Apols for the hiatus...

I've got a life outside of blogging, so I have been neglecting my duties, some of which I will get around to posting about in the not too distant future. As for the Oscar Wilde of British Fascism ie "Sid", life is too short to waste much time on a nasty piece of work like him.

To fill the gap a bit, I got this meme from Madam Miaow. It's doing the rounds through the blogosphere at the moment:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

I had to think hard about this. I am so out of following current musical trends. I keep telling myself to listen to XFM, but the few times I've tried to listen to it in the last couple of years I seem to tune into some DJ "telling me and more about some useless information" (to quote Sir Michael Jagger). At least with my own musical collection I can listen to what I want when I want. Most of what I learn about "new music" is via going on YouTube.

So the 7 I've chosen are very much pieces of music which have been going through my mind over the last few months:

(1) Tori Amos: Professional Widow (Amand Van Helden mix) I'm far from a connoisseur of "dance music". The best of it is glorified disco. The worst is like prog rock with a beat, with nothing to sing along to and just far too long. However, I like this, mainly because it doesn't go on too long and is based on a real song: "Professional Widow" by Tori Amos, which is supposedly about post-Kurt Cobain Courtney Love.

(2) Jarvis Cocker: Running The World. This makes "Common People" sound like a vicarage tea party. Link has scenes from my favourite film of 2006 "Children of Men".

(3) Black Kids: I Ain't Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend To Dance With You. Saw these on Jools Holland a couple of months ago. I totally agree with the sentiments: too many objects of desire go out with complete numpties- don't encourage them!

(4) Rage Against The Machine: Testify. From 2000, a good antidote to the current bout of Barak-mania (and Gore-mania too).

(5) : Supergrass: Sun Hits The Sky. A great summer song (even better if the weather goes with it) from their best album of the lot, In It For The Money.

(6) Eye of the Tiger. Not the version in the Rocky film, but from Persepolis. Marjane comes home to Iran from Vienna in the late 1980s, finds it extremely hard to adapt, then almost kills herself with a drink/drugs cocktail. Then she snaps out of it, and this is the soundtrack to picking herself up from the floor.

(7) Moby: Everyday It's 1989. From his new album (but I found it on a freebie Sunday Times CD) some glorified disco.

That's my 7. If anyone else wants me to tag them, be my guest!

Why does ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man" Come To Mind?

Richard Barnbrook: The BNP's man in the GLA. Who says you can't look good in brown?

This is republished and slightly changed from Friday...got some bile from a BNPer as a consequence [see below]...


It is worth noting that the BNP got virtually the same share of the vote in this year's GLA Elections- 5.4%- as the NF did in the 1977 GLC elections (the NF got 5.3%. They took 119,000 votes, compared to the BNP getting just under 131,000 this time). The only real difference from 31 years ago is that there is an element of PR in this year's elections*. Under PR it is generally easier for fringe political groups to gain seats (although try telling the SWP that after their latest "cunning plan" ie Left Luggage went arse over tit last week. No wonder Lindsay G didn't turn up to the Mayoral election count...).If the benchmark of racist sentiment in London is the city-wide performance of "the Far Right", not much has changed over 30 years. There are still Racially Obsessed types out there, but overall they haven't really increased in number over three decades.

* I can see anti-PR people arguing that Sharp Dressed Man's election to the GLA proves that PR encourages "the Far Right". However, those who defend First-Past-The-Post will have to explain why when Italy had PR, overt Mussolini worshippers got nowhere near national political power, while now under FPTP they are Government Ministers. Plus I'm sure if Richard B was Italian, Berlusconi would give him a job, simply due to his natty threads...

2 comments:

Sid said...

It's ironic that an ugly, smug, bastard like you would mock Barnbrook's appearance. And you actually look quite a bit older than your age (pssst - the boys down on the common are just flattering you to get your money).

By the way, the BNP's vote was actually better than the NF's thirty years ago because of the huge demographic changes since then which make 5.3% much harder to get. Understand, you thick cunt?



2020: As Nick Griffin becomes PM, Sid and friends crack down on erstwhile anti-BNP bloggers...

Anglonoel said...

Hey Sidney! (or should I call you Mr. Vicious...or Mr. Little?)

Cheers for your first ever contribution to my blog. You really know how to win friends and influence people on behalf of the BNP (I take it you are a loyal BNP member/supporter- or do you think Nick Griffin has sold "British Nationalism" out to the Zionist Occupational Government?).

Unfortunately, that'll be your last to be published here as I've changed the settings. All comments from now on need my approval before they appear.

Before you start effing and blinding (which you seem incapable of NOT doing- or did the Stella/Special Brew make you do it?) on the grounds that I'm gagging your freedom of speech, I would point out:

(i)where's your blog with comment box, so people (ie 95% of the population) who disagree with you can take issue with, and take the piss out, your "thoughts"?; &

ii) by the way you attacked me, you foul mouthed nasty piece of work, I should guess that if you want a picture of future BNP Government, just imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. If the BNP took over I don't think anti-Government free speech would last very long. In particular, if your attitude is anything to go by, taking the piss out of BNP would be a thing of the past, and there would be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.

So, sorry Sid, I'm pulling the plug on you. However, you'll be glad to know that your erudite contribution will be the focus of my next post. If you think I took the piss out of Richard Barnbrook (got a suit like his have you?), you ain't seen nothing yet.

So long, you sad race obsessed loser.

PS I might be ugly in looks, but at least my politics ain't. BTW where's your mugshot? I take it that YOU haven't put male Supermodel Fabio out a job yet...

Elections v. v.quick update- First Highgate, then the world...

Well, Boris won the Mayoral Election. The best thing you can say for him is that he is opposed to ID cards.

Furthermore, the BNP got a seat in the GLA.

On the plus side, the Greens took the 3rd seat in Highgate ward. Lab came second and the Cons third. The Greens took two seats on the GLA (same as in 04)and Sian Berry (who I found out on Wed night drinks bitter, after an evening getting soaked leafletting letter boxes in Archway) came fourth in the first round of the Mayoral contest. Furthermore, the Greens did pretty well in most of the constituency contests.

Respect (apart from 15% in City and East) and Left Luggage, sorry Left List, did extremely badly. It seems the last hope of the English Left is the Green Party. However, how more disasters it will take for the message to get home to all those wanting to re-stage Sergei Eisenstein's October?

Will blog more Sunday night/Monday morning here. I saw Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine going dirt cheap in a bookshop yesterday so I'm going to splash out and read it in the park this afternoon, either trying to get a suntan or rust...

Update: Early Hours of Monday 5th: Just finished Shock Doctrine. It is even better than No Logo. The book it complements is Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse (I need to look hard in the footnotes to see if NK cites him). I want to review it at length, or at least use it as a starting point for other posts. For instance, surely there is a viable political way between grovelling to Corporate Capitalism on one side and pandering to RORO (Racially Or Religiously Obsessed) types on the other? I'm tired and I digress...

There has been talk over the weekend that there may be a challenge to Gordon Brown's leadership of the Labour Party at some point in the coming months if things don't impove. There seems to be hopes on the Labour Left that NuLab can be defeated at last, but I'm pretty sure NuLab will find someone else to lead them all on the Forward Path to Reform and Modernisation if GB fails. The Tories seem to think the next General Election is all over bar the shooting, sorry shouting, but I still think we will have a hung Parliament in 2009-10 and a National Government of "Reformers" and "Modernisers" will form in the aftermath. We will see...

What England Means To Me

The Battle of Hastings, October 13th 1066: A bad day at the office for England.


It's up there in its full glory in cyberspace at What England Means To Me.

Here's what I said:

I think of myself as an old-style English Radical in my politics, somewhere on the Left. I see the English people, whatever their origins, as having struggled for centuries to reverse the effects of the “Norman Yoke”. When I was about eight, living in a Labour-voting (or, more accurately, Tory-hating) household in the West Midlands, I remember learning at school about the Roman and Viking invasions of England and how they left eventually. Then when learning about the Normans, the obvious question to me was “when did the Normans leave?” I never got a decent answer at the time. As I got older the obvious answer was “never”, but l knew from the callous destruction of much of the West Midlands’ industrial base under the Thatcher regime that we were a nation of lions led by donkeys. When I was 19 I came across the Levellers in the English Civil Wars and their idea of the “Norman Yoke” which deprived the “free-born” Anglo-Saxons of their liberties after 1066. Ever since, I have basically held onto the idea that England is still under the thrall of a much-modified “Norman Yoke”. The faces and names may change (and if your ancestors came over in 1066 I don’t hold you personally responsible for anything!) but “the Thing”, to quote William Cobbett, has persisted for centuries. Its “golden thread”, to coin a phrase, runs from the “Harrying of the North”, Magna Carta (a baron’s carve-up), the Glorious Revolution (a banker’s coup d’etat) all the way up to New Labour’s paeans to “New Britishness”.

Why does anyone on the Left have hang-ups about the idea of being English? It sure beats the idea of Britishness. For about two decades I’ve thought the whole concept of Britishness (for which my spellchecker suggests “Brutishness”) as an idea whose time has gone. The only question is how we give the United Kingdom a decent burial. However, too many on the Left hold onto the idea of Britishness, fearing Englishness. However, how on Earth can holding onto the ideology of a big business dominated imperial state, which is in its death throes, be progressive? There is simply no “Britishness”, new or otherwise, that political progressives can subscribe to and be true to their ideals. It is a concept too weighed down by the gap between its democratic, enlightened rhetoric and the sordid reality that the British state has presided over for centuries.

Instead the Left should embrace English Radicalism, which inspired thinkers and movements such as the Levellers, Tom Paine, William Cobbett, the Chartists, the mutualist and co-operative movements, William Morris, the pre-1914 syndicalists and Guild Socialists such as GDH Cole. It was driven underground politically by the triumph of “top-down” socialism, in both its Fabian and Leninist forms, after 1918. Now that global “top-down” models of organising society, whether by states or corporations, are under attack from decentralising, democratic tendencies, it is time for the English Left to embrace a national identity that accords with the spirit of the age.

It also means we need a national identity that draws upon one of the most abused phrases in modern politics: “Little Englander”. The original “Little Englanders” were patriotic radicals who were opposed to the Empire building that underlay Britain’s participation in the 1899-1902 Boer War. Our nation can only be at ease with itself when we abandon imperial adventures, whether our own or on behalf of the USA or EU, and realise that our real gifts to the world are our language, our culture and our sense of humour, none of which the Normans gave us! (“Taking the piss” is something that William the Conqueror, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair would never appreciate!). We should become a country where, to quote Orwell, we “hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anyone else.”

Biographical note: I was born in Walsall in the Black Country two weeks before the end of 1969. My mother was also born in the Black Country. My father was born in County Sligo. He came over in 1948 at the age of six after his dad served in the British Army during WW2 (and was to again in Korea in the early 1950s). However, I think of myself as English rather than British, and have done for 30 odd years.

Little

How Monty Python Made Me A Socialist

I would have probably become a socialist of some sort anyhow. I was brought up in a working-class Labour-voting family (my dad did join the Labour Party for a while, but found out, like Oscar Wilde had claimed, the problem with socialism was "too many meetings"). I am also left-handed, so when I was a sprog and people said Labour was on the left, I sort of automatically identified with Labour!

Then came the Python connection. When I was about 9 my parents gave me "Monty Python Live At Drury Lane" on tape as a Xmas present. It had the Communist Quiz sketch in which Karl Marx, Lenin, Chairman Mao and Che Guevara are asked questions about English football and pop music that they had next to no clue about. However, in the second part of the sketch Karl was asked questions about "workers' control of factories" to win a beautiful lounge suite (though he flunks it when asked about who won the 1949 FA Cup Final). It was there I fell for the idea of direct workers' control of their work places! After that I got out the "Great Lives" volume of a massive set of encyclopedias my mum had and looked up Karl Marx and it spoke about his support for workers' control of the economy. Being a mid-1950s mainstream sort of publication, "Great Lives" slagged Marx off, but he seemed a decent sort to me. So I have always been quite pro-Marx from quite a young age.

To Be Continued...

London Election latest and stuff

I spent yesterday morning leafleting a housing estate up in Highgate (next to the cemetery with Karl Marx in it)for the Greens. There is a Camden Council bye-election on May 1st, the same day as the London-wide elections, and as the Greens have two out of the three councillors in the ward, they are hoping to take the third off the Tories.

I think the Greens have a reasonable chance of taking the ward. On the estate (I managed 275 or so letter boxes in 90 mins) the only political posters in windows were Green ones. I think there was someone else delivering stuff (or it could have been just someone delivering leaflets for pizza). It could well have been the Lib Dems as I saw someone delivering Lib Dem Focus leaflets on my way back to Gospel Oak train station. It was a cold, grey, damp morning so there weren't many people about but those I did say morning to were friendly, so that it is a good sign. All other things being equal, I should be able to get up Highgate again the day before the election for one more leafletting blitz.

Two Tuesdays ago I did turn up at the Friends Meeting House over in Euston for a meeting organised by NO2ID. It was about the surveillance state in London. Ken Livingstone didn't turn up (he was represented by a full-size cardboard cut-out!), but Boris Johnson, Brian Paddick, Jenny Jones (for the Greens), Lindsey German for Left Luggage (sorry, Left List) and Gerard Batten for UKIP were there. The BNP candidate for Mayor Richard "one suit" Barnbrook turned up, but as the BNP aren't represented in Westminster, the European Parliament or the GLA (yet) he wasn't invited onto the platform and was given a ticking off by security. (You might ask, why was Lindsey G allowed on the platform when Left List have no electoral representation in London? Apparently she was asked to speak when she was still Respect's Mayoral candidate...).

There was quite a consensus amongst the platform speakers: opposition to ID cards and fears about where surveillance of London and Londoners is heading. The big arguments were between Jenny Jones and Brian Paddick (over whether crime in London was going up or down) and Lindsey German and Gerard Batten (over immigration). I must say Boris Johnson was quite impressive, but the format of the meeting (I left 8.30ish as I was nodding off and I had a night of work ahead of me)aided him. Each of the 5 speakers was given 3 mins to do their spiel, then the chairwoman (apols, I didn't catch her name) read out 4 issues NO2ID wanted the speakers to address. Each of the speakers were given 3 mins (or so) to give their view. Then it was questions from the audience (you had to fill a piece of paper in- I split before that started). I have been reading that Boris Johnson has been taught to stick to the point, otherwise his minders think he'll go off topic and alienate audiences. So three mins to reel his spiel off was ideal for him, and to his credit he is genuinely anti-ID cards, so he was reasonably impressive.

I still think I'll force myself to vote for Ken as my 2nd choice for Mayor, but I have no enthusiasm for him at all. Having said that, a few Conservative contacts of mine are not too keen on Boris either. I suppose it will all depend on where the Lib Dem votes go after Brian Paddick is eliminated. At the hustings he was very pro- civil liberties and vehemently anti-racist. However, I have been reading that he is quite pro-City of London and has accused Ken of wanting to make London "a socialist republic" (do me a favour!).

Anyway, before I started dropping off into the land of nod, I wrote down a few facts and figures mentioned in the meeting:

Later this year non-European Economic Area foreign nationals (that is, anyone who desn't come from the EU, Iceland, Norway or Lietchenstein)in the UK will be compelled to register for an ID card and be fingerprinted in the process. I can't see this going down well with people from outside the EEA living in London, including all those non-doms...

Those who have ID cards will have to give the authorities information about 50 categories (not just 50 items) of personal information. These can be added to via Government regulation (ie sod Parliamentary scrutiny).

In London there are around 10,000 CCTV cameras on the roads and 8,000 on the Tube. I feel safer already... There are 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK as a whole.

There are 700,000 DNA samples on the Metropolitan Police database, with around 90,000 new samples being added to every year. I feel safer than ever...

Sort of update...

Hat-tip : A Very Public Sociologist

Really I should be typing lots. Lots in my mind's eye (as per usual) but I have a strong "manana" tendency in my outlook, which means I put off a lot of stuff I could really do now. I'm not proud of this. I wish I could flush this annoying habit of mine down the toilet of history.

My article on "what England means to me" has got bogged down with two other possible pieces. One on socialism and another on "radicalism, conservatism and populism" (working title). All three pieces wander into the other two. However, with April 23rd coming up (St. George's Day and Shakespeare's birthday) I have a deadline in my head for getting this stuff down on paper (or up on hyper-text). This is my final night of freedom out of 10 before a week back at work. So it'll be a week's time when I start grappling and slaying my article demons.

In the meantime I will leave you with a quote I quite like...

"The mere fact that communism didn't work doesn't mean that capitalism does. In many parts of the globe it's a wrecking, terrible force, displacing people, ruining lifstyles, traditions, ecologies and stable systems with the same ruthlessness as communism."- John Le Carre, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 20/6/97, p.11.