a group of people holding the country to ransom for their own private gain; they don’t have a mandate – less than half the people who could have voted to show support for their actions did so. maybe we need to change the law to punish people who do this – it just can’t be right that schools, borders – all areas of public life are disrupted, that children are without education and people who rely on essential public services should suffer for no fault of their own.

that’s why tomorrow i will not be supporting the actions of the government.

yeah, of course you knew where i was going with it. if you want surprises, you could try sticking your fingers in the electrical socket.

the mighty andrew ranwsley has written about them.

that tory mp who makes her living writing books that might one day aspire to a career as toilet paper tried (without much success) to get a laugh on ‘have i got news for you’ by rubbishing the protesters because some of them may have visited starbucks (says plenty about their taste in coffee but little about the validity of their agenda).

someone somewhere (yes, my usual level of detailed research has gone into this post) felt that as some of the campers may go home at night  (dognose if this is correct) they are hypocrites.

there is a degree of cynicism about all this.

i am reminded of greenham common, of molesworth and indeed of the chartists.

i have dropped in very briefly 3 times. if they are still there i will drop in again. on one occasion i was with the clp and the kids. every time the atmosphere struck me as friendly, thoughtful and unthreatening. as an unreformed old stalinist i like a situation that may turn nasty – i myself am cynical enough to believe that governments rarely start to listen until people turn nasty. but this wasn’t. this weekend people were doing shoutouts – brief spots at the central microphone giving their take on what the protest was all about, why they personally were there and what this moment in history might remedy about the sad, broken system that has impoverished us all even more morally than financially (and the financial bit has been bad enough). they weren’t ranting; the ones i heard spoke with composure and calm – goodness, they even made sense. they spoke with respect for the views of others there while accepting they may not agree with them. they seemed to be saying that this was just their way, it didn’t have to be that of the whole world, the whole camp, or even of a single camper other than themselves. this is perhaps unusual. the fact that people around actually listened and apparently thought about what was said was bloody unique. at a time when the level of debate in parliament has risen to the lofty heights of cameron calling milliband a complete mug, the sound of people listening to what someone else thinks and seeing how it works for them rang out like truth in a stock exchange.

as it stands, the camp has a lot of people debating, thinking and listening. of course it isn’t the answer to the crisis of capitalism, but nobody is sorting that lot any time soon. and the people who are at the heart of that crisis and profiting from it are the ones shouting loudest that it’s hopeless even to address the issue. funny that…

the chartists are often cited as an example of the inevitable failure of all rainbow alliances. but chartism’s legacy is best seen not in what they achieved directly but in what others achieved precisely because chartism had been there first. standing on the shoulders of giants – or even ordinary people; the little people – bless ‘em. bless us.

it’s the new putney debates. just hope it doesn’t throw up a new cromwell.

four brothers, sons, fathers, husbands will be carried out of their pit never to return.

four more men are taken by our hunger for coal to warm us and light our homes.

i’ve never lived in a pit community, but as part of a pit family the hairs rise on my neck every time i hear of pitmen trapped underground. every time i look to some higher power i’m not even sure is there to help the men in the dark between rock and water; to comfort the wives, the mothers, the friends and the children. to take the miners back home with their pit boots on their feet, not carried out by their mates under a blanket. ‘let them walk out’ i whisper to myself.

this time, for all the heroism and hopes of a whole community they didn’t walk out. the whispered prayers went unanswered as prayers often do. the rescuers left empty-handed with exhaustion their only reward.

four men.

four families.

tiny in global terms. a deep seam of grief in human terms. a reminder that the industry that saw men bound as slaves to their owners long after the british empire had abolished slavery, then paid in tokens that could only be spent in their owners’ shops, still demands its sacrifices. a reminder that the earth, vast and powerful, is murderous when it chooses, crushing us like poverty.

they say you can’t understand the feel of a pit tragedy until you have been part of that village waiting, clinging to the whispered hope for its men. i believe it. but i know that the memory from my grandfather and his father squats deep underground in me. it broods under my soft life, miles from home, from where home will always be, from where the broken bodies of generations of men lie underground, where the tears of their women fell. it’s a chain that binds durham to yorkshire to wales to waikato. it rings the world to anywhere men have wrestled with the earth to win a handful of black rock and a lungful of dust. to dig profit for men who never touched a pick or a geordie lamp, for women who never washed their crushed sons and husbands to give them back to the rock, to darkness one last time.

so that’s why the blog wears black. for those four men, their four families, their village and for every man lost to the pits, every child whose father was stolen by the merciless seam, every tear shed in every pit village anywhere in the world.

from me and my folk, sleep well bonny lads.

ah no feckit…

sorry.

just can’t waste the seconds of my life it takes to say why the death penalty is like a kinda bad thing. nope; can’t be bothered. just doing other stuff like breathing in and out and not making arguments that should be blindingly obvious to all semi-intelligent-and-up human beings. (yes, since you ask, priti patel is one of the tories who has come out (or remained out, i guess) as being in favour of the death penalty.)

for fuller details visit tory home, or the isle of wight’s mp’s website (hell yeah – if we care, he ‘ lists his interests as reading, walking [that's an 'l' just for clarity], old movies and avoiding gardening!’ oh the dangerous old radical. and note the jauntily placed exclamation mark. he seems unaccountably to have missed ‘killing the mentally ill’ off that riveting list. it is perhaps the one thing that makes you imagine for a moment he is actually still breathing.) or even read the daily male if you want to see why europe, feminists or the blacks (if not black european feminists) are to blame for … oh, you know … stuff.

i wonder what me ole chum dom raab thinks about all of this… no actually i don’t. i couldn’t give a buggering stuff. valuable seconds of my life have already been expended hearing what these vacuous tossers think about this and that when i know it will only inflame me further.

i shall resort to beating myself repeatedly over the head with an old kipper until the blood and the will to live are leaving my body/spirit at about the same rate.

don’t suppose there’s a portobello riot i can join. better stick the clash on loud and watch the images of burning buildings from croydon to haringey. that can’t be anything to do with the government can it?

yeah ok, that is just silly.

ahem! the writer of this blog remembers the saurian dom raab. if you don’t (and why should you?) you can see where he first writhed into my ken here http://simplywondered.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/slimy-things-did-crawl-with-legs/. i am delighted that he lives up to form as a grade A twerp by using his elected position in the motherf#*&@!$ of parliaments to reveal the real villains of the news of the world scandal… who are

those who are responding with unpleasant glee to the temporary difficulties faced by that paragon of virtue the news of the world.

lest we should be in any doubt about my own moral turpitude, i would point out that glee just doesn’t cover it for me. not even with a capital G and a 2hr special of annoying american teenagers miming to studio sounds on channel 4. anyway, here was me thinking it was them pesky muckrakers who were the villains of the piece when it fact it was me by the simple act of crowing loud and long (oh how loud!) that these bastards had been caught doing all the naughty things they do in the noble cause of making money.

and lest we should be in any doubt about the upright nature of rebekah brooks and andy coulson and their approach to things like the truth, these were the people who had two views about whether they had paid police for information:

view 1 was ‘no we didn’t',

view 2 was ‘yes we did’.

they used these answers to the question more or less interchangeably and at random. however they were quite certain that if they did pay police they only did it in a legal way.

glee glee fucking glee.

talking of people who really are moral, geoffrey robertson qc (i’m a bit of a fan – sad, really but he is and always has been dead cool) explained the complex legal situation thus: ‘paying the police is illegal’. anyone got any moral or legal queries on that ???

the zim is 70 tomorrow.

70.

lordy!

i was working out with some friends and fellow lovers of his oeuvre (nothing to do with eggs) what he might want as a present. i thought a nice chinese suit, a few bottles of bread, one more cup of coffee – all the usual – and they made many cleverer and more abstruse references.

then it hit me… it was simple and somehow obvious…

i think he’d just like a woman.

the people with minds full of nasty dark things have largely realised they can’t get them out in public because it will be like the bit in the horror film where a scuzzy but otherwise normal head dissolves in a mass of putrefaction and loathsome crawling things. sure, the things will still lurk somewhere in the secret part of them for which they will one day have to answer; but like torturing then slowly starving children to death all the while laughing like a drain or watching x factor, they are the things NEVER TO BE SPOKEN.

every so often one of these things worms out of an eyeball and bears witness to the squirmy maggoty special effect-fest within. and almost invariably it comes out of something nasty and smug and appears in something akin to the daily male.

which is pretty appropriate i suppose.

today’s crawling thing oozed unpleasantly out of something whose human name is dominic raab. (conveniently, raab is one of the surnames a demon can actually pronounce.) it coalesced here:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23916856-tory-mp-blasts-obnoxious-feminist-bigots-and-says-men-get-a-raw-deal.do

even the title will probably be enough for those without a gut of stainless steel. i got to the bit where it said:

‘If you buy into the whole Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus theory of gender difference – with all its pseudo science – you can’t then complain about inequalities of outcome that flow both ways from those essentially sexist distinctions.’

before my search for anything recognisable as logic or even grammar caused my brain to start oozing sadly down my left nostril.

for some reason it felt the need to tell us that the writer’s wife ‘works in marketing for a major IT firm‘ and just to prove it, they had a picture of raab in human(ish) form accompanied by said smiling wife. ‘hey’ it gushed ‘ even if this is what happens when you open your mouth, you can still get a girlfriend, guys’.

‘i have sex’, shrieked the expression on the raab-demon’s face, ‘and i have also read a human book’. he then didn’t rip off his skin and howl ‘fall before me, puny mortals’. shame really.

no of course he didn’t do that, because he isn’t a demon at all. he’s human; he walks among us, living in esher, proudly saying such things for the better education of his fellow humans. these are the kind of things we say when we leave our humanity so far behind as to justify all the oppression with the perfect non-logic that ‘it’s all their fault’.

someone did quietly point out: “Women still earn 20 per cent less than men, domestic violence claims the lives of women every week and women bear the brunt of poverty in the developing world…. feminism is a just demand for equality and human rights“. but that was just a woman.

quite cunning though, cos if you look at what she says, it actually seems like it’s true, whereas if you look at what the raab said, it had all the clarity and beauty of pus.

a bit later i read that goldman sachs paid £7.9 BILLION to around 7000 people.

Broken cutters, broken saws
Broken buckles, broken laws
Broken bodies, broken bones
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath, feel like you’re chokin’
Everything is broken

as the wheel turns, the winter king is slain and the summer king is born, whatever you call him, proserpina has had her pomegranate and you start to hope more. this year i feel i have no real hopes … oh the usual, i hope the world deals kindly with those i love most, gives rich experiences to my boys and returns softness for the softness of the clp*.

the hope is for others. and before there are cynical rumblings from the boathouse, it’s not just blether. i don’t think i can be happy in a society where there is unfairness. apart from anything else, it just bloody annoys me. there is no point in having things in such a state that some people get screwed; it’s not even as if it makes anyone’s lives better, it just makes others’ lives worse.

this year, among the many pointless cuts, have been big cuts to legal aid. the law centre where i volunteered is likely to close; the people who work there will lose their jobs. lawyers, eh! tough… many comments i have seen about the cuts to the legal aid budget are based on the notion that lawyers are all the same. the city boys (and even occasionally, whisper it low, a girl!) on their large salaries doing whatever it is they do for big businesses who do errr … whatever they do too. and the law centre solicitors, who after maybe 20 years in practice probably earn less in a year than a city partner earns in a month. their law is getting repairs done for someone living with hiv in a flat with a sieve for a roof and ‘damp’ just doesn’t cover it; stopping an attempt to recoup £40,000 of housing benefit from an unemployed single parent because they say she is married to the landlord – without actual evidence; fighting for a domestic servant who was made to sleep on a floor, was beaten and so maltreated she drank bleach (like a bloody priestley play innit?). the clients aren’t all likeable, they aren’t all right – but they all deserve a shout.

and the law centre solicitors keep people in their homes and fight for people everyone else disregards. when the law centres go – and they will go, despite the will of people to work in them for less money than they could get elsewhere – people, families, will become homeless. and we could have stopped it.

and we didn’t.

and i sit here happy with my lot. the world has looked after me again. there have been potatoes, beans and raspberries… god there were raspberries! and the garlic will soon pop its head through the snow. the world turns and my boys grow towards the sun. i give thanks to the world for another year where someone has looked after us.

i’ve saved some hopes for you: if you’re faced by a senseless system that doesn’t appear to understand your true value, well, i just hope you get pupillage. i hope you find where you need to be and the quiet that goes with it. i hope you find a place … for us … for you.

i hope you remember that this time we didn’t (couldn’t?) help these people. and if that worries you, resolve that when you next have the choice, you choose to do that small thing that brings whatever you believe in just a step closer. if not, may you never make your bed out in the cold – you may be short of room. and may i not be there first – but if i am, i’ll let you share my blanket and offer you a shrivelled raspberry.

i raise a glass to your dreams for 2011.

* ‘chosen life partner’: for those of you who weren’t reading about 4 years ago

you can take that f***ing stupid flag down now, you old tosser.

love simply.

——————————————————————–
dear simps,

defeat not our fault; rather a necessary evil forced upon us by the general mismanagement of everything by the previous government. however because of our fair and necessary action in losing 4-1 to germany, team now on track to win the world cup this year.

and anyway, it is our all-conquering national cricket team in whose honour i am, and always was, flying the flag. go captain peterthing!

big d

ps portobello star at 8?

——————————————————————–
hey dave

as ever i am indebted to you for your clear logic; i had thought for a misguided moment it was a national disaster caused by your greed.

sw

ps: tell that daft ***** sam to look where she is going – she nearly mowed down the wife and kids yesterday in that vast environment-destroying chelsea tractor that appears still to be your car of choice. thought you had gone faux green? or did you lose it when they said you couldn’t have the windmill and decide to punish the planet?

pps: star at 8 fine as ever.

ppps: any idea on the price on aus winning last two one dayers?

———————————————————————-

simps, you jolly japester. what do they expect me to do? go round london by bike?? what sort of twat does that???

8 it is then. (bring your wallet, i’m saving for a pension)

dman

———————————————————————-

yo d!

household income 20k – gideon stole the child tax credit and the borough have chipped in by taking away free swimming for my kids. bolly’s on you or it’s two pints of tap water.

simpmeister

ps if you have a spare pot, i’m dying for a piss

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-welcome-to-cameron-land-1962318.html

osbore’s 4:1 is a fine and fair theory. as i understand it, this means that when you need a bit of cash, you raise £1 from a bank and £4 from the old, the disabled, the homeless, the poor and generally workshy over-procreating council house-occupying democracy-detroying muslim-leaning single mothers. adds up to £2.5 billion from the banks and £11 billion from the underclass. terribly hammersmith, darling. please do not adjust your calendars; this is not the 1980′s.

further details at worshipthe markets.com – simples!