The Exile

Following on from last night's posting about a British Parliamentary proposal to censor the blogs, it is now emerging that the same committee wants to censor the likes of YouTube as well. The excuse, of course, is to combat child pornography, but that is something that YouTube do very well on their own for the simple reason that it just happens to be illegal pretty much all over the world.

It is obvious from reading the report that this bunch of clowns may have no real idea about how the World Wide Web actually works. For instance they have called for YouTube to install a button so that people can denounce non-existent child pornography to the police. OK, what can the British police do to an uploader in Russia who is using servers located in the USA? That's why it is called the World Wide Web - it's not the same as your local newspaper which is printed and distributed in one area.

On the other hand, the politicians must know this, I mean they can't be that fucking stupid, so what's going on? The best guess is that this is just so much alarmist twaddle and what they are really after is putting a stop to people who post videos that embarrass the state. People like Vanessa Brookes spring to mind, as Vanessa had the temerity to record the monotonous tones of a genuine lump of social work shit as it told her how her still unborn child was going to be kidnapped as soon as he emerged from her womb.

Vanessa foolishly put the recording on YouTube and it didn't take Calderdale Council's arselicking councillors all that long before they complained to the company and the recording was pulled from the site. Luckily for everyone the torture session already been uploaded to the file sharers, so just click on this link and hear it for yourself.

If YouTube can be prevented from taking material like the one Vanessa provided, then obviously the state's control is strengthened. The point is that YouTube may have censored Vanessa, but the recording is out there: so what the buggers want to do is prevent that happening in the first place, and thus to silence dissent.

Now that is a frightening thought. . .

Working on the principle that if one pair of shapely female buttocks will sell anything, the British Show Jumping Association decided that a double pair would be perfect to raise the level of the sport in the public mind. So the said association put Georgie Strutton and Laura Renwick in virginal white panties and had them photographed.

Frankly, I don't see why they wanted to sex up the image of a sport that is pretty seriously sexy already. Let's face it, show jumping has always had the image of beddable young birds, thighs firmly clamped around a bucking stallion - then they go off and ride a horse around a ring and jump over a few hurdles.

The photo on the right is my favourite. Sweet little 21 year old Georgie seems to be wonderfully embarrassed by it all, whilst raunchy Laura, 33, looks as if she is only too expert at holding thick hard implements in her hand.

I wonder if either of these two tasty bits of talent have ever done any video work? The people want to know!

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As part of its drive to ensure that political debate in Britain is fully controlled, Nu-Labour now wants to censor the blogs and the social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace. Under new parliamentary proposals a watchdog would be established, but without any statutory powers. Knowing Nu-Labour that would probably change later as part of a drive to ensure that people's legitimate complaints are fully answered, or some such guff.

If anyone doubts that, then let them consider these carefully worded remarks from a source close to the committee:

At the moment consumers don't know where to go if they want to complain about something they have seen on the internet. The absence of any industry body is leading to a great deal of confusion and to widely differing practices. The idea is that a self-regulatory body like the Advertising Standards Authority would be set up to make sure that members, including, internet companies and search engines, subscribe to the code and abide by rulings.

Now, the fact that the Daily Telegraph's report also included details of a businessman who has just received £20,000 in compensation after having been libelled on FaceBook suggests to me that consumers and every bugger else knows only too well how to complain, but that's Nu-Labour spin for you.

What happens when the bloggers give a sarcastic, two-fingered salute to this new body? That they will is beyond doubt. We write for ourselves, and unlike traditional newspapers cannot be blackmailed with the usual threat of toe the line or your editor doesn't get his knighthood. Furthermore, socialist blogs such as this one, or libertarian sites such as The Devil's Kitchen would almost certainly go out of their way to ensure that the new regulatory body criticised them. Let's face it, the hits that we would get from just a single criticism would be zip busting in the extreme, and we just live for that stat porn, don't we?

So legal powers to enforce judgements can be expected to follow in due course. That's just the way that Nu-Labour operates.

British bloggers need to put aside their political differences and decide how we are going to combat this attack on all of us.

Yes, I love peer to peer as well, although not as much as my teenage son. That said he's pretty lucky in that only about ten percent of Mexicans even have a telephone line at home, and out of a population of roughly 110 million, there are only about half a million individual and corporate internet connections in the whole country. The lad's got one, but that doesn't stop the rest getting el cheapo music, because just about every street corner has its little man selling disks at about 50p each. Some are pirate copies of a particular album, but most these days are unofficial compilations that involve a certain artist or music genre.

I was reminded of this when I read the news that Britain is planning to introduce tight new laws on file sharing. The point here is not the laws, because Mexico has them as well, the point is that most British people are pretty bovine, and accept the legitimacy of those laws. The Mexicans don't, and neither does most of the world come to that, which suggests to me that the rest of the world is way ahead of the UK when it comes to figuring out what the boss man's game is all about.

You might argue that the British working class are pretty much on the ball when it comes to sussing out the boss class and its games, but in Mexico even people who would be regarded as well entrenched middle class don't believe in capitalism's tales very much.

I remember about 15 years ago when I was teaching English to a major company's head of personnel. When an edict was issued by the board of directors, this guy not only had to send out the new rules, but he had to actually take a copy of the memorandum to each and every head of department and get them to sign for it. If he didn't, then they would claim that they had never received the memo.

Now we are not talking here about rank and file workers. We are talking about the heads of department, with each man being responsible for several hundred people who were his underlings. In Mexico, and the third world in general, they don't give a shit, either.

Countries like Mexico are not governed by the likes of Sod's Law, they are governed by Herod's Law, which states that you fuck or you get fucked. In fact, so engrained is Herod's Law that the Mexicans even made a film with that title about a decade ago - it was, needless to say, a very popular hit.

That helps to explain why the third world is the way that it is, but it also explains why western style capitalism will never take off in these lands. People are just too sophisticated to believe the lies that people in Britain swallow with their mother's milk. Here even pretty senior managers know that the owners of capital don't give a shit about them, so they return the favour with interest.

What has all this got to do with file sharing? Quiet a lot, actually, because our job as socialists is to help undermine that bit of capitalist hegemony which states that we as a class gain something by following the bosses' rules.

So file sharing, in its own little way, helps chip away at a tiny amount of that hegemony. It's also good fun - and if you can't have a laugh and a joke when you are smashing the state's power, when can you?

Will Britain have a new Prime Minister soon? No, says your friendly old Exile, as Gordon Brown will remain in office until the election which is due in 2010. There is a lot of talk of palace coups at the moment, but there are several good reasons why we should conclude that it is merely hot air.

The first is that what people are rejecting is not Gordon Brown per se, but the whole Nu-Labour experiment. That much should be obvious from the decline in working class turnout and support for Nu-Labour at every election since 1997. That has now accelerated, hence all the talk about a coup, but as Peter Kellner pointed out yesterday, the polls do not show any possibility of a surge in support for the government if it were headed by someone else.

To make matter worse, who would the replacement be? The most likely candidate would be David Miliband, a Primrose Hill pretty boy who has been variously described as looking like "a pillock on his gap year" and "a trainee manager at the Grand Hotel in Brighton". The problem is that Miliband and all the rest are tarred with the brush that gave Britain the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and not one of those putative replacements has ever even hinted that he believes in nationalisation, re-industrialisation and stronger trades' unions. The middle class are not going to return to the party that refuses to end those wars, and the working class are now sick of being treated as voting fodder.

Funnily enough, Brown is probably the only man who can actually prevent an electoral meltdown. He could cajole the cabinet into withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, and that would bolster his position with the liberal middle class. At the same time, he could quickly dust off some policies that would be popular with the traditional Labour voters - what they are doesn't matter, just so long as some unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are created out of the process.

Gordon Brown could do that because he has about him the air of a Labour Man, and Labour voters would most likely return to the fold if he started speaking the language that they want to hear. However, he won't, because in spite of his Labour air, he is a Nu-Labour man to the core.

So, since there is nobody to replace Brown in Downing Street, and since Brown is unwilling to produce the policies that are needed to prevent a meltdown, he will remain at the helm until the general election puts him and everyone else out of their misery.

This is bollocks - but it is good bollocks, if you know what I mean. Down the decades to come, when old blogging hacks meet to chew the fat about the bollocks of yesteryear, this posting will spring irresistibly to mind. This the the creme de la bollocks, take my word for it.

Dr Melissa Clouthier is responsible for it. OK, she isn't really a doctor, she's a chiropractor, but let's ignore that. What Melissa wants us to believe is that as soon as she saw the Obama image she immediately saw a likeness to an image of Hitler. OK, but the two images look nothing like each other, dearie. A more likely explanation is that you saw all that German writing on the Obama poster, then went hunting around for a profile picture of the late A. Hitler that you could juxtapose with it.

Still, never mind, Melissa, as it is not your fault that you have a bra size larger than your IQ. That said, check out her photo at the blog - I love the tussled blonde hair. It's very Bund Deutscher Madchen, if you get my drift?

Cheers: Matthew Yglesias

Here you go lads - another couple of Girls Aloud upskirt shots for your weekend delight. The aloud girl who is showing off her charms tonight is Kimberley Walsh, and next week we will round off the series with Cheryl Tweedy and Nicola Roberts.

If you have a particular favourite that you want featured here then just drop me a line and I will see what I can dig up for you. That's how the Girls Aloud upskirt series began, and since all I'm doing is increasing my stat porn I am more than happy to oblige.

As you will know by now, Nu-Labour has been hammered by the Scottish National Party in the Glasgow East by-election. It is just so nice to see prediction after prediction from this blog coming true. Last night I had a bit of a wobble when I saw the opinion polls, but my earlier instincts were correct: Nu-Labour is now a corpse, just waiting for the undertaker to arrive in 2010 so that it can be given a decent burial.

The interesting thing about this by-election was that the Scottish Socialist Party and a breakaway from it called Solidarity scored between them almost 1,100 votes. Had those fools not split then the single party would almost certainly have overtaken the Liberal-Democrats, and possibly even the Tories as well. So much for the notion that people will not vote for socialist parties. . .

Another factor that Nu-Labour cannot spin away is the fact that unlike the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, turnout did not collapse in Glasgow East. True, it was down on the general election, but only by about six percent. Given that Glasgow is enjoying her annual holidays at the moment, the turnout at this election can only be described as high.

What happened was that the Glasgow working class decided that they had finally had enough of the Nu-Labour nightmare and they voted for the social-democratic SNP. Some went for the two minor socialist parties, and taken all together this amounts to a ripe, two-fingered gesture of contempt for the Blatcherite consensus that combines lifestyle politics with economic neo-liberalism.

It is too late for Nu-Labour, but the party that will be created to fill the void that it leaves will have to accept the fact that the working class are economically radical and socially conservative. The new party will have to work with that grain and not against it. If it does that then it could quickly begin to pick up support.

The party needs to campaign for a British withdrawal from the European Union. That will immediately put the Tories on the defensive and open up all their carefully hidden wounds over European integration. It would also demonstrate to working people that the party is as patriotic as they are - something that many on the left have always had a problem with. Two outcomes for a policy that most socialists just happen to agree is the right one, anyway, cannot be bad, now can it?

Secondly, the party needs to heal the rift that exists between the left and the Catholic Church. I write here as an Englishman who loathes the organisation, but as an Englishman I accept the need for tolerance and compromise. The writ of the Bishop of Rome will never run in England so long as we have the Act of Settlement, and an avowedly secular population, so what is the problem? Let the Catholics keep their adoption agencies and their schools - it is not as if they are asking for very much, now is it? In return the new party would get the support of millions of Catholic working men and women who just happen to believe in the same, economically collectivised future that we want to see for ourselves.

You can see the shape of this new party dimly on the horizon. Socially conservative and economically radical: just like the class that it will represent.

Gordon Williams was driving his van home after visiting the shops when a council jobsworth saw him smoking and gave him a dodgy fixed penalty notice. It is out of order because Gordon's van is not his place of work, it is just the vehicle that he uses to get to and from work. Yet more council jobsworths have cracked down on folk having a tab in a South Wales bus station, and staying on the theme of transport, a fucking dog warden managed to get a lorry driver fined for enjoying a smoke in his cab.

Contrary to what many people believe, all of this is council, and not state, action. Parliament passed to buck onto the local councils and gave them money to hire unproductive jobsworth scum to enforce the rules. There is nothing in the law to say that a council has to enforce this law, and in working class areas any decent Labour council would just ignore this class based bit of legislation.

However, as we know, Nu-Labour doesn't even try to represent our class anymore, and local councillors tend to be the local polyocracy writ large.

In the medium and long term we need a party that will represent out values, but the fact that such a body does not exist does not mean that we can't start to process of creating one - and the smoking ban is a good a rallying point as any.

If you get a fixed penalty fine, why not get one of your mates to take a photo of the jobsworth? Find out who the cunt is and then post all his details on the web? Start a smoking group and go along to the jobsworths' office mob-handed - see how the fuckers like that!

I have no doubt that some toy-town Trot will argue that this involves threatening working class people who are only doing their jobs, blah-blah-blah, but that argument is as much a load of old wank as everything else that moronic Trots come out with.

Bastard work is where we go to get our money. Our interest in bastard work starts and ends with the money. So the jobsworths should just go out and have a walk around - and then report to the management vermin that they saw nothing. As is always the case, if management vermin want to ensure that this is true, then they are going to have to wave the big stick - that's the only method that will ever get any decent British working man to do as the fuckers want.

So then we get two issues that can be used to mobilise the tribe: smoking is one and defending the right of council workers not to have management filth give them lip is the other.

Once we even get to the first stage, that of organising local resistance to the ban on our estates, then the basis of a new working class party has been created in that area. It will have begun by using issues that are directly relevant to our people, and using them as building blocks for our badly needed working class party.

People, all it takes is a bit of organisation - let's get started!

Voting is now under way in the Glasgow East by-election and Nu-Labour and the SNP appear to be neck and neck. PoliticalBetting.com, a website that has a good track record of calling results is being careful about this one.

In the unlikely event that anyone in the constituency reads this blog, your friendly Exile would just like to point out that the good people of Glasgow East now have a wonderful opportunity to stick the boot into the party that has treated them like shit for over a decade.

Let's hope that they take it.

Gordon Brown seems to have prepared the ground for the final cut and run from Iraq. About 4,000 British troops are still occupying Basra airport, but that is too few a number to do anything other than defend the base if it were ever to be attacked.

Given that the British people seem to be evenly divided between those who were opposed to the whole imperial adventure from the beginning and those who were always indifferent to it, why that number still remain in the country is anyone's guess. However, the good news is that any notion that any Nu-Labour warmonger had about Iraq becoming a model client state that would recognise Israel, allow its natural resources to be raped and then act a springboard for further aggression in the region has now been dashed.

The issue for socialists now is to start asking the awkward questions: why are 176 British soldiers dead? What did the regime in London gain from those deaths? Will resources now be allocated to repairing the damage to the British economy that 30 years of neo-liberalism has created? When can our people start earning a decent wage for a decent week's bastard work?

We have to frame the debate in those terms, otherwise the warwankers will hijack it again and start bleating about harkies getting chopped up, or women being persecuted. Comrades, that is not our fucking problem. The Iraqis can sort out their own mess, because after three long decades of defeat after defeat we have a mess of our own that needs attending to.

Our enemies are at home, men, and it's time we starting giving the fuckers some grief!

Time to repost the celebrated image of the original twatting hammer, I feel, as I metaphorically take it up and lay about yet another disciple of St. Leon the Loser. . .

I almost missed this gem as the wankblog concerned usually falls under my radar. How, asks a spaz so prime that he can only be a mongish Trot, will the "ultra-right, Stalinist and simply unhinged" respond to the arrest of Radovan Karadzic?

Now John Laughland is a fucking Whig who believes in a state so limited that it would not have a monopoly over the issuance of its gold currency. That ideology is so far removed from authoritarian ultra rightism, that only a bovine Trot could conflate the two. Furthermore, I don't think that you could call Neil Clark unhinged since he is a personable bloke who did more than most to ensure that Iraqi scabs spend their days hiding out like frightened little sewer rats - until the day that the guerrillas take over and then they will go the way of the Algerian Harkis that is. If that counts as being unhinged, then we need a few more like Neil, helping us to fight our corner, instead of moronic Trots, all wanking dementedly over their messiah and his failed theology. That said, I will concede that the Morning Star is Stalinist - so that's one out of three for the Trots - which is more than they normally score.

Why has reaction to the Karadzic arrest been muted? Probably because the left accepts that Serbia wants to join the EU so that they can get their paws on all those subsidies and also to stop further moves to recognise Kosovo. It was a fairly sordid political deal, and nothing to get worked up about.

Besides, the war against globalised capitalism has shifted to Iraq and Afghanistan. That is where the wheels that will break the system apart are to be found.

Hard though it may be for a mongish Trot to believe, but the Iraqi militias and Afghan tribesmen have done more to damage the international capitalist system than any hand-shandyist ever did as he spurted his wad over the collected works of St. Leon the Loser.

Update, 30-July-2008, 2.45am:

Bored out of my skull I checked my stat porn and was pleased and delighted to see that some spaz from Shitarse Socialist, or whatever it's called, has been sniffing around here. He's a Brummie, and you know what The Exile thinks about Brummies, don't you?

Go on holiday and get arrested under the Terrorism Act when you return - the abuse of that act's powers is becoming almost a daily occurrence.

Let's take the example of the Coombs family who had a day trip to France and then returned home via the Channel Tunnel. First they were accused of child trafficking, because Joshua, their 12 year old son is of a different race - he's probably adopted.

Then ten coppers surround their car and they are all nicked under the Terrorism Act. Do you see how it works? The filth start off with one allegation and then use the Terrorism Act as a catch-all to arrest anyone they like.

The family were only held in custody for two hours and the filth are now being all sweetness and light because they can't lie and spin their way out of this one, but that is not the point.

The point is that if you give the state more powers, then the state's overpaid and undereducated thugs will abuse those powers.

Play the video and listen to the soundtrack whilst you are reading this posting.

What I know about China could be written on the back of a postcard - and what I care about the place could be written in the spot reserved for the stamp. This being the case, it would have to be a damned fine blog that attracted my attention if it was connected with matters Chinese.

One such damned fine blog is called Sex and Shanghai, as written by the formerly anonymous Chinabounder. The author's real name is David Marriott, and he emerged into the light of day to publicise his recent book Fault Lines on the Face of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.

That said, it is the blog that we'll chat about here, partly because Chinabounder is a shagger after my own heart, and partly because of the reaction that his blog elicits from Chinamen. Take a trip over there if you don't believe me, and see how just about every posting attracts the same puerile rants from the short dicked men over and over again.

Obviously they are annoyed that Chinawomen are more interested in Chinabounder's kidney wiper than they are in their underdeveloped tackle, but that doesn't mean that we have to take their whining seriously.

So get over to Sex and Shanghai and have a laugh at the inadequate little men. Now you know why I suggested that you listen to the video soundtrack while you were reading this, don't you?

Has Nu-Labour got a real death wish or is it hubris that drives them on? The reason I ask is that last week's rumour that Nu-Labour was planning to introduce welfare reform became hard fact yesterday when the wheeze was unveiled. The reason why I asked the question is because the Glasgow East by-election will be held on Thursday of this week, and I can't figure out the motivation behind the announcement.

The point is that if Nu-Labour wants to hold Glasgow East then this announcement is pretty much guaranteed to ensure that another few thousand people either stay at home or vote for the Scottish National Party.

To make matters even worse, enough Nu-Labour backbenchers will vote against the reform to ensure that it only passes with Tory help. Isn't that just a wonderful way to ensure that even the most bovine Labour voter finally realises that the Tories and Nu-Labour are both cut from the same cloth?

As Zimbabwe introduces a $100bn banknote today - worth about 10p in real money - then we can expect yet more cries from the world of webmongery to do something, anything, about the deteriorating situation in the country.

Aside from the fact that most people in Britain lost interest in Zimbabwe when it became independent back in 1980, there is one tiny hurdle that the do-something crowd have to leap. Britain has ceded all relations with Zimbabwe to the European Union. In other words, London can't do anything, even if it wanted to.

The fact that the webmongs who want to invade Zimbabwe also tend to be pretty keen supporters of the Brussels' machine is just the icing on the cake for your cynical old Exile.

An American lady named Lisa who has lived in England for just over 20 years has been in touch, to tell me the sorry tale of her treatment by the social work filth. The full story is rather long and complicated, but three aspects stick out.

The first is that Lisa and her husband, who were then going through a painful divorce at the time, were unable to decide which of them would have custody of their three children. The two eldest, who are now 17 and 15 went to live with their paternal grandparents, and the youngest, now seven, and not fathered by the ex-husband, stayed with Lisa. According to her, it was at that point that her ex-husband then began to involve the social work filth, seemingly as a way to pressure her to make concessions.

People that is just a very bad idea indeed. No matter how much you hate your awfully wedded wife - or no matter how much you dream of widowhood - a basic rule of thumb should be that at the end of the day you sort the mess out between yourselves, using your lawyers to help. Bringing in the rancid crew only makes a bad situation worse, so don't do it.

Secondly, what sticks out in this case is how the social work filth decided to use the police to seize a child in the middle of the night, and without a court order. The social work filth then claimed that Lisa had handed the baby over voluntarily, which she has always denied. The point here is that at some point in the proceedings an anonymous report was sneaked into Lisa's file which claimed that she was drunk when the police arrived.

When the matter finally got to court the police were forced to admit that the house was neat and tidy, everyone was fast asleep when they arrived, and that the drunkenness allegation may just have surfaced because of an empty wine bottle that was found in a rubbish bin. In other words the social work filth just made that up to try and cover themselves. Now it didn't work, because Lisa got her baby back and was awarded £1,900 in compensation, but that is not the point, is it? The point is that the filth broke the law and then tried to cover it up - and it took Lisa over a month to get her child back.

Finally, Lisa was subjected to what can only be described as blackmail by the social work filth. Soon after the state-sponsored kidnapping took place, Lisa was threatened into handing over her American passport. The filth told her that she had to show a "commitment to work with them," if she wanted her child back. In other words they wanted her to make a gesture of submission to their power and their will.

Stories like this come up time and time again. Social work filth making up the rules as they go along, constantly demanding gestures of obedience from their victims; it is actually the reason why I don't relate many personal accounts these days. Put bluntly, they are all the same.

What makes Lisa different is that after she had recovered from her shock she was able to take stock and argue her case. She refused to bow to the the filth and demonstrated her contempt for them by returning their letters, with the spelling mistakes and grammatical howlers neatly corrected in red pen.

What are the lessons that we can learn from this story? The first has already been stated: whatever else you do, keep the social work filth out of your squabble. The second is the remember at all times that these creatures are motivated by power, and the sheer exhilaration that comes from exercising that power. If there is a child at stake, then you must do as Lisa did and proceed with extreme caution.

Lisa now runs her own internet forum and you can chat to her there if you wish. She has asked me to point out that she is a dab hand at spotting social work scum who try to join up by pretending that they are normal human beings.

Here you go blokes - you can't say that your friendly Exile doesn't give you the sleaze that you know that you want. This rather nice upskirt shot is of Nadine Coyle of Girls Aloud fame.

Do you think that someone should teach tottie like this to sit properly? No? Neither do I.

Check back next week for yet more Girls Aloud upskirt photos!

It rained like buggery last night; real monsoon rain, of the type that you never see in the UK. Needless to say, the power went out and the house was illuminated by candlelight for about three hours.

If you want to know why the power goes out almost every time it rains just have a look at this man in the photo. If you are wondering what he is up to, wonder no more, because he is nicking electricity directly from a power line's junction box.

Just about every junction box has a myriad of highly unofficial cables leading from it that go down to the houses below. Since these connections are cobbled together by just about anyone who has a ladder, and the nerve to take his life in his hands at the top of it, then you can imagine that as soon as it starts to rain the water gets into the box and the system trips out.

Every now and again the state-owned power company sends out its people to disconnect the unofficial cables, but the people just give the men a few pesos and they go back to work and report the job done. Occasionally a senior figure will accompany them just to make sure that they actually do the work. What happens then is that those same power company fellows will return later that night to do a reconnect, for a suitable consideration, of course.

As a result of all this hardly anyone in these United Mexican States pays more than a few coppers for their electricity, but every time it rains the candles come out.

Such is life. . .

How much do you think that a lump of social work shit is worth?

Let's think... So useless to the economy that they create nothing of value through their activities... So ugly that they even have to wear a brown paper bag when using their vibrators... So stupid that they can barely construct a sentence. You don't believe the last one? Take a look at the creatures on their home turf, and see how they write when they think that nobody else is reading their inane scribblings.

So how much do you think that fat, ugly, pieces of lower middle class filth like this are worth?

"The new middle-class Labour activist is quite happy to use the urban poor as voting fodder, paying lip-service to the mantra about alleviating economic inequalities." Rather a nice one-liner, I think, out of a piece by James MacMillan in the Daily Telegraph. The article takes this blog's line that Nu-Labour will lose the Glasgow East by-election because it has alienated is socially conservative, economically radical base.

However, another factor has now emerged which may turn what was still a close race between Nu-Labour and the Scottish Nationalist Party into a romp away for the SNP. That issue is welfare reform.

Nu-Labour is trying to introduce a work for dole scheme, and that more than anything else is liable to tip the balance away from Nu-Labour. About half the population of Glasgow East are on some form of benefit or another, and that is not their fault.

Working class people are quite willing to risk their lives down mines, be bored out of their skulls standing behind lathes, or be equally bored on a production line. However, what they expect in return is a decent wage. Being told to get sweeping for their benefits is not the same thing, is it?

What is needed is a working class political party that will cut away at the parasitic non-jobs that the middle class now enjoy and begin a policy of creating the tens of thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that our people want to do.

Certain things irritate and this video just happens to be one. It's aim is to make you, the denizens of the first world, feel guilty because over one billion people on this planet only have access to impure water. Thus you will presumably shell out some donations to keep members of the well-fed third world aid and development industry in lucrative employment.

I didn't know the exact number of people who receive more than just water through their pipes until I saw this video, but I do know that I happen to be one of them. We have a filter that sort of cleans the water that is piped into the house from the city supply, and if the cartridge isn't changed regularly, then after about six months or so of daily use it gets so clogged with gunk that it jams up.

The funny thing is that when the water leaves the plant it is sparkling and clean, so what happens to turn it into a brown sludge? Basically, people tap into the water pipes to nick a free supply. They don't seal the pipes properly after they have made their connection, or don't seal them at all, and dirt gets in. It is that rather than worn-out pipes that causes most of the problems in Mexico City.

Not that you would realise any of that if all you had to go on was a video like this. That same video says that we can't live with this situation. Well, we can and we do. And we shall continue to live with it until the third world ceases to be so damned third rate at just about everything that it does.

It seems that Maggot Thatcher is to get a state funeral when it finally pops its clogs. The Guardian's readers are pretty clearly opposed to the notion, but even the Mail on Sunday crowd are not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the idea, either.

Let's be honest, a state funeral for the old slag gives us a chance to have a demonstration and ruin the event for all the arse-lickers who want to turn out and weep.

That said, what happens to the creature's carcass after it has ceased to pollute the air that the rest of us have to breath is a side issue. The question still remains: how are we to destroy the scum who did well out of the whole Thatcher era; the vermin who voted Tory and left us on the dole?

The issue of that act of revenge is still outstanding and will remain so, whether Thatcher is alive or dead.

As we reported a month ago, the Moscow based alternative newspaper, eXile, was shut down by the Russian authorities. It's now back under the slightly new name of ExiledOnline.com, and claims to be based out of Panama. If you believe that then you will believe anything, but if you enjoyed your web-based fix from Moscow - and over 200,000 people did every month, then you will enjoy visiting the new site - wherever it happens to be located.

You have just got to watch this video, shot in the European Parliament in Brussels. The footage was taken at 7.00am one Friday morning by a German TV crew. Check out the MEPs with their cases already packed, signing in to claim their massive whack, before darting off to the airport.

Well, that was their plan, until the camera crew arrived. Then they darted around trying to hide their faces from the camera. Trust me, it's like Fred bloody Karno's, it really is.

This is the flag of the Kingdom of Northumbria. It hasn't snapped in the northern winds for over a 1,000 years - is it time that it did once again?



If the Nu-Labour meltdown is a bad as this writer hopes, then the Scottish National Party will most likely be the main beneficiary in that country. It is likely that faced with a Tory government in London the SNP will call a Scottish referendum with a view to gaining a mandate for independence. If Scotland does become independent, where does that leave the people of Wales and Northern England?

Although the Welsh Assembly does not have the powers of the current Scottish Parliament, it is still a body that can ameliorate London's neo-liberal desires. If push came to shove, then Wales could follow Scotland out of the union because the Welsh have the structure, via their assembly, that could lead to that move.

Northern England would be left alone - and we have more in common with the Scots and the Welsh than we have will ever have with the arse-licking gaffers' men who make up the population of Southern England.

Nu-Labour did try to split England up into artificial regions, each with their own limited powers, but when the matter was put to a vote in the North-East the people rejected the wheeze, and quite rightly so. None of those proposed regions had any historical resonance, but that does not mean that we should think of England as one entity - because that is not how we see ourselves, in spite of what some, mainly southern, writers think.

England historically can be divided into three, and possibly even into four, states that have a history all of their own. The old Kingdom of Northumbria fits in very nicely with what is today Northern England. Historically it came under the Dane Law, and culturally speaking its values are far removed from those of the south.

The Midlands corresponds to the Kingdom of Mercia and the south to that of Wessex. The fourth would be Cornwall, if they chose to go down that road. The chances are that they wouldn't, any more than Mercia would, and both would probably remain with Wessex as a truncated England. And good luck to them if that is what they want.

Northumbria - Northern England - really needs to be thinking about its future and for that to happen we n