The Soweto Gospel Choir in Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Festival doesn't officially start until the 1st August, but that hasn't stopped all and sundry from beginning the street performances. The highlight of this year will be the Soweto Gospel Choir, four members of which entertained the crowds in Edinburgh today. 

Many English people support a yes vote.

The polls show that a majority of English people in Scotland will vote no to independence, but as always the devil is in the detail. The detail here is that the bulk of English population is made up of middle class types who have an economic interest if keeping hold of the Union. That's not the case for all of us, however.

I was in my local Asda earlier today and since the place was quiet I got to chat with the checkout girl. From her accent she was obviously a Londoner, and she told me that she had moved up here a year ago, which is the same amount of time that I have been in Scotland. She explained that along with her boyfriend they had just bought a two-bedroom flat with a garden and parking space for £72,000, "and in London you can't get a garage for that," she said.

The girl went on to explain that she gets annoyed at the TV because all the reports about London only talk about the rich, and everyone forgets the native London working class who are being forced out of their city. When her boyfriend suggested that they cut their losses and move to his home town she agreed with alacrity.

I told her that I was voting yes in September and she nodded her head and said that so was she.

This story can be repeated across Edinburgh when it comes to English working class people who have had a bellyful of a country that has become the Land of Dopey Tories, especially in the South. To make matters worse, although Ed Miliband clearly has his heart in the right place, he still has to think about all those aspirational  scrotes in Southern England, the types who wanked over Thatcher and then drooled for Blair. They cannot be ignored in England, but in Scotland they do not exist, so I can well understand the people who move north to be in a country that reminds them of what England once was before it all went pear-shaped.

Let's hope that a miracle occurs and we can wake up on the 19th September and know that we now live in that part of North Britain that is free of Tory rabble and the  arsewipes who support them.

Sunday Sport Spurt Guide

Standards are slipping at the Sunday Sport which led to editor Nick Appleyard objecting strongly to a headline which read: "MAN LOSES B*LLOCKS BUT DOCS SAVE HIS BELL-END!" To quote from the all-departments e-mail that went out: "Bollocks is NOT censored, even in headlines, and who the hell puts a hyphen in bellend?"

Just to make sure that the Spurt never lets the organ's standards slip again, the following style guide was helpfully enclosed:

SHIT: Full out in copy and in headlines

FUCK: F**k in copy and in headlines

CUNT: C**t in copy and headlines

WANK: Full out in copy, w**k in headlines

TWAT: Full out in copy, tw*t in headlines

COCK: Full out in copy and in headlines

BOLLOCKS: Full out in copy and in headlines

BELLEND: One word, full out in copy and headlines

Cheers: Popbitch

The day a pussy got her revenge

You have to laugh at the things women get up to, especially when they go all hysterical, as Dave Foster (35) can testify. Karen Gibson (33) is his now ex-girlfriend who discovered that our Dave had slipped a length to her best friend, so she through a girly wobbler and created a banner which accused the poor bloke of fingering cats. She then went to the trouble of stringing it out on a bridge over the A500, near where it joins the M6 at Crewe.

For six hours last Wednesday the banner hung over the road where it was seen by thousands of drivers. It even featured on Twitter with people trying to figure out who Dave Foster was and why he fingered cats.

Dave takes up the story: “I started to get calls on my mobile from mates who had seen the sign and were wondering why I’d taken to fingering cats. As soon as I heard about it, I knew that Karen had found out I’d shagged her mate. When I called her, she put the phone down on me. I think she was a bit upset."

Typical, isn't it? He goes to all the trouble to call the girl up and because she's feeling a bit upset she doesn't want to talk to the poor fellow. It's always about them as far as today's women are concerned.

We'll let Karen have the last word: “That bastard shagged my best friend. In my book, that’s even worse than fingering a cat. I hope the bastard gets beaten to death by cat activists, or something. The bastard.”

Yet another social worker writes - or does he?

Last week this blog was pretty much inundated with social work types, all screaming abuse at your truly for refusing to take seriously their pathetic demands that I stop treating them as parasitic, lower middle class scum. Sorry boys and girls, but that is never going to happen.

Needless to say, being complete and utter fucktards who have nothing better to do with their working lives than spend long hours reading this blog, many of them left comments on very old postings. I am not sure why they did that, but whenever anyone is dealing with a social worker it is always best to keep in mind just how utterly useless they are at everything they do, so leaving one idiotic rant on one post and then making a follow up comment on another is pretty much par for the course from a social worker.

That said, this comment which I reproduce in full below is somewhat different. It's as stupid as anything else that any of these parasites have ever written, but I have my doubts about is veracity. I will explain why in a moment, but for now the comment appeared on a very popular post from 2013 which explained that Femen is not actually a genuine feminist movement, instead it is a stooge organisation that was set up by a man who wanted his very own harem.

Hello Mr Bell. Thank you for posting my comment and thank you for your reply. Ignoring the predictably Americanised nature of your chosen terms of abuse, let me explain to you why I object to some of your postings. You seem to think it is acceptable to comment on women's physical appearance in terms of their attractiveness to you, which is classic male arrogance and sexism. Reducing a feminist political protest to an opportunity to leer lecherously at a photograph of topless women is itself crass. Having the sheer temerity to add comments about the slight variation (from an idealised, male-dictated 'norm') in the body shape of one of the protesters is rude, adolescent and unnecessary. It attempts to reassert the thousands of years of male control of women's bodies which feminism has been challenging for decades. The general tone of your postings on women is a curious combination of 'Carry On' style adolescent leering and misogynistic hatred, neither of which are appropriate in this day and age. Finally, a word about the terms you choose as insults which are, in my view, deeply revealing of the precise natuire (sic) of your mysogny (sic). The term 'pussy-whipped' conflates together the vagina and violence. Does this perhaps indicate a deep-seated fear of women in general and their vaginas in particular on your part? The suiggestion (sic) that I am 'dickless' is equal;ly (sic) interesting as dicklessnes (sic) in itself is usually an indication of femaleness. The fact that you actually believe a state of dicklessness is inferior to a state of dickedness indicates that it is noeither (sic) certain women nor certain attiutudes (sic) that offfend (sic) you but women themselves. You are clearly afraid of women and this fear translates into hatred. This is classic mysogny (sic). It may not be your fault that you are a mysogynist (sic) (as a social worker I understand that people are largely the products of their environment) but it is unbecoming to flaunt this ugly trait in public.

Yeah, I know, on the surface it is inane isn't it? Not only that, but it looks as if the dickhead who wrote it didn't even read my post properly. Remember that it was about the fact that Femen is a stooge outfit, so only an idiot could then go on to claim that the group's antics are part of serious politics. Now you might say that feminism as a whole is nothing more than a bourgeois pose that is adopted by ugly women who hate men more than they hate other women, but that is not the point, is it?  

Then we have the spelling mistakes,especially the fact that the writer cannot even spell "misogyny" correctly. Again, we take that as being normal from a social worker because we just assume that as a breed they  are semi-educated buffoons with a desire for status who use big words to make themselves feel important.

Yet, there is something wrong with this comment which leads me to believe that it is not genuine social work wank, but instead a rather engaging bit of trolling. In other words, this writer is not as stupid as he tries to pretend, being someone who sat down, presumably with a cigarette in his mouth and cup of tea steaming at his elbow, to give us some stereotypical social work spurt to amuse himself.

Why do I think that? Mainly because it is too perfect an example of how these clowns write. It is as if someone went over to a social work site and grabbed a few ideas from the genuine dickheads. Then he sat down and covered everything in one paragraph. It's a Daily Mail idea of social work, in other words, and very funny for all that.

Now, we had better just hope that this theory is correct. If it isn't, and if this is a genuine social worker, then the need to organise ourselves to pressure the political parties to stop providing employment for these sub-normals is rather more pressing that I ever imagined.

A social worker writes...

There are many things that are amusing about the social work industry, but the one aspect of them which has me chuckling with great glee is their puerile desire for respect that comes coupled with a pathetic demand for status. That status is never going to be awarded to them, something which I suspect they know, deep down in their reptilian minds, but it doesn't stop them pleading. 

A few days ago the Guardian attempted to present these parasites in a good light, and needless to say my quite reasonable comment led a gang of social work types  leaving whatever foetid hole they normally inhabit and start screaming an entertaining torrent of abuse at me.

Yesterday one Gavin Tucker, a social worker in his mid-thirties who works in Havering, decided to leave a comment on this blog which I reproduce here, since it basically proves pretty much everything that I have ever said about these pathetic individuals:

Dear Ken, thought  I would drop you a line as this vehicle for your ego contains so few comments. I am one of the 'filth' who dares to care. I have also read your poorly informed attacks on the Social Work profession. I think you should spend a bit of time with Social Workers and actually find out what they do. You might be surprised, as Social Workers help and protect people everyday. The reality of Social Work is different to the stereotypes you peddle. All your attacks serve to do is align you with those who harm others. You portray the Social Work profession as some kind of secret police, when in fact we are an unfairly maligned profession that is, if anything, disliked by the establishment. I might add also that Social Work contains many talented and bright people, many of whom have previously been supported by Social Work themselves. I might add, just to establish my credentials, that I have two masters degrees and have attended three Russel  Group universities (incl Edinburgh University!). I would be interested to know your credentials. Gavin Tucker 

Just look at this ejaculatory spurt for a moment. When you have finished laughing, consider how outraged Tucker must have been to take the trouble to write this drivel in the first place. Then consider that if I had criticised a genuine profession in the same way that I go after the social work industry the reaction would have been one of bemusement. The true professions are recognised as such by the broader society, thus their members do not have to stake hysterical claims like this because their membership of an elite body is taken as read.

In just two hundred words or so, Tucker felt the need to use the word "profession" three times. That is not making a  case, rather it is the abject pleading of a man who knows, deep down inside, that he is nothing more than the representative of a body that is about as much use as the rats which dwell in a city's sewers. 

You will note that he invites me to engage in a pissing contest with him by posting my academic curriculum vitae on-line. What the fool fails to understand is that this is a political debate about how we allocate resources in our country. My view is that providing employment for the bovine is a good thing, just so long as those mouth breathers leave the rest of us alone. Thus Tucker can social work his mates, write reports that are never implemented and advocate actions that are never taken, but what he should not be able to do is dictate to the rest of us how we live our lives and run our families.

He makes the point that social workers are not secret policemen, and I agree entirely with that view. I had a close encounter of the very unwanted kind with Rhodesian security men in 1977 and many of them had served on the front lines in the brutal war that was then being waged in that country. There is nothing brave about social workers, which is why they take an army of thuggish policemen along when they make their dawn raids on people's houses.

Viewing Tucker's wank overall, I sense a fear  underlying his words; a fear that we may one day wake up to just how much money we squander every year providing cushy numbers for types like him. Our country has many faults, but it is still a mature democracy and the system is flexible enough to accommodate varying demands that are placed upon it. If the people of Scotland can force a referendum on the country's future, and if the people of Britain can push the Tories into promising a referendum on our membership of the EU, it is perfectly possible to push for the destruction of the social work vampires.

As I have said many times before, it only takes political will and British society can be rid of these parasites once and for all. Change the laws and we can then live our lives in peace, and ex-social workers can get used to their new status as employees of McDonald's.

Update: The little retard left another comment as a follow-up to the first. Alas, he left it on an unrelated post, which means that anyone stumbling on it by accident will wonder what the hell he was babbling about. I guess this is all pretty much par for the course from one of these head the balls.

Great War propaganda in Edinburgh

Pitt Street, in the Leith district of Edinburgh has this long forgotten and now badly damaged reminder of Great War propaganda on one of its buildings. Quite when the bas-relief was created in unclear, but it was most likely about 1915 when atrocity stories about the German army in Belgium were at their height.

Going from left to right, we can see a civilian about to be stabbed by a soldier, then a mother pleading for her baby who is being held by another wicked Hun. Just behind and now barely visible, is another soldier doing something terrible to a woman. As our eyes move to the right we can see what appears to be two civilians, one with a child in her arms and to their right is what appears to be a soldier, who seems to be about to club the two women.

Originally, it looks as if the work formed a triptych, but the other two panels have now been lost with only the spaces that they once occupied remaining on the building:

The German army did behave atrociously in Belgium, with summary executions of civilians deemed to be partisans a common occurrence as the army marched through the country. However, Britain went to war on the legalistic grounds of defending Belgium's neutrality and that was not enough to encourage the young men of the day to volunteer in sufficient numbers, which is probably why the press began a campaign to talk up the atrocities to turn the war into a moral crusade. Hence this rather curious and now sadly ignored work which still just about stands in Edinburgh today. 

Romanian Gypsy Artistry

I came across this Romanian gypsy in Princes Street, Edinburgh. He works with sand, a bottle of water to damp it, and a knife to create his artistry with. The dogs' eyes are glass, but the rest was created from a lump of went sand and a great deal of skill.

What Yes Scotland needs to do to turn things around

Back in the spring it was obvious that the loosely connected, political insurgent groups who were coming together to campaign for a yes vote were making major inroads, with the result that the Unionists were becoming frightened that they might lose the war. They set up stooge grassroots bodies of their own which were widely ridiculed. Today the campaign for Scottish independence seems to have stalled with only about forty percent of the population being committed to a yes vote in September. What on earth is going wrong?

The problem with insurgencies is that if they don't maintain their momentum, the better organised government forces will invariably recover the upper hand. This insurgency seems to have run out of steam, with the result that the activists are now talking to each other rather than to the wider society. Had they created a machine, then by now their army would be knocking on doors, finding out who the committed were and giving them posters to stick in their windows. That is not happening, which is why I sent an e-mail to the local yes team and asked them to deliver me a stack of posters, with the promise that I would speak to people on my street and try to turn at least one Leith block into a yes district. Those posters were promised for the weekend that has just ended, and needless to say they never arrived.

I can understand what is going on. Most yes activists consist of the graduate without a future, that new sociological group that I discussed in April. The problem is that such people learned their tactics at university, and may be very well clued in to the modern methods of communication, but those methods don't count for much when a sizeable chunk of your target voters do not actually use the internet.

What is needed is a machine that is run by campaigning veterans who can organise a district into bite sized chunks and then send their foot soldiers out every single night with canvass cards in their hands to knock on doors.

The failure to create such a machine may be the one reason why this campaign is going so badly, but there is still time, just, to turn things around if the will is there.

Uncensored search engine results

As you will be aware, the European Union has decided to censor the search engines, which is why finding out the truth about sleazy politicians has suddenly become more difficult. If you don't believe me, just type in the name of someone rich and loathsome, and at the bottom of the search page you are likely to see the news that some links have been removed by EU order.

A workaround exists which will have to do for the moment until someone comes up with something better. Just type in www.google.com/ncr and that will take you to the American site, and you will not then be redirected to the censored British version. If you just type in Google.com there is a very good chance that links will take you to your country specific version, which of course is now censored.

Noes seem to have unbeatable lead in the Scottish referendum

The unionists look fair set to win the Indy-Ref on the 18th September, which is something that all the polls agree on. What they disagree about is the relative tally of the yes and no votes, with figures fluctuating between an average for YouGov of 41 percent for the yes campaign and Panelbase who put the nationalists on an average of 46 percent. The variation is due to the different political weighting  that the five main polling companies use to exclude the don't knows. It all comes down to past voting, with YouGov weighting heavily against yes because they believe that many former Labour voters switched to the SNP because they wanted Alex Salmond to be first minister.We will not know which company got it right until after the referendum, which rather defeats the object of the exercise, so why do I think that the noes will have it?

Aside from the obvious answer which is that all the polls agree on the result, even if they disagree on the amounts, the outcome seems obvious to me because of the total lack of enthusiasm for either team. In fact, if you did not know that there was a referendum heading your way the month after next, you would not know that Scotland is facing her biggest choice in the lifetimes of the people who live here.

I can count on one hand the number of yes posters that I have seen in people's windows, and I don't need any fingers at all to count the no posters because I haven't seen any at all. As any old political hand will tell you, window posters are one way to judge people's  involvement, and the fact that there are hardly any to be seen suggests to me that the average punter is very disengaged indeed.

The nationalist grassroots campaign is magnificent, and a few weeks ago I thought that it would begin to sweep all before it. However, it seems to have reached a plateau, which leads me to suspect that they are now talking to each other rather than to the wider society. 

That wider society seems to be indifferent to the referendum. I use it as an conversation topic when I meet someone, and am invariably met with a response that consists of little more than a shrug, or a vague comment that it might be a good/bad idea. For instance, yesterday I played host to a Virgin Media bod who came to fix my broadband, and in between pulling cables out of his bag, he told me that he was indifferent to the whole event. 

Aside from the committed nationalists, the only people that I have met who were keen to vote yes are the unemployed, underemployed and the claimants. Independence is a gamble, and it seems to me that only the people at the bottom of the heap are willing to take the risk in the hope that their lives will improve with independence. The rest may very well want to keep Southern English Toryism away from them, but thanks to the Scottish Parliament they feel that they can do that, anyway, so why risk a leap in the dark?

The position could change, of course, as well still have eleven weeks to go. As a yes voter I hope that things do move our way. It's just that I see no signs of that happening.

Introducing Kathy Wiles, the true face of Unionism

Until today when she resigned, Kathy Wiles was the Labour candidate for the Westminster seat of Angus, currently held by the SNP. What can we say about her, other than the obvious that she could do with a decent hairdresser, dressmaker and brassiere? That she supports the Union is obvious from her Facebook page. That she hates claimants is equally obvious from the comment she left back on the 25 April, which you can read if you click on the photo to enlarge it. 

Kathy came to prominence when she commented on a group of children who were photographed outside the Scottish headquarters of the BBC as part of a protest against the Beeb's perceived pro-Union bias. A Brit-Nat posted the photo on Twitter and commented sarcastically on it, which lead to various types piling in. The comments got more and more off the wall until someone had the bright idea of comparing the five Scottish children to the Hitler Youth. Not to be outdone, Kathy Wiles then Tweeted this gem:

She quickly deleted it, but this is the internet, folks, and more than one person had already grabbed a screenshot. To make matters even nicer, someone then had the bright idea of digging a little deeper into Kath's background to see if they could find any more gems, which is how the Facebook page pictured above came to see the light of day. Kathy then deleted her Facebook account, but by then it was too late as the hounds were off following yet more scents.

Late last year, Kathy commented on a newspaper article in which she gave vent to yet more spleen about claimants:

What has become clear from other questions that have been asked during polling exercises is that those reliant on benefits (but not pensioners) believe that they will be better off under independence, while those working believe that they will be worse off- in other words working households feel they will be required to foot the bill for the SNP's left-wing welfare policies. 

So here we have an official Labour Party candidate who slags off the SNP for its  left-wing polices, as well as hating claimants and thinks that some children having their photo taken in front of the BBC HQ are putative Nazis. You couldn't make this shit up, could you? Could it get any worse for Kathy Wiles I hear to ask?

Actually, it could, because the silly cow seems to believe that only ethnic Scots should be allowed to vote in the independence referendum. In August last year she moaned at the number of foreigners who have the vote and could use it to deprive her of British nationality.

Kathy Wiles woke up as the Labour candidate for Angus today and spent the morning and early afternoon deleting as much of the evidence of her own stupidity as she could. Eventually, as more and more people piled in to dig up yet more information, she threw in the towel and resigned as the prospective candidate for Angus. 

What can we say about a party that selected this very weird woman as a candidate? Labour is supposed to be the party of the working class and claimants are an integral part of that class. It should be remembered that many of them do the McJobs and claim benefits to top up their crap wages. Labour is also supposed to be the party of the ethnic minorities, and here was a candidate who felt that those minorities should be disenfranchised.

It looks to me as if the Unionists will win the referendum vote, but an awful lot of people are not going to forgive and forget the utter contempt that this candidate has for the core Labour voters. What Kathy Wiles said was only what the Labour Party nationally also believes. She would probably have got away with those comments had the referendum not put her in the spotlight.

The Labour Party will pay a heavy price in May 2015 when an awful lot of Yes voters remember the contempt that the party has for them.