Yesterday's Zaniness...

Just recently I've watched a number of episodes of the Kenny Everett Video Show.  I'm not sure his posthumous reputation as some kind of 'zany comedy genius' can stand many more of these repeats.  This is the show he did for ITV, for its final series, it became Kenny Everett's Video Cassette, but the format was much the same.  Anyway, watching it now, it is hard to believe that this was ever considered 'cutting edge', let alone 'daring'.  Basically, each episode is simply a platform for a couple of performances from well known pop acts of the era, punctuated by some very weak, sub-Monty Python shenanigans, some involving Everett dressing up as various characters and cracking lots of corny old jokes and the dance group Hot gossip performing some supposedly 'naughty' routines.  The lack of a studio audience doesn't help - instead we hear the studio crew cackling away every so often, which simply gives the impression that this is Everett performing for his mates down the pub.  The only segments which still seem mildly amusing are the animated 'Captain Kremmen' episodes - by the final series, though, these had been replaced by vastly inferior live action versions.  It's not that it is irredeemably awful - Everett exudes a great deal of charisma which carries the show through its many longueurs - it is just that even when it was made, it was all very old hat and derivative.  That, combined with an air of quiet desperation which accompanies many of the skits, (they aren't developed sufficiently to be described as sketches), leaves one wondering just why Everett was so popular back in the day.

I have to admit, that I never saw these shows when they were first transmitted, so this isn't a case of revisionism on my part.  Perhaps younger me would have found them amusing at the time, but decades later, they do little for me.  I came to Kenny Everett on TV after he moved his show to the BBC and it became the Kenny Everett Television Show, an entirely different kettle of fish.  This was a fully fledged sketch show, where Everett's characters were given more room to develop and better scripts.  The range of characters on display was wider, with running gags and catchphrases established, helping the show to achieve a much more polished finish - it actually felt like a proper TV show rather than simply a self indulgent video Everett had recorded with his mates.  The presence of a studio audience not made up of employees and mates helped - the laughter didn't feel forced.  It proved a popular format, propelling Everett into the mainstream of TV entertainment.  But, inevitably, he threw his success away, not by breaking broadcasting standards, as he has when working on BBC radio, instead by appearing at a pre-election political rally for Maggie Thatcher.  He made all kinds of excuses for his appearance and various of his friends and associates tried to claim that he was essentially non-political or even politically naive, claiming he only appeared at the Tory rally because they'd asked him first, but it was to no avail - he'd alienated part of his audience.  It's difficult to present yourself as an anti-establishment, anarchic, comedian when you end up supporting the most establishment political figure of the time.  Viewing figures for his show began to decline - perhaps coincidentally, because it certainly felt as if it was past its prime and running out of steam - and Everett gradually vanished from our screens.  As I say, looking back now at his ITV show, on which his TV fame was built, it's difficult to see why it was considered so 'daring' - maybe it's a case that you had to be there at the time to understand it's success.

Glorious Counter Revolution (Part Two)

Getting back to that idea of bringing the US back under the umbrella of British rule after their, frankly disastrous (for the rest of the world) 250 year experiment in independence, I think that we need to do more to expose their foundation myth as the pack of lies it really is.  As we've already established, that whole business about throwing off the shackles of a tyrannical king was all utter bollocks - George III, like every British monarch since William and Mary was a constitutional monarch with very limited powers.  It was really about the fact these revolting colonists didn't want to pay tax - most specifically the taxes which would pay for the UK's defence of them against the expansionist French, (we were, after all, in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars at the time).  But even then, it wasn't quite that simple, as it wasn't everyone who would have been paying the lion's share of those taxes, the main burden would have fallen on the wealthy. Like their 'Founding Fathers'.  These guys were the eighteenth century equivalent to today's billionaires and, like those contemporary guys, just don't see why they should pay tax.  Any tax.  So, again, just like today, these rich creeps decided to manipulate the populace into acting against their own interests.  Rather than trying to buy the system to elect their own right-wing millionaire clown, they instead cooked up a revolution by mobilising the masses against British rule.  Which, of course, involved lots of misinformation about the British.  Like the King being a tyrannical absolute monarch.

One of the supposed key events in working up this revolutionary fever was the so called 'Boston Massacre', when British soldiers allegedly opened fire on protesters in Boston, resulting in casualties.  It was the basis for much revolutionary propaganda.  But, bearing in the mind the parallels we've been drawing between 'Founding Fathers' and today's billionaires and their MAGA mobs, how do we know that these really were British soldiers?  I mean, the MAGA crazies like to claim that those January sixth whackos weren't really extreme right-wing Trump thugs fired up by Trump himself, but actually Antifa agitators in disguise, their actions designed to discredit Trump and his supporters and backers.  This is a narrative spun not just by the usual online crazies, but by wealthy Trump supporters, too.  So, is it inconceivable that those wealthy 'Founding Fathers' didn't organise some revolutionary cronies to dress up as British soldiers and shoot colonists in order to ferment dissent and slander the British?  Far fetched?  No more than that Antifa-disguised-as-MAGA January Sixth bollocks - and large numbers of Americans seemed happy to swallow that, so why shouldn't we use our version to further erode their foundation myths?

Because, you know, it's important to disabuse Americans of their self-aggrandising creation myths, from which they derive their extraordinary hubris that makes them think that they are somehow the God's 'chosen people', the 'Land of the Free' and the 'Greatest Nation on Earth'.  While Trump's reign might have started to beat some humility into some of them as a result of the US' subsequent lack of popularity in the rest of the world, it's important to remember that Trump isn't really that much of an aberration.  The US has always been a hypocritical bully that likes to preach its supposed democratic values at the rest of the world whilst simultaneously taking opportunistic advantage of the misfortunes and weakness of other nations in order to extend its wealth and power.  It's just that under Trump, the bullying and hypocrisy is undisguised.  But with their perfidy out in the open, it means that we no longer have to listen to their tiresome lectures about their supposed moral superiority, their claims to be a bastion of free speech or how we all 'owe' them for World War Two. (ignoring the fact they couldn't be bothered to turn up until some of us had already been holding off the fascists for nearly three years).  It's time we started reminding them that, in reality, their whole state was founded on lies, the creation of a bunch of super-rich scumbags who gaslit their population into a 'revolution', which swapped rule by an elected parliament (albeit in London), for rule by the aforementioned super-rich under the cloak of local 'democracy'.  An exaggeration?  Well, maybe a bit, but ultimately I'm so tired of being lectured by Americans about the UK's 'awful' imperialist past and all the bad shit done in our names back then.  But at least we acknowledge the evils of our past and accept that our prosperity was based upon the exploitation of weaker nations.  So, I think it's about time the Yanks started critically evaluating their history and accepting that their prosperity is equally based upon the bullying and exploitation of weaker nations and that they also have been responsible for a lot of nasty shit.  They aren't the greatest nation on earth by a long chalk, just another country founded on the lies of the rich.

Some Seventies Sitcoms Revisited

Seventies sitcoms are a funny thing - and not necessarily funny in the way intended by the makers.  Watching them now, from a distance of fifty-plus years, you are sometimes left wondering exactly why some of them were so popular at the time.  Of course, in part, for me, the answer lies, partially, in the fact that when I first saw them, I was a child and far less critical, not to mention far less aware of the gender, class and racial politics that underpinned the humour.  While most of them seem dated, to put it mildly, I many of their attitudes, as always, we have to put it all in context and accept that, at the time of their making, these merely reflected the wider social values of the time.  Well, usually.  Even as a child back in the seventies I thought 'hilarious' ITV race comedy Love Thy Neighbour was offensive, it's supposed humourous look at race relations in the UK simply an excuse to for having every offensive racial epithet for non-whites spoken on air in the guise of it all being 'a joke'.  'But the black characters give as good as they get', was the excuse used by the makers.  Except that a black man calling a white man 'honky' (the extent of the white epithets used), is in no way equivalent to a white man calling a black man by the N-word (amongst other offensive terms).  Mind Your Language, which came later in the seventies is another ITV sitcom which often gets bracketed with Love Thy Neighbour as being irredeemably racially offensive, but, having recently seen most of the first series again, for the first time since its first screening, I'm left feeling somewhat ambivalent about it.

The thing about Mind Your Language - which is based around a class of English as a Foreign Language students and the tribulations of their teacher as he tries to teach them the language - is that it isn't so much that it bandies about racial epithets, but that it trades in some truly outrageous racial and cultural stereotypes.  Where it does employ terms of fairly mild racial abuse, it puts them in the mouths of non-white characters, most notably the Pakistani and Sikh students, who engage in an ongoing war of words.  At the time, this must have seemed a smart way to get away with generating a few cheap laughs from their use without seeming to be endorsing white vs black race hate.  But it is those stereotypes which seem most jarring today - they really are crude in the extreme, but at least not confined to non-white characters.  Whilst the Pakistani, Sikh and Indian characters do, indeed, speak in the stereotypical 'amusing' fashion popularised by Peter Sellers, complete with mispronunciations and malapropisms, so do the Greek, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, French, Japanese and Chinese characters, just with different accents.  They all conform to the appropriate cultural stereotypes: the Austrian woman is stern and frosty, the French girl a sexy tease, the Italian guy a sex maniac, the Chinese girl a propaganda-spouting devotee of Chairman Mao and so on.  The thing is that the stereotypes are so lazily obvious, that they simply fail to offend.  That, combined with the fact that the characters, regardless of race and culture, are presented as being sympathetic defuses the potential offensiveness of the situation.  Which isn't to say that the series isn't as corny as hell, peddling in hoary old jokes and running through all the farcical stock situations so beloved of seventies sitcoms.  But was very popular back in the late seventies.  So popular was it in overseas markets that, incredibly, five years or so after its initial run had ended, another series was made for export, featuring many of the same characters and stereotypes.  Even foreigners, it seems, can enjoy a good stereotype, even of themselves...

Travelling Hopefully...

According to Robert Louis Stevenson, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  Well, I'm betting that he wasn't trying to get to the coast from Crapchester on a summer's day.  It's just as well that I find the sight and sound of the sea relaxing - I needed to unwind after the nightmare journey down today.  OK, OK, I know that I started out late, so got caught up with school traffic and the like, but there was really no excuse for the sort of insanity on display on the roads today.  Along with far too many roadworks.  I was hoping that the journey back this evening would be easier, it usually is, but no, I found myself constantly hindered by slow drivers in front of me, tailgaters behind, over hesitant learners and even some idiots racing horses and buggies on the last stretch of dual carriageway before home.  I kid you not on that last one - it really happened, not for the first time, either.  So, was it all worth the effort and trauma?  Well, with more crazy temperatures forecast next week, I decided that I'd take the opportunity for a day out when it was warm enough to enjoy the beach, but still cool enough for getting stuck in seemingly interminable traffic jams without suffering heatstroke.  So, from that point of view it was worthwhile.  Plus, the beach made for a more unusual venue for my daily walk than the local park.  

Anyway, this was my second trip to the New Forest this week - the first time I've visited since they started charging for parking there.  The effects of the charges can already be seen: near empty car parks everywhere.  I know it is still early in the season, but in my experience, there's usually far more visitors than I saw evidence of at this time of the year.  The charges are an absolute pain - like most people I'll habitually visit a number of venues in the New Forest in the course of a day trip.  Now, it'll not only cost me a small fortune every time I go down there, but I'll have to go through the rigmarole of trying to pay via phone (they offer no alternative).  It's one of those bloody systems where you have to speak your registration number - which their software inevitably tells you it can't hear, or turns out to have completely misheard it.  Meaning, of course, going round the houses again and again - racking up charges all the time, which, of course, is the point of the exercise.  It does no good to try the option of texting the reg number as, when you call back, it claims not to have received it - more costs racked up.  I ended up shouting my registration down the phone in order for it to be correctly taken.  I then had to waste more time getting it to understand the make of my car - apparently it's never heard of a Saab.  Yet more shouting.  Incredibly, you can key in your card details - begging the question of why you can't key in the other details?  I must have wasted nearly half an hour trying to pay for an hour's parking on what Forestry England claims is a car park but, in reality, is simply a strip of unmaintained gravel at the entrance of an enclosure.  Bearing in mind that the New Forest is a national park and therefore belongs to the nation, ie taxpayers like me, it really is a bloody liberty to be trying to rinse us for money like this.

After Hours: Confessions of a Sex Pest From Outer Space

Back in the world of After Hours, can Dan guess who the real celebrity sinner is in ‘It’s a Sin!’? We get a preview of the new, non-woke, ‘Doctor Who’, while The-Man-in-the-Pub ponders the existence of an entirely unknown (to the public) regeneration of The Doctor. ‘Consumer Eye’, meanwhile, investigates a dodgy ‘On the Day’ hearse hire app, with explosive consequences, while the ‘Downey Bit Spaceman’, who terrorised the female inhabitants of a small village, is exposed, before we go behind the scenes at a tabloid newspaper.

Listen Here: Confessions of a Peeping Tom From Outer Space 

‘After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio, Chat GPT Reader and FreeTTS.  Sound effects by Freesound Community via Pixababy.  Music: ‘Spin the Wheel’ and ‘Cold House Files’ by Cosmiczebra via Suno.

We're at episode five already.  My battle to keep the running time continues, a battle I seem to be comprehensively losing.  Despite cutting out virtually all the inter-segment breaks, this one still weighs in at thirty four minutes.  It's still my aim to get down to around the thirty minute mark.  I think that next time around, I'll be curtailing somewhat The-Man-in-the-Pub's ramblings, as he is regularly the longest item in any given episode.  Anyway, overall, I'm pretty pleased with this episode overall - there is more completely original material, as opposed to stuff adapted from The Sleaze, than in previous editions.  I have no idea what's going to be in the next one so, until then, enjoy this one.

Australiens (2014)

I've said some harsh things about some of those micro-budgeted direct-to-streaming movies that seem to pop up everywhere these days.  Many of them are would be horror films and the overwhelming majority that it has been my misfortune to sit through are shoddily made and atrociously acted.  They are invariably derivative, but not in a positive way, with ambitions that far outstrip their resources.  In short, most of them are absolute shite, home movies with ideas above their station, that should never have seen the light of day.  Recently, however, I saw one that I actually enjoyed.  Australiens (2014), as its title implies, is an Australian alien invasion movie, which belies its tiny budget with some very impressive-looking production values and effects work.  Despite an ambitious scenario - a full-scale alien invasion - it wisely opts to focus on a small group of characters who seem, for reasons which become clearer as the plot unfolds, are intimately linked to the invasion.  Equally wisely, it plays out as a more than slightly surreal comedy, as it becomes clear that Australia is the only country that has been attacked (except for Tasmania, which is left unscathed), much to the chagrin of the USA, which takes the aliens' failure to recognise them as the earth's predominant power personally, refusing the Australians any assistance.  Much of the humour relies upon a series of running gags, most set up early, like the apparently charmed status of Tasmania, one character's propensity for being mistakenly shot every so often, amongst others.  These gags are very well maintained throughout the movie's running-time, with a couple of them providing the film's closing punchlines.

The movie also derives much of its humour from the ever-evolving plot, which is continually throwing up new, out-of-left-field developments, which completely change the story's direction, whilst still advancing the main plot.  In this aspect, it effectively parodies conspiracy theories, whose adherents, when presented with concrete evidence that contradicts their belief system, suddenly pull some other bizarre idea out of their arses in order to distract attention from these anomalies.  Hence, we have the lead character's father suddenly revealing that he's a retired Australian secret agent who had been involved in investigating earlier alien incursions, but later revealing that he, himself, is an alien, in order to explain how he knows so much about the invaders.  The dawning realisation of the main characters that they somehow sit at the centre of the invasion, further parodies the conspiracy mindset, with adherents of conspiracy theories always thinking that they are somehow special and the guardians of the real truth.  Overall, the film is very professionally made, with some good comic performances from the cast, bringing to life its roster of deeply flawed, but ultimately quite likeable, characters.  Unlike many would be low-budget parodies, Australiens successfully lands most of its comic punches - it probably helps that, culturally, British and Australian humour don't sit too far apart, so I could get most of the references in the gags.  As I say, Australiens is actually a pretty entertaining movie, head and shoulders above most of the micro-budgeted dross currently cluttering up the lower levels of steaming services.  It actually looks and feels like an actual film, not a home movie escaped into the wild.

Too Hot to Handle?

'Hot enough for June' they always used to say when we had a run of unseasonably warm weather.  Now, it seems, in order to be sufficiently hot to emulate June, any future unseasonable warm spell will have to be over thirty degrees Celsius.  But hey, despite three consecutive days on which UK high temperature records were broken, those tiresome right-wing nutters are still denying that climate change is a real thing.  Well, they say, it's summer - what do you expect other than high temperatures?  Well, for one thing, we're in the UK, where summers are traditionally wet, for another, this week wasn't an isolated incident: just last month we had a similar spell of plus thirty temperatures.  Indeed, for the past few years, summer temperatures, particularly in early summer have been getting higher, as have those in late spring.  This can't be written off as some kind of 'temporary blip' - a pattern is emerging suggesting that there has been a distinct climactic shift.  While, in principle, I'm in favour of warmer weather for the UK, (even if it presages the entire planet burning to a crisp), this week has pushed my love of the warmth to its limits.  The main reason I enjoy the warmer, drier, weather is that it means that I can get out more, on longer trips than usual.  But the past few days have been so hot that, at times, it felt impossible to stay outside for more than a few minutes at a time with the risk of frying.  Which has severely curtailed my activities.

A planned trip to the coast, for instance, was cut short and I ended up visiting an en route beauty spot closer to home.  It wasn't so much that it was too hot drive - with the fans on full and windows down, the interior of the car was quite bearable - but that I found that I couldn't cope with other drivers, who seemed to have been rendered even crazier than usual by the heat.  Even at the local filling station, they seemed to have lost their heads - with cars parked blocking pumps and the exit blocked by an idiot in a flat bed truck, meaning that I spent more time there than I'd anticipated.  Then, yesterday, I was forced to traipse halfway across the town and back for a medical appointment I neither wanted nor asked for, not being able to drive there and back because it involved drops being put into my eyes which leave my vision blurred for hours afterward.  So, on a blazing hot day I had to defy medical advice for those of us with diabetes and on blood pressure medication and walk miles to and from a doctor's surgery.  Despite taking water with me and sticking to the shade wherever possible, I felt like shit when I finally got home, drenched in sweat.  But yeah, global warming is just a myth, a Chinese conspiracy according to that moron in the White House.  So it must just have been my imagination that I spent yesterday walking through a furnace. 

Girls Are for Loving (1973)

So, I finally got around to watching the third (and last) instalment in the Ginger trilogy: Girls Are for Loving (1973).  On the one hand, it is very much more of the same, with frequently naked PI Ginger McCallister (Cheri Caffero), taking on the bad guys through a combination of sex and violence, getting tied up and sexually abused at one point, before turning the tables and responding in kind.  On the other hand, Girls Are for Loving is notably slicker than the previous two entries, (although that isn't necessarily saying much), more smoothly shot and edited and also boasting much more of a plot.  Unfortunately, the script proves to be far too convoluted in its construction and has far too many lengthy dialogue scenes full of exposition, which badly slows down the action.  Moreover, the acting performances haven't improved much, particularly from the leading lady - who also gets to sing a couple of songs.  Not very well.  (One can't help but suspect that the fact that the director, Don Schain, was also her husband was a significant factor in this indulgence).  Notably, the film veers away from the private eye antics of the previous two films into James Bond territory, with our heroine recruited by the CIA to find out who is behind the abductions of key officials connected with upcoming trade talks between the US and an unnamed Asian country.  

The villain turns out to be a sadistic femme fatale Ronnie St Clair (Jocelyn Peters), who is hoping to find out details of which companies are set to benefit from the trade agreements in order to indulge in a bit of insider dealing before they are announced.  Bearing in mind that this is part of the Ginger series, it will come as no surprise that there is a significant sexual element to St Clair's sadism.  Nor will be a surprise that, at one point, she has Ginger spread eagled naked on a bed and abused by a henchman.  Not that this phases Ginger, who has spent a significant part of this series being variously bound, gagged, drugged raped, fondled and pawed by various bad guys.  Part of St Clair's mission is to try and prove to Ginger that they are two of a kind: strong, ruthless women who get what they want through any means.  Which they are, except that Ginger enjoys all the sex, whereas for St Clair it is merely a means to an end.  Inevitably, of course, after a fight that sees them both losing their clothes, Ginger gets the drop on St Clair and ties her to the bed.  Deciding that St Clair's problem is, basically, that she's not 'getting enough', Ginger gets a male character who was previously St Clair's captive, to give her 'a good seeing to' - which St Clair ultimately seems to enjoying.  Obviously the 'cure' is working.

These final scenes underline the fundamental problem with these films: while they like to sell themselves as being about female empowerment, with a tough and violent heroine who can kick ass - a sort of white equivalent to those Blaxploitation films starring the likes of Pam Grier - they are ultimately deeply misogynistic.  Those tough women are really only there to fulfil yet another male rape fantasy: that of dominating and 'taming' a tough, independent woman.  St Clair eventually has to submit to male domination in order to gain some form of redemption.  While Ginger might well emerge unbowed from the various sexual abuses piled upon her, the theme is the same - she really just wants to find a good man to submit to.  But in the final analysis, Girls Are for Loving is a reasonably enjoyable - if you can ignore the questionable sexual politics - low budget softcore action film.  In terms of production values it is certainly a step up from its two predecessors, with some well staged action sequences in between the sex, nudity and Caffero's singing.  Yet, despite the slickness, it still comes over as somewhat less interesting than the very rough and ready original, whose sheer crudeness made it startlingly fascinating.

Get a Sense of Humour...

OK, so last week I was on about how my ideal outcome for this latest FIFA World Cup of corruption would be an England-USA final, with the US getting thrashed in front of Trump in their 250th anniversary year, followed by rejoicing England fans burning down the White House in celebration.  Well, since then, I've though of something better: an Iran-USA final.  Maybe Trump could base the whole outcome of his 'peace talks' with Iran on it - if they win, they retain full control of the Straits of Hormuz, if they lose, the US can bomb them 'into the stone age'.  Even better, though, the Iranian players and fans could all turn out to be suicide bombers and blow themselves, the stadium and Trump to bits, win or lose.  Of course, if I were to try and run this gag past any US acquaintances, then there'd be much pearl clutching and hand wringing as they expressed shock and horror over the idea of joking about political violence.  Their sensitivity on this subject is a phenomenon that never ceases to amaze me - one of the most violent societies on earth, where the ownership of lethal weapons is constitutionally enshrined as a right and actively encouraged, where they allow their children to be slaughtered by crazed bastards exercising such rights on a regular basis, but they can't take a joke about political assassinations.  I mean, it isn't as if they haven't assassinated enough of their own presidents and political leaders to assume that this simply wasn't a sensitive subject any more.

But no, you can't joke about blowing up even a deadbeat senile sex offender like Trump, without finding yourself subjected to much finger-wagging and admonishments over 'encouraging' or 'condoning' political violence.  Oh, for fuck's sake!  Get a sense of humour!  There's a version of this sanctimonious shit this side of the Atlantic, as well, in those people - usually on the right - who bellow about how Nigel Farage having milkshakes thrown at him somehow constitutes assault.  Because, you know, next time it might not be a milkshake - it might be battery acid!  Which begs the question, of course, if the hurlers of milkshakes really wanted to harm Farage, why didn't they throw battery acid at him in the first place?  (Mind you, these self-same hand-wringers would always applaud loudly when eggs were thrown at Jeremy Corbyn or water poured over John Prescott because that so obviously wasn't assault, was it?).   It's all bollocks, obviously.  The throwing of stuff at politicians goes back to at least Roman times, when it was considered perfectly legitimate to hurl rotten fruit and vegetables at public speakers if you didn't like what they were saying.  Indeed, I recall that when I was a kid people were always throwing tomatoes at Ted Heath when he was Prime Minister and nobody batted an eyelid - there was nobody going on about 'assault' or claiming that it might encourage or condone actual political violence.  I guess it all comes down to how robust one's sense of humour is - I mean, these right wingers are always banging on about how the left are over-sensitive to stuff intended as a joke and are a bunch of snowflakes, yet throw a milkshake at Farage, which I think is hilarious, and the cry-babies start whining.  If you can't take a joke...

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.