Don't call them "so-called"

The death of P W Botha has led the BBC, true to form, to claim that he made his name as a Minister by clearing District Six, home of the "so-called coloureds" (you can pretty much hear the small c as they say it). There is absolutely nothing either small c or "so-called" about the Coloureds, "of mixed European and non-European descent and speaking English or Afrikaans as the mother-tongue". That mixed means really mixed, and mixed a very long time ago: a distinct people with a distinct culture (and, please note, including half of all native speakers of Afrikaans). As they themseleves would tell the BBC or anyone else, they are "Coloured with a capital C".

It Seems To Us That He Lived His Life...

The following version of Candle In The Wind is by the admirable Ian Oakley:

Tony Blair: lapdog in the wind

He lived his life like a lapdog on drugs,
Licking George Bush's boots and doing what he was told.
The truth is he lied and lied and lied,
And tens of thousands Iraqis died.
He was a liar and a phoney who did Bush's bidding
When he is gone we will wish he had never beenLike a lapdog in the wind
Bye Bye Blair, I hope you lose all your hair.

I don't think it actually fits the tune: but what the hell?

Meanwhile, this one does, although its author has asked to remain annonymous:

Goodbye Tony Blair
Though we never knew you at all
You had no grace, just span your spin
While those around you fawned
You crawled out of the woodwork
On the back of ninety-seven
That set you on the treadmill
From which you had to change t’world

Chorus
And it seems to me, you span that web
To bury all that ba-ad news
Never knowing (to) whom to listen
Until Bush got in
And I’d have liked you to leave earlier
But you just pushed right on
Any legend burned out long before
The memory ever will.

Afghanistan was tough
But then Iraq was tougher still
You plagiarised, lied and deceived
For there were no WMD’s
And even though you lied
We never questioned you
And we voted for you again
Now though its time to fade away.

Chorus

Goodbye Tony Blair
From “terrorising” Walter Wolfgang
Thank goodness you are finally off for good
Only now we’ll have that bloody Brown

Chorus

Hatty, Patty and Dick

In addition to not depriving me of Gordon Brown's members-only email on climate change today, my "auto-exclusion" from the Labour Party has not deprived me of two of my three votes in the forthcoming elections for Leader and Deputy Leader.

The latter contest is the interesting one. My first preferences will be for the sound Eurosceptic, and sound enough Catholic, Jon Cruddas; and my second preferences will be for Hilary Benn, still known to oppose the Euro and to favour restoring the supremacy of British over EU law. If I indicate third preferences, then they will be the erstwhile Maastricht rebel, Peter Hain.

However, I will not be voting for the war criminal, Jack Straw. I will not be voting for the French-style rabid secularist, Alan Johnson. And I will certainly not be voting for Harriet Harman. Wasn't the old National Council for Civil Liberties hand in glove with the old Paedophile Information Exchange back in the days when the former was run by Hatty and Patty? Yet now Hatty wants to be Deputy Leader, while Patty is actually responsible for social services throughout England. Worth looking into, I feel.

And then there is Richard Dawkins, on record that sexual abuse is less serious than bringing up a child Catholic in the first place, as well as that his own interference with at prep school did him no harm whatever.

Get Over Her!

I have been taken to task by some people for attacking Margaret Thatcher. But did Margaret Thatcher, or did she not, sign the Single European Act? Did she, or did she not, sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement, as well as attempt to reintroduce devolution in Northern Ireland at one time, causing integrationist PPSes to resign? Did she, or did she not, take Britain into the ERM? (And don't give me the "she was bullied" line. Margaret Thatcher was bullied? Pull the other one!)

Did she, or did she not, bring in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act? Did she, or did she not, replace O-levels with GCSEs? Did she, or did she, not, effect the destruction of the stockades of working-class male employment, and thus of paternal authority (especially over teenage boys), in those communities? If you take away the economic clout of teenage boys' and young men's fathers, and you dismantle the institutions through which they exercise their authority, then you rob them of their power over their hot-headed sons. And we all know what happens next. This is not about class: if the same thing were done to the patriarchal figures of upper-middle-class families in the Home Counties, then the same consequences would result.

Did she, or did she not, at least indulge and tacitly encourage the misdefinition of liberty as the "freedom" to do absolutely anything one pleases, and the maxim that "greed is good"? And did she, or did she not, actually say that "there is no such thing as society", by definition including the society that is the family, and the society that is the nation?

So one could go on, and on, and on. Is not Political Correctness a recognisably 1980s phenomenon? Are not Thatcher's arguments against pits, steelworks, shipyards and factories directly applicable to farms? Indeed, did she not continue to subsidise farmers (as I'm very glad that she did), along with fee-paying schools, mortgage-holders and nuclear power (a good idea now, I might add), all for purely political rather than economic reasons, and thus contrary to her own ostensible ideology? Did she not, contrary to that same ideology, decline to privatise the Royal Mail "because it's Royal" (as, again, I'm very glad that she did)?

Did not welfare dependency increase to previously unimaginable proportions on her watch? Was not the provision of local services subjected to an unprecedented degree of central government micromanagement? And did she, or did she not, practically invite in the Argentine forces and then find that a Navy which she had starved of resources effectively had to function as if independent of political (i.e., her) control (a sort of coup), or else the Falkland Islands would be Argentine to this day?

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Get over her!

Are Americans Having A Laugh?

For their own sakes, I sincerely hope so. The Republicans are now accusing the Iraqis of insurrgency merely in order to influence the American mid-term elections. American voters are just laughing in their faces. Aren't they?

Not The Ten O'Clock News

Or, indeed, the news at any other time. Well, except on Channel Four. On the BBC, we are fed nothing but the reading out of public relations material from Tony Blair's office, David Cameron's office, and certain favoured charities and campaigning organisations. How much longer is this going to go on? And how much worse is it going to become in the meantime?

Nothing Is Too Good For The Workers

I have had quite enough grief from people whom I shall not name, and who sometimes do not even name themselves, about how claiming only the national average wage for full-time work, rather than a full MP's salary, would be all that I deserved anyway, and all that people who shared my views deserved anyway from "their" MP.

Well, I would actually be my constituents' MP, plain and simple. And I am now on record as believing that no EU law should have effect in the UK unless or until it has gone through exactly the same parliamentary process as if it were a Bill which had originated in our own Parliament. This would require Parliament to sit properly, as has not happened for many a long year, precisely because of the EU.

So let me make it clear that I would now indeed claim a full salary, because my constituents would be worth as much as anyone else's, and because I believe that MPs should be made to work proper hours.