Wednesday, August 12, 2015 

"One girl was clearly upset by what was going on."

The singer Paloma Faith has been found guilty of a public order offence following an impromptu gig at a private function in Hyde Park.

"I was shocked," said Andrew Shandy, giving evidence for the prosecution.  "There I was, just about to shoot my bolt, and suddenly this excruciating noise started up.  It startled everyone.  At first I thought someone had got a little bit too enthusiastic with the noshing, but then I realised the screeching was vaguely in tune and made out the words truth and beautiful.  The last thing you want at an event like that is Paloma's brand of nasal bird scaring."

The court heard that the singer had mistakenly turned up at the Blowjobs in the Park (incorporating Cunnilingus in the City) cheese, wine and fellatio picnic bonanza believing it to be the adjacent Radio 2 Party in the Park concert.  Rather than make a swift exit, and despite the entreaties of the organisers, Faith saw fit to serenade the exhibitionists with songs such as Slightly Tipsy and Only Teeth Hurt Like This.

Passing judgement, Mr Justice Cocklecarrot commented: "This was particularly revolting behaviour.  Generally we turn a blind eye to such indiscretions so long as they take place in full view of CCTV or in dimly lit rural car parks.  The sheer number of people that filmed your performance when there was so much other action going on stands as testament to that."

Ms Faith, 48, of Shoreditch, was fined £10 and pleaded with to pack it in.

--

Labour MP for Rochdale Simon Danzcuk has called for an immediate halt to the party's leadership contest, saying that survivors of child abuse have no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn's ability to hold the establishment to account.

"Survivors tell me that they could never put their trust in a man with a beard, not least one who has represented Islington for over 30 years, the other dark heart of the country, apart from all the others.  Should Corbyn win the leadership nonetheless, I pledge to lead an immediate coup and install Our Liz, the sensible candidate for sensible times as leader for life, or at least until we inevitably lose again."

In other news:

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8/12/2015 10:09:00 pm | |

Thursday, June 18, 2015 

A genuine question.

Has any other group as objectively rancid as Florence and the Machine managed to gain both commercial success and a pass from the critics?  The two other bands that came instantly to mind, Mumford and Sons, and Coldplay, don't really count as both have received the odd critical mauling and are sniggered about, if not to the extent of the mocking they receive elsewhere.  Plus, to be fair, Coldplay's first two albums aren't that bad.  Closest in fact might be Adele, but then I seem to be in the minority in finding her oeuvre (Rolling in the Deep excepted) insufferable.  Any suggestions?

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6/18/2015 06:55:00 pm | |

Tuesday, November 19, 2013 

Those 10 X Factor changes for 2016 in full.

1. Simon Cowell to return to the show in robot form. The Cowell android will be indistinguishable from the real thing (high trousers, inane grin, wads of cash poking out of back pockets), and be programmed to give 5 interchangeable put downs, along with 1 ridiculously overblown monologue of praise. If another dowdy Scottish spinster with a voice of an angel should audition, the unit will applaud furiously and then self-destruct.

2. The set will be redesigned, with further inspiration taken from the style of mid-1930s Europe. The already intimidating aesthetic of swooping, dramatic lighting and terrifyingly loud Wagnerian music will be added to with floor to ceiling banners, the audience marching to their seats, and the judges saluting the robot Cowell as it trundles in. Megaphones will also be distributed to the crowd, who will be asked to scream "HAIL!" before and after Cowell gives his verdict.

3. In a new twist, the most widely lauded auditionee after boot camp will join the judges and have the deciding vote, thereby avoiding the embarrassment of having turned to talentless nobodies to adjudicate over talentless nobodies in the past.

4. In the most dramatic departure of all, the public will vote for which auditionee they thought the worst, who will then be subject to mock execution. Believing they really are about to be killed, the electric chair/gallows/guillotine/crucifix (the method will change each week) will in fact fail at the last moment, with the lights coming on to reveal an audience all wearing Cowell masks (this change presumes a Conservative victory in 2015, and the anticipated withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights).

 5. The winner will no longer receive a Syco record contract due to budget cuts. The new prize will be a tour of Abbey Road, a £25 iTunes card and a packet of wine gums.

 6. ITV to be renamed SCTV.

7. Err...

8. That's it.

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11/19/2013 09:05:00 pm | |

Thursday, January 10, 2013 

Bumford and Sons.

There's very little point in getting worked up over the Brit awards.  Every industry simply has to have a ceremony where the biggest successes of the year are celebrated, if only to ensure Jimmy Carr can keep stashing his money offshore.

This said, Mumford and Sons in three categories, including best album?  Really? Really?  And Paloma Faith in any category at all?  Thank heavens for small mercies: the Vaccines are completely ignored, as is Nicki Minaj.  Just a shame the same can't be said for Muse.

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1/10/2013 10:24:00 pm | |

Tuesday, September 14, 2010 

The definition of collusion.

We've had a summer taken up with the publishing of reports into the recent past in Northern Ireland. Back in June Lord Saville published his long-awaited report into Bloody Sunday, which was unequivocal in its conclusions. Likewise, last month saw the release of the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland's report into the 1972 Claudy bombings, which similarly unequivocally put the blame upon the long suspected Father James Chesney.

Oddly, the investigation into possible collusion in the murder of the founder of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, Billy Wright, in the Maze prison, the most recent incident of the three, is the least conclusive. This is also despite the report going into a similar level of detail to that in the Saville inquiry: it took Lord MacLean and his two fellow panel members five years to put it together, and while it doesn't quite extend to the multiple volumes which the aforementioned report did, it still weighs in at 699 pages.

While the report finds that there was no active collusion between the state and Wright's INLA assassins, this is thanks mainly to the report's restrictive and contestable definition of the term, especially when compared to the definition which Judge Cory used in the report which resulted in the setting up of the new inquiry. This is set out in paragraph 1.33:

It may be that the very wide definition of the word collusion that Judge Cory adopted was due to his concentration on one of the synonyms, namely the verb connive. We have been concerned throughout the Inquiry by the width of the meaning applied by Judge Cory, having in mind in particular that the word is not to be found in our Terms of Reference. For our part we consider that the essence of collusion is an agreement or arrangement between individuals or organisations, including government departments, to achieve an unlawful or improper purpose. The purpose may also be fraudulent or underhand. It seems to us that the situations envisaged by Judge Cory in paragraphs 3.187 to 3.189 of his Report, especially those in which he refers to prison services or the NIPS ‘turning a blind eye’, would amply be covered by the Terms of Reference without attempting to analyse them in terms of collusion. We have in mind here ‘wrongful acts or omissions’, including attempts, which ‘facilitated his [Billy Wright’s] death’, whether ‘intentional or negligent’.

More than understandably, Billy Wright's family reject this shifting of the goal posts. It reminds me of the similar different definitions of what "rendition" was as set out in the report by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which duly gave the government a clean bill of health thanks it to deciding that what everyone else defined as a "extraordinary rendition" was in fact something quite different and therefore far more legitimate. While then there is no evidence to suggest that the state and the INLA had come to a specific arrangement or agreement by which Wright was to be murdered, there is more than a few good reasons to suspect that "blind eyes" may well have been turned. Thanks to the report's stricter rationale, what happened duly is not collusion, and so all are innocent.

While the report's findings on how the Maze was operating in November 1997 are then damning, with negligent being the repeated descriptive term, it seems unlikely that this will be the end of the matter. The report also completely fails, as the authors admit in the final paragraph, to explain how the firearms which were used to murder Wright entered the prison. The cost and time expended on the Saville inquiry was offset by the vivid nature of its findings and its damning conclusions. The inquiry into the Claudy bombings took up just 28 pages and were equally final. The same cannot even begin to be said for this latest supposed authoratitive investigation into Northern Ireland's torturous and bitterly contested past troubles.

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9/14/2010 11:24:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 21, 2010 

A (very short) open letter to the Heart network.

Do the only records you possess comprise of Sex on Fire (incidentally, considering I was complaining about Lily Allen's lyrics yesterday, shouldn't the similar mediocrities in Kings of Leon be down the VD clinic rather than telling us that their sex is on fire?) and Poker Face, or is it just some truly bizarre coincidence that every single time I catch even the slightest jangle from your wonderful radio stations that either one or the other, or as today, one followed by the other are the tracks you've chosen to broadcast from your doubtless incredibly diverse playlist?

Yours,
septicisle.

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7/21/2010 10:17:00 pm | |

Friday, May 14, 2010 

10 years to spend thinking about the coming race war...

Ian Davison, the neo-Nazi who succeeded where others failed in producing ricin, must be somewhat relieved at receiving only a 10 year sentence for concocting a chemical weapon along with other terrorist offences, including making pipe bombs, one of which he recorded exploding. After all, Martyn Gilleard, the skinhead who shared a passion for potential race war with a predilection for children, was given an 11-year-stretch for similar offences while only putting together some very rudimentary nail bombs, involving film canisters. Davison's son Nicky, on the other hand, has been given what seems a far harsher sentence of two years detention for only having the almost required Anarchist Cookbook and Poor Man's James Bond manuals, both of which the judge himself noted are available to purchase from Amazon (and still are) despite their possession itself being an illegal offence.

In line with when our jihadist friends have been convicted, the police themselves have come out certain that they've prevented an atrocity, whether or not Davison and his pals in the Aryan Strike Force really were about to set out in the footsteps of David Copeland. There certainly is a parallel with the jihadists cells that have gone on supposed "training" out in the countryside, as the ASF it seems had away days in Cumbria where they seemingly spent most of their time sieg heiling and running around with Nazi banners, but again, whether they were truly prepared to act on their online rhetoric is something different entirely. That Davison had stored the ricin he'd made in a cupboard for two years gives a clue, as does the fact that he like Kamel Bourgass doesn't seem to have any real idea as to use it to its full effect; the only discussion about poisoning anything which the police came across involved the "water supplies of Muslims", which would have diluted the tiny amount of ricin he had even further.

In any event, it does once again show that far from just having a problem with Islamic extremists, there remains a significant if small threat from the very far-right. And unlike with the takfirist jihadists, and indeed the remaining paramilitaries on both sides in Northern Ireland, there are very few resources being dedicated to watching their antics with the caution with which they deserve.

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5/14/2010 08:41:00 pm | |

Friday, April 30, 2010 

Ricin, the Aryan Strike Force and the continuing delusions of the ultra far-right.

It's somewhat odd that the conviction of Nicky Davison on three counts of "possessing records useful in committing or preparing acts of terrorism" seems to be attracting more coverage than the successful prosecution of his father, Ian Davison, did. Davison senior, you might remember, had triumphed where those racially inferior jihadists had failed, managing to produce the poison ricin, which was found in a jam jar in a kitchen cupboard. Despite beating Kamel Bourgass at his own game, Davison sadly didn't reach critical mass in the media, almost certainly as a direct result of having both the wrong skin colour and presumably the wrong religion.

We do though now know just which far-right organisations Davison junior and senior were associated with, having been skirted over during Nicky's father's trial. Both Davisons were members of a tiny neo-Nazi groupuscule calling itself the Aryan Strike Force, centred around the aryansf.com website, currently being squatted by a Wordpress spam blog. Unfortunately there's not much in the way of archives of the site, the Wayback Machine only having caches of the forum set up there from March, April and May of 2008, none of which contain much in the way of material, with just a few threads available to browse. One of the few revelations is that the ASF thought it had struck up an alliance with the better known Racial Volunteer Force, itself a splinter from Combat 18. The RVF has an especially fetching website, and currently has an poster up advertising a gig in London at the end of May, the text appearing on top of a photograph of Rudolf Hess. One of the threads of note on the April cache is titled Enemies, and features poster AngrySoldier getting both the wrong end of the stick and carried away with himself:

Muslims......and believe me there are LOTS in my area, (Hounslow)
The jews are the most important enemy, i personally think we should take out the jews before any of our other enemies as the jews are the most dangrous

This is especially revealing of how the extreme far-right tends to think. While the likes of the BNP and the English Defence League, desperate to banish the bad old Holocaust denying days of the past increasingly focus their efforts on Muslims, those on the outer reaches who find themselves being abandoned by their former brethren continue to obsess themselves with Jews, or in what passes for modern Neo-Nazi ideology, the theory of Zionist occupied government, or ZOG for short. The prosecution in both cases claimed that one of the aims of the Aryan Strike Force was to ultimately overthrow our own ZOG, although few of the pages still available freely now formulate any such out there ideas. More their style it seems was potentially targeting left-wing and anti-racist groups, a large number of their properties being listed in a thread titled "Courtesy of the BPP".

The BPP is presumably the British People's Party, another sect of a sect of a sect, most notorious for previously having Martyn Gilleard amongst their number. Gilleard was convicted back in 2008 of having nail bombs and much the same idea of carrying out the violence which the more respectable sections of the far-right has moved away from, namely bombing mosques. Oh, and much to the BPP's embarrassment, just the 39,000 indecent images of children.

For what was such a small grouping, the Aryan Strike Force had tentacles reaching out far into the other tiny neo-Nazi sects. Arrested at the end of last year on separate offences but similar charges also relating to ASF's website were Trevor Hannington and Michael Heaton. Michael Heaton is especially notable for having been heavily active online, under the name "WIGANMIKE", as seen above, as well as off the internet with other far-right organisations. According to Edmund Standing, author of two reports on the far-right, Heaton was the leader of the British Freedom Fighters, a skinhead gang with their own piss-poor blog, not updated since January. Heaton was also formerly active on YouTube under the account NSMIKE266, according to an especially helpful post on Indymedia by Malatesta, which as well as featuring videos of his almost customary Rottweiler, also has clips from various EDL protests he presumably attended. Hannington and Heaton's arrests were noted on the Vanguard News Network forum, where Heaton had also posted under the name WIGANMIKE. In another thread commenting on the progress of the younger Davison's trial, the (slightly) more moderate right-wingers there were especially stinging in their criticism of their more boisterous brothers:

These idiots were told repeatedly by a LOT of people that they were being retards. Did they listen? No. Do they ever? No. Bunch of morons who actually did NOTHING remotely positive or conducive for the cause other than shout about killing Jews on their 'ops' - if these people didn't actually exist the state would HAVE to make them up!

These are the WW2 Fantisists which Griffin did not want in the BNP. Theres a good few of these 40 year old unemployable Mummys Boys sitting at their PC with a Kaiser's helmet at their PC'S claiming to be Aryan Warriors. You have a good few of these Numpties on SFB.

As before, it's difficult to tell just how dangerous the Davisons actually were. One report in the Times claimed that the jar of ricin in the Davison household had sat there for two years. Whether he was truly preparing to go from fulminating on the internet with other like minds to launching attacks with pipe bombs and the ricin he had, or rather doing what other far-right militants have claimed, namely to be preparing for the inevitable race war, is equally uncertain. The conviction of Nicky Davison, simply for possessing the usual array of cock-eyed, out of date and more dangerous to the owner than anyone else explosives manuals, including the Anarchist Cookbook (the reports say Anarchist's Cookbook while the infamous widely distributed book is the Anarchist Cookbook; is there a difference?) which is still freely available from Amazon, while always likely, is especially shaky. His claim to be acting out of allegiance to his father didn't convince the jury, but sounds reasonable. Undeniable however is one of the messages which he left on the ASF forum:

"I know my aims. I don't care if I am fighting an unwinnable battle.

"I would rather die fighting than let the scum of the earth walk over us."


All depends on whether he was truly prepared to put those words into action.

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4/30/2010 08:06:00 pm | |

Thursday, November 05, 2009 

The unreality of Afghanistan.

There's a distinct air of unreality which must around hang around newspaper offices and also the realms of Whitehall. The reaction to the killing of 5 British soldiers by an Afghan police officer, who depending on who you believe, either had a grudge against an officer called Manam, who was also injured and may well have been the original target, or a long-term Taliban agent waiting for his opportunity, was one of a still aloof nation that regards it as unbelievable that it can be so apparently easy to kill Our Boys, while also perplexed at how "Terry Taliban" isn't prepared to play by good old fashioned Queensbury rules. It wasn't so long ago that IEDs were being described as "new" and "asymmetrical" tactics, as if guerilla warfare was some new concept, and that it was perfectly beastly that the other side weren't allowing themselves to be shot out in the open like the clearly inferior fighters that they are. How dare they make the greatest, best trained army the world has ever seen look bad?

The imperial hangover which this country suffers from is reasonable enough, but it still makes you wonder what planet some people are living on when the Mail incredulously asks on its front page "[W]hat kind of war is this?" A fairly standard war, really, considering you're battling against non-state backed fighters. Anyone would think that infiltrating organisations, spying on others and even occasionally carrying out the type of operation as took place on Tuesday was a unique and untested innovation. We seem to forget that our enemy probably feels much the same when a unmanned, unsighted drone suddenly unleashes a Hellfire missile and turns what was the centre of a village into a scene of utter carnage. We like to imagine that we're the ones with the moral authority, that we're not the ones that use children as either suicide bombers or distractions, even while we without a second thought call in airstrikes that are not exactly discriminate in those that they kill and maim. In terms of similar attacks, this one wasn't even exactly highly sophisticated; it was an opportunity which was taken when it arrived. Compared to say, the suicide bomb attack inside the Iraqi parliament, or the attack carried out by Ansar al-Sunnah in which they got inside an American military base in Mosul, killing 14 soldiers, it's not even in the same league.

The problem the attack poses though is obvious: when our policy is to train the Afghan army and police and then get out, or at least that's what it's meant to be, that this officer was apparently not a new recruit and had been in the police for three years raises the nightmare that there may be many more "cells" where we have in fact trained those will then turn on us when the chance arises. This isn't exactly new either though: the Iraqi police and army were and probably still are riddled with those with their own distinct agendas, and that was in a country where there are only two major sects in conflict with each other. In Afghanistan there are at least five different ethnic groups, speaking at least six languages, and where tribal rivalry and personal fiefdoms are far, far older than the modern state itself. Like in Iraq, where a job in the police or the reconstituted army were around the only ones going, that there is a such a low threshold for potential recruits to pass to become officers creates problems in itself. The Afghan army and police are notorious for their unreliability, and I don't think there's been a film yet shot of either Americans or British troops working with them where spliffs haven't been passed around at some point by their companions. The Taliban of course, despite their supposed purity, are probably much the same, especially those who are being paid rather than the true believers, but that doesn't make the situation any better.

Again, none of this would much matter if we had anything approaching another plan to put into place should everything go wrong as it seemingly is, but we don't. The closest thing either us or the Americans have to an advanced military strategy is to flood ever higher numbers of troops into the country. This has been vastly encouraged by the supposed success of the "surge" in Iraq, but that coincided with two much more important occurrences: firstly the setting up of the Awakening councils, when the insurgent groups outside of the hardline Salafists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Islam turned on their former allies, and secondly the ceasefires declared by the Mahdi army, which vastly decreased the attacks by the Shia around Baghdad, as well as the sectarian killings. Despite attempts to encourage something similar to the former in Afghanistan, there's little sign of it happening. The increase in troops is also meant to go hand in hand with the strategy of "taking and holding", having previously only taken land held by the Taliban to then withdraw and let them take it again. This is all well and good, but it still leaves us at some point having to give that which we've taken back, with no guarantee whatsoever that the Taliban won't then come straight back. Training up the Afghan army and police is meant to stop just that, but there's still no real belief that they'll be able to hold their own when the time comes.

With there being no apparent alternative, you have to wonder if Kim Howells' intervention yesterday was meant to further cement the current policy as the only one in town. Only someone in the chair of the completely toothless Intelligence and Security Committee could think that the best way to spend the money saved by getting out of Afghanistan is to raise up the drawbridge here and in Howells' words introduce "more intrusive surveillance in certain communities", which has to be one of the most cowardly ways of calling for more spying on Muslims imaginable. Howells seems to be basing this on the false premise that getting out of Afghanistan would make the security situation here deteriorate, when if anything the opposite would be the case, as well as helping to ameloriate the attitudes which some within this country hold. Just to further flesh out his attitude that this whole mess isn't our fault but rather the Afghans' own, just like some blamed the Iraqis for not embracing the democracy we so kindly imposed down the barrel of a gun, he continues: "I assumed, wrongly, that a desire among ordinary Afghans for peace would prevail over the prospect of continued war and the spectre of being ruled by a tyrannical theocracy in one of the world's poorest and most backward countries." He seems to think that what they're currently experiencing is somehow better. Indeed, some would doubtless suggest, despite the Taliban's brutality, that at least during their short rule there was something approaching security, hardly the case now and hardly the case during the previous years.

We shouldn't pretend that getting out of Afghanistan immediately would either be easy or not have major, long lasting effects on our relationships both with the United States and NATO. It would however be better to consider it as a genuine option and to plan for it than to continue with the lunacy of our current position, knowing that it is untenable as a going concern. Our politicians however, with the exception of the Liberal Democrats, who finally seem to be coming round to the fact that this war is just as unwinnable and disastrous on all fronts as our adventure in Iraq was, seem to be far more prepared to continue lying to the public about al-Qaida and safe havens than admit that this simply cannot go on.

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11/05/2009 08:50:00 pm | |

Tuesday, September 08, 2009 

Mercury music prize hilarity.

Worst winner since M People.  A shame that Burial didn't release his album a yet later, as he would have surely won against the line-up this year.

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9/08/2009 11:05:00 pm | |

Tuesday, September 01, 2009 

The Maltese double cross part 4.

It would be tempting to dismiss the continuing posturing and political point-scoring over the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi as a late silly season skirmish between parties with nothing else to argue about. Yet this whole dispiriting farce in fact seems to be where politics in this country is going - away from actual policy to focusing on unprovable conspiracies, and also interfering directly with decisions that should be made not on ideological background but on the facts available before the person at the time.

Incredible though it might seem, nothing has actually changed since al-Megrahi was released on the 20th of August. Al-Megrahi is still terminally ill, although some have called into question the prognosis that he has only 3 months or less to live; the decision was still made wholly by the Scottish government, which the documents released today don't even begin to alter; and lastly, the decision was the right one, taken by Kenny MacAskill, and also one which was supported by the prison service and parole board. It remains a nonsense and half gesture that al-Megrahi should have been released to a hospice, as some have suggested, regardless of the probably exaggerated security costs mentioned by MacAskill. The best solution remains that al-Megrahi should have been granted compassionate release, but allowed to continue with his appeal against his conviction in the interests of justice.

Al-Megrahi's dropping of his appeal, which he didn't need to, remains the only real properly unanswered question surrounding the case, and should be the main bone of contention, along with MacAskill's visit to him, which many have deemed unnecessary. Whether al-Megrahi was told that he had to drop his appeal otherwise it would cause major problems with his release is unclear, but it seems likely that it was intimated to him or his lawyers in some way. Likewise, why MacAskill felt that he needed to meet the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing when he could have made his decision without doing so is also currently impenetrable, and is only likely to lead to conspiracy theories.

Instead we're being lead on a wild goose chase, where everyone seems to think that something isn't right, yet no one has found any definitive evidence to prove it. It's quite obvious that since Libya emerged from its pariah status that the UK state and the companies which are only at arms length from it have been salivating at the opportunities which the country promises, and it's equally obvious that Libya, as proven by the documents released today, was intent on getting al-Megrahi back at the earliest opportunity, with the likes of Jack Straw scrabbling around looking for a way for al-Megrahi to be eligible for return under the prisoner transfer agreement. Who knows quite why Jack Straw suddenly came round to the idea that despite previously saying al-Megrahi had to be excluded from the agreement that he could in fact be included in it, although we can probably guess. The government was never going to release anything that directly implicated it; you only have to look at the tenacity with which it is refusing to hand over documentation on Binyam Mohamed's treatment to see that. Instead Straw and the government will doubtless be mildly embarrassed at how easily his mind could be turned, as will Brown and Miliband at how they agreed that they didn't want to see al-Megrahi die in jail, a fairly benign thought to make clear, considering how it's distasteful in the extreme for anyone to die from cancer while in prison, even a mass-murderer, and also knowing how outraged Libya would be.

Yet if anything the documentation makes the Scottish parliament and the SNP look far better than they did originally. They clearly wanted al-Megrahi excluded from the prisoner transfer agreement (PDF), unless they were just going through the motions, something which the UK government decided wasn't going to happen. The machinations of Downing Street look shady; Salmond and MacAskill look pure.

Even if the dealings do look shady, David Cameron is calling for a public inquiry on the grounds of a hypothetical, and demanding to know what the prime minister thinks about a decision which he couldn't make and which is none of his business to interfere with. Cameron isn't the only one playing politics though, as we saw previously: every major party both in Scotland and Westminster with the exception of the SNP has disagreed with the decision, almost certainly in some instances purely because they can, rather than what they would have done were they to make the decision. Somewhere in all of this there is a dying man, denied the opportunity to clear his name, and over 280 families in similar circumstances, some equally uncertain of how their loved ones came to die, others outraged by the decision to release the man in anything other than a box. All are being ignored for as ever, short term political gain. This isn't going to win any elections, it isn't even going to make a difference in opinion polls; it's either, according to your view, bringing a good, humane decision into disrepute, or even further distracting attention from someone who has escaped justice. Politics is as usual struggling to pull itself out of the sewer.

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9/01/2009 08:09:00 pm | |

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 

No smoke or fire.

It's now almost three days on from when those arrested last Wednesday were supposed to have launched their attack at the latest, yet surprisingly considering the scare stories which the press was full of last week it still remains the case that the most dangerous items to be found so far remain photographs of 4 separate locations, and after a raid by the bomb squad yesterday, a bag of table sugar.

Regardless of the fact that the botched arrests look likely to have been even more botched than they were originally by Bob Quick, a kind judge has agreed that the police can continue to hold 11 men for another week (one man caught up in the raids having already been released without charge and another turned over to the immigration authorities), although whether they're saying anything or indeed whether the police have even began to question them yet is open to scrutiny.

The plot though does seem to be thickening. Despite claims that the raids were only 12 hours away, having to be brought forward after Quick exposed himself (geddit????) other sources seem to have suggested that the plans outlined on Quick's briefing note were simply one option, that had yet to be authorised, and that it was likely that the "plotters" would have been left to incriminate themselves further if it hadn't been for the snapper in Downing Street. This would explain why nothing has been found, and possibly also opens the idea that Quick was seeking political opinion on what should be done. If this was the case, it still doesn't explain quite how wrong the intelligence seems to have been - both Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown swiftly praising the police for swooping in the way they did and claiming that a "very serious" terrorist plot had been disrupted. There still might well have been a plot, unlike at Forest Gate, where there was nothing whatsoever, but it seems to have been nowhere close to being put into action, despite the predictable briefing of the media that doom was just around the corner unless they had acted.

The Times reported on Monday that the most likely course of action would be that all the Pakistani students here on visas would simply be deported, which though again is only speculation, seems to suggest that the intelligence was almost entirely wrong. As I wrote last week, this is the danger with relying on intelligence rather than good old fashioned surveillance, and while we should hesitate before second guessing the security services or the police over when such raids should take place, the danger is that you both alienate the communities where the arrests happen when no one is charged, while also creating cynicism about the scale of the threat and the political motivation behind the exaggeration of it. It was peculiar that so soon after the head of MI5 and the government itself had almost unprecedentedly started to talk down the level of threat from jihadists that such important arrests would be made, and the failure to find anything suggests that the prior assessments are still the ones that seem to be the closest to the truth.

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4/15/2009 11:38:00 pm | |

Friday, November 23, 2007 

God help us.

The latest musical terrorism to be foisted upon us is Adele Adkins, yet another vulnerable, troubled, earnest, talented, insert bullshit adjective here female singer-songwriter who made her name on MurdochSpace. Talking to the Grauniad today, she says:

She laughs: "The Daily Mail? I'm in the posh papers! I read the Sun."

If anyone would like to submit their in-depth plans for how they would like to kill me so that I don't have to suffer any longer, I'll be more than happy to receive them.

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11/23/2007 11:03:00 pm | |

Tuesday, August 07, 2007 

Tonight the streets are ours.

Encouraging news from the United States, where Lily Allen has had her work visa revoked after the unfortunate incident where she was cautioned for common assault earlier this year in London.

Is there any reason why we can't take similar action against Allen and her sort of partner in musical crime, Amy Winehouse? If we can deport suspected terrorists for "not being conducive to the public good", I'm sure we can apply the same standards to Allen. After all, what is her oeuvre if not an musical assault against the ears, aimed at terrorising the average listener into smashing their radio whenever her insipid, overrated jarring compositions, complete with hilariously awful lyrics start floating across the airwaves? Additionally, her body of work has succeeded in brainwashing both record company executives and hopefuls themselves into thinking that they can emulate her unwarranted success, unsurprisingly resulting in the arrival of even less talented knock-offs, such as Kate Nash. Her most inspired, profound, life-affirming lyric?

Why you being a dickhead for? Stop being a dickhead Why you being a dickhead for? You're just fucking up situations

If that's not quite your cup of tea, how about her other crack at conquering the poetic brilliance of our most acclaimed songwriters? Behold the "Shit Song":

Darling don't give me shit Cos I know that you're full of it (you're full of shit, you're full of shit) Darling don't give me shit Cos I know that you're full of it (you're full of it, you're full of it)

Quite clearly, thanks to the actions of Lily 'n' Amy, we're facing an epidemic of worthless, tuneless morons taking over. If their music is not glorifying terrorism against the ear lobes, what is?

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8/07/2007 07:07:00 pm | |

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