The Exile

The news is breaking that Essex social work filth, along with the local plods, are attempting to force 16 year old Sam Johnson to leave his father's house and return to their clutches.

As The Exile understands it, Sam quarrelled with his mother and has refused to speak to her for some time. This was enough to allow the local social work filth to apply for a care order that allowed them to seize Sam and his 13 year old brother.

Sam comes over as a brave young soul and he then went off and briefed a solicitor, prior to returning to his father's house.

None of this is allowed, of course, as if Sam gets away with his open defiance of the social work filth then it could set a bad example to others.

Information just received suggests that the police raid on the father's house is taking place at this moment.

What will probably happen is that Sam will be forcibly removed to wherever the social work filth have decided to hold him. The police will then leave and shortly afterwards so will Sam Johnson. The social work filth will then get the cops to return him and the sick game will continue until the police decide that they have better things to do with their time and Sam will be left alone.

What Sam needs is publicity - the one thing that the social work filth find the most frightening of all. Remember that we are dealing here with over-ambitious, thick as pigshit, lower-middle-class scum. Let's treat 'em with the contempt that they deserve.

Bloggers, please link to this posting!

One of the themes that comes up time and again in the world of wank is this notion that everyone will dance to a particular tune, assuming that the carrot is correctly balanced with the stick. Gimlet Kamm is one of my favourites at this game and his "if America threatens China with a nuclear armed Japan, then China will pressure North Korea on America's behalf" was a classic of its kind.

This being so, its nice to see that Mark O'Atilla Hoare is running with the same type of theme. It's understandable when you consider that he is one of Gimlet's mates, but it still provides a good laugh.

O'Atilla argues that all the capitalist powers need to do to force Serbia into line is "by dismantling Bosnia’s Serb Republic". Once that has been done, Serbia will know who rules around here and will shrug her shoulders and presumably apply for membership of the European Union.

A cynic might argue that this bloke is basically a cheerleader for Croatia - which he is, actually - but let's take his words as read and not be too cynical when we read them. The problem is always the same: what happens if the other team don't play as you expect?

This is something that wankers like this cannot understand. The notion that a sizeable chunk of this planet is not post-modern and metrosexualist is something that lies beyond their powers of comprehension. Until reality comes along and bites a chunk out of them. Which is what is happening in Iraq, right at this moment.

The Serbs are now in a much stronger position than they were a decade ago. Backed by Russia she is able to play cat and mouse games with the west over Kosovo, and force the imperialist powers to keep troops tied in that province. Sooner or later Serbia realises that the pressure will grow to withdraw those forces - especially if trouble breaks out in the Middle-East.

Now threatening Serbia via the Bosnian Serb Republic is likely to be as counter-productive as all the other threats that Serbia has shrugged off. It is possible that they may come to heel as Mark O'Atilla wants, but their are lots of other possible outcomes as well.

That, finally, is the difference between the world of wank and the normal planet that the rest of us inhabit. We can think about all sorts of logical outcomes, but the world of wank really, truly, deeply believes that there is only one.

That is why they are wankers.

To my mind the notion of an American attack on Iran is ludicrous. The American army that occupies Iraq has been stretched to breaking point, and there is no sign that the Iraqis are about to accept their status as America's latest puppet state.

On the other hand, Justin Raimundo's latest offering has an inescapable element of logic to it, and I for one couldn't find many holes to pick in the argument.

I think that it all comes down to just how much hubris is left in the American system. They went into Iraq believing with total certainty that the country would fall into their arms with tears of joy running down every Iraqi's face.

Yes, well that was a big mistake, wasn't it? A mistake made all the clearer yesterday when the grave of Saddam Hussein became a place of mourning as hundreds of youngsters turned out to honour his memory.

Are the Americans ready to compound their first act of criminal stupidity with another one? Raimundo says yes.

The Tories set up a pretty good system of local government back in the 1880s, only to start damaging it in the 1970s with the Heath-Walker reforms. This emasculation continued under the Blatcherite years that have run since 1979 to the present day.

The Daily Telegraph has advocated the restoration of local democracy for quite some time. Their aim, obviously, is to damage what they refer to as Labour's client state, but stripped of the rhetoric, this campaign is going after the same creatures that we as working class people so despise.

The thesis that working class districts are little more than colonial territories, run by a class of colonial administrators made up largely of social work filth, the teaching trade and local government time-servers, is one that this blog has long been arguing.

It looks to me as if we have the beginnings of a new political issue, here, and one that could just wake people up out of their torpor. People who agree with this argument from the right will argue that it is about saving money. We can argue that it is about using resources to recreate the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that our people want.

Either way, it is also about doing over the local polywallahs who make up the colonial administration - and that is a worthwhile end in itself.

Some big changes are coming at The Money Blog. The name will change and it will be known as Ask-Ken; which is the domain that it runs under. The blog will deal with matters economic, and draw on my own personal experiences of living through one great economic meltdown as Britain prepares to undergo one herself. Trust me, the gloating is going to be ferocious.

I started The Money Blog as a money maker and have never really enjoyed the work involved in writing for it. It has always been just a bastard job that I did, just like all the others that I have always done.

Well, The Exile gets hits as a platform for my idiosyncratic views, so I figured maybe Ask-Ken.info could do as well? Why knows - maybe I will start to enjoy writing for it in the way that I do at The Exile? The Exile will remain as the vehicle for politics and whatever takes my fancy, and Ask-Ken will cover economics and whatever takes my fancy as well.

So, as even Starbucks starts to go tits up, let's have a laugh at the sad-arses who are going to take a bath, and let me draw on my experience of this kind of thing to speculate about who will emerge grinning from ear to ear.

See you at Ask-Ken.info starting on the 1st May!

One of the things that an observant reader of the wankblogs will notice is just how keen the wankbloggers are to take something out of context, or just plain misrepresent it. Little Gimlet did it with his North Korean exercise and Norman Geras tried it on with his smear directed at Hugo Chavez Frias.

Geras has quite a bit of form when it comes to games like this, since he also did it with his Sudan posting. Now he is up to the same trick again, this time over European attitudes to war.

The Guardian's Simon Jenkins has a piece which takes issue with America's use of war as a diplomatic tool, and which argues that Europe has given up on wars of choice. Geras takes a sentence out of the article, the one which runs that Europeans "have tested war to destruction as a way of settling the world's ills and reject it", and then created a full posting which attacks this notion.

Now everything that Geras says may very well be true, but that is not what Jenkins had argued. As with the Sudan posting, Geras has set up an Aunt Sally and then knocked that down.

Here is the full paragraph, in which Jenkins discusses the words of the writer James Sheehan:

If you look at the passage in its entirety, it is obvious that what Jenkins is attacking is the notion that wars of choice are a good thing. Wars like the one against Iraq, wars of "colonial violence" spring to mind. Wars that Geras wanked so enthusiastically for in other words.

Now nothing in Jenkins' essay can be taken as meaning that if Germany, say, was ever attacked the young men of Germany would not rally to her defence. It is also not to say that Germans do not have an aversion to war - given the number of German women who ended up polishing the knobs of Ivan Gangbangski and his mates back in 1945 that is hardly a surprise, either.

However, the basic point is that Geras has created a posting which, not for the first time, uses as its hinge a misrepresentation of what someone has written.

Why do they do it? I think that the buggers have run out of ideas to defend the indefensible. On the basis of that hunch I suspect that they just hope that enough people will accept their words as they are written, and not check back to the sources.

I think that the silly sods are that desperate, in other words.

I've made a couple of small changes to the blog. I have removed altogether the list of recent postings that took up far too much space on the sidebar, and the monthly index has now been shunted to the bottom of the right hand sidebar.

If you look at the Labels index you will see that some of the labels now come in two parts. This is because Blogger only records 20 postings under each label. Blame them and not me, but what it means is that to keep the indexing operational, I have had to split it up into 20-post sections.

The nice thing about university is that you get to make friends who you can call on years later. This isn't the case for types like Gimlet, of course, but for most normal people it is. It certainly is for Pru1066, as she calls herself, as her light blue background has turned up trumps for all those of us who find Gimlet Kamm an endless source of amusement.

Gimlet's crew have been trying to derail another of Neil Clark's posts over at the Guardian. It's the usual story of a seemingly endless number of screen names, most of which funnel down to just one or two prize members of the mongish crew.

Up pops young Pru to help, only to get her thoughtful contribution deleted, courtesy of a complaint by a mongish crew member.

Alas for poor Gimlet, the delightful Pru had friends to call upon in her hour of need who work at the Guardian. This is part of the reply that she received from one of them:

I will guess and say that the "Iranian silliness" refers to Gimlet's most bovine Guardian posting, when he claimed that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Unfortunately that came on the very day that the Americans decided that they weren't.

The e-mail goes on the state that the writer will try to prevent the deletion of Pru's latest offering, which went up at 3.30pm yesterday. At the time of writing it is still there, so that promise has been kept. It is also nice to see that my 12.30pm comment is also still around, since it gives a link to my Gimlet files here at The Exile. They may both be deleted, but they have certainly been around long enough to serve their purpose.

There is only one thing better than sticking the boot into the representative of a class that I despise - and that is when people of his own sort disown him by joining in the kicking as well.

Gimlet, you short-arsed little fucker, life just doesn't get much sweeter than this.

The Americans have threatened to hit back at Moqtada al-Sadr's 60,000 strong militia, if he unleashes it against the occupation forces in Baghdad.

It is to be expected that the webmongs will shortly start cheering that on, but sensible people are encouraged to pause for a moment and think through the consequences.

If Sadr's militia is destroyed as a single fighting force, with the man himself either dead or captured, then that does not end the war. All it will mean is that the militia will bombshell into small groups, rather like the Sunni guerrillas who made life so entertaining for us as they culled Americans on a daily basis.

When that happens any hope of recreating Iraq as a functioning state will have gone, but more entertainingly, it will mean that the Americans will not be able to leave the country even if they wanted to. The small Shia groups will clash with each other, but they will also come together to kill Americans. The war will just go on and the American economy will just continue to sag under the strain.

Go ahead, America. Kill Moqtada al-Sadr.

This is a guest posting by UKSecretCourts:

Can you imagine what it's like to get comments from those vehemently opposed to your ideals? If not, may I suggest an afternoon on You Tube to regain your faith in dialogue and debate? One memorable comment, was that I was a "crack whore", which has the advantage of being a short, snappy retort, that requires no elaboration. Such simplicity is always to be admired.

On the other hand there are social workers who write to tell me why they left the horrors of Social Services. And social workers who write to tell me that I insult their gender, and am facile and advise me to "try doing a social workers job and then come back with your allegations of corruption".

Then there's the wonderful Nigella, otherwise known as Nigel the Paedophile. He considers Doctor Richard Gardner to be a visionary, when Doctor Gardner's quotes include "Rape is the price to be paid for receiving the sperm". Well quite, but I can't see many rape victims agreeing with that. Nigel was convicted for downloading 11,000 indecent images, and runs a website promoting paedophile in some vague non descriptive language. (If you want to know more about the late Richard Gardner, by the way, just watch my video.)

But I ask you, how often have you debated under aged sex with a paedophile? Or Finland's answer, which is castration, or nip and tuck as I like to call it? You see, for all its trials, You Tube is simply wonderful for meeting such characters who enrich your life. I'm not saying I'll ever agree with SFrench, Social Worker From Hell, or Nigella, but we shout barbed insults over the Berlin Wall, and engage with each others' viewpoints. That makes You Tube priceless.

The recent fight to take Basra was an "unmitigated disaster at every level", according to the British commanders who watched the disaster unfold. So why is the British trained puppet army so crap?

The answer is rather simple - they fight for money and the militias and guerrillas fight for ideologies. The latter almost always trumps the former.

Let's think about this in a British context. You go to work to earn money. As I said recently, it is neither your place, problem nor profits that are at stake. You collect your wages on Fridays and then become a free man until Monday morning swings around again. If the employer wants to change something, then the bugger had better have a fucking big stick to enforce his will. Otherwise you will just ignore the odious little maggot.

Why do you think that the Iraqis are any different from us? They join the army for the pay packet, just like we go to work for the same reason, but they are as indifferent or hostile to their employers as we are to ours.

The militias, by way of contrast, are fighting for reasons of tribe, nation or religion. A soldier who only signed up for the money isn't going to go into battle against men who share his basic set of ideological values.

This is why thousands of puppet troops deserted rather than go into action. By deserting in that way they ensured that none of them will suffer a court-martial, and all of them will continue to draw their wages. Imperialism will come up with a face-saver along the lines of more training is needed, and nobody will face up to the simple truth that the Iraqi army is little more than a form of outdoor relief for the unemployed of that benighted land.

It is good fun to watch thieves fall out, and what follows is a classic of its kind. The Drink Soaked Hand Shandyists For War have been a semi-regular target of this blog's contempt for years, but a new contender in the spill it over the thumb stakes has now entered the race. Mark O'Atilla Hoare - could I make that monicker up? - is a mate of Gimlet and is, therefore, as pompous and opinionated as you would expect from one of that short-arsed little fucker's associates.

The argument itself is a trivial as you might expect, given participants like these, but it's the abuse that is being tossed about that makes it so funny. The Shandyists accuse O'Atilla of belonging to the group who have "lost the faith of their youth," and the Gimletista goes on about "unrealisable left wing ideals".

Do you see why they are all so risible? British socialism doesn't have its roots in either idealism or faith, because it is not a religion. It has its social roots in the rough and ready collectivism of urban Britain.

Ideologically it appeals to those who have an atavistic loathing for the employer and the employer's man. The notion that bastard work involves boss man's place, boss man's profits and boss man's problems and that we are just there to pick up our wages is an integral part of that same easy egalitarianism that I mentioned earlier.

Idealists, like the Gimletista and the Shandyists have always had a problem with this truism, but that just reflects the fact that they came to their socialism not through a sense of economic self-interest, but via a one-handed reading of the Communist Manifesto. Thus in the past, early steam-driven Gimletistas would argue that under socialism, workers would skip merrily to their work, secure in the knowledge that they were working for themselves and the betterment of society. Yes, well that was a load of old wank as well, wasn't it?

The rest of us came to socialism because we don't want to have to labour to keep some fat-arsed gaffer behind his desk, giving out his old buck. We want to share out the bastard work so that no bugger has to bust a ball to earn a buttie and we can get down to the pub a lot quicker to get the taste of what will still be bastard work out of our gobs. We also want to see the boss dangling from a tree, legs kicking in the breeze, and his bitch reduced to sucking cock to survive. Socialism is also about revenge, lads. It's also about revenge.

Now it may very well be that we will have to settle for a high tax, high inflation regimen, but that actually has an advantage over a tall tree and a short rope, in that these creatures get to survive, get to be humiliated, day after day after day. That is the way it used to be; that is the way it will be again.

Update, 19 April, 1.35am:

We would just like to take this opportunity of welcoming Mark O'Atilla Hoare to the blog. Mark blessed us with his presence at 7.05am BST and stayed for just under four minutes. He logged on from Southend-on-Sea, where we hope that he is having a dirty weekend. We also hope that it is with a girl...

We would like to know why he is not tucked up at this time in the morning? We hope that he did not shit the bed.

Update, 19 April, 3.00am:

The Exile has now been doubly blessed. Mark returned at 8.22am and stayed until 8.30. Oh joy! Oh rapture!

Oh fuck it, I'm off to bed.

Last Friday I began to run The Exile on its own domain, and this posting is just a brief explanation of what happens for any Blogspot blogger who wants to do the same.

The process takes less than 15 minutes to complete. In your dashboard, go to settings, and then click on the publishing tab. There you have a list of options so select the one marked custom domain. You will then be asked if you want to buy a domain, so click yes if you don't have one.

Once your blog is running on its domain you will find that the new URL and the old one will run in tandem for 72 hours. Once that period is over a 301 redirect will be automatically set up and all your old links will then feed into the new address.

Also at that moment you will have the bowel churning sight of your blog vanishing from the Google radar. Relax, because that happened to me on Monday evening and by Thursday The Exile was back, safe and sound, in the arms of Old Mother Google.

What you need to do during the transition period is to make sure that as many of your in-links as possible have been changed over to the new URL. People are decent at doing that, and only three of the blogs that I share sidebar links with have not made the alteration at the time of writing.

You might also ask your friends to give you a couple of heads-up to postings that are at the new URL. Bloggers like Neil Clark and Chris Paul did that for me, and that's one of the reasons why the new address got picked up so quickly by Google and the other engines.

You will lose your Google PageRanking, I am sorry to report, but that is only really a problem if you want to make money out of your blog with sponsored postings. As I do just that, the financial hit that I am going to take this month will be considerable, but that can't be helped. Things will come right at the next GPR upgrade.

All in all, a simple and easy process to get rid of that nasty old URL and one that makes your blog look more professional and altogether nicer.

Serbia has announced that Kosovo will vote in the 11th May local and parliamentary elections. As to whether the imperialists who have created the puppet state of Kosovo will allow that to happen, well that is another matter.

The important thing is that Serbia keeps the pressure on and takes advantage of whatever situation emerges. The agitprop value of United States' troops and their clients forcibly preventing the Serbian authorities from setting up polling stations in Kosovo is just to good to miss.

As both Iraq and Afghanistan continue to go from bad to hilarious - unless you are a warmonger that is - Kosovo needs to be kept firmly on the front burner to increase the pressure on the imperialists.

The Serbs seem to be doing just that.

The future of the class war and of working class organisation may be very different in the future than it was in the past. If you are looking for a Lenin who will lead a vanguard of the working class or a new Labour Party to represent them then I think that you will be disappointed.

The future is here now. Small groups of alienated young men are starting to take matters into their own hands. In parts of the north they go out at night and pile tyres around the closed circuit television cameras and then set them alight. It is called necklacing. Most of this activity never gets reported, but sometimes the news seeps out. This attack on two business parks in High Wycombe is one such exception. How much did the bolt cutters that were used cost? Probably just a few pounds, but the damage done ran into thousands.

This is what it is going to be like: small groups that have only a tenuous link to any other, based around a geographical area where everyone knows everyone else. Some will be violent and others will operate through the political process.

They will be almost impossible to subvert because their small size and homogeneous nature will act to prevent that. If one group is subverted, another will rise to take its place because the issues that led to the first group's creation will not have been addressed.

Do you remember the British sailors who were taken prisoner by Iran in march of last year? They were well treated and released soon after. The wankblogs had a field day as they screamed about aggression and the like. Some tried to do sarcasm, but it is impossible to pull that off when you are as much of a mong as this tosspot. Anyway, you get the basic idea: they wanked furiously in the hope that war would come as well as them.

It has now emerged that the British sailors were not in Iraqi waters as Parliament and the British people were told, but in waters that are disputed between Iraq and Iran. So the Iranians were telling the truth and the British weren't. The government lied in other words.

Will heads roll? Probably not because we are so used to the lies that this government tells on an almost daily basis that one more added to the collection doesn't seem all that important.

The Euston Manifesto appears to have died a death. It's second anniversary passed unnoticed on the 13th of this month. The website sits, like a spare prick at a wedding, unwanted and ignored. The blog hasn't been updated since the 24th February and even if you wanted to go and sign-up to the Eustonite's lofty set of principles, you can't. As I reported here, the silly sods couldn't figure out how to stop the porn merchants who were trawling for punters from signing up. Why they bothered I can't imagine since both Eustonites and porno punters are wankers, but never mind...

The Guardian has a long piece on why this load of old wank failed, but from my point of view the answer is simple. The British working class are not in the slightest bit interested in Israel, Darfur, Zimbabwe nor Uncle Tom Cobbly and all. They are interested in jobs, decent housing and cheap services. I might add that the lower middle class gang of social workers, council officers and coppers who conspire to make people's lives a misery, are also pretty high on the working class shit list.

The Euston manifesto failed because it offered nothing that is of any interest to the working people of Britain.

Cheers: David Lindsay

A few days ago a member of the social work industry was stabbed and killed in Preston, Lancashire. The Mothers for Justice board has a discussion going on about this, and what follows is the raw testimony of one mother who has to endure the living hell of waking up each day and knowing that her two children are not asleep under her roof.

This is what she wrote - I have edited the text slightly to make it easier to read:

What can I add to that? If you are anywhere near Preston, why not visit that dead lump of social work shit's grave and have a nice long piss all over it?

Then when you next bump into a member of the social work industry, just tell it what you did. Just so that it knows. Just so it feels the hatred and starts to know what fear is like.

Is it my imagination or is this bird seriously tasty? I was just sitting here, watching the Gif file run... And run... And run again, when I thought that I should share it with you.

So what do you think? Fit as a butcher's dog or not? Give it one or pass the sick bag?

Just sit back and let your one-eyed friend decide for you.

We have argued here at The Exile for quite some time that the British school leaving age should be reduced to 14. We've also considered the main reason why this is unlikely to happen, which is because the education racket is about providing jobs for over-ambitious and under-talented lower-middle-class types with their polytechnic degrees.

The Labour MP Frank Field has now joined the sensible side of this debate and has argued that the school leaving age should be reduced to 14. He argues that half of Britain's children are turfed out of school at the age of 16 with less than the five GCSEs that the government regards as an absolute minimum. He goes on to point out that over 30,000 children gain no qualifications whatsoever. Having met some of these drop-outs, Field was "struck by just how intelligent some of this group are". He then argues that:

A school-leaving certificate testing basic English, maths and IT skills should be instituted. Many of this disenfranchised group would get down to some work if they knew that passing at 14 would free them from school and allow them to work. This group would then have the money that would be wasted on their non-attendance at school put aside as a training endowment. The education budget for a 14 to 18-year-old is £22,000. This sizeable sum could then be spent by the young people themselves on the training that they choose to advance their careers once they realised that being out of work is a tougher proposition than they once thought. But having control over their own budget would also help drive up training standards.

This idea is excellent and should be adopted by any government that wants to improve British educational standards.

The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who make an unproductive living in the teaching and ancillary trades. We are talking about the educational social workers, the administrators and other assorted riff-raff. Overcoming their natural desire to avoid the cold blast of economic reality by keeping their snouts firmly planted in the public trough is going to be difficult, but not impossible.

It's not impossible because this is one issue that, along with opposition to the social work industry, can be almost guaranteed to get working class support. As a class we tend not to have much of an interest in school education, and teachers are barely above social workers in the level of public opprobrium that they attract.

As socialists we believe in a collectivised economy that is run, basically, by and for the producers' of wealth. It makes perfect sense for us to get involved in a campaign that will have working class support behind it, and which aims at hitting the unproductive consumers of wealth: the local government employed lower middle class.

I've changed this blog's URL and we are now running on our very own domain. The Exile will still run on the Blogspot servers, and for the next couple of days the two URLs will run in tandem. By about the middle of the week Google, who own Blogspot, will have set up a permanent redirect, so you can still tap in the old URL if you wish.

That said I would be obliged if people would update their links to this site as it does effect my Google Page Ranking.

Why have I made the change? The reasons are commercial: a lot of advertisers don't like spending their money on free hosted blogs.

That aside, everything else stays the same. So sit back and enjoy the blog in the future as you have in the past.

The life of the former president of Cuba, Fidel Castro Ruz, appears to be drawing peacefully to its close. No official word to that effect has been issued by Havana, but the rumours are strong that the heart of this giant of Latin-American politics will cease to beat, probably this month.

A source in Mexico who has connections to the Cuban diplomatic service says that Fidel is on a life-support machine and has been unconscious now for over a week.

This writer spent most of Saturday evening chatting on the telephone to various Cuban friends in Havana and the story that is going around the streets is pretty much the same. The Grand Old Man just cannot fight any longer, and Cubans are quietly waiting to see what comes next.

The Havana Journal has listed 17 major reforms or initiatives that have come into effect in Cuba since Raul Castro Ruz assumed the presidency on the 28th February this year, nine of them having taken place since the 24th March.

The Journal's editor believes that "Raul wants to capture peoples’ attention in a positive way so there is no disruption," when Fidel passes.

Finally, Cubans appear to be ditching their convertible pesos in favour of the national ones that people are actually paid in. The national peso trades at 24 to one convertible, which is a considerable rise on the exchange rate of three years ago when it stood at 33-1. This speculation has been fuelled by the rumour that the Cuban government will finally ditch the convertible peso, and make the national one the only currency.

It is unlikely that any of this would be happening if the rumours of Fidel's impending death were not based on hard information. Along with very many others, The Exile was hoping that he would be alive to welcome in the New Year 2009, as that day will be the 50th anniversary of the entry into Havana in 1959. The sight of Fidel, the Lion of Latin-America, spitting contempt at los gusanos (the maggots) in Miami, would have been a sight worth seeing, if only to hear those creatures howl in impotent fury.

That will not come to pass, but those same gusanos need to bear one thing in mind. Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz will die in Havana; the gusanos will continue to live in exile in Miami.

Swivel on that, fuckers.

Click to enlarge.

It seems like yesterday, but it is actually five long years since the American army rolled into Baghdad. Do you remember the crowing? Not to worry if you don't because this piece exists to remind you of what was being said in the USA. However, let's ignore the Americans - the Iraqis are still settling their hash with a further twenty of the colonialist fuckers having been spread over several grid references up to now this month alone.

What about those who wanked for war at home: what were they saying five years ago? The Harry's Place gloating about the toppling of Saddam's statue was fairly typical of the triumphalist glee just five years ago.

It is important that we remember all this, partly so that we can gloat at our enemies' misfortunes, but mainly because these are the creatures who like to propound the notion that globalisation is the irresistible wave of the future.

As far as Iraq is concerned they were just plain wrong. As house prices in the UK prepare to tank, and as the creatures who have done so well out of the last generation's cheap credit prepare to take an economic bath, it still remains to be seen if they are wrong about the UK as well.

Is the Renaissance scholar dead? That's the topic of a debate in yesterday's Guardian in which Professor Adrian Monk of London's City University argued that the last thing that Britain needed was more arts graduates:

Actually, no, not so long as graduate conversion courses still run. We are far from nuts.

A friend of mine read Physics at Christ Church, Oxford, and then decided that what he really fancied being was a barrister. So he trotted off, funnily enough to the City University, and did his GCC. Any number of others followed that path, first reading for an arts degree, then switching via a GCC to something else.

Probably a pretty extreme example comes from another friend of mine who did it all by himself with no formal training whatsoever. This fellow read Geography at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and now advises banks on their computer needs. He actually goes a bit further than that and installs the damned computers and gets them running.

The point is that if you have a decent degree from a decent, Russell Group, university, then your mind has been opened to all sorts of possibilities. Furthermore, you have proven that you can assess, analyse and weigh the value of evidence. Making the switch from arts to technology is relatively simple for a man like that.

I might add that society is also a damned sight more civilised.

If you have been follwing the news over the past few days then you will have noticed the glee with which the American media have reported the story that Muqtada al-Sadr would disband his militia if so instructed by the senior Shia religious leaders. Not just the media, but a fair few British wankblogs were getting ready to greet the news that the Sadr militia were no more with a furious pud pull, followed by a great spurt all over the monitor screen.

Sorry, boys, but you can put your todgers away because it isn't going to happen. They've told him to keep his army intact.

As Juan Cole pointed out, Sadr has a habit of offering to disband his militia from time to time because it makes him look all sweetness and light in Shia eyes. The good Dr Cole also pointed out that the chances of the militia actually being disbanded within a week of its victory over the imperialist forces and their stooges in Basra were non-existent.

Lads, what can I say? This is a no-wank moment.

Hello, Dave, how's it been for you these past 23 years? Rather better than it has been for the Wapping print workers that you helped put on the dole, I'll bet. I was never one of your students at Ruskin College, Oxford, but I was sitting finals when your Sunday Times article came out. Dave, let me tell you that it was a miracle that anyone passed, given the uproar that your brain fart caused at the college.

Enough of this merry banter. In your Guardian piece you argue that if "the sense of duty to community, environment, polity and nation" is taken away, then "collapse awaits". That's fine, Dave, but a little bit of consistency is needed here.

The working class had just such a sense of duty and community that came via their autonomously created structures, such as the unions. Structures which you did your level best to destroy when you had your brain fart moment, Dave.

All those years ago, you argued that the Wapping printers' strike was essentially reactionary, and you went on to speculate what the likes of Engels would have thought about it all. Guess what, Dave? You were dead right.

The unions, especially the craft unions such as the printers, were incredibly conservative. Do you remember all those disputes about differentials? They came about because the craft unions really just wanted to keep the unskilled in their place, Dave.

The point is that you cannot now argue for everyone to know their place when you did so much to smash that sense of place a generation ago.

When you were having your brain fart, I took the trouble to wander around the Senior Common Room to gauge the members' opinions of you. Dr. Jack Eames had always been dubious about your attitudes and he dismissed you as an "intellectual grasshopper". The late Raph Samuel said that he never expected much else "from a man like that," and Dr. Victor Treadwell just rolled his eyes in exasperation.

They had your ticket well marked, didn't they?

Well, that was good fun, wasn't it? Getting it censored was even better because the only person that I can think of who would take offence at my words was Dave Selbourne himself. Welcome to The Exile, Dave, and if you want to know what I have been doing to help shag capitalism I suggest you have a look at the Working Class archive, especially the internal colonialism posting.