The day Jim Murphy met The Pope.

A question has been going the rounds ever since this photo of Jim Murphy, Labour's Scottish leader, emerged a while back. Was Spud dumping his load or shooting his wad when the shutter clicked?

The people in Scotland demand answers to these pertinent questions.

Natalie Bennett and her brain fart interview

Following right along from today's earlier posting about the bourgeois wankfest that is the Greens, Natalie Bennett the party's leader has just given  what is probably the worst interview that any party leader has ever given in the history of British politics. If you don't believe me, just click this link and listen to it for yourself.

The web is roaring with laughter at Natalie's brain fart, but I am still inclined to think that it will make no difference to hardcore voter turnout for this collection of posturing ninnies. The reason as I said earlier today is that Greenery is little more than the pose of that section of the middle class that really wants the Tories to win, but don't have the nerve to vote for Cameron's gang. 

However, people who are leaning in the Green direction will be reminded that if you have half a mind to vote Green then that is all you need. If that happens then with luck the poseurs will drop down to a more acceptable three to five percent of the vote, concentrated in the wealthier suburbs where Labour does not feature anyway. 

For the rest of you, there is no no excuse whatsoever not to vote Labour in England.

Why we cannot afford the luxury of voting Green

Thoughtful Tories are clearly concerned that UKIP will take enough votes off them to allow Labour to come through the middle and grab a few seats in May. Given the rise in support for the Greens, Labour must also be worried that the same thing will happen to them. It is a ridiculous situation, with the Tories worried about a party that wants to take Britain back to 1950 and its one television channel and Labour fearful of a party that hankers after 1450 with every house having to keep a cellar full of turnips in preparation for the next famine.

Back in the day I voted Labour because I wanted to keep the wages up and the management down. Becoming unemployed in the early 1980s, I wanted Labour to retake power so as to restore the status quo ante, and in the meantime fight to keep my dole payments up to scratch by opposing Tory cuts. Today, as a disabled man reliant on benefits, I want a Labour-led government that will cease the Tory war against all claimants.

All good bread and butter stuff. The same type of things that led people in Scotland to switch from Labour to the SNP, because the latter has banned the sale of council houses, and kept such payments as Education Maintenance Allowance alive north of the River Tweed when the Tories scrapped them in England.  

If I still lived in England I would vote Labour, without a doubt. Of course I would like to see a referendum that would hopefully lead to British withdrawal from the European Union, and yes I am gagging for levels of taxation that would see the middle class taxed to the levels where they have to pimp their daughters, but I also accept that neither of these policies is liable to happen under Labour. So I would grit my teeth and take the best that is on offer.

 The Greens do not offer an alternative that appeals to many people. Instead what they offer is an opportunity for a well-fed section of the middle class to play posture politics and allow the Tories to snatch a seat or two by taking votes off Labour. If you think that I am being alarmist, then just yesterday I was reminded by an old friend in the United States of just what can happen when bourgeois posturing  gets out of control. Back in 2000 the American Greens ran Ralph Nader as their candidate for President of the United States and he took just over 97,000 votes in Florida. That state went to George Bush by a mere 537 votes, giving him the White House.

Nader and his followers have argued that they are not to blame, and the fault lies with the right-wing shift in the Democrats, but that argument ignores the possibility that had the Democrats moved leftward, they would have lost votes on their right flank. In a two-horse race, both parties are giant coalitions, and people have to make the compromises necessary to ensure that their team wins so that they get some of what they want.

Under Miliband, the Labour opposition prevented the Tories from obeying the Americans and going to war against Syria. The party has now pledged to introduce a mansion tax to fund further NHS spending, something which is a good in itself, but made even nicer here by the fact that it will hit the aspirational scrote element in London especially hard. As revenge for the 1980s goes, the mansion tax proposal isn't much, but it is something the cheer for, and more than people will get from any other party in England.

If there is something to vote for with English Labour, why are around eight percent of the population seemingly determined to throw away the chance to be rid of the Tories? I suspect that some of them are just mental defects, but the bulk do tend to come over as people who are well cushioned economically, but want to pretend that they are right-on and radical. In other words they are middle class crap who have done well out of globalisation, but who want to pretend that they are part of the proletariat. Voting Green gives them the best of both worlds: a Tory government that they can pretend that they did not vote for.

Voting Green anywhere in Britain is nothing more than a posture, and those who thus posture need to be treated with derision and contempt by everyone who wants to see an end to this Tory government.

CitizenFour is a worthy Oscar winner and wakeup call to us all.

CiizenFour won the Oscar for best documentary at last night's award ceremony, and if you haven't seen it yet, do so as quickly as possible. Trust me, it does for mobile 'phones what Psycho did for showers.

The film follows the first eight days that Edward Snowden spent in Hong Kong with the film-maker  Laura Poitras, and the Guardian journalists Glen Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill. It is obvious from the start that neither of the two reporters has any clear idea what Snowden is talking about, which is good because most of the viewers won't either. Instead of explaining it all using a voice-over, Laura Poitras allows us to realise the terrifying implications of what Snowden is saying through their eyes. 

We learn not just that the state spies on us, but that it spies on pretty much all of us via the mundane items that we take for granted, such as our mobile 'phones. Prior to 2013 when these Hong Kong interviews took place, few of us realised that the Anglo-American states had taken surveillance to levels that the old East German Stasi could only dream about.

To make matters worse for the British viewers, whilst the Americans still have some protection under their constitution, the British have hardly any protections from their own state, which is why Laura Poitras has decided not to visit this country for the time being.

If that sounds alarmist, then towards the end of the documentary we are reminded of just how the British version of the old Strasi pulled in Glen Greenwald's boyfriend under the all-covering excuse of terrorism.

My only criticism of CitizenFour is the fact that it ends just as Ed Snowden is about to leave Hong Kong, and it doesn't follow the next week which saw him leave for Ecuador, only to become trapped in Moscow. That said, Laura Poitras became certain that she was being followed so it made sense for her to vanish back to Germany with her reels of film. By the way, she edited everything in the German capital for fear that if she took the raw footage to the USA it would be seized by America's home-grown Securitate.

Another point that the film might have made is that Snowden is not the leftist that many people in Britain think he is. Actually, he is a libertarian admirer of America's Ron Paul, who began his road to whistle blowing by objecting to Barrack Obama's desire to ban the sale of assault weapons.

Small caveats aside, the film did clear up one matter that had stuck in my mind ever since this story broke, which is that Lindsay Mills, Snowden's delightfully exhibitionist girlfriend, did manage to join him in Russia. He had left her in the house that they shared in the USA with just a note saying that he would be away for a few days on business, and the first that she knew about anything was when Uncle Sam's Securitate began banging on the front door.

As a lesson in the raw power of the United States, and the craven desire of the British ruling class to grovel to that power as a kicked dog whimpers at its master's feet, this film cannot be matched. It needs to be watched by everyone who has ever thought that they are safe from prying eyes, especially those people who think that British sovereignty needs to be saved from Brussels. Sadly, it has already been sold to Washington. 

Press go into self-righteous mode over Manchester bus brawl

The press are making a big play on this fairly typical 5.00am Manchester bus brawl between four cocky, pissed as farts, Wythenshawe chavs and two Spaniards. Well, it is reported that they were Spanish, but I couldn't hear the accents so will have to take that on trust. I suppose tales like this provide cheap space fillers for the papers as well as giving them another chance to scream "wacism" and "homophobia." Quite how a spat between Europeans can be called racism is anyone's guess, but the precious metropolitan souls who write this drivel were probably doing it on autopilot.

Here's the video:

What can we say about the delightful combination of cheap lager,  bags of chips and rampant chavery that all came together on an early morning bus to that centre of urban sophistication known as Wythenhawe?

I suppose that the first thing that comes to mind is that Wythenshawe really was lovely half a century ago when my parents took me there as a Sunday treat to visit my two aunts, Back then everyone had a job because when the estate was built in the 1920s the city council ensured that space was provided for light industry so that the new residents of Wythenshawe had new jobs as well as light, airy new homes.

Those light engineering firms went the way of everything else during Thatcher's War, and that left the people of Wythenshawe high, dry and with their dicks in their hands. The Labour council then encouraged technology firms to move in, but needless to say, none of them provided anything other than the odd cleaning job to the army of unskilled and semi-skilled people who lived in the area. Also needless to say, Wythenshawe quickly began its death spiral to become the shithole that it is today. Nice work, Labour.

That doesn't justify the piss headery that we can see on the video, but it does go some way to explaining it, which is more than the press are doing with their idle chants of racism.

Funnily enough - actually it's more than funny, it's seriously hilarious - if you can read Spanish you might want to visit the YouTube page where the video is hosted. Scroll down to the comments, and you will find any number of Latin-Americans piling in to defend British chavdom against the descendants of the wicked Spanish colonialists.

The self-loathing metropolitan middle class may like to keep that in mind before they start squealing again, but they probably won't.

I think that I'll leave the last word to the insouciant Manchester police spokesman who said that, "It's not been reported to police, but if it is we will investigate."

Welcome to urban Britain, in other words. It's what the middle class wanted and voted for.

Social work industry objects again to people's politics

Just when you thought that the social work industry couldn't get any more retarded in their desire to attack political thought, up they come with another example of their jaw-dropping stupidity.

Two years ago they tried to stop a couple in Rotherham from fostering children because of their membership of UKIP; now they have tried to forcibly adopt a child in Darlington because his father is a member of the English Defence League.

The mother of the 13 month old baby in Darlington does not live with the father and supports his wish to have custody of their child. However, the parasites of social work then got involved on the ludicrous grounds that the EDL is "immoral." They added to this the fact that the father a decade ago when he was 17 was foolish enough to have sex with a 13 year old girl. He wasn't prosecuted for that, probably because even Mr Plod isn't daft enough to try and drag a teenager to court for doing what all teenagers do these days. Nevertheless, for Darlington social work industry that was evidence that he was also "immoral," and grounds enough to seize his child.

The case ended up in the High Court before Judge Sir James Munby who ruled: "The city fathers of Darlington and Darlington's director of social services are not guardians of morality." He went on to say: The justification for state intervention is harm to children, not parental immorality."

I have asked this question many times before, but it is always worth repeating: what do we think that we are doing even listening to the knuckle-dragging, educationally subnormal members of the social work industry, still less providing them with cushy numbers on the local government gravy train?

By the way, as a rule when I post about the latest act of madness by these fuckwits, an army of them crawl over here from whichever sewer they inhabit to take over my comment box. Please don't this time, as I am really not in the mood for being nice to any representatives of British headbangery.

Channel 4 give a lesson in how not to smear UKIP

Did anyone watch the Channel 4 mockumentary tonight? In case you missed it don't worry because it was appallingly bad.

Satire involves mockery, but there was nothing to laugh about in this po-faced account of the horrors that awaits the UK if Nigel's gang take power in May. The script was banal and the ending obvious. Pulling holes in the story is a waste of time as there were too many to list, but the one where a newsreader announces that sixty-eight percent of the population support the new government's drive to kick out illegal immigrants sticks in my mind because minutes later we are treated to riots in the street. Trust me, if such a big percentage supported our Nige then the couple of hundred remaining Trots in Britain would be back at daddy's Surrey pile shitting their loads.

What made such a good idea so bad? It seems as if the grandsons of the late Sir Bufton Tufton converted to New Labour in the 1990s and their children are now making TV programmes of which this is a fine example of the genre. These wealthy children of the Metropolitan elite have convinced themselves that UKIP means the end of civilisation as we know it, probably because it is unique in being a mainstream party that is not run by them or their friends.

Dear God, UKIP really is a party that is made up of small town cardigan wearers who seem to have been asleep since the League of Empire Loyalists folded in the 1960s.  They are ripe for mockery and deserve to have to piss taken out of them on so many levels.

This just isn't one of them.

Foul-mouthed Sarah Haseler: Labour's secret weapon

Meet Sarah Haseler, a 30-something Media Studies graduate of the University of Exeter. In 2013 she and her boyfriend took over a firm called Right Price which flogs double glazing out of its base in Plymouth and she is now its managing director.

Last week a former soldier called James Allen had an informal meeting with Sarah as the company wanted to recruit a self-employed labourer.

Sarah promised to send Jim her thoughts and when she failed to do that he sent her an e-mail. This is her reply, please click to enlarge:

Now. let's just ignore the foul mouth rant for a moment and ponder on what type of person rejects a labourer in part because he is old, ugly and missing a few teeth? 

Old and ugly he may be, but Jim is not daft because as soon as he got the e-mail he got in touch with the SWNS press agency and sold them the story, which is why it is now in just about every paper in the country.

Sarah seems to enjoy her potty mouthed rants as her boyfriend found out when she commented on a photo of her that he posted to Facebook:

Now I know that the University of Exeter is a bastion of Sloanery, and chock full of Oxford rejects, and under normal circumstances I would leave this tale alone, but these are not normal times are they, folks?

We have an election coming up and if the Tories win then people like Sarah also win. If that happens then middle class insolence like this will only increase. I am older than Jim and I can remember when types like Sarah kept their pretty mouths shut around working class people, no matter what they thought in private or said over the dinner table.

Since 1997, since New Labour took power in other words, this insolence has increased, is increasing and needs to be diminished. Labour today under Ed Miliband needs our votes, which is why the party is frantically conjuring up policies that they think will appeal to the likes of Jim Allan, and me.

Hopefully, a new Labour government with SNP support in May will make the likes of Sarah Hasler even more foul-mouthed than they are already, but in private, amongst their friends. Not in public, so that we can go back to just ignoring them, so long as they pay their taxes.

Hopefully those taxes will be very high indeed.

Nigel Farage's weird claims about Scotland

Nigel Farage has made the curious claim that the SNP cannot hold the balance of power after the next election on the grounds that the SNP will only take votes off Labour, and thus what will happen is a swap of leftist seats from one party to the other.

This headbanging thesis ignores the fact that the Liberal-Democrats have eleven seats in Scotland, and at least nine of them are under threat from the SNP. In fact, such are the majorities in Labour's West Coast strongholds, that it is quite likely that the bulk of them will remain Labour after May, so put together those two factors combine to make Farage's point risible.

Is it just me or is Farage losing his formerly steady touch?

Tory list of no-hope seats is leaked

The first leak from the Tory camp is out and it's a delightful list of the seats that the party thinks are either rock solid or no-hopers; either way resources are not to be put into any of them. Interestingly enough, Rochester and Strood is on the list which suggests that the Tories have written than one off to UKIP already. Manchester Withington is also there, and that came as a surprise given that Withington is as bourgeois as they come.

Here's the full list:

Ben Adams – Stoke-on-Trent North
Bim Afolami – Lewisham Deptford
Festus Akinbusoye – West Ham
Heidi Allen – South Cambridgeshire
Valerie Allen – Sefton Central
Sue Arnold – Walsall South
Liam Ascough – Stoke-on-Trent Central
Andrew Atkinson – Wrexham
Anwen Barry – Arfon
Peter Bedford – Bolsover
Huw Bell – North East Fife
James Bellis – Vauxhall
James Bird – Birmingham Hall Green
Will Blair – Holborn and St Pancras
Alex Boulter – Birmingham Selly Oak
Miles Briggs – Edinburgh South
Louise Burfitt-Dons – Nottingham North
Alexander Burnett – West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine
Kim Caddy – Streatham
James Cartlidge – South Suffolk
Jo Churchill – Bury St Edmunds
James Cleverly – Braintree
Rebecca Coulson – City of Durham
Peter Cuthbertson – Darlington
James Daly – Bolton North East
Chris Daniels – Stockton North
Dehenna Davison – Kingston Upon Hull North
Keith Dewhurst – Cynon Valley
Oliver Dowden – Hertsmere
Sarah Downes – Bassetlaw
Spencer Drury – Eltham
Luke Evans – Birmingham Edgbaston
Chamali Fernando – Cambridge
Peter Fortune – Lewisham East
Lucy Frazer – South East Cambridgeshire
Fraser Galloway – Paisley and Renfrewshire South
Nusrat Ghani – Wealden
Laetitia Glossop – North Durham
George Grant – Bradford West
Fiona Green – Wythenshawe and Sale East
Charlotte Haitham-Taylor – North West Durham
Ed Hastie – Neath
Darren Henry – Wolverhampton North East
Garry Hickton – Nottingham East
Claire Hiscott – Bristol West
Kevin Hollinrake – Thirsk and Malton
Paul Holmes – Mitcham and Morden
Marc Hope – Central Ayrshire
Sajjad Hussain – Oldham East and Saddleworth
Russell Jackson – Lewisham West and Penge
Ranil Jayawardena – North East Hampshire
Meirion Jenkins – Bridgend
Gillian Keegan – St Helens South and Whiston
Seema Kennedy – South Ribble
Resham Kotecha – Dulwich and West Norwood
Pearl Lewis – Hayes and Harlington
Michelle Lowe – Coventry North East
Alan Mak – Havant
Robert Manning – Manchester Withington
Lindsay McCallum – Ross, Skye & Lochaber Conservatives
Robert McIlveen – York Central
Johnny Mercer – Plymouth Moor View
Huw Merriman – Bexhill and Battle
Amanda Milling – Cannock Chase
Dom Morris – Exeter
Stefan Mrozinski – Tottenham
Kieran Mullan – Birmingham Hodge Hill
David Nicholls – Clwyd South
Luke Parker – Brent North
Lindsay Paterson – Edinburgh West
Suria Photay – Wolverhampton South East
Alex Pierre-Traves – Leeds West
Beth Prescott – Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford
Mina Rahman – Barking
Paul Ratner – West Bromwich West
Alastair Redman – Argyll and Bute
Katie Redmond – Luton South
Bill Rees – Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney
Joe Rich – Stoke-on-Trent South
David Roach – East Lothian
Dean Russell – Luton North
Molly Samuel-Leport – Walthamstow
Matthew Scott – Leyton and Wanstead
Olivia Seccombe – West Bromwich East
Isabel Sigmac – Birmingham Ladywood
Matt Sleat – Sheffield South East
Matthew Smith – Bethnal Green and Bow
Ann Steward – North Norfolk
Rishi Sunak – Richmond (Yorks)
James Symes – Ealing Southall
Ross Thomson – Aberdeen South
Kelly Tolhurst – Rochester and Strood
Clark Vasey – Birkenhead
Mark Vivis – Chesterfield
Matt Warman – Boston and Skegness
Christopher Wilford – Poplar and Limehouse
Evonne Williams – Derby South
Tom Williams – Warley
Simon Wilson – Leeds North East
Mike Wood – Dudley South
Scott Wood – Sedgefield
Jacob Young – Redcar

Nailing the first Labour lie of the general election

Labour has kicked off its 2015 general election campaign with a lie that is so blatant that it has forced me out of my Christmas and New Year hiatus a month earlier than planned. The porkie basically states that a vote for the SNP in May's general election could leave the Tories in power. This is because, says a Labour spokesman: “It is a simple fact that the single biggest party gets to form the next government. The more seats the SNP get from Labour, the more likely it is the Tories will be the biggest party and David Cameron will get into government through the back door.”

In February 1974 the Tories won 297 seats to Labour's 301, but Ted Heath did not resign immediately, he tried to cobble together a coalition with the 14 member Liberal contingent. He was entitled to do that as sitting Prime Minister because it is not about which party is the largest, but about who can command a majority in the House of Commons.

That is why when Labour scored 258 seats to the Tory 306 in 2010, Gordon Brown still tried to hang on in the hope of a coalition with the Liberal-Democrats who had been returned with 57 seats. As with Heath a generation earlier, it was not possible, but nobody in 2010 claimed that Brown had to resign because he had fewer seats than Cameron. His resignation came about because he could not create a majority in the Commons which is not the same thing.

So why are Labour lying? The answer is obviously that they believe that we are so stupid north of the River Tweed that we will believe any old wank that they can come up with, such is the hatred of Toryism in Scotland. If Labour can take its Scottish fiefdoms for granted then it can pander for the votes of the South English middle class scrote element and then form a majority government.

In other words, the people who have suffered the most during that past thirty-odd years will get nothing other than a few table scraps, because Labour will have to keep pandering to the scrotes for fear that they will desert back to the Tories at the following election.

On the other hand, the SNP have already set out their stall for a deal with Labour and none of the items on offer are anything that a traditional Labour man can oppose. End the war on claimants, abolish some of the more loathsome Tory acts such as the bedroom tax, stop the near constant wars against the Islamic world, abolish Trident.

If Labour wants to get its collective snout into the public trough then we should at least ensure that we get something for ourselves out of the deal. A vote lent to the SNP might just ensure that an incoming Labour government has to remember that it isn't just Tristram and Samantha who can dump them: so can Billy and Mary.