Short Story

We've had a competition (a very civilised one) at work on my nightshift to write a short story, maximum 1,000 words (minus title). 12 people out of around 50 submitted something by midnight last Sunday, including yours' truly. All of them are pretty good, as a thousand words max (which I did, according to the spell-check)does not allow a writer much space to create new characters and a universe (however small). I tried to write a second one (someone apparently submitted two, so that makes it 11 contestants) but although I thought of a number of opening scenarios, they did not develop very far. There was too much dialogue, not enough plot.

All entrants had to submit a quid to enter and the winner gets the cash everyone put in, plus a fancy pen/pencil. (I can't remember which!) To be honest, even if everyone on the shift put forward two stories, with a £100 prize, it would still be more about kudos than cash. I think the voting is next week.

Anyway, here's my short story...


The View From Tower Bridge

It was 5.30 on another hot sunny July Saturday morning. Archie Hook looked east from Tower Bridge, before walking over the bridge to look west. This was the London he knew and loved.

In half an hour the first workers would be arriving. They all had their swipe cards and photo ID to get into London. No tourists before nine. He hoped the Beef Eaters would be there on time today. Yesterday had been such an embarrassment, not being able to open the Tower before 11am.

However, these minor hiccups in running London were nothing compared to those in the days when Archie first came up with his idea of how London should be run. His eureka moment happened after one pig of a day. It began being stuck on the tube for two hours (“Signal problems at Canada Water”: it was always signal problems at Canada Water). Shattered, he arrived in the nick of time for a conference in Westminster called London: Great or What? Archie kept his head down during most of it, nursing a hangover, until that idiot off the telly with the stupid transatlantic drawl came out with “London, a great place to work and live.”

“No it’s not, it’s bloody awful!”

“Mr. Hook, you are the sort of person who makes me ashamed to be a Londoner.”

“You’re no Londoner, you just sleep with one, and it ain’t your wife!”

Dismissed immediately from his post as Quality Administrative Executive with Making London Better (Working For You, So You Don’t Have To was the motto he had made up for them), Archie got a job in advertising, due to his way with words. He enjoyed his days with Sadista and Norquist, and it was there he got to work with the World Preservation Alliance. He came to know, in all senses of the term, Nicole, their London chief, who was always amazed how little Londoners cared about their heritage and how they put up with the prices, the dirt, the violence and the fact so little worked properly.

“London needs saving from itself,” were Nicole’s last words to Archie before she returned home, “and I’m not marrying you, Big Guy, until you do it”.

After Nicole left, Archie was offered her job by the Alliance, who within weeks of him arriving began their campaign to make London a World Heritage Site. Although they were coy about the details, it would mean effectively no-one living in London ever again. Archie knew it was a forlorn campaign, but if he was to make Nicole Burnaby the next Mrs. Hook, he had no choice. His ex-colleagues from Making London Better used to leave extremely abusive messages for him on the Alliance’s website, but Archie knew, somehow, that if he sat by the River Thames long enough, the bodies of his enemies would come floating by. Love would conquer all; not least those muppets.

It all started going right for him at the time of the Olympics. Archie was one of the few Londoners to enjoy the event, because it was such a fiasco. “NO MEDALS, NO TRAINS, NO HOPE” was one headline he remembered, as the whole world looked on London with disgust. Not long afterwards some idiot at Nazgul Asset Management plugged his MP7 player into the wrong plug; the City of London was closed for two months. It was a grim time for most Londoners as the Square Mile ceased trading; only the riot control effects of virtually continual rain prevented London’s total collapse into anarchy that Autumn.

Archie was now very much homme du jour. He was on television nearly all the time now, saying London needed saving from itself. Very few people were prepared to argue with him any more. Many more slept with him. Those who did take him on in television studios, like Mr. Stupid Transatlantic Drawl, usually arrived late, due to London’s collapsing transport system. “Makes my point, doesn’t it? London’s great to visit, if you’ve got the time, but who seriously wants to live or work here?”

Just before Christmas Archie picked up the phone to the Prime Minister. “Sorry to disturb you, but we surrender. You can have London, the whole lot”.

“We only really want Zone 1”, spluttered Archie.

“No, have the whole lot. Bucks House agrees. The City announced an hour ago that it is upping to the Azores, and everyone in Westminster and Whitehall much prefers doing business in, well, anywhere but here. With the Scots and Welsh voting to leave the UK after the Olympics screw-ups, it doesn’t really matter where we go. Of course, it will take time to get everyone out of suburbia and relocated, but nobody really wants to stay in this dirty, crowded dump, do they? Tourists will still love London, which is what matters. By the way, Hook, we want you to head Making London Better as we think it’s the ideal organisation to oversee the transition to Tourist City Central.”

Within four months London was deserted. Many left for abroad. Most of those remaining in England were now employed as “professional Londoners” (20,000 Pearly Kings and Queens and 15,000 Cockney Chimney Sweeps, for instance) to entertain the tourists, living just outside the city’s parameters. Apart from walking, the Tube and buses were the only way for visitors to get around, but they worked perfectly. There was no crime (after thirty pick pockets were hung at Tyburn- half a million saw it live), the streets were clean and you could get served in pubs, which all shut at midnight every night, before all visitors had to leave.

Archie saw it was 6am. Time to start another day. He walked north up towards the Tower. In two weeks he would make an honest woman of Nicole in St Paul’s Cathedral (“Get married like Royalty for just $50” said the London World Heritage City website) and he was the happiest man alive.

“London has been saved from itself", Archie mused. “Now for Paris…”

Bloody Camden Council...

My parents' dogs, Daisy and Sam, who fortunately don't live in Camden...

I know local councils in Britain are fighting a losing battle to raise funds and keep their powers. However, with everything going on in the world you would hope that my local council here in London, Camden, would have better things to do than start a fight with dog owners.

Yes, there ARE bad dog owners but why try and punish the whole lot of them? It reminds of really bad student/supply teachers at school who decide to collectively punish the whole class instead of sorting out the disruptive individuals causing the problem...100% pure weakness from authority, which nobody respects.

Back at long last!!

Soon be Summer!!!



Apols for anyone who has been waiting the last month or so for a post. I've been having a lot of PC and Net niggles, but touch wood, these are over. Being a techno-sceptic I won't bore you with it all.

Also I've updated a couple of the links at the bottom of the blog. Hope to add some more in the near future. I'm open to anyone wanting to promote their services or goods if I like what you do. I'm thinking of having a proper webpage and going into Myspace but one thing at a time!

Film Plugging

One out already, one to see.



I went to see The Last King of Scotland a few days ago, which was well worth its win as Best Film at the BAFTAs last night (although why didn't Children of Men win anything? Perhaps dystopias aren't in this year.) Forest Whitaker would make a worthy Best Actor at the Oscars, although we all know what that can be like. Plus Last King has Gillian Anderson in it, which is always a plus point ( & a pathetic way of crow barring a pic of her into my blog...).



Right, back to the films.



Coming up, which anyone who remembers Shaun of the Dead from a couple of years back might be interested in, is Hot Fuzz, which again stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost from "Shaun..."



February is usually the worst month of the year for me to get through (so far from Yule, so long until Summer...) so I could do with a good laugh. According to the advert in this week's Guardian Guide, Hot Fuzz "CONTAINS VERY STRONG LANGUAGE AND STRONG COMIC BLOODY VIOLENCE". Sounds better than Hannibal Rising anyway ("...in which Thomas Harris graphically flogs a dead horse to death.."). BTW, is it just me, or is every novel published these days written with a film script in mind?

More on Nick Cohen

Another decent review of What's Left? from the Indecent Left blogsite.

Also a few words from Chicken Yoghurt:

Left-wing intellectual Norman Geras on Nick Cohen’s new book:

…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the decents’…

As opposed to…

…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the stoppers’…

…I suppose.

But wait, there’s more from Norman:

…give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas.

Jesus Christ, man, let it go. You got your invasion, you got your liberation, and you got your victory. And you’re still whining. You and Cohen and ‘the Decents’ were listened to and the anti-war crowd were ignored - that’s why the world looks like it does today. And you’re still not happy?

That Nick Cohen should then feel compelled to write a book rubbing us anti-war types’ noses in it, despite getting everything he wanted, smacks of gloating. Nobody likes a sore winner.

More on Actual Existing Capitalism

I think most of the stuff I post on this blog is just to remind myself that, yes, the world is like this- it's not just me going mad...

Gravy train of big business must hit the buffers
Simon Caulkin, The Observer, Sunday February 4, 2007

The justification for big business - and the management principles which govern it - is that it is the engine of economic development. There is no such thing as an advanced economy without large companies (a measure of India and China's progress is that they are quickly developing them). Roughly speaking, the greater the density of organisations above £10m in size, the higher the standard of living.

However, for the West, this description no longer applies. One of the topics the global business elite discussed at Davos was the 'soggy middle' - the resentful perception that while the engine is steaming merrily ahead, it has quietly slipped its coupling and left the middle-class train in the station.

Thus, economist Paul Krugman notes that 'even households at the 95 percentile - that is, households richer than 19 out of 20 Americans - have seen their real income rise less than 1 per cent a year since the late 1970s'. In the UK the median disposable household income has progressed at the same leisurely pace. Meanwhile, those aboard the first-class coach - last stop, Davos - are travelling in ever more extravagant luxury. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent in the US have doubled; those of the top 0.01 per cent have risen fivefold. Again, the story in the UK is similar.

One even more uncomfortable estimate was on offer in Switzerland: in the largest 1,500 US companies, the take of corporate profits appropriated by the top five executives has doubled to an astonishing 10 per cent in a decade. That's $40bn, which would make a sizeable dent in the pensions deficits that, in the US and UK at least, are in the process of ensuring that the now stationary middle-class coaches will in the future be shunted sharply, and permanently, backwards.

Let's ignore for a moment the complacency, incompetence and cowardice of the companies, the actuaries and, above all, the Chancellor, who have presided over this wholesale tearing-up of previously agreed contracts, and recall that no more than a decade ago ministers and City types routinely boasted of the UK's Rolls-Royce pensions system and castigated the Continental economies for not following its lead. Now we are asked to believe that the engines of progress in the third- or fourth-richest economy in the world, where the labour share of national income is at a historic low and the capital share at a historic high (another Davos insight), are suddenly enfeebled. Not only are they unable to improve the living standards of their employees, they can't even prevent them falling.

What, then, are big companies for? Increasingly, the answer seems to be: to keep the City and a tiny minority of top earners in the extravagant style in which they are cocooned. While 70 per cent of large UK firms with company-wide final salary schemes have abandoned them since 2003, an unchanged 80 per cent of directors are still so covered; they still retire at 60; and they still build their pots twice as fast as the rest of us. Last year the average FTSE 100 director's pension was £168,000.

Yet Davos man should be worried. If the engine argument falls, there is no earthly remaining justification for these inequalities, or the management principles that perpetuate them. Rather, they can be seen for what they are: the scaffolding that holds in place an upside-down world in which it has become the function of individuals to serve organisations, rather than the other way round. In this chilly, Orwellian universe, individuals dance to the tune of the organisation - faster! harder! longer!. And the organisation dances to the tune of the City's dealmakers and financial engineers, all under the Panglossian gaze of the government, which decrees that the pain is for our own good.

In fact, what was being experienced in Davos was a forewarning of economic and social global warming. The 'soggy middle' is nature's way of saying that our economic and management practices are as unsustainable (to use another favourite Davos word) as our environmental ones. The inequalities are already fracturing psychological and social contracts within organisations - witness the dire levels of engagement and trust measured in umpteen surveys, and in society as a whole. How long before they lead to open breakdown and conflict?

Sustainability is not just about green issues - without their social and economic equivalents, environmental initiatives are just greenwash. It's also about being fair, secure, in control of the job, and, unfashionable as it is, relatively equal. All these are proven contributors to job satisfaction and thence to productivity; and, as Richard Layard and other economists are beginning to show, to overall happiness and welfare, which are the point of economic activity.

Runaway engines are dangerous as well as unproductive. It's time to re-attach this one to the train before the brakes fail - or it is blown up by disaffected passengers.

Some words on Nick Cohen's "What's Left?"

I have so far resisted the urge to buy Nick Cohen's What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, the latest missive from the shrinking ranks of Chickenhawk Armchair Generals. To be fair, Cohen is far from the worst. (Oliver Kamm? Stephen Pollard? Melanie Phillips?) On domestic issues, such as how management consultants are leeching the public sector, how big business avoids paying too much tax and how secular society is under attack from various religious totalitarians, he is still very much on the ball. However, anyone who has read his columns over the years will realise that he is returning to a limited number of issues in his various columns (in the Observer, New Statesman & Evening Standard). That's another problem with columnists: sooner or later they run out of new things to say, being reduced to saying the same old stuff or making complete u-turns on positions they held before.

Perhaps this is a reason why Cohen moved towards the a pro-invasion position on Iraq during 2002-3. USPs in politics and political journalism are very hard to carve out, and let's face it, Nick Cohen is one of the few British journalists who opposed the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, but supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In a way it is not necessary to read Cohen's book when the same themes have been coming up in his journalism for the last few years. One of his repeated claims is that opponents of the Iraq adventure have been duped into supporting an unholy alliance of the Marxist Left and Islamic Fascists. Cohen wants the hundreds of thousands who marched against possible war in Iraq on February 15th 2003 to be tarred as "objectively fascist", being led by George Galloway, the SWP and assorted Mullahs into metaphorically defaceating from a great height upon the brave people of Iraq.

Well, apart from George Galloway getting elected in Bethnal Bow with under 36% of the vote (a landslide of New Labour proportions) and Respect taking some council seats in a few areas with high Muslim populations, not that many people seem to be "objectively fascist". Indeed, it appears that less than 1% of the people who went on the Feb 15th 2003 march joined the SWP or other Marxist grouplets. Four years on it seems the SWP faces imminent liquidation into Respect. Perhaps most people are not the willing dupes of political extremists Cohen seems to think they are.

Another one of Cohen's bugbears is why "the Left" (which, as several reviews have noted, he never defines) concentrate on criticising the USA and Israel, rather than, say, Zimbabwe, North Korea or China. He attributes it to self-hating Western intellectuals and de facto anti-Semitism. There are self-hating Western intellectuals and anti-semites out there (who are generally such humourless nobodies that just making fun at their expense is enough). However, most criticism of Israel and the USA comes from people seeing these countries betraying their ideals. Most people expect China, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe etc to be brutal dictatorships that terrorise their political opponents and are aggressive towards other countries. On the other hand, most people in Britain and elsewhere in the Western world expect the USA and Israel to conform to democratic principles and act in a peace-loving manner except when under direct attack. When Israel and the USA go to war in the face of world opinion many see these actions as betrayals of what these countries stand for. The USA and Israel get admonished more than other countries for their aggressive actions simply because people expect better of them. People expect governments, like individuals, not to be deliberate hypocrites. People see Bush and Blair acting like hypocrites in Iraq and they don't like it. It doesn't make them apologists for Islamic reaction, whatever Nick Cohen says.



A good a place as any to read about Nick Cohen and What's Left? is Aaronovitch Watch. Two reviews that don't respect the Great Man are for your perusal below. The second one I came across in the Daily Telegraph of all places. It wasn't like that when Conrad Black owned it. I bet Mark Steyn is crushing grapes in fury as we speak...

Into bed with Tony: Nick Cohen thinks his defence of the Iraq war in What's Left? is a sign of maturity. Peter Wilby begs to differ
The Guardian, February 3, 2007

Almost from the moment Tony Blair became Labour's leader, Nick Cohen was his fiercest and most articulate critic. While nearly every other liberal press commentator hailed Blair as the saviour of the British left, Cohen saw through new Labour from the start, denouncing it as modish, shallow and potentially corrupt. His rage, in columns for the Observer and the New Statesman, was unrelenting: in his own words, "attacking Tony Blair was what ... got me out of bed in the mornings". He brought to his mission not only a scornful wit that drew comparisons with Jonathan Swift, but also the skills of an exceptional news journalist who could unearth telling evidence to support his case.

For the past five years, those talents - in debased form, some would say - have been turned to supporting the US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq. It would be wrong to say Cohen has become a new Labour supporter, still less a Tory. But from being, at one stage, Blair's sole enemy on the mainstream journalistic left, he has moved, on the defining issue of Blair's premiership, to being just about his only remaining ally.

This book is the political testament of Cohen, Mk II. If you want a measure of how far he has travelled, consider what he wrote on November 4 2001, as Blair joined George W Bush's invasion of Afghanistan: "If Bin Laden died tomorrow, he could console himself ... that the deaths of civilians and the coming Afghan famine have ensured a posthumous victory ... Supporters of the war should be required to defend ... the refusal of America to accept restraints on weapons of mass destruction, the collapse of our national independence, mines falling from the heavens ... "

The Damascene moment - about which this book is frustratingly uninformative - followed shortly afterwards. "My pieces weren't written in good faith," Cohen states. "I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him." Most people on the left, we are supposed to understand, took the easy option. Cohen chose the harder one and his subsequent political trajectory followed, with an interesting exactness, that of his journalistic hero, Christopher Hitchens, the self-styled "contrarian". When the Iraq invasion came, Cohen was onside with his new friend Tony just as the Washington-based Hitchens was with his friend Dubya.

Many commentators who supported the Iraq invasion....have since repented. Not Cohen. Far from accepting the war's aftermath as the left's vindication, he sees the post-invasion period as the most damning proof yet of its wrong-headedness. Indeed, he seems almost to blame the war's opponents for the anarchy and enormous loss of life in Iraq and to portray the present state of that country as a bigger catastrophe for the left than it is for Bush and Blair. The left, according to Cohen, has found itself backing a fascist attempt to regain power in Iraq, misrepresenting it as an "insurgency" against imperialist oppressors.

It has thus abandoned its "comrades" in the Iraqi trade unions who, even if they opposed the invasion, now want the occupation to continue.

This is not the first time the European left has dug itself into an embarrassing hole, Cohen argues. Its opposition to the war effort during the Hitler-Stalin pact, its collaboration with the Nazi occupation of France, its denial of Srebrenica - all these show that the left, in its determination to oppose western capitalism, too easily slides into uncritical alliance with fascist or other totalitarian regimes. Readers may object that only small sections of the left (and not always the same sections) were responsible for these crass misjudgments, just as only a few leftists have hailed the suicide bombers of Iraq as liberationists. But Cohen won't have it.

The more extreme individuals and groups, he insists, magnify an unsteadiness of principle that afflicts the entire western left. So we are asked to believe that George Galloway's feline antics on Celebrity Big Brother, the late Gerry Healy's sexual harassment of the women members of his Workers Revolutionary Party, and the preposterous attempt by the Revolutionary Communist Party's LM magazine to prove that people pictured inside a Serbian concentration camp were actually outside it are examples of where we shall all end up if we don't watch our step.

Cohen follows the precept that has served him, and many other journalists, so well in the past: simplify, then exaggerate. He never had much time for political trade-offs and, in his anti-Blair phase, couldn't accept that, for example, an outright Labour commitment to high public spending and egalitarianism might be at the cost of losing the confidence of the financial markets. He can't now accept that the overthrow of Saddam came at the cost of strengthening Iran, creating a rallying point for jihadists and, not least, causing (directly or indirectly) the deaths of hundreds of thousands who might have been miserable under the Baathists, but would probably have preferred to stay alive. Just as no prisoners could be taken in the war on British social inequality, so none can now be taken in the war against "a global fascist movement".

Cohen appears to think this book shows he has put infantile leftism behind him and attained a new maturity. Alas, it shows that he is, and always was, a political innocent.




Is a liberal a nincompoop? Nicholas Blincoe reviews What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen
Daily Telegraph, February 3, 2007

Let's begin with the diagnosis. As "Leftish puritanism" disappeared, "the rich world's liberals", afflicted by "enfeebling self-consciousness", devoted their energies to enjoying "exquisite regional cuisines" and "long holidays" while foregoing the "cost and inconvenience of raising the young".

Today, these liberals have to "live with the consequences" of a sybaritic life that "could not be borne without bringing in immigrants" who found their "values repugnant". The result is that "a part of British Islam went off into the wilds"; indeed, "by the time you read this, maybe the body count will have risen."

"Fortunately, one party "understood what was going on in the slums": the "BNP was seeing Britain clearly" when they claimed the "Muslim community… chooses to vote only for those political parties that explicitly promote the interests of the Muslim community itself".

At this point, I feel I should stop and reassure the reader that my quotations genuinely reflect Nick Cohen's arguments on the decline of liberalism. He really has come to praise the BNP, at the expense of the liberal elite: the Noam Chomskys, Jacques Derridas and… er… Malcolm Rifkinds of this world.

They are not, for the most part, outright villains but fools who created an environment that enabled the rise of the Islamic-Fascistic hydra. The liberals' crime is to prize individual identity above everything, forgetting that the Enlightenment rested on a respect for the universal Rights of Man, not the mere tolerance of difference.

In Cohen's view, liberalism begins in relativism and ends in "nihilism": a gobby blathering about cultural equivalence, without ever developing a real political programme.

The chief symptom of this nihilism, so Cohen argues, is to identify Israel as the source of all disquiet in the world. In his view, liberals are only obsessed by Israel because Islamists regard it as the "root cause". Liberals go along with this lie in the pursuit of a quieter life. In sum, they are fascist appeasers: and four years ago, one million of these nincompoops paraded through London to oppose the removal of a fascist dictator.

It is difficult to know how to address this tap-room rot. Perhaps it is enough to say that the only possible political programme it suggests is a pledge to breed more, eat less and never engage with a Muslim nation: just bomb them. Or to argue, as Peter Oborne has, that the people most obsessed with Israel are Cohen's "new-found neo-conservative friends".

As a Palestinian voter and thus a kind of Palestinian citizen, I can report that Palestinians are amazed that the world is so interested in their plight. Yet they would take issue with Cohen's claim that the world cares too much about them and insufficiently about Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Their reply would be that at least the world knows that Mugabe is engaged in the forced nationalisation of private property. No matter how often Palestinians try to make Israel's forced nationalisation of their land the chief issue, the terms of the debate are framed by Security, Islam and the clash of East and West – which, to conclude a rather circular argument, are the very issues that make Cohen so obsessed by Israel.

On another tack, one might suggest that calling everyone a fascist is the flabbiest kind of relativism: the so-called Reductio ad Hitlerum. Or perhaps point out that the only person ever to have advocated the wild-eyed relativism that Cohen describes is Aleister Crowley. Unless all the anti-war protesters were death metal fans, they may have had better reasons for marching. Surely respect for liberal democracy compels one to ask why about 60 per cent of the country opposed the war at a time when a cache of lethal weapons still seemed a possibility.

There were many reasons to go to war: to depose a dictator, to render these weapons safe, to secure energy supplies, to spread democracy or to remove an avowed enemy of Israel. Yet a majority of the country felt these reasons were insufficient.

Indeed, the very fact that so many arguments were offered suggested there was no true analysis of the situation and thus no credible war aim, and no possibility of victory. By their sheer numbers, a majority of Cohen's fellow citizens showed startling collective wisdom by predicting a grave problem before it arose. This is why we should love democracy.

To Cohen, the marchers were stooges of Muslims and Marxists. He cannot accept that ordinary people had, in essence, hijacked the event from its organisers. Yet he should consider why protest dwindled once Saddam was deposed and the issue became one of supporting Iraqi democracy and British troops. Or the fact that almost no one opposed the war in Afghanistan against al-Qa'eda and the Taliban, real Islamic terrorists rather than an abstract notion of "Islamo-Fascist Terror". Mind you, we learn from Cohen's book that one person, at least, opposed this war: Nick Cohen.

Finally, we might reply to Cohen's self-righteous claim that, unlike him, no protester bothered to ask an Iraqi his or her opinion of the war. I did, and their opinions varied – but most exiles opposed the war because they recognised the true nihilism of blowing up a country in the vain hope that the pieces might fall into a more perfect order. Cohen spoke to a few enthusiastic Kurdish nationalists, but found only one self-proclaimed Iraqi who supported the war. Just one. On this, he builds his arts and martial exercises.



"Hey, Your Highness, that Limey Pinko Nick Cohen reckons we're fighting for democracy in Iraq!"
"Neither am I, infidel scum."