fahrenheit451:045

Here 

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There's a little over another 8 weeks of nose to tail electoral campaigning to endure before we finally get to cast our ballots on June 23. And the blizzard of increasingly vacuous and contentious statements and reciprocal point-scoring is inexorably gathering pace. We have become unaccustomed to mature,nuanced,indeed clever political badinage and rhetoric here in the formerly " great " britain. Instead we've allowed ourselves to be alternately hectored and lectured by a seemingly endless cavalcade of preening,fatuous wannabe poseurs and parliamentary arrivistes who are for the most part are utterly devoid of even the merest scintilla of statesmanship and popular political acumen that might influence and resonate with the ordinary citizenry and electorate.

The EU Referendum debate,such as it is is being soundly buffeted by verbiage and flimsy assertions coming at it from all conceivable ideological and Party directions.For Labour it is essentially a tribal struggle vis a vis the Conservatives.Their worn out,dessicated mantras are being dusted off and brought back into circulation,wrapped in a faux-nostalgia and counterfeit,superficial class politics that long ago ceased to have any traction in the world post Thatcher-Blair. Following on from Shadow Foreign secretary Benn's wildly delusional and idiosyncratic exposition of his tenuous grasp of modern history during the " May we bomb Syria "debate ;Alan Johnson follows Benn into going over the top on an equally implausible rhetorical suicide mission underscoring the axiom that truth is the first casualty in war,but in Johnston's case as in Benn's earlier,Meaning itself is the biggest casualty of all. Gleaned from the eponymous Labour List site,Tuesday 26 April. :-

" The EU referendum is as important as the General Election of 1945, Alan Johnson says today in a rallying speech to trade unionists.

The “immediate consequences” of Brexit would harm both the country and society as a whole, the chair of Labour In For Britain is expected to warn at the Usdaw conference later today.

“I believe the vote in the referendum on the EU on June 23 is every bit as important as that election in July 1945. Perhaps more so,” Johnson will say.

“It is a vote about whether we remain or leave the EU, and there will be immediate consequences to that decision for everyone here, and every family in the land.  But it’s about more than that.  For me, it’s about what kind of country we are, what kind of society we want to be.”

“Nearly four million British trade union members are represented by unions campaigning to keep Britain in Europe this June.

“From nurses and builders, to railway workers, steel workers, postal workers and shop workers, trade unions will be campaigning for a Britain that Remains in Europe.

“The rights of working people are protected by our EU membership.."

This is absurdist installation performance art on an epic scale.Benn 's verbal necromancy sought to conjure the ghosts of a largely misunderstood Spanish Civil War of the 1930's -here Johnson trumps even that vainglorious essay with: “I believe the vote in the referendum on the EU on June 23 is every bit as important as that election in July 1945. Perhaps more so,”  The meds have clearly kicked in and someone ought to fetch the Nurse.

More important than the general election of 1945 ? The absolute zenith of Labour Party/Trades Union reformist mythology second only to the Keir Hardie Creation myth.And Johnson has gone and erased from the collective,historic working class memory absolutely everything else.The coup de grace being his repeating the outright figment of Blairite imagination,that " The rights of working people are protected by our EU membership ". Theologically this would count as Apostasy or even Heresy. coming from within the Vatican itself. And we all know what should happen to Heretics.

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*** IT'S THE 1st. ANNIVERSARY ***
‪#‎DansLaMerde‬ ‪#‎Interserve‬ ‪#‎WDHCS‬ ‪#‎FLUTTERBUYS‬

-THE DAY THE WAR STARTED - ‪#‎TUSC‬ ‪#‎TUSCWAKEFIELD‬

Following legal advice , advice from my Church and the advice from my JCP Wakefield Work Coach,I can confirm that I shall be "reporting" to the placement at 11.30 am this coming Monday as set out in the letter of 20 April. I do so under the most strongest personal protests and misgivings. My attendance cannot be legally interpreted as my having agreed or given any willing consent to this scheme of state-sponsored forced labour. Interserve are aware that they have not made any rationally,fact-based assessment of what might constitute a beneficial placement. I must also inform you that I am initiating a formal complaint with the JCP West Yorkshire District Office against Interserve for their failure to adhere to procedure and additional and repeated failure to offer an explanation of their statement to me that this MWA meets the criteria that " the activity you undertake will also be of benefit to the local community ". A separate complaint against WDHCS to the Charity Commission is also under active consideration . I look forward to commencing my MWA at 11.30 am Monday 27 April.

P.S.

I Won .

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So, anyway we're now into a fully fledged-motoring toward an existential abyss -Plebiscite on the question of our once Sovereign Nation's continuing subservience and deeper incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation under the aegis of Empress Angela.

Or at least it would seem so from the requisite prominence being accorded this most vital of concerns throughout the mainstream and not so mainstream Media. But,hang on a mo' what's this being sneaked past our ever vigilant parliamentary watchmen,those heroes of Labour ?

The Daily ProperToryGraph  reports :-

18 APRIL 2016 • 10:00PM

 " Britain is prepared to send troops to Libya to bolster the country against Islamic State without asking for Parliament’s permission, the Foreign Secretary has said.

Philip Hammond said MPs need not be given a vote, as they were for air strikes in Iraq and Syria, because British troops would be deployed on a training rather than combat mission.

The Foreign Secretary spoke as the Government rejected Labour calls for a legal guarantee that MPs could veto sending troops to war in future.

Enshrining in law the current agreement that MPs vote on sending troops to fight would tie the hands of a future Government and limit options in a crisis, the Defence Secretary said.

Defence chiefs are considering offering as many as 1,000 troops as part of an international effort to train the police and army of the fledgling Tripoli government.  "

So,where's Shadow Foreign Secretary Benn's impassioned,hyperbolic,quasi-moralistic outrage when you need some ? After all ,during the "Can We Bomb parts of Syria,please "debate , he managed to invoke the entire,largely bogus mythology surrounding the events in Spain 1936-39 with such aplomb that many a grown politician,ekeing out a pitiful existence on parliamentary expenses,were reduced to weeping aloud and gnashing their privately maintained teeth and some,those on the proper Left may even had cause to rend their garments.

But not this time,a diplomatic " piss off " is all that our sojourners on the benches of Westminster are getting by way of reasoned argument sans actual debate in the hallowed Chamber. The Chamber of the Commons which has seen many an eloquent rhetorical defence of,the continuation of slavery,arrest and imprisonment and execution of various opposition leaders and people who the majority wanted rid of, ( circa 1630-49 ).

And so it goes,bomb a country,destroy a country,lament the ensuing chaos,look aghast at all the people who flee the chaos and then cobble together something anything with a lot of heavily armed gangsters who are only in it for the money and the power. And of course there are also the diverse Libyan factions to deal with as well.

Postscript :-

Oh and don't forget to comply and endorse in a personal and meaningful way your own desire that the place you were born and brought up in remains a peripheral maritime province of the Imperial Tyranny.Who ,quite honestly couldn't care less one way or t'other.Unless,of course you happen to be someone who shares the intellectual rigour and comprehensive worldview of someone like, Mary Creagh MP.

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I prefer my politics to be more Gunfight at the O.K.Corral than the usual, Briitish lower middle class,circumspect, pseudo-polite parlour game of who can recite the most " facts ".

The EU Referendum has gone " Live ",and if the Public discourse wasn't weaponised before it's certainly become that now. Hallelujah to that ! Whereas most of our politicians sound just like corporate middle-management clones ,there are those, largely Conservative heavyweights,who still have some grasp of what rhetoric is supposed to be .

This gleaned from the Daily Telegraph of 16 April :-

In a separate speech in Nottingham, Mr Gove said: “[Remain’s] vision is so deeply and bleakly pessimistic and negative. What they are really saying is Britain, this country that we all love, is too small, too weak and it's people are too stupid to be able to succeed on our own without  the European Commission there to hold our hand and look after us.”

He added: “The EU has moved from being an idealistic vision so of us could have believed in into a job destroying, democracy denying extremism creating disaster.”

I believe  a remark accredited to Tony Benn also capture that indefinable quality; TB said something along the lines of " People are not inspired to fight for their country to defend its Gross Domestic Product ". Alas, most of the indolent swindlers,chancers and cretinoid careerists sojourning on the Benches at Westminster are convinced that facts and figures pristinely presented as a neutral and rational alone can provide sufficient basis for the Populace to come to a decision on, in this instance continued national subservience to an alien empire . It is the same type of pseudo-political idiot that,on a not too dissimilar basis supports the Bombing of yet another arab country or even more insanely, imposing economic sanctions against the Sovereign and democratic nation state of say, Russia. The faux-morality of an ever benevolent US of A is the lodestar for these pernicious and dangerous imbeciles who are unaware of their own stupidity. The ones, who if they were actually Christians - which self-evidently they aren't - would be the C.of E. whining and prattling on for century after century; their cloying waffle neutering every single spark of genuine reforming and restorative fervour .

And so we come to it in the end. Alas it won't be 1649 all over again;the big loser won't be getting beheaded -pity. On 23 / 6 WE shall declare Britain Free-free at last from the EU Tyranny !

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Apparently,and here I'm taking my cue from the Corporate Media, campaigning in the United Kingdom's Referendum on Continued Membership of the EU has now officially begun ! So,quite what the previous few weeks have all been about makes no sense whatsoever ; anyhow.. According to the agreed beforehand  " Rules ", there is an Official body to campaign on behalf of the cause for  " Remain " and one equally so for " Leave ". And a lot of people right across the political/ideological spectrum are terribly upset,were terribly upset and will continue to blubber long past their bedtimes over who and how some group got or didn't get the nod from the Electoral Commission to be designated as  "Official ". It's all a bit like a Pilot back in 1940 throwing a hissy fit for not getting picked to lead the Spitfire squadron taking on the German Bombers. I look at it this way, June 23,2016 will see the Sovereign Electorate of this Country,My Country of Birth and habitual residence decide to BREXIT. Liberation Day 23 / 6. And quite frankly I couldn't care less as to the who,what,where,why,when and how that goes into achieving this most desirable of democratic outcomes. I've heard and indeed conversed with,presumably otherwise rational individuals on this topic who have as their starting point that they would not be seen dead voting alongside- and then they lapse into calumny,invective and ideological prejudice - whoever it is they don't want to be seen to be associating with ! Yes,all well and good, but the actual,epoch defining question confronting the Electorate isn't about personal, vacuous and ultimately untenable and largely irrelevant,personalised political prejudices ,what the decision is about is :- What does the Sovereign and indivisible Electorate wish to happen hereafter with the UK's relationship with the Supranational, European Union ?  and as a participant in articulating the Will of that Electorate what is your contribution to that answer ? Millions of people,down the Historic Ages have sacrificed life and limb in the cause of Universal Suffrage ; I am way beyond sick and worn out by the historically illiterate and morally unconscionable verbal dross that the SWP and other pseudo-revolutionaries are, after even all of their time-wasted decades of institutionalised failures,continue to hurl at Universal Suffrage. Go away and be infantile somewhere else, go organise a nationwide placard waving demo in London.  By encouraging people to desist from participating in the referendum or even worse,persuading the undecided to vote to Remain is in itself objective betrayal of the Very Classes and causes which the SWP,Labour Left,whoever, assert ad infintum they're fighting for ! Then again,there really isn't anything new under the sun. Is there ? Have I forgotten to mention anything ?  Thought not.

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It's been about a year or so since Alex Tsipras led his Syriza comrades to an astounding electoral triumph in Crisis-ridden Greece. Long story short; it all got snuffed out. All the hopes,misplaced or not,all the aspirations,partially deluded or not. Gone. And the multi-layered Crises deeper and sharper and even more brutal than were apparent in 2015. The Troika - European Commission,European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund - have gotten away with carrying out regime change / externally orchestrated, unconstitutional coup d'etat via their policies of political intimidation and blackmail against yet another formerly sovereign, democratic nation state. It's as if the fevered Greek elections and subsequent referendum of 2015 had never happened. Bloomberg News quoted in the Daily Telegraph of 11 April 2016,reports :-

Germany tells Greece it needs to 'do more' as debt talks stutter ahead of May deadline

 11 APRIL 2016 • 9:56AM

 Greece said it’s aiming for an agreement with creditors on the next tranche of emergency loans by the beginning of May as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble sought to play down debt relief expectations.

“We have almost identical estimates with the European Commission,” Minister of State Nikos Pappas said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

“And what needs to be done in the following days is to turn the almost identical into identical,” he said, ahead of frantic negotiations between the government and officials representing creditor institutions that failed to find a deal.

Bailout auditors from the European Union’s executive arm, the euro area’s crisis fund, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been holding talks with government officials in Athens for the past week to discuss policy measures attached to the country’s bailout.

The biggest area of contention is the management of bad loans burdening bank balance sheets, Pappas said, with their positions closer on a pension system overhaul and income tax reform.

“We’ll find a solution in the coming weeks,” Schaeuble said Sunday in an interview with German public television channel ARD. This solution “has nothing to do with debt forgiveness, but with the fact that Greece needs to do more” to return to a competitive economy, he said.

POSTSCRIPT

The irony in all this diplomatic imbroglio,is that the EU itself is in terminal decline and is losing itself in ever more byzantine chicanery and outbursts of quasi-judicial acts of diktat against an increasing array of partially comatose sovereign states all locked in to the single currency madness. There is no  " solution " in sight because there are no solutions to be had. Disorder is a natural state for the capitalist economic system to find itself in ; more or less unfettered or rigged or mediated by state intervention doesn't actually make any significant difference to the actual conditions that determine and constitute Crises. Schadenfreude it is , then we BREXIT !

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There's a story been making the media headlines in Britain and it has nothing to do with capitalist economics, the Referendum on our Continuing Feudal Servitude to the Holy Roman Empire or Austerity in general. The story is fairly typically representative of everyday humanity and not in its best light. I remember the infamous Jamie Bulger case , about the 3 year old who in February 1993 was lured away from his Mother out shopping by two young boys . It was pretty horrific stuff and the two evil doers got long sentences and both have since been paroled and in one case re-arrested. Anyhow. The bourgeois print and other Media are awash in the mire of liberal-inclined philosophy and tiresome quasi- marxist models of explanation and cod analyses. How terrible it is for these " girls ",yatta-ta,yatta-ta. As if this kind of psychotic outburst is a relatively modern phenomenon. As if.  Reason,Sanity and Common Sense have been declared redundant and in many cases virtually abolished and are no longer available to assist the vast docile majority within our Society.  Hence the report gleaned from the 9 April Daily Mail :-

" Held captive in her own living room, Angela Wrightson (top) was beaten, brutalised and defiled by two jeering teenage girls she had befriended out of loneliness. For eight hours, this feral pair - who were aged just 13 and 14, and supposedly in the hands of the care system - rained blow after blow upon her. In a macabre twist, they even paused mid-slaughter to pose for giggling selfies, which they uploaded onto a social media site, while dancing to music videos and joking with friends on the phone. Among the weapons used by the teenage killers was a shovel, still covered in Ms Wrightson's blood (bottom left picture). After the trial macabre childish drawings emerged in which one of the girls had etched a picture of someone being stabbed (bottom right picture). This week, the girls were found guilty of murder and given life sentences with a minimum of 15 years by Mr Justice Globe QC. ".

Pity; because a true Society girded with a fundamental Order, Discipline and Hierarchy as once was commonplace would have done the Right Thing and carried out Capital punishment for such an abomination and outrage. Retribution works.

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In the April 4 ,2016 edition of The Guardian the theme of  " Poor White Kids " cropped up,again :-

" The problem of poor white kids cannot be properly defined: not in the language of freemarket capitalism, at least. It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.

It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.

Thatcherite culture celebrated the chancers and the semi-crooks: people who had been shunned in the solidaristic working-class towns became the economic heroes of the new model – the security-firm operators, the contract-cleaning slave drivers.

We thought we could ride the punches. But the great discovery of the modern right was that you only have to do this once. Suppress paternalism and solidarity for one generation and you create multigenerational ignorance and poverty. Convert Labour to the idea that wealth will trickle down, and to attacks on the undeserving poor, and you remove the means even to acknowledge the problem, let alone solve it.

Thatcherism didn’t just crush unions: alone that would not have been enough to produce this spectacular mismatch between aspiration and delivery in the education system. It crushed a story. "

Orwell made the same point in his fiction, that whoever controls the Past controls the Present and thus controls the Future. It's Politics 101. it is axiomatic that The Guardian and its ideological confreres are not in business to shed light on anything new, they merely rework and reconfigure oft told stories. A bit like  " 1984 " itself. They major in hypocrisy. And what can be re-spun once can be palmed off as rigourous analysis and insight. herewith some more examples of genuinely " Shoddy " journalism. ( Shoddy being cloth spun using rags from old,used cloth )

 

Give white working-class children extra English help to ...

www.theguardian.com › Education › Schools

 

25 Jun 2015 - Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian ... White working-class children should receive additional help with English so they can ... In 2013, white working-class pupils were the lowest attaining at GCSE with just ...

Why the white working class are unlucky - The Guardian

www.theguardian.com › World › UK News

 

14 Dec 2014 - Hugh Muir: When I was at school, the poor white boys thought they had ... is a continuing crisis in the education of the poor white working class.

The Guardian and its ilk are not part of the solution..

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In a shocking series of high profile,world-wide Media revelations, news has left law-abiding citizens everywhere dumbstruck that very rich people have been covertly secreting away their wealth unbeknownst to the rest of us !!

11,000,000 heretofore confidential client data files from a Panama -based firm have been leaked to the media and has unleashed a veritable pent-up tsunami of pseudo- moralistic outrage,verbiage and hyperbole across the globe.

An orgy of liberal-induced pietistic self-flagellation has gripped the Commentariat and entire swathes of the Political Classes in dozens of countries, who it has now come to light weren't smart enough or quick enough to have taken advantage themselves of all the tax-avoidance schemes whose very existence they'd obviously been unaware of prior to these shocking revelations.

For instance, the UK-domiciled Daily Usurer-Friendly Mail,has squarely placed much of the blame for all of this on Russian President Putin's shoulders.

Yet beneath my seeming veneer of indifference toward the whole matter there beats a heart that simply couldn't care less.

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fahrenheit451:035 ( reblog of :027 from 15 March )

( Well,well,well my local weekly paper - the Wakefield Express published a not too redacted version of this original,on Friday April 1st. )

There aren't half some right cheeky bastards sticking their unwanted noses into Britain's domestic politics these days. The BBC's news website of 15 March reports:-

" If Britain votes to leave the European Union it could have a negative impact on the Nato alliance, a senior US military commander has warned. Lt-Gen Ben Hodges, head of the US Army in Europe, said he was "worried" the EU could unravel just when it needed to stand up to Russia. He acknowledged the vote was a matter for the British people, but said he was concerned about the outcome. "

Have we suddenly become El Salvador or Guatemala ? Don't tinpot,strutting warmongers like him over at the Pentagon have better things to do right now ? Such as targetting the next North African / Mid East sovereign state that US  foreign policy requires be bombed to smithereens for no accountable reason ?

Apparently the British electorate's decision on June 23 is of " strategic interest " to the General. The correct term to be applied to anyone making any such pronouncements about a sovereign,democratic nation state's political processes,is " egregious ". The general's remarks are egregious. And the words he uses stink of an altogether unpalatable arrogance and hubris common amongst military commanders of the World's pre-eminent war-mongering, imperialist power.

With historical hindsight,it was really a pity that the British failed to snuff out the little monster at its birth in 1776.Just imagine of all the subsequent pain,misery and sorrow that could have been avoided - such as President Obama's visit to the UK next month.