Americans seem to arrest New Dawn leader

Just watch this video of the New Dawn leader, Nikolaos Mihaloliakos, being arrested yesterday in Athens. At the 51 second point you can clearly hear an American accented voice that seems to come from one of the guards shout "let's go" as the politician is about to be hustled into a car.

Now this video clip could be a fake, with the voice dubbed onto it as a bit of agitprop to rally the faithful on the Greek streets. Or it could be that the Greek government does not trust its own security forces and feels the need to hire American goons from a company like Blackwater to do its dirty work for it.

Interesting, though, isn't it?

Godfrey Bloom is latest MEP to leave UKIP

Godfrey Bloom MEP has resigned as a UKIP MEP and will sit as an independent. He joins Marta Andreasen, David Campbell Bannerman and Mike Nattrass in taking his hook from the party since the last Euro elections in 2009. In the last parliament, Tom Wise  and Ashley Mote both had their hooks taken by Mr Plod and ended up as guests of Her Majesty.

The moral of this story is that for UKIP, getting people elected to the European Parliament is the easy bit. The hard part comes afterwards in keeping them out of jail or preventing them from resigning the whip during their terms in office. 

The 11 September Anniversary

Today is the 11th of September. Exactly forty years ago today the Chilean armed forces mounted a coup against Salvador Allende Gossens, the country's legitimate president, an act which led to seventeen years of military rule and the deaths of thousands. It was also an act that would not have occurred without a nod and a wink from Washington.

In spite of the heroic efforts of the small presidential guard at la Moneda, the presidential palace shown here under attack, the building quickly fell and President Allende chose suicide rather than submit to the whims of America's dogs.

The legacy of this coup still reverberates today. It led to future socialist leaders in Latin-America realising that attacking the elite was a waste of time unless they also went after the parasitic middle class which grovels to that elite. For instance, in Venezuela, the late President Hugo Chavez Frias made the degradation of the middle class a priority for his government. Following the failure of the 2002 coup, which demonstrated that he had full control of the army rank and file, Chavez Frias adopted policies of high taxation and high inflation that had the effect of encouraging the middle class to leave the country. At the same time, the tiendas populares, the government owned chain of shops ensured that the ordinary Venezuelan were able to purchase basic food stuffs at either cost price or sometimes even below it.

Chavez Frias had learned from Chile that winning an election is only half the battle as the enemies of the working class will then seek to undermine the new system just as they did in Chile. They failed in Venezuela because the new government realised that the main danger to socialism comes not just from the old elite, but also from the middle lass who are desperate to preserve their privileges. 

One good reason to vote yes for Scotland

I'm a Mancunian who moved up to Edinburgh over the summer. One of the women at my local chippy asked me what I thought of my new home and I told her it was just like Manchester with a different accent. She laughed and nodded her head, before tossing a few extra chips onto my already belly busting pile. The point is that Scots have more in common with the Northern English than either have with the people in Southern England. To my mind that is the only reason why a working class person should vote no next September, to avoid leaving the Northern English in the lurch.

However, if people back home are willing to take all the nonsense that the Tories and New-Labour conspire to give them, then why should I run the risk that my life will revert to being as horrible as  it was before I moved up here? As things stand, London is willing to give Edinburgh almost anything at the moment, but if there is a no vote then Scotland could find that Westminster starts clawing back those powers as the nationalist threat lessens.

To give you one example. The government here has now banned the sale of council houses. Prior to that they emasculated the policy by preventing new tenants from buying their houses. As I write, Edinburgh is one big building site as more and more housing association flats are built, with the help of the council and government. Jump forward a decade and we could imagine a Scotland that does not have a housing problem because most people will be able to get a house pretty much at will. The fear must be that when the English see this they will demand the same, so to prevent that happening Westminster would force Scotland to fall back behind a line drawn in London.

For this reason I will almost certainly vote yes to independence next year.

Femen is a man's toy!

I've always been a great admirer of Femen, the Ukrainian based feminist group that puts topless pretty girls in front of cameras and then encouraged them to mouth off about something or other. Not that I cared about any of the causes, you understand, but these girls are my kind of feminists, even though the girl on the far right in the photo below looks as if she might want to lay off the cheeseburgers for a couple of months.

I'm not the only cove with a soft spot for these little darlings, just look at these two cops who are clearly nursing a blue veiner each:

As for Vladimir Putin, there is no mistaking his delight as a protester flashes her fun bags in his direction. I don't know about you, but I kind of admire old Putin who comes over as a man who knows what his middle leg is for, unlike the gang of pretty boys that we have running our country.

Even the Guardian ran stories about Femen, usually written by fat women, but I doubt if anyone actually read their turgid prose, as I suspect that it was just added to to make the photos acceptable to the sisterhood - and give the chaps something to smile over. The Sun has its page three and the Guardian has its pieces on Femen and we all get something to perv over. I ask you, what is not to like about this situation?

Well, sadly it has emerged that Femen is little more than a front set up by a Ukrainian man Victor Svyatski to get his leg over. I can see how the strategy panned out, as he chose the girls and always made sure that they were the shag-worthy ones ones. Then he convinced them that they were getting genuine publicity for the cause when in fact all that was happening was that chaps were admiring the tits on display. After that it was really only a matter of deciding which little darling was going to be given the honour of polishing his knob that night, and I am willing to bet that the beauties were fighting each other to get into Vic's bed.

All this leaves me with one question: just how will the Guardian fill its perv quota now that the sisterhood will no longer allow it to be reported seriously, with all those photos just added in to illustrate the story, of course.

The social work industry harasses thousands of mothers

The English branch of the social work industry  placed 4,000 children on its at risk register last year when they were still in their mothers' wombs! Even by the standards of that most loathsome of state security agencies, this marks a pretty new low in the harassment of women when they are at their most vulnerable. 

I have had few personal dealings with these creatures, but for quite some time I did help to fight the good fight by using what little talent I have as a wordsmith to help agitate against their activities. I think that the time has come to start reprinting some of my older works here as they seem even more valid today than they were a decade ago when I first wrote them.

For the record, if you are going to expand higher education down to almost primary school level, then the only way in which the bovine "graduates" of those "universities" are going to find employment is in local government. Capitalism is not as stupid as we on the left sometimes fondly imagine it to be, and any City institution will prefer the Oxford or St. Andrew's man over the wretched poly wallah, so social work is pretty much the only option open to these chancers.

They are the people who when I was a youngster were the foremen and chargehands in factories, and who used to strut around self importantly in overalls that were differently coloured that the rest of the shop floor. Today they manage to get into some wretched old polytechnic that has been allowed to degrade the name of university, and on that basis slither their way into a local government sinecure such as social work. As my mother used to say, they are the types who have got a class above themselves and need to be brought down a peg or two.

I have always regarded the middle class in general as scum who haven't got the balls to be workers nor the brass to be gaffers, but the lower middle class, many of whom come from my type of background are little better than graveyard rats to be taunted at every opportunity.

Time to start having the fuckers again!

Why are the Americans seeming to back away from bombing Syria?

President Obama has decided not to attack Syria without first seeking the approval of both Houses of Congress for the act. Congress does not convene until the 9th September, and he doesn't need their authority, anyway, as under the War Powers Act he can launch any attack he wants for 60 days. In fact, if Congress says nothing, he can carry on killing at will beyond the 60 days. All presidents have done that so why has Obama decided to hand the matter over to Congress?

Is it possible that Russia has drawn a line in the sand and has warned America that they will not allow their Syrian ally to be destroyed? I don't have any evidence for that, but since we went to war in 2003 on the basis of a student thesis, sexed up with some old tosh that Tony Blair pulled out of his arsehole, evidence doesn't seem to be needed in these post-modern times.

Seriously, the Senate will probably vote next week on this matter, but the House is unlikely to schedule it until the week after, at least. A joint resolution, which is what Obama is after, carries the weight of law once the president has signed it, and obviously it needs to support of both Houses of Congress.

What we have here is a grand old Duke of York situation where the army has been marched up to the top of the hill and then marched all the way down again. There has to be a reason for that and the most logical one is that Russia has quietly put the frighteners on. If that is the case, then the vote will be lost and the crisis has passed.

By the way, the French are now demanding that their National Assembly be allowed to vote on any attack, so even if I am wrong about the reasons for the Congress being allowed to vote, there is still a good chance that America will have to bomb alone.

All good stuff!