New Media, Same Old Cobblers...

Being the time of year when I find myself driving around quite a lot, as I try to get the most out of the good weather with trips all over the place, I end up listening to Radio Four in the car more than usual, (I'm too old for Radio One and have been boycotting Radio Two since they sacked Scott Mills).  Which means that I hear all sorts of stuff that might otherwise have passed me by - the suggestion, for instance, that broadcasters like the BBC and ITV putting material onto You Tube should have it boosted in their algorithms.  A suggestion which, not surprisingly, has been met with hostility by a lot of those You Tube 'creators' who bang out endless crappy videos.  Especially those self-styled 'citizen journalists'.  There was one such example raging against the idea that the news output of BBC News or ITV News should be given priority over his 'reports'.  Yeah, I'll just bet you don't want something as outrageous as reporting that attempts to be balanced and neutral, actually basing itself on facts and created by professionals, competing with your paranoid, conspiracy driven lunacy, eh?  Quite frankly, a bit more in the way of real factual reporting is what You Tube and social media in general needs, bearing in mind that a scary number of people seem to glean all of their ideas and opinions from stuff put out by these 'citizen journalist' types - basically completely unqualified amateurs, usually with extreme right political agendas.

I also heard the head honcho of You Tube playing down this idea of prioritising legitimate content, claiming that You Tube is all about 'choice' and how their wonderful algorithm will always serve you up appropriate viewing suggestions.  Which, as the interviewer pointed out, simply wasn't true.  From personal experience I can attest to the fact that it frequently serves me up all manner of irrelevant and sometimes offensive viewing options.  Getting back to those 'creators', though, I also had to endure hearing one of the people behind creating and distributing their content across You Tube telling us how wonderful they were and how much better and in tune with public demand than mainstream TV is.  Really?  Their argument always seemed to be based upon the idea that, thanks to being across social media, they have 'reach', which means that 'everyone' is aware of them.  Well, I'm not.  I have no interest in the amateurish, egotistical output of these exhibitionist cocks.  Aha! is the response - but you  aren't in the target age group.  Which is exactly the point - the entire entertainment audience in the UK, let alone globally, doesn't consist of adolescent, easily impressed and influenced, males.  Moreover, even those who fall into this demographic will age and within ten years will no longer be interested in this shit any more.  Just because something is getting 'clicks' is no indication of actual popularity, let alone quality.  On You Tube, for instance, someone just has to hit 'play' on a video for it count as a 'hit', even if they only watch the first couple of seconds.  For all we know, people might simply be clicking on these videos by 'creators', realising after a few seconds that they are shit and turning off.  Hardly an endorsement.  We really do need to be very careful about the supposed 'reach' and popularity of platforms like You Tube, as the stats used to back up the claims of their supporters are highly suspect.

Whitewashing the Racists

In view of today's political developments in the UK, your regular reminder that we don't elect prime ministers.  Parliament, in effect, does that, in that whoever can command a majority there can form a government.  We get to elect the parliament.  That's why it is called a parliamentary democracy.   Hence, there is no requirement to have a general election every time the prime minister changes.  Which also means that if you are one of those people who bangs on about 'unelected prime ministers' every time the ruling party changes leader, then you are politically and constitutionally illiterate and thus too ignorant to be commenting on UK politics.

Back to business.  Still politics, though.  I read an article from the Daily Telegraph recently that noted with shock and horror that Rupert Lowe's Restore party was being financed by white supremacists.  Well, golly gosh, who would have thought it, eh?  An extreme right-wing party that advocates the forced removal of immigrants and allegedly doesn't want non-white people standing for it as candidates, regardless of whether or not they are UK citizens, is being supported by a bunch of Nazis?  I found the Telegraph's apparent naivety somewhat perplexing, bearing in mind that they, along with the rest of the right-wing press have been busy turning out the sort of hateful rhetoric and right-wing propaganda which has helped create the sort of discourse in which these extremist parties can be nurtured.  There is, of course, a catch to all this: the story goes on to claim that Restore are so extreme that even Stephen 'Tommy Robinson' Yaxley-Lennon, convicted mortgage fraudster and violent football thug, thinks that are just too, well, Nazi.  Yes indeed, this is really another media attempt to normalise Robinson and his thugs, with the article going on to tell us how uneasy Restore's attitude to race makes him.  Because Tommy, after all, is now peddling his brand of hate under the 'Unite the Kingdom' banner, claiming that it is a movement unifying all true British citizens, regardless of race, in a patriotic campaign to save British values.  Yeah, and pigs might fly.

Apart from whitewashing Robinson, there's another underlying theme to this and similar articles in the right-wing press - that Restore, by attracting the hardcore Nazi nutter vote, is weakening Reform UK at the polls.  Reform UK and more specifically Nigel Farage, being the current darling of the billionaires who currently own most of the UK's press.  Despite them not living in the UK or paying taxes here, these guys see him as their best hope to lead Britain into becoming a low tax (or no tax for billionaires), low regulation, (especially any of those pesky workers' rights), playground for them.  So, anything that threatens his ascendancy has to be discredited.  The thing is, though, that it isn't just the Restore vote which is eroding Reform's support, as the Makerfield by-election result shows. (See that folks? See how I've brought us back to the first, apparently unrelated, paragraph?  Neat, huh?)  As it turned out, Andy Burnham was able to win the seat easily with a majority far more than the combined votes cast for Reform and Restore.  This despite the right-wing press' constant parroting of Reform propaganda claiming that it was going to be a 'close contest'.  (Just like they were salivating over that referendum in Switzerland about reducing immigration by capping the country's population - that, too was going to be a 'too close to call', but the proposal was actually decisively rejected by the Swiss electorate, 55% to 45%).  The reality highlighted at Makerfield is that there is a strong progressive, decent or whatever you want to call it, vote out there who simply don't want Reform, Restore, Tommy Robinson and their ilk - it is notable that the Greens and Lib Dems offered only token campaigns to avoid splitting this vote too much, giving Burnham a clear run.  So, there you go - if you want to keep theses neo Nazi nutters out, then be prepared to vote tactically in order to ensure the least worst outcome.

Sexual Assault at First Sight

So, is anyone really surprised that a 'reality' TV format with a title like Married at First Sight has generated allegations of rape from some of the female participants?  As a non-viewer of this and other reality shows, it just seems obvious that this is a set-up that practically invites sexual abuse.  I mean, didn't the producers ever ask themselves exactly what sort of man would be attracted to participate such a show, with its implicit promise of virtually instant sexual gratification for them?  I couldn't help but laugh when I saw that various people involved with the show said that there had been too much emphasis on sex.  You don't say?  Like a lot of current 'reality' TV output, Married at First Sight is entirely based around the idea that the audience are a bunch of slaving, voyeuristic perverts who are only watching because they want to participate in the vicarious pleasure of imagining the contestants having sex with each other - the whole, implicit, question of who is going to shag who and when, is the mainspring of the format.  Not, of course, that the producers or the network will admit that, instead trying to claim that these formats represent some sort of sociological experiment.  Utter bullshit!  It's titillation, pure and simple.  Just look at another Channel Four format - Naked Attraction - whish is like Blind Date, but with the hopefuls having to select their potential mate on the basis of viewing various bits of their naked anatomies.  Titillation and sexual objectification, all in one package!  It's quite clear that the audience at home are being invited to look at the naked bodies - particularly the female ones - and say 'Yeah, I'd shag that'.  Talk about depersonalisation.

But Channel Four aren't the only offenders here.  Just look at ITV's Love Island.  Once again, it's an exercise in crude voyeurism, with the audience invited to ogle all those near naked beautiful bodies while speculating on who is going to 'do'  who and, no doubt, asking themselves who they'd 'do'.  It wouldn't be so bad if the makers of these shows were just honest about what they are really about: sex, voyeurism and the objectification of, primarily, women, reducing them simply to bodies to be lusted over and judged, rather than as people.  Perhaps they should just come up with a new format where all the guys are sex offenders and have semi-naked women paraded in front of them in order to see who breaks first and tries to rape one of the girls.  You can guarantee that there'd be guys at home urging some of them on - 'Go on, get in there, mate.  She's just gagging for it!'.  Or maybe they could have a format along the lines of Love Island, except that one of the girls is actually underage and see if the guys can work it out before they sleep with her.  Obviously, the 'attraction' behind all of these sex-based 'reality' TV shows, for both networks and audiences, is that they are dealing with 'taboo' subjects surrounding sex  - in much the same way that hardcore pornography's big draw is the promise of seeing real sexual intercourse take place, so it is with these shows, the promise of contestants 'doing it' for real.  It's pushing boundaries, the producers will say.  But what will they do when the novelty of 'ordinary people' shagging wears off?  Reality shows following serial killers around?  A version of The Traitors where one contestant is an actual psychopath and murders their rivals for real?  Or maybe live torture shows from the dungeons of some horrible dictatorship far from UK laws?  Viewers could take bets on which victim will last longest.  Quite frankly, nothing would surprise me these days.

Splitting the Hate Vote

It's becoming increasingly clear that Andy Burnham must have something in terms of ideas, policies, appeal or whatever, that might just halt the rise of the UK's rather pathetic extreme right in its tracks.  How do I know this?  Not from anything he's said, that's for sure, but rather from the way in which the likes of the Mail, Express and Telegraph have gone on the offensive against him since he became Labour's candidate in the forthcoming by-election.  Starmer seems forgotten about already as, day in, day out, they pump out spurious headlines trying to discredit Burnham: he's a U-turner because he's prepared to seek compromise on his position with regard to some issues, he's anti-woman because he doesn't hate trans people, he probably eats babies and he was really shit as 'Mayor of the North'.  All highly questionable in terms of veracity and reeking of desperation.  He's clearly got them spooked.  I find it interesting that Burnham is now seen as some kind of centre-left, progressive, leadership candidate, whereas, the last time contested for the leadership he was rejected as some kind of Blairite right-winger in favour of Jeremy Corbyn. (Possibly Labour's greatest ever act of self-harm, at least since Foot's leadership, or the split with Ramsay McDonald's National Labour faction back in the twenties).  It's a measure, though, of how far to the right the political discourse has been pushed in recent years, that Burnham, of all people, should be characterised by the right-wing media as some kind of 'left-wing firebrand'.

Still, it seems for once that Elon 'Never Met a Nazi I Didn't Like' Musk's attempts to interfere in UK politics might actually turn out to be beneficial.  He's allegedly been backing Rupert Lowe's band of extremists in the by-election, resulting in Farage bleating on about how he's thereby splitting the Nazi vote and calling for a 'United Extreme Right' front.  Which is ironic, as he doesn't seem to like it when parties on the left do such things.  But hey, hypocrisy and Farage are pretty much synonymous.  But it all throws up the strange question of which fascist-lite is worse: Farage or Lowe?  I mean, they are both  utterly repugnant individuals, with their hectoring, bullying approaches and loud-mouthed bottom-of-the-barrel, rabble rousing, rhetoric.  I remember when Lowe was chairman of Southampton Football Club, (maybe that was when Portsmouth fans started calling them 'scummers'), and he was an utterly hateful character then - an arrogant and ignorant snob who alienate fans and foes alike.  So it was no surprise when he started dabbling in extreme right-wing politics, first with Reform UK, then setting up his own, one man, party after his inevitable falling out with Farage.  Not that any of this makes Farage any less repulsive in comparison. He's a hateful grifter and bigot, too.  The fact that he enabled the likes of Lowe in the first place possibly, though, makes him slightly worse, just edging Lowe out in the 'most repulsive extremist bastard' stakes.

Euro Ingratitude

I was going to concoct a satirical piece on how, if they aren't going to let us win it, the UK should pull out of the Eurovision Song Contest.  Much in the manner of Trump's rant about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize, so why should he be concerned with peace any more?  But yesterday I came across a piece in the Express which said much the same thing, then went further.  Now, ordinarily, I'd assume that something like that was written ironically, but the Express doesn't do irony, (it's writers can't spell it, let alone understand what it means), so I have to take it at face value.  Anyway, the gist of the piece was that those Europeans are so bloody ungrateful for everything we've done for them - most notably funding Eurovision - that they only give us one bloody point.  The fact that this single point came from Ukraine drove the author to further apoplexy - apparently, after all that aid we've given them, not to mention the fact that we've let so many of them come to live here, without requiring the usual visa requirements, plus the fact that they can claim benefits more easily than British layabouts, you'd think that they'd be more bloody grateful and at least give us ten points.  So, in retaliation we should cut off support to them, not to mention all the other foreign aid we give to people who don't vote for us at Eurovision.  In fact, can't vote for us at Eurovision.  Because we could better spend that money at home helping good British people.

Apart from sounding like the Reform UK manifesto, there is just so much wrong with this it is hard to know where to start.   Bearing in mind that Ukraine is engaged in an existential conflict with Russia (and that those Ukrainians we've so 'generously' allowed to come here are war refugees), the idea that we should abandon them because they wouldn't give is more points at Eurovision is utterly perverse.  Then there's the hoary old chestnut of foreign aid - quite apart from the moral aspects of giving less well off countries assistance, in terms of national self-interest, it represents 'soft power', a way of influencing and winning around the sympathies of potential allies.  You'd think that the US's plummeting standing in the world and inability to get anyone to support them in their foreign adventures, would stand as a dire warning as to the perils of cutting off foreign aid - particularly when the likes of china are standing ready to fill the aid vacuum.  As Trump has shown, flexing your military muscles in trying to intimidate smaller nations is no substitute for the influence that the soft power of aid gives you, (at a far lower price, also).  As for the idea that any money saved might be used to help the 'deserving poor' of Britain, well, we all know that, in reality, it would simply finance tax breaks for the wealthy, or be paid out to private companies via dodgy 'outsourcing' contracts for public services.

Now, I could say that I think that the sort of people who write this drivel should be sent to re-education camps in an attempt to drill some kind of basic education into them, accompanied by being forced to work on community projects in deprived areas, (wearing day glo orange jackets with 'Moron' or 'Ignorant Bastard' printed on the back).  But if I were to do that I'd have all those right-wing bastards, (the very same people who think that working class 'young offenders' should be put in the army, that asylum seekers should be confined in concentration camps, or that people should be made to 'work' for their benefits by being put into slave-like indentures to filthy rich companies who could easily pay them proper wages), screaming about how I'm a typical lefty git who just wants to suppress free speech and who is showing their true colours as a supporter of Soviet-style brainwashing and gulags for dissidents etc. So, instead, I'll just confine myself to observing that maybe, just maybe, the reason why nobody votes for us at Eurovision is because we keep entering unrelentingly shit acts.  Just a thought.

It's the Narrative...

It feels like it is becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle what's really happening in the world from the narratives being propelled by the media.  Take this whole circus surrounding the Labour leadership.  I make no claims of having any inside knowledge or insight into the situation, but what is clear is that the media has decided upon a narrative which has only one conclusion: that Keir Starmer either steps down or is forced out.  It is built upon all those opinion polls showing support the government being eclipsed by other parties and the recent unfavourable local election results.  Added to this edifice is the right-wing press's current obsession with the state of the UK's armed forces, (which conveniently ignores the fact that the present situation is the result of fourteen years of swingeing cuts in defence spending by a series of Tory governments that these self same newspapers supported, endorsed and helped sustain in power), the usual nonsense about immigration and the ever present cost of living crisis (also a product of the economic mismanagement of those same previous governments).   The problem with this narrative is that it doesn't necessarily conform to reality - those local election results weren't great, but sitting governments often receive such setbacks mid-term. Plus, they have to be taken with the usual provisos that local results are not necessarily directly translatable into national politics - people frequently vote on different issues locally than they do at national level - and that they actually have no bearing upon how the national government operates.  

In reality, Reform UK's momentum at national level is stalling and the government are beginning to regain some ground.  Moreover, the government has sufficient majority that it doesn't have to go the polls until 2028/29, when the situation could be very different.  Furthermore, it remains to be seen how many Labour MPs actually will be willing to translate their dissatisfaction with Starmer's leadership into concrete action to try and force a leadership contest, bearing in mind how difficult it is to remove a sitting Labour Prime Minister under party rules.  (Notably, all the figures given by various media outlets as to how many Labour MPs who have supposedly called for his resignation is caveated by the fact that these figures are merely based upon MP's having made some sort of public utterance that could be taken as dissatisfaction with the leadership, rather than reflecting actual actions to trigger a leadership challenge).  So it isn't as clear cut as the media would have us believe.  But the media loves a story.  In fact, it demands that real world events neatly arrange themselves into some kind of narrative with a predictable outcome.  But as we all know, real life simply refuses to conform to such artificial forms.  Just look at the way in which the Iran-Us war refuses to adhere to the constructed narrative that the US has tried to impose upon it, with Iran stubbornly refusing to capitulate and give Trump the victory he so craves.  Much the same can be said of the war in Ukraine, which has likewise refused to follow the Russian narrative which culminates in their swift victory.  Of course, these are state driven narratives, not necessarily supported by the media, but all too often, as in the case of the current Labour leadership problems, political narratives are driven by the press, who persist in trying to impose them upon the public, regardless of the actual facts, buoyed up by their feverish speculation.  You don't just see it in politics.  Here in the UK, the press like nothing better than trying to construct narratives concerning outcomes in the premier league and don't like it when clubs refuse to conform to them, by winning matches they aren't 'supposed' to.  

Ultimately, I'm not trying to deny Starmer's problems, or the fact that the local election results are, to say the least, challenging, for the government.  In truth, this government has done itself no favours, missing opportunity after opportunity to actually do something radical to galvanise its electoral base.  Because that's their biggest problem: a failure to deliver on their manifesto promises.  It's no good Starmer announcing yet more policies today in an attempt to shore up his position - he has to start delivering on the policies the government promised in its election pitch.  Just pick a handful of policies which would be popular and are achievable and use that parliamentary majority to push then through, regardless of whether the right-wing press like them or not.  Because that's what will attract voters - the idea of a government that might actually make decisions and do something beneficial to them.  It doesn't matter who the Labour leader is, it matters whether or not they can actually deliver on their promises, regardless of the media's narratives. Which, in spite of what they would have you believe, are not set in stone.

Local Election Madness

I can see that it's going to be one of 'those' weeks.  Much as I enjoy bank holidays. (although, as noted elsewhere, they are technically meaningless to me, as I'm no longer part of the regular workforce, so can take off any day I damn well please), they are disruptive to my normal schedules.  As, per most bank holidays, I spent Monday mainly on the sofa watching old films and eating peanuts, my normal Monday activities had to be deferred until today, making today feel like a Monday.  It won't get any better as the week goes on - with local elections on Thursday, my routines will be disrupted again, as I'll have to find time to vote.  But the elections will cause wider disruption - the BBC, along with most of the rest of the media, have decided that, this year, the local elections will be VERY IMPORTANT.  Which means that on Friday, most of BBC1's viewing time is to be given over to various so called 'experts' poring over the results as they trickle in and telling us how, if these voting patterns were repeated in a general election, would lead to Nigel Farage being PM.  The problem with all such analyses being that voting patterns at local level aren't necessarily indicative of voting intentions nationally.  Particularly when it is highly unlikely that there will be a general election before 2028/29.  Moreover, turnout at local elections is, traditionally, far lower than at general elections.  Not to forget, also, that not the entire country votes in local elections, meaning that results can't be perfectly be mapped to possible national trends.  

Of course, having said all that, we might actually have a high turnout this year, just to prove me (partially) wrong.  While, obviously, I hope that the expectations for these elections of the media are frustrated, not just because I'd like to see their attempts to propel Farage into Number Ten suffer a setback, but also because I'd like to see their overblown coverage fall flat on its face.  But even if this doesn't happen, I still expect the reaction of the viewing public to be 'where the fuck is today's edition of 'Bridge of Lies'?', or 'why the fuck was 'Pointless' on BBC2?  I bloody missed it because its BBC1 slot was full of boring bastards talking shit about politics!'.  The BBC even seem deluded enough to believe that primetime audiences will share their local election obsession, scheduling an edition of 'Question Time' - ignorant berks asking ignorant questions of a bunch of third string politicians - in the evening.  Even 'Have I got News For You' gets shunted to BBC2 - although not because of the local elections, but instead because the Beeb think that a Friday evening, after hour upon hour of local election bollocks which will have driven off most of the audience - is the right time to schedule a celebration of David Attenborough's hundredth birthday.  Madness, sheer madness!  Not to mention a severe disruption to my regular routines, (although, to be honest, I don't actually watch much of BBC1's Friday evening schedule on a regular Friday - but it's the principle that counts).  

Attack of the Killer Carrots

Damn it, I did it again!  I allowed myself to be drawn in by one of those tabloid story headlines and ended up underwhelmed!  In this case it was a Daily Star story on an aggregator site, entitled 'Brit Scientist Killed by Carrots After Horror Experiment Went Very Wrong'.  I mean, how could I resist?  It immediately conjured up visions of a crazed botanist in a lab full of bubbling test tubes, hell bent on creating a new race of ambulatory, intelligent carrots through genetic modification.  Doubtless, despite his plans to create a carrot army for world conquest, his creations turned on him - probably boiling him hot water in revenge for humanity's treatment of their vegetable cousins.  Of course, it turned out to be far less exciting than this: the story turned out to be about a nutritionist who had to try and prove the efficacy of 'healthy eating' by going on an insane diet of carrot juice and vitamin A supplements.  The inevitable overdose of vitamin A destroyed his liver with fatal consequences.  Yeah, I preferred the walking carrots as well.  Moreover, it turns out that all of this happened in 1974!  Hardly current news, I'd say.  Clearly, the Daily Star's writers' ability to make up vaguely plausible shit woven around the bare bones of a contemporary story, is flagging and they are having to go back to the archives to create filler.  Frankly, in this case, they'd have been better off just making up a story along the lines of my imaginings.  

The idea of intelligent killer carrots does, of course, have some precedent.  In 1951's The Thing From Another World, of course, the title creature is the thawed out pilot of a flying saucer crashed in the arctic ice, who turns out to be a plant-based lifeform: 'an intellectual carrot!' as one character declares.  Not that he looked like a carrot of course.  He was distinctly humanoid and played by James Arness, long before he became Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke.  But TV did give us a genuine malignant intelligent carrot, in an especially ludicrous episode of Lost in Space in the sixties.  Played by Stanley Adams in a truly crappy costume, he got very het up about Dr Smith picking a flower, turning Smith into a tree and Penny into a flowerbed, (I kid you not - I'd like to think that young Angela Cartwright, previously a promising child actress, was onto her agent after being forced to portray a floral border, after all, she'd been one of the Von Trapp kids in The Sound of Music only a few years earlier!).  Notoriously, the episode was so bad that several cast members couldn't keep straight faces and ended up being suspended, (Professor and Mrs Robinson are absent from a couple of subsequent episodes).  So, getting back to the point, such as it is, the Daily Star really had no excuse for teasing with a such headline, then failing to deliver any true killer carrots - they had plenty of precedents to rip-off, after all.

'Immigrants Ate my Granny!'

Cannibalism - is that going to be next racist trope peddled by extreme right and their enablers in the British press?  Obviously, they might have missed the boat on that, as cannibalism was always - wrongly - associated with 'darkest' Africa.  Well into the seventies: I well recall seeing as a child all those cartoons in newspapers and comedy sketches on TV involving hapless white missionaries being put into a large cooking pot by grass skirt clad African tribesmen.  Nowadays, though, the racists preferred targets are Muslims and illegal immigrants from North Africa, Albania and the like.  Black African immigrants still feature in their hate, but seem to have fallen down the pecking order somewhat.  But there's nothing the bigots like better than a racial or cultural stereotype with which to beat their targets.  Hence, all Muslims are crazy fundamentalist terrorists, all South Asian men are misogynists who like to sexually exploit women, especially white women and Eastern Europeans are all gypsies, werewolves and vampires who kill and eat swans when they aren't raping British women.  I suppose that the closest we've come to the Black African cannibalism trope were all those stories a few years back about African witches and witch doctors supposedly working in the UK, murdering children in their rituals.  Not to forget that in the States we had Trump claiming that Somali immigrants were eating people's pets in Cleveland, or wherever.  

Nonetheless, it is surely only a matter of time before that cannibalism meme gets another airing in the UK, particularly with the apparent rise of our own homegrown crypto-fascists like Nigel Fartage and 'Tommy Robinson'.   I have no doubt that they'd like to go back to the 'good old days' I still recall from my seventies childhood, of portraying black people as being savages, who were arriving in the UK straight from the jungle, still wearing their 'war paint', bones through their noses and waving spears.  I'm really not exaggerating, here - TV shows, in particular, seemed to be full of such caricatures.  So, I'm sure that, given half a chance, the right-wing press wouldn't be able to resist running headlines along the line of  'Cannibal immigrants ate my granny!', accompanied by mocked up pictures of OAPs being put into huge cooking pots suspended over fires, while groups of wild eyed black men in loincloths dance around them.  Or, they might try being subtler, with stories about unsuspecting diners at a Somali restaurant finding a human ear, or finger, in their meal and realising that they're being served up human meat.  Maybe, with Reform UK beginning to lose ground in the polls, we'll start seeing their MPs coming out with such stories - 'Only last week one of my constituents told me of how a black African immigrant tried to take a bite out of them on the bus - why isn't Keir Starmer personally tracking down this cannibal and bodily throwing him back into the Channel?'.  Before you know it, all those stories of Asian grooming gangs will be replaced by stories of black African immigrants kidnapping white children, keeping them in cages and fattening them up for their cannibal feasts.  Remember, you read it here first!

Making Excuses for Nigel

When, oh when, are large sections of Britain's media going to stop making excuses for Nigel Fartage?  Remember when all those people he went to school with came forward with their stories of how he had racially abused them and taunted others with anti-Semitic taunts?  What was the response of  the likes of the Daily Hate?  'Oh well, he was young and didn't know what he was doing', or 'It was a long time ago and he's changed now', or even ''They were just harmless jokes that were misconstrued'.  None of them actually condemned him for having been a racist bastard - not even when he couldn't categorically deny that he had ever made any of the remarks ascribed to him.  Indeed, his non-denial denials were, to those of us not in thrall to the extreme right, the surest sign that he was guilty as sin.  Yet the right-wing press remained silent. Or, worse, tried to give the impression that he was the victim, being smeared with outrageous allegations.  Fast forward to this week and we have more revelations about Fartage, namely that he's been endorsing fascists and repeating fascist and racist slogans in messages vai his Cameo account.  Again, the reaction of too much of the media has been to try and paint him as a victim, exploited by these right wing extremists into unwittingly repeating their slogans - which they then edit into their own videos - and endorsing thugs with convictions for violence.  Oh, poor Nigel!  None of them seem to want to address the elephant in the room here - that surely if someone who aspires to lead their country can be so easily duped, then doesn't that call into questions his credentials to be considered a serious politician?

Obviously, we shouldn't be surprised by any of this, the right-wing press in the UK have always loved a right wing politician advocating a tough line of immigrants and foreigners.  Let's not forget that back in the thirties the Daily Mail had Hitler as their 'Man of the Year'.  But, to be fair, it isn't just the right wing media who are guilty of giving Fartage an easy ride.  Large swathes of the media seem quite unwilling to address the wider issues that both the schoolboy racism allegations and the Cameo business raise.  In the case of the former, it is conveniently dismissed as 'unfounded' allegations (although, as noted, Fartage hasn't actually denied them), with the rider that many people do and say things as youths they wouldn't espouse as adults.  Except that most people guilty of youthful racism don't go on to found and lead a series of political parties based on extremist anti-immigration platforms.  As for the Cameo stuff, not only does it - if we accept at face value the explanation that he is an innocent victim of nasty neo-Nazis duping him - call into question Fartage's judgement, but also his motivations.  Again, we have someone who aspires to lead the country filming videos for fans, for money, when he should be conducting his duties as an MP.  Let's face it, if this was Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch doing this, then they would, rightly, be pilloried and their commitment to their positions called into question.  But, like Boris Johnson, Fartage seems to get a free pass.  We've gone from 'Oh, it's just Boris!' as a response to every outrage committed by Johnson, to 'Oh, it's only Nigel!' as a response to every piece of evidence that points to Fartage's links to extremist politics.

Of course, what these two have in common, apart from carefully curated buffoonery, is their utter venality, their willingness to do pretty much anything for money.   Just why people cannot seem to see that Fartage is nothing but a grifter is beyond me.  What more evidence do they need?  Not only is he happily debasing himself and his office by basically recording any message for absolutely anybody on Cameo, just so long as they pay him, but let's not forget that Reform UK isn't really a political party:  it is a limited company owned by Fartage!  Think on that before you give Reform financial contributions or membership fees.  The fact that Fartage so assiduously crawls and fawns to Trump should be another red flag - grifters of a feather flock together, after all.  

It Only Happened if it Was on TV...

It seems that nowadays nobody believes anything until they've seen it on TV.  Not as a news item, that is, but seen it dramatised with familiar actors playing all of the main participants.  Take the Post Office scandal, for instance, when all those sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of stealing from the Post Office - some even going to jail - due to a fault with an IT system.  That story ran for years in the news media, with numerous campaigns to try and get justice for the wrongly accused, but nothing happened and the public just seemed to give a collective shrug of resignation.  But as soon as was turned into a TV drama, it was a different story, with the public clamouring for justice.  It seems that seeing Toby Jones playing a victim and chief campaigner being harassed by the Post Office was more evocative than reading about it happening to the real person that he was playing.  That's the key: the participants in news stories are just ordinary people, unknown to the general public who just can't identify or empathise with them.  But replace them in a drama about the story with recognisable TV faces the public knows and loves, then they become outraged at the injustice.  Hence, we now have a Channel Four drama about the water companies dumping shit in our rivers featuring the likes of Jason Watkins and people are suddenly talking about the issue.  Although you'd think that shitting in the rivers was enough an issue in itself to mobilise the public.  

But it isn't just members of the public who now have to be portrayed in a TV drama by well known actors in order to get people engaged with their stories.  Right now, we're being promised a drama about the downfall of newsreader Huw Edwards, with Edwards played by Martin Clunes.  Bearing in mind that this story played out for real, with huge headlines, quite recently, you'd have thought that people really wouldn't need to see it played out as a drama with the star of Men Behaving Badly.  What detail or insight could such a pantomime possibly highlight that we hadn't already been exposed to for real?  But, of course, the real thing didn't count as it had Huw Edwards appearing as himself and he couldn't possibly play himself as well as Martin Clunes could.  So, I guess that people won't really appreciate just how monstrous the Trump regime is, despite living through it (twice, in fact - they had one dose, kicked him out, then re-elected him, having apparently suffered mass amnesia), until they see the TV drama about it a few years down the line, with a padded up Robert De Niro as Trump, Al Pacino as Bernie Sanders and Anthony Hopkins as Joe Biden.  Of course, if they had made it directly after his first term, then the people of the US would of said 'Wow! That guy's a dangerous psycho, unfit to hold office, Thank God all his secret depravities have been exposed over six hour long episodes!' and his second term would never have happened.  Such is the power of TV.

Out of Step

The right-wing press in this country really can't help themselves, can they?  If there's any opportunity, no matter how ill advised, to attack a Labour government, they'll seize upon it.  Witness their recent gleeful reporting on Trump's criticisms of Starmer for having actually shown a bit of backbone with regard to Iran - all trumpeted in huge headlines.  Yet, in this instance, they really have read the room badly and are quite out of step with the public.  Really badly.  The reality is that Trump remains hugely unpopular here in the UK, so that anything he says criticising Starmer is actually likely to bolster the PM's standing with the public.  More importantly, Starmer's position on Iran - not directly supporting the US and actually questioning the legality of Trump's actions - is actually pretty much in alignment with UK public opinion, as backed up by recent polls.  Tory leader Kemi Badenoch made the same mistake in the Commons - attacking Starmer for not getting involved in another war, when the public is overwhelming against the UK getting drawn into any more American wars.   Such a lack of judgement and connection with public sentiment is one of the main reasons, of course, that Badenoch and the Tories are essentially irrelevant right now.  But this is all part of the fundamental problem the right in the UK have: the Trump factor.

At a time when the UK's political discourse has been pulled so far to the right, having someone like Trump in the White House should be a boon to them.  He's enacting the sort of policies, both domestically and internationally, that the right-wing media and politicians wet their pants over.  The billionaires who own much of Britain's media would just love to have a UK government that gave them the sort of privileges and access to power that their US counterparts are getting under Trump.  Yet Trump is massively unpopular in the UK, making writing favourably about him, or speaking in support of his policies, represents a huge risk.  Politicians or newspapers  praising him risk alienating huge sections of their supporters or readers.  But every so often, they just can't help themselves.  They get so frustrated by not being able to say what they really want to say - that they just love Trump and all the evil he stands for - that they just can't keep their mouths shut.  Hence, we have the press revelling in Trump criticising Starmer for not supporting them in a war the UK public don't approve of and the Leader of the Opposition similarly lambasting the PM for failing to be Trump's lapdog, boasting that she would have been right there at America's side sparking another destabilising Middle Eastern conflict, despite Trump's unpopularity here.

But still they keep trying to find some stick in this unpopular war with which to beat the government.  They seem to think that they've found it in the UK's allegedly inadequate response to committing defence resources to protect its allies from the fall-out from Trump's latest adventurism.   In particular, they keep obsessing on that bloody Royal Navy destroyer which won't be sent to Cyprus for weeks, as if it is vital for the island's defence from stray Iranian drones.  Cyprus and various Gulf States, they claim, are complaining about the UK's lack of commitment.  All of which ignores the fact that the UK has a significant deployment of RAF resources at its base in Cyprus, including not just aircraft, but air defences which are probably more capable of defending the island than a single air defence destroyer.  But the French and the Greeks have sent support!  I heard some Cypriot rent-a-voice bewailing on the BBC today.  Yeah well, Greece is just next door and France has a naval base - Toulouse - on the Mediterranean coast, so it is hardly surprising that they can respond more quickly than the UK.  As for the various Gulf States allegedly upset with us - well, they are oil rich states who apparently aren't prepared to spend their money on their own defence and expect us to defend them instead, is that it?  As for the other issue that the right-wing media are harping on about - the parlous state of the UK's armed forces, particularly the navy - well, let's not forget that they got into that state thanks to fourteen years of Tory spending cuts - cuts by Tory governments that this self same right-wing press endorsed and cheered on.  Presumably they must also have supported those cuts.  So yah boo sucks!  Stick that in your collective pipes and smoke it! 

No Accounting for Some...

One of the perennial refrains of Britain's right-wing press goes along the lines of 'Isn't it outrageous that Labour wants to persecute our brave soldiers/policemen by investigating and sometimes prosecuting them for alleged war crimes and/or excessive use of force?'  Which ignores the fact that this doesn't just happen under Labour governments and that accountability is a cornerstone of any democratic system.  People can't be allowed to use 'It was a war' or 'We were just enforcing the law' as a cover for committing illegal acts - regardless of circumstances, they still must be held accountable for their actions, they have to be able to justify what they have done.  What the foaming-at-the-mouth headlines in the likes of the Telegraph, (which is fast outpacing even the Mail for insane and utterly delusional, fact free, right-wing rants masquerading as journalism), fail to mention, of course, is that the soldiers against whom prosecutions have been brought (or, at the very least, have been investigated with a view to possible prosecution), stand accused of the killing and abuse of non-combatants.  Regardless of whether such things happen in a war zone or not, they might well constitute war crimes, depending upon on the circumstances , and those involved have to be held accountable.  The same applies in police killings.  Strangely enough, we can't just take peoples' word that their actions were justified, otherwise every criminal prosecution would inevitably end in an acquittal.  Except, the right-wing press seem to be saying, these chaps are soldiers and policemen, for God's sake!  British soldiers and coppers at that: if we can't accept that they are beyond reproach, then who can we trust?

It's all part of the right's quest for exceptionalism.  While they like to pay lip service to the idea of political and criminal accountability, in truth, they think that it should only apply to 'other' people: the poor, non-whites, the left, immigrants and so on.  'Their' people should be excepted from the rules because, well, they are just of a 'better' type, or they represent a revered conservative institution, particularly things like the military and the police, that can be used as tools of repression against those great unwashed masses.  It's not even the big stuff that they feel that they should be excepted from in terms of accountability.  There's a whole stratum of white collar crime they quite clearly feel shouldn't be treated as crimes - fiddling the expense account isn't embezzlement, just a perk or breaking the speed limit isn't a crime if you are a middle class BMW driver as, obviously, you are far too superior a driver to cause an accident.  This view extends to stuff like tax evasion, which isn't a crime as long as the wealthy are doing it, but benefits fraud most definitely is, as it is only committed by nasty poor people.  Not that this call for exceptionalism is confined to the UK, it's a phenomenon you'll find, in one form or another, across the globe.  In recent times it has been fuelled by the rise of the super-rich, who definitely don't see why they, or their corporations, should be constrained by the puny laws of mere mortals.  Indeed, as right-wing politicians have, increasingly, cosied up to the billionaires in order to get their financial backing, the situation has become worse as it is clear that the price for their endorsements is a loosening of regulations and weakening of enforcement of relevant rules and laws.  All of which brings us back to the UK's right-wing press and their outraged cries for exceptionalism for soldiers and policemen accused of murder, corruption and abuse of power - their strategy is clear, if you can set a precedent for excepting one group from certain laws, hen you can free other groups and entities from those pesky chains of accountability.  Future Tory or Reform UK governments, for instance...

Even AI's Gone Commie!

The insanity of the Daily Mail continues apace - it is now complaining that AI Chatbots have a 'left-wing' bias, because their answers to queries allegedly source 'left wing' sources 'like The Guardian and the BBC'.  This is so problematic on so many levels that it is difficult to know where to start with responding to it.  Let's start with their definition of 'left wing sources'.  Clearly, the BBC isn't a left wing source - it aims for political neutrality (and in reality tends to present an 'establishment' perspective on the vents).  But to the increasingly rabid Mail, (the newspaper that, in the thirties, once had Hitler as its 'Man of the Year'), 'neutral' is apparently the same as 'left wing'.  As for The Guardian, well, it certainly sits to the left of centre, but it certainly doesn't consistently articulate any ideological or doctrinaire left wing perspective.  It's well-meaning liberalism for the well intentioned but ineffective.  (I should know - I read it every day).  The biggest problem with this story is that it doesn't explain just how sources are attributed, or what the queries used in the data were about.  Now, I'm sure that the original report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) that the article draws on (and undoubtedly misquotes and misrepresents in order to fit the newspaper's own biases), probably does provide clarity on these matters, but the fact is that more people will read the Mail article than the report, so that has to be the basis of my analysis.

I'd hazard a guess that many of the queries involved probably have little to do with politics and it simply happens that the BBC and Guardian can provide more relevant information to the AI algorithms.  Moreover, on issues like the environment and climate change, say, they are far more likely to provide information in line with accepted scientific opinion than right wing sources like the Mail, who are far more likely to give credence to climate change deniers.  Indeed, I'd say that a large part of the reason for AI's use of non right-wing sources is because, in the UK at least, their 'journalism' rarely has a sound factual basis, instead being based upon bigotry, bias and deliberate misinterpretation of actual facts.  No wonder AI algorithms filter them out.  Obviously, though, the underlying problem with the story is its rank hypocrisy - a newspaper with and an increasingly extremer right-wing bias, (a lot of its output these days reads like agitprop for the likes of Farage), complaining that another source of news has a different bias.  Bearing in mind that the UK's print media is overwhelmingly owned by wealthy right-wingers, who use it to try and indoctrinate readers to their selfish agendas in order to try and influence elections, surely having a rival source of information which leans the other way can only be health?  Surely it would create balance in the news sphere?  But alternative viewpoints are simply not allowed in the world of the crackpot right.  Such things are dangerous.  They might encourage people to think for themselves - and we can't have that, can we?

Manifesting the End of Civilisation?

If you were to take everything in the UK's right-wing media at face value, then you'd think that we were living in some kind of third world Hell hole, with a collapsing economy, crumbling infrastructure, and drug-ravaged cities overrun by violent, mostly foreign, criminals.  Either that, or you'd think that we were living in some kind of police state, with your right to hurl racist insults in the name of free speech, being severely curtailed by a dictatorial government led by the reincarnation of Josef Stalin.  Yet, step outside of your front door and it all looks very different.  In fact, it all looks much the same as it has for the past few decades.  People aren't being murdered in their beds on an hourly basis, women aren't being raped in broad daylight in shopping centres by foreign infidels and people aren't offering you drugs on every street corner.  Hospitals, courts, schools etc still function, buses and trains still run (albeit usually late, but what's new?) and the bins are still collected (except maybe in Birmingham, where the council is apparently still in dispute with its own refuse collectors).  Certainly, prices are up, (but inflation is historically something of a national institution in the UK), much of the public sector is badly underfunded, but still functions, crimes still occur and the police are as ineffective as ever, but none of this is indicative of the sort of end-of-civilisation scenario painted by the press.  Most of it is the result of government policies - primarily the economic mismanagement of fourteen years of Tory governments and the disaster of Brexit, which has undermined the UK's economy.  Of course, if there was still a Tory government in office, all of these things could be happening, but the right-wing media wouldn't be framing it the same way.  

No, it would all be the fault of the victims, be they the unemployed, the poor, immigrants, single mothers, the disabled, or whoever, not the government.  But as we have a Labour government in office, it is instead all evidence of an impending apocalypse brought about by the government's determination to punish the Daily Mail reading middle classes by flooding the country with murderous immigrants, cutting public services and turning the police into the Gestapo, unreasonably expecting them to enforce the law, particularly traffic law and public order laws, regardless of whether you are middle class or not!  Such laws are only for the horrible working classes!  So day in, day out, they print their hysterical headlines about how 'Asylum seekers ate my Granny' or 'My daughter was raped by a coke crazed one-legged transsexual benefits claimant wearing a turban', seemingly in the hope that if they keep imposing their false vision of the state of the UK on the public then maybe they can actually force its physical manifestation.  At the very least, the hope to be able to create a false perception in the minds of the public.  What can we do to counter this propaganda war aimed at creating sort of new reality which will have people running into the arms of Nigel Farage for protection, (although why anyone would think that some drunken old racist could protect them from armies of homicidal foreign brigands is beyond me)?  Obviously, it's pointless trying to create an alternative, competing, vision, with most of the media in the hands of wealthy right-wing bastards.  

What the government should do, I think, is to employ some of those Tibetan monks.  You know, the Buddhist ones who, through intense mental training can, through meditation, manifest Tulpas, unreal beings who have the appearance and substance of real humans.  Because, surely, if they can individually do that, then surelt, en masse, they could manifest a whole new reality.  Just to make out sure, they could get them to train groups of Labour staffers in the meditation technique, so that they can reinforce the projection of this new reality.  The fact is that they wouldn't have to create this reality in all of its detail, just create a thought form version of it so powerful, that it can supplant the Daily Hate inspred version from the public's minds.  It wouldn't even have to be some kind of projection of a false paradise, just a powerful projection of how things really are.  OK, I know it all sounds utterly fantastical, but Hell, we're living in an age where Donald Trump is US President, imposing fascism on his country and trying to buy or steal Greenland, so, to be frank, anything must be possible!

Cranking Up the Hate

I've speculated here before on the levels of outrage and hate that the right-wing media seem to be trying to drive their readers toward with their rabid headlines.  The question is, how can those of us who still live in the rational world turn this to our advantage?  After all, such headlines must surely be pushing the blood pressures of the average Daily Mail-reading proto-fascist to potentially fatal levels.  I mean, bearing in mind that so many of them are elderly or grossly overweight and subsisting on a diet of pure fat, it can surely only be a matter of time before they start suffering massive coronaries as they read the latest made-up story about illegal immigrants raping white women or eating swans without the King's permission.  Just how much outrage can their cholesterol congested circulatory systems take before the inevitable happens?  I could even envisage a scenario where some of these arseholes become so enraged that their faces go puce-coloured, the veins on their necks and heads bulge and their eyes start popping out, before their whole head explodes, spattering their living room with their diseased brain matter.  So, rather than condemning the right-wing media for their constant stream of poisonous bile, perhaps we should be encouraging them to go further, to print ever more outrageous lies about immigrants, Muslims, gays, lesbians, trans people, single mother, benefits claimants, non-whites and anyone who votes Labour.  Maybe that's it - we need them to stoke up their vile readership's hate levels to maximum, in order to ensure that that their hearts and heads start exploding, thereby significantly whittling down the number of potential Reform UK voters.

But maybe we can go further.  Maybe we on the non-foaming-at-the-mouth-neo-Nazi-collective could start our own faux extreme right-wing media, peddling the most offensive and outrageous lies about all of the usual hate targets in order to try and push those blood pressures up to breaking point.  While the kind of stuff that the current right-wing media puts out might be hateful, it is usually, to some extent, constrained by some sorts of boundaries of decency and lip service to the notion of 'journalistic integrity', such false media as I'm proposing could go the whole hog.  There'd be, I'm sure, a guaranteed readership - all those right-wingers who want to go beyond the mundane hate purveyed by the likes of the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and GB News.  The ones who want the 'hard stuff', who crave to read about how Britain is wrecked due to rampant immigration and unbridled socialism, who want to hear how every crime is committed by black people, Muslims or, failing that, working class benefits claimants, the one who need their ignorant bigotry and biases confirmed on an hourly basis.  These are the sort of people who will lap up headlines like 'Immigrants ate my twelve year old daughter's pussy', (it was apparently  black and white and the bastards skinned it before frying it and serving it up for dinner).  Because that's the sort of direction we have to go in if we're to get their hardened arteries over the line into the heart attack danger zone, as, like drug addicts, they need their hits of hate ever stronger to fuel that outraged reaction.  Before long, we'll have the bastards dropping like flies, depriving the likes of Fartage and 'Tommy Robinson' of their potential base of supporters.  Hate, hate, hate!  It's what sells newspapers!

Headline Hate

So, Trump thinks that, regardless of what his country's constitution might say, the only constraint upon his power and authority, at home or abroad, is his own morality.  In which case, I guess, we're all fucked.  But, before we all sink completely into despair over the idea of the moral vacuum currently occupying the White House thinking that he has the right to use US military, economic and political power to do whatever the fuck he likes, wherever and whenever he likes, for us in the UK, there has been some good news.  Not that you are likely to hear about from our right-wing press, of course.  In which case, if you missed it, London's murder rate is at an all-time low.  Not only that, but net immigration to the UK has fallen by two thirds to a post-pandemic record low!  But that can't be right, I hear you say, the Daily Hate and Nigel Farage assure me that the UK, especially London, is a crime ridden Hell hole overrun by dangerous foreign murderers and rapists personally invited into the UK by Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan.  So that must be the truth as the Daily Hate and Farage would never lie, would they?  Yet these are the facts, backed up with data: crime and immigration are down.  But as we've established here, time and again, most of the UK's press simply isn't interested in facts.  Well, not if they contradict their agendas, that is.  They'll only report them if they can somehow distort and misinterpret them in order to bolster which ever prejudices they are peddling this week.

Which is why, of course, the majority of voters mistakenly believe that immigration is rising, not declining.  But the right's grip on much of the UK's media is only half of the problem.  The other half is that the government is so poor at getting its message generally and the facts in particular, out to the electorate.  Sure, I know that they are facing a hostile media, but they really should be utilising other channels, be that social media, online media or whatever, to bypass the traditional media which is clearly not going to do them any favours.  Yet they persist in trying to curry favour with the right wing press, whether it is with immigration 'crackdowns', benefits 'crackdowns' or watering down much needed labour law reforms, regardless of the fact that it doesn't matter how right-wing they try to be, the right wing press will still hate them and simply use it all as 'proof' of their hypocrisy and untrustworthiness.  Why do they have such difficulty in grasping this simple fact?  Traditional media is never going to give a Labour government credit for anything.  They would be better off simply doing what they believe is right according to the party's founding principles.  At least have the press pour hate on them for being principled.  Plus, there's always the chance that if people's lives are improved by such measures, then their first-hand experience of reality might just override the propaganda being pumped into their brains by a hostile media.

Losing the Plot?

'Is Trump losing the plot?' seems currently to be the question on the lips of many US political commentators.  Well, have I got news for you guys - we're way past the point of asking that question.  It's been patently obvious to any sane and rational person that the Orange Shitler is completely off his trolley since the day he took office in January.  Lat's face it, he was patently insane during his first term, but the US media seemed incapable of communicating this truth.  Until now, that is.  Finally, they are starting to dare to whisper that he might be, well, exhibiting symptoms of senility.  Again, not shit.  Their problem is that they've spent so long attempting to normalise his behaviour, even during his first term, that it has become increasingly difficult for the media to acknowledge that they were wrong and by covering up for the Mango Mussolini, they have done the US electorate a severe disservice.  But why have they previously been so keen to try and characterise the Trump administration as being somehow 'normal'?  Perhaps it is because so much of the US media is owned by billionaires who, even if they aren't publically conservative-leaning, see Trump as an ally in their attempts to subvert those democratic processes they see as harmful to their own interests.  Maybe it is simply fear - fear that if they don't curry favour with the fat bastard then he'll use the full force of the state to intimidate them.  In either case, they are neglecting their duty to speak truth to power, the main function of any media in a democracy.

But it isn't just the US where we see this happening - just look at the way in which the British press are going out of their way to normalise not just Nigel Farage but, increasingly, also the mortgage fraudster and convicted thug turned 'citizen journalist' and extremist rabble rouser 'Tommy Robinson'.  Despite the fact that, to be frank, the kind of views they are known for espousing are basically fascist, they are now presented to us a legitimate political players.  It's not just the usual suspects, the right-wing millionaire owned print press, who are culpable here:  the BBC's current chief political correspondent Chris Mason, for instance, seems to have a major league crush on Farage, praising him and giving Reform UK an easy ride whilst simultaneously launching assault after assault, often on the thinnest of evidence, at the government.  I'm not saying that the government shouldn't be held to account, it most certainly should, but I'd expect the BBC's overall political coverage to be just a little more balanced and consistent in its tone with regard to the different political parties.  I mean, it isn't as if we don't already have right-wing TV news channels that give regular platforms to the likes of Farage, so we surely don't need our national, publicly funded, broadcaster to jump on that bandwagon as well, do we?   But if they don't we'll have the various Farage mouthpieces, like the Telegraph, bellowing that they are all a bunch of lefties and should be shut down.  Are we getting to the stage, I wonder, when we have to storm the offices of these rags, waving flaming torches and shouting 'Kill the monster'?

Pigeons From Moscow

Flocks of cyber-pigeons.  That, apparently, is the rumoured new Russian super weapon.  According to a report I heard on the radio this afternoon.  A report, as ever, to be treated with caution as it originates with a Russian tech firm.  But, for what it is worth, the Russians are allegedly putting brain implants into pigeons, so that their movements can be controlled.  The idea being that, as they are pigeons, nobody will pay any attention to them until they explode, fly into aircraft jet intakes to cause crashes, or just crap en masse all over our cars.  It all sounds more than a little fanciful, the sort of bollocks the Russians tend to come up with every so often to see what they can get the west to swallow.  Yet it has just enough of a sliver of credibility - the Russians are known to have previously experimented with using animals in war, such as spy dolphins, for instance - that it is precisely the sort of thing that both some politicians and  some in our intelligence services might grasp at and start running with, despite a lack of any hard evidence to back it up.  Thus, precious resources will be wasted on trying to gather intelligence of these 'pigeons of death' and devising counter measures to protect against them.  Indeed, don't be surprised if, sometime in the near future, we see mass culls of pigeons in the UK with little or no official explanation.  It will mean that some crank in the intelligence services will have succeeded in spooking a government minister or two.

If nothing else, this story is somewhat insulting toward pigeons and birds in general, presuming that they are easily controlled by external forces due to their lack of intelligence.  In my experience, (particularly my recent experiences with the local swan population), birds are anything but stupid, being remarkably observant and capable of some impressive feats of reasoning.  (One of the young swans I regularly feed, who I've known since he was a bundle of grey feathers following his parents around the pond, not only seems to recognise me as an individual, but has correctly assessed me as a soft touch who will indulge his antics, has lately taken to going through my jacket pockets if I don't give him my full attention and instead feed other birds - he's observed that when I arrive at the pond, I carry the bag of seed in an outside jacket pocket, so now insists on checking whether I'm holding out by having a second secret stash hidden in my pockets).  Besides, do we really think that Russian technology is up to producing a brain implant that can influence the behaviour of even birds?  I've seen that recent video clip of the unveiling of Russia's latest humanoid robot, which staggers around and falls over like the average Geordie after two pints, (if only they could make it throw up as well, then the resemblance would be uncanny).  But hey, if nothing else, this story opens up another front for the World War Three doomsayers of the UK tabloid press - doubtless they'll soon be running headlines about the risks posed by Russian robo-birds, warning of dive bombing killer gulls, expploding Christmas turkeys and the like.  Accompanied by unhinged calls for the government to allow people to booby trap their bird feeders, so as to slaughter the little feathered bastards by the dozen as a precautionary measure.

Daily Hate

I think that the only way to understand the Daily Telegraph's war against the BBC is to bear in mind that it is currently desperately auditioning for potential new owners, with various suitors having already been blocked because they would involve foreign ownership of a British newspaper.  (Which never seemed to worry anyone when Australian turned American Rupert Murdoch was allowed to own the Sun, News of the World and later The Times and Sunday Times).  So, bearing in mind that these days newspapers and non-public service media are only owned by billionaire extreme right-wingers or billionaires who seek to cravenly pander to extreme right-wing politicians in order to further their other business interests, it is only natural that the Telegraph should seek to establish its extremist credentials by trying to trash the UK's main public service broadcaster.  Because, by any standards, its recent campaign against the BBC has been truly extraordinary, culminating with the perverse situation of a UK based newspaper effectively encouraging a fascist-lite dictator masquerading as the US president, to sue the UK's flagship, publically funded, broadcaster.  Particularly bearing in mind Trump's antipathy to all media, print or broadcast, that refuse to act as propagandists for his demented regime.  You'd think that any newspaper which would want to cling to some vestige of integrity and quality in its reporting would be steadfastly anti-Trump.  Unless, that is, it is looking for a new sugar daddy who is likely to be steadfastly pro-Trump.  In which case ethics go out of the window.

Now, it isn't as if the Telegraph has ever been a hot bed of liberalism, but I'm old enough to remember a time when it was simply a right-of-centre broadsheet which reported the news with a degree of objectivity, albeit always retaining a broadly conservative perspective.  As such, it was a well-respected heavyweight on Britain's newsstands.  But nowadays, it feels like a parody of its former self, with screaming headlines that seem to be trying to compete with the Daily Mail and Daily Express to see who can come up with the most unhinged and hateful takes on the news.  When it isn't attacking the BBC, the Telegraph is pursuing some of the most frothing at the mouth reactionary takes on Labour policies, trying to paint the current government as a manifestation of the Anti-Christ.  It's really quite embarrassing.  It also doesn't seem to be doing much for sales.  I often buy a newspaper late in the day and what I've noticed is that while I often find it difficult to get a copy of The Guardian, having to visit multiple newsagents and supermarkets to find one that hasn't sold out, all of them still seem to have stacks of unsold editions of the Telegraph (and Daily Mail).  Now, I know that this isn't a particularly scientific study and you have to take into account that The Guardian has a much smaller daily print run than even the Telegraph, plus bear in mind that Crapchester may well not be representative of overall UK newspaper reading habits, but nonetheless, it makes you think.  Overall print sales of newspapers may well be in decline in the UK, but my unscientific survey would seem to suggest that it is right-wing titles which seem to be suffering most.  Perhaps this down to the fact that those inclined to read such things can now get their daily dose of hate and misinformation in more convenient and easily digestible form via the web or the proliferation of right-wing broadcast options, or it could be an indication that the sort of hateful bile they peddle is nowhere near as popular as they'd like us to believe.