world. But now, with a Malthusian inevitability, that the need to have quite so many of them has passed, can we not make use of the superfluity of their numbers by an arrangement whereby the relevant authority would issue a licence permitting the shooting of an appropriate amount of them each year.
The advantages of such a scheme are manifold, the disadvantages, that I can see, none. It might even constitute an improvement on the older form of the sport. The shooting of a magnificent red deer or a prettily feathered bird may sometimes cause a pang of conscience, but no such emotion can occur in the extermination of bankers, who are universally despised and invariably ugly. It occurs to me that a limited number of politicians could profitably be included as 'guest' targets, perhaps on a monthly basis. Their usefulness to society is exaggerated and a member of their own fraternity, David Cameron, has if anything pre-empted my suggestion by announcing his intention, should he accede to power, of substantially reducing their number.
Another advantage of transferring the sporting arena from the moor to the city could be a heightened exhilaration in the pursuit of the game itself. The shooting of an immobile deer and the extirpation of fish in a barrel afford an uncomfortable parallel, similarly the use of what is effectively a scatter gun to cover an acre of sky with shot in order to bring down a smallish bird might even provoke an accusation of unsportsmanship. With a banker as your prey such considerations do not arise for, to give the creature his due, the banker is often possessed of an animal cunning that will try the hunter's skill to the utmost, thus making for a more compelling contest in the chase and a concomitantly greater relish in the kill.
The first order of business, of course, will be to form a club, for it can be regarded as axiomatic that one cannot have simply anyone going around banging away at bankers. The establishment of a club will supply two essential elements of the sport, viz. the exclusion of those not considered by the committee appropriate to be members and the creation of a market for enrolment to the club by virtue of its exclusivity.
The social benefits of the scheme are many. The exterminated bankers will in nearly every case be extremely rich and therefore not only will a division of their spoils bring profit and pleasure to their family and friends but it may also have the effect of making the banker himself more popular in death than ever he was in life. Florists, funereal directors and monumental masons will also benefit and so it will be seen that this single event constitutes the very paradigm of utilitarianism in that will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
I seek no profit in offering this enterprise to the public as I believe it is the duty of every person to supply the community with the results of whatever gifts nature and nurture has provided him. Some may find it of too visionary a turn, others might even find it unworkable, but a little ingenuity will, I feel confident, remedy any embryonic deficiencies. My reward will be if this proposal is received in the spirit of public benevolence in which it was conceived.