July 11, 2010

London Called. I answered.

As part of my occasional attempts to understand how normal people live their lives I have decided to indulge in what is commonly referred to as a “holiday.”

Despite the etymology of this word it has, you will be glad to hear, no longer got anything to do with holiness. Instead the idea is that you just go somewhere for an extended period of time. A simple enough prospect, but like many other areas of life, it has been ruined by both stupidity and capitalism.

When my girlfriend first suggested that we take a holiday I immediately leapt into action and ignored the idea for several years. When the suggestion evolved into insistence I boldly attempted to pass the suggestion onto a parliamentary committee for consideration. Unfortunately I am not a cabinet-based government, and this evasion failed.

Hence this trip. To be honest, I can’t see the point in coming to London, as I was here in the 1980s. It seemed to me highly unlikely that much could have changed, and the fact that I would no longer be viewing the city with the wide eyed innocence of a child means that I’d fail to be impressed.

My predictions were, as usual, correct.

Last time I was here London was large, smelly and ruled by Tories. This time, ditto. In fact the only change seems to be that there is no longer  great aunt and great uncle showering me with sweets. No wonder there has been so much talk about “Broken Britain” lately.

London, and in fact England as a whole, still lags far behind the civilised world when it comes to simple matters like currency. I’d managed to avoid visiting a Bureau de Change for several years, as the Euro works in proper countries, and I had a big stack of Sterling left over from my trips to Scotland and the occupied territories.

However it seems that not only are the English refusing to accept normal money, they also have difficulty accepting sterling. I had to get mine changed as it was originally issued by banks in remote places like Belfast or Edinburgh. Napoleon, it seems, was both short and stupid. He described the Saxons as a nation of shopkeepers, but what shopkeeper would turn down legal tender?

Apart from such eccentricities, which must be endured by cosmopolitan travelers such as myself, the English are actually quite a pleasant people when they aren’t invading places. While I have been on the receiving end of many a sullen stare, and six stabbings since arriving here, it’s quite clear from my time travelling about the town that this has been in no way racist. The Londoners spend their time glaring at, and attacking with knives, each other. They’ve clearly moved on from the anti-Irish racism of yesteryear, and are now prepared to abuse us as equals.

Later today I shall be testing some of the pubs in the area to see if they are acceptable. I am not optimistic.

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July 3, 2010

Terms and Conditions Apply.

Fear makes people stupid. It shuts down the brain, reducing your options to fight or flight. This can be good for a hunter-gatherer facing a large predator in North Africa half a million years ago. But it’s confusing for a right wing Irish politician looking at an opinion poll one month ago.

Flight isn’t really an option in politics. Just ask George Lee. But fighting isn’t always a good idea either. Attacking other parties, rather than attacking their ideas, doesn’t win you votes. All it does is persuade undecided voters that the whole business is a waste of time, that politicians are fundamentally uncivilised, and not worth bothering with.

This has been shown repeatedly in the USA, where election campaigns often, but not always, go off the rails as candidates start insulting each other, and turnout at the polling stations collapses.

Here in Ireland the government parties would probably benefit from a low turnout at the next election, so it’s not surprising that John Gormley, the most desperate man in Leinster House, has been lashing out at Labour lately. What’s more surprising is that Fine Gael have been joining in, and with gusto.

Now if you are going to play the dirty game, it would help to do it right. Keep your attacks vague. Stick to insinuation. If I keep claiming that you can’t be trusted, then eventually some people will believe me, and it’s up to you to prove that you aren’t dishonest. But if I say something specific about you, and I’m lying, then it’s very easy for you to prove that I’m a liar.

And that’s precisely what Labour’s opponents are doing wrong. They keep repeating the tired old mantra of “Labour haven’t got any policies.”  This is a ridiculous claim to be making, for two simple reasons.

The first of these is that Labour do, as a matter of fact, have policies. Barrels of them. 45 policy documents since the last general election. 28 private members’ bills in the same period of time. This isn’t because Labour are particularly hard working, it’s because opposition parties always have lots of policy. They have time to devote to policy formation that simply isn’t available to government parties.

But it’s the second reason that shows precisely how stupid these attacks are. A decade ago looking up the policies of different parties was a very time consuming business. Most people simply didn’t have the time to do it, so they relied on the media to keep them informed. These days any voter with access to the internet can hop on to Google and find the answers they need in seconds. In the world of cheap point scoring, the referees are no longer in the dark.

The time has come for Labour to respond to these attacks, but to do so intelligently. Not by calling other parties liars and cowards, even if they having been frightened into telling lies, but by launching a campaign to sell our policies as aggressively as we’ve been selling some of our personalities.

We need a billboard campaign, backed with advertisements in the print media and online, under the slogan “Terms and Conditions Apply.” We’ll set out a group of five or six policies that Labour will insist on in any negotiations for a new government.

Not only will this help us address our ideas directly to the electorate, and bypass the filter of the media, but it will keep us left wing. The Spring Tide went out the moment we were seen to U-Turn on coalition with FF. The Lib Dems are currently, and quite rightly, getting hammered for flip flopping on VAT. If we’re going to run a campaign like this, and we should, we cannot afford to break our promises.

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June 27, 2010

You can’t be Eurosceptic without breaking eggs.

Both The Daily Mail and The Grocer are currently claiming that the EU is about to make it illegal for Brits to buy eggs by the half dozen. As long time fully paid up member of the Evil European Conspiracy (EEC) I’d like to go on record as saying that I really, really wish this was true. I know we like to go on and on about how the European project is about trade, and peace and human rights, but we all know that’s not true.

Right from the Treaty of Rome, the only purpose of European cooperation has been to irritate British grocery shoppers. And it’s been working. The only embarrassing thing is that we’ve never actually passed any of the laws that irritate the Brits. But we don’t have to. No matter what legislation comes out of the European Parliament, parts of the media will “interpret” it as an assault on the British way of life. And occasionally they’ll take regulations that may or may not exist, but certainly have nothing to do with the EU, and blame Brussels anyway. And yes, by “interpret” I mean “lie repeatedly.”

The Grocer gets its lies in early, with sentence number one; “It tried to ban pounds and ounces.” Even the first word here is a fudge. It’s clear from the following paragraph that the word “It” refers not to the European Parliament, or the Council of Ministers, or indeed any particular body, but to “Europe” itself. That’s right, they’re blaming a landmass for a law that never existed in the first place.

And it’s downhill from here. The gist of the story is that a bill, 75 pages long, has had 174 pages of amendments added to it. Food industry lobbyists are insisting that among these amendments is one banning the use of item numbers on food packaging. So you couldn’t say “six slices of bacon” or indeed “a dozen eggs,” but rather everything would have to be sold by weight.

There are just two massive holes in the Eurosceptic panic mongering. The first is that all the legislation does is insist that the weight be printed on the packaging. It does not, anywhere, include a law making it illegal to say how many eggs are in box. Nor does it insist on opaque packaging to prevent wily consumers looking for themselves. The second hole, and this is the crucial one, the hole you could troop your colours through without touching the sides, is that the legislation hasn’t been passed, and will have to go through the parliament again for a second reading, at which point it could be amended again. So even if there’s a stupid regulation in it, it isn’t too late.

This despite the cries of “it’s too late” issuing from the eurosceptic press. To be fair to the Mail, their spin is slightly different. They’re portraying this as Cameron’s first face off with Brussels. Nice move. The EU isn’t going to ban a half dozen eggs, so the Mail will be able to present Davey boy as a hero, standing up for the Brits. And there’s no real harm in that.

The real harm will come from the columnists. While news journalists are obliged to at least stay in the vicinity of the truth, columnists aren’t. For years to come we’ll see the likes of Richard Littlejohn claiming that Europe banned eggs.

And it’ll all be the fault of the muslims. You couldn’t make it up.

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June 18, 2010

Daily Mail no longer even pretends to tell the truth.

The Daily Mail don’t have a website for the Irish edition of the paper. That’s fair enough, as obviously we don’t have the internet here in Ireland, and if we did we’d probably feed it to the pig that sleeps by our fireplace, or sell it to buy whiskey. But unfortunately it means that those of you outside the republic are missing out on a stunning new development in journalism.

The newspaper industry has long enjoyed a reputation for being somewhat economical with the truth. But most papers do this by ignoring stories that they don’t like, and giving undue prominence to ones that they do. What they don’t do is tell complete and utter lies in huge letters on the front page.

Unless they’re the Irish Daily Mail.

Yesterday there was a leadership challenge in Fine Gael. This is a matter of fact. The Fine Gael leader, Mr Enda Kenny, won the vote of the parliamentary party and remains leader of Fine Gael. This is also a fact. There’s an awful lot of other things you could say about this story, but a lot of them would be classed as opinion. The facts are, I repeat, confidence motion in Enda Kenny. Enda Kenny wins.

The Irish Daily Mail has chosen, in its wisdom, to print a picture of Enda Kenny on the front page under the headline “THE LOSER.”

This is a brave thing to do. You can walk into any newsagent in the country and see every other paper getting the result of the vote right, and only the Daily Mail living in fantasy land.

Of course the Mail isn’t completely stupid, so it tries to justify its deranged headline. And the justification is hilarious.

Apparently Enda Kenny has to resign immediately because he won the backing of a majority of his parliamentary party. And he has to hand over to Richard Bruton, who the Mail claim is more popular and capable than Kenny.

The Mail’s evidence for this popularity and capability? The fact that Bruton, well, didn’t win the backing of a majority of the parliamentary party. Apparently that’s what makes him a winner.

The one sane conclusion that can be drawn from the Blueshirt madness of this week is that Richard Bruton lacks the political savvy of the average Student Union activists. And we all know how average they can be.

When he announced his challenge the only supporter he had lined up was in New York. His challenge saved Brian Cowen’s government. His challenge resulted in Fine Gael front benchers spending two days attacking Fine Gael in public. And then his challenge failed.

The man who was being touted as a possible Minister for Finance can’t even count up to seventy.

And according the The Irish Daily Mail, he’s a winner.

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June 11, 2010

Some Champagne for the Socialists, Please.

Opinion polls are never the most reliable of beasts. I’ve never been sure whether the money is spent on them in order to provide accurate information about the electorate, or whether it’s just to give nerds like me something to talk about.

Though for the first time in many years those of us in Labour have a poll we can not only talk about, we can crow about. It’s nice, just this once, to get to analyse the figures without having to start every sentence with “But the thing is…”

It’s great that for the first time we aren’t facing into the standard Irish political looking glass, where people agree with our policies, but vote for Fianna Fáil instead.

It’s great to see an electorate that have finally decided to support the party lead by the most popular leader.

And most of all, it’s great that people are realising that not only have Fianna Fáil’s policies broken the country, but that Fine Gael aren’t offering an alternative.

We’ve picked up more of our bounce from FG than we have from the government. That’s encouraging to those of us in Labour who don’t trust the Blueshirts, who know that removing corrupt individuals isn’t enough to fix a fundamentally corrupt system.

And yes, it’s only a mid term poll. And yes, there’s a lot of work to be done. And of course, we need a second candidate for Carlow/Kilkenny. And anything could happen before the next election, and we don’t even know when that will be, but right now I don’t care.

Right now I’m the happiest nerd in the country. And tonight I’ll be drinking to everyone who helped make this happen.

So please don’t phone me early tomorrow morning for any reason whatsoever.

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May 9, 2010

The Chicken and the Eggheads.

You may find this hard to believe, but this week’s stupidest political statement didn’t come from Nick Clegg. In fact none of the British politicians even get a lo0k in, despite the fact that all three parties managed to lose the same election. Their attempts to pass the result off as some form of a mandate have resulted in some top quality stupidity, but it all pales in comparison to Bolivian President Evo Morales’s latest outburst.

Good old Evo has decided that homosexuality in western countries is caused by chickens. “The chicken that we eat is full of female hormones. Because of this the men who eat this chicken have deviations in their being as men,” he babbled. But that wasn’t the end of his dietary advice. There was also this Nobel-quality scientific observation; “They are almost all bald and this is because of the things they eat, while among the indigenous peoples there are no bald people because we eat other things.”

Now Morales likes to paint himself as a left winger. And I’m quite familiar with leftist theory. What I hadn’t noticed before was any attempt to take the economic theories of Marx, mix it with the rigid dietary science of Gillian McKeith, and then throw in some casual racism. But then again, I haven’t spent much time reading the ideas of Morales, a former head of a coca producers’ union (always ask your dealer for Bolivian cocaine, the only fair trade nose candy on the market).

Now this kind of nonsense would be understandable if he’d said it in a nightclub, at three in the morning, with a head full of his country’s most valuable export. But of course, this was something he’d actually intended to say. He was speaking at an event called the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. I’ve got a chip on my shoulder about this conference. Despite being a person, and living on earth, I wasn’t invited. This is clearly a conspiracy by Morales, who was worried that the presence of a hairy heterosexual chicken eater might have blown his theory out of the water.

This conference has been organised as an alternative to last years’ failed climate talks at Copenhagen. And it certainly is alternative. Instead of gathering together the people who are capable of actually doing something about climate change they’ve assembled fifteen thousand cranks to listen to lectures about the dietary habits of Right Said Fred.

I’ve one a question for Morales. If he’s so macho, and his diet is so healthy, how come he can’t grow a beard?

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April 29, 2010

My Hero.

It’s nice to know that we still have some heroes left. At least some politicians are prepared to stand up for what’s right, regardless of what people think. Regardless of how it will affect their careers. Regardless of what the word “right” used to mean.
Take Jim McDaid. He’s not afraid to go against the flow, whether in politics or on a motorway. Despite these lily livered TDs giving up the ministerial pensions, Jim’s holding on. He says it’s a matter of principle. He’s bravely, selflessly, brainlessly continuing to pocket €22,487 a year, in order to prevent corruption.
According to Jim, who is forced to survive on just €98,424 as a TD, plus whatever he draws in as a practicing GP, the extra €450 a fortnight “isn’t much.” But he has to take it, because if “we are reacting to this mob-type frenzy now, it will continue until we are brought down to a basic level and that will result in only the very wealthy entering political office.”
Which would be far worse than the current situation, which results in only the very wealthy leaving office.
Dr Jim is probably right to feel that his pension, which on it’s own is more than people on the dole are expected to live on, is only a drop in the ocean. Compared to the billions which we, thanks in part to Deputy McDaid, are pouring into NAMA, his pension barely exists at all. And nobody could seriously argue that twenty two grand either way will make a difference to the fine financial mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.
But unfortunately, this money does matter. It matters because it helps to explain why the government can’t cut a deal with the unions. We all know that belts need to be tightened. We may not be happy about having to this to save the country from an insane gambling spree that spilled out of the Fianna Fáil tent in Galway, but we know it has to be done. We’re all in the same boat.
Except that it’s a big boat, and there’s a big difference between steerage and first class. If you’re on the bottom of the civil service pay grade you take a proportionately larger paycut than the people at the top of your department. Even though they were directly involved in the decisions that broke the country. Though I suppose those decisions couldn’t have been implemented unless the people at the bottom of the public sector photocopied all the minutes, put them in envelopes, and sent them back to be signed off by the people whose pay we can’t touch.
And every time we come across one of these pay and pension scandals, whether in the Dáil, the top of the civil service, or the top of the banks, we look to Brian Cowen to see what he will do. Unlike Jim McDaid, Cowen is no hero. He just shrugs and mutters that he’d like to help, but, you know, there’s a law that stops him. If only poor old Brian had some way of changing the law. Maybe he should write to his local TD, and see if he can help.

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April 24, 2010

Thanks, Britain.

I may be stuck at work on a sunny day, I may be missing out on a thousand barbecues and beer gardens, but I’m still smiling. I’ve been reading the funniest collection of words ever strung together.

Yes, folks, it’s that time again. BNP manifesto time.

And what a refreshing read it is. Most parties, when faced with the job of writing a manifesto, get some of their policy specialists, some PR advisers, and the brighter front benchers together in a room, leave them for a couple of months and let them produce a plan to improve the nation. Not the BNP. Their method is a lot simpler. Get twelve taxi drivers, a couple of crates of Tesco Value vodka, and run the results through a spell checker.

The only thing the document lacks is brevity. It runs to ninety four pages, when any competent copywriter could have condensed it to three words; “We hate everyone.”

But perhaps they’re worried that the “hating everyone” policy wouldn’t gain them many votes in the crucial “everyone” section of the electorate. This leaves them in a quandary. They need to use clever language to hide what they’re saying. But they can’t get too clever, in case the message goes over the heads of their target audience; the “idiot” section of the electorate.

I could bore you with their economic policy, but I won’t. Nobody cares about that. Not even the BNP. If they did they wouldn’t have started rabbiting on about “natural monopolies”, as if the Royal Mail was some kind of domesticated animal.  What you’re really interested in is the racist stuff. That’s the only reason anybody reads BNP publications, to find out what kind of language to use while trying to be both racist, and on the BBC at the same time.

In unsurprising news, they want to halt all  immigration.  On top of that they want to halt immigration “in particular” from muslim countries. At this point they’re beginning to sound like stage Irishmen. “You can’t come in at all. But you, Mohammed, you can’t come in at all at all.” Foreigners who already live in Britain will be allowed to stay. As long as they obey the law. And as long as other members of their “minority” obey the law. Oh, and Islam is going to be against the law.

And just in case the foreigners haven’t got the message yet, old age pensions will be restricted to “Britons.” I’m not sure what the BNP have against Anglo-Saxons, or quite how they plan to square this with their proposed invitation to the “Irish Republic” to join the UK. We don’t need to do that, we’ve got a home grown government perfectly capable of not paying our pensions.

Actually, that “invitation” is an old BNP policy. They’ve been promising this invitation for years, but they’ve yet to come over and deliver it. Ireland isn’t hard to find. About a quarter of it is inside the area that the BNP want to reserve exclusively for the British fishing fleet. I want Nick Griffin to come over here and explain to our faces why we should deliver ourselves into his care.

And while he’s at it he can go deep sea fishing in Tallaght.

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April 6, 2010

Possible Threat To The Great Online Chimp Project.

According to science, which tends to be right about these things, malaria spread from humans to chimpanzees some time in the last two million years.

But frankly, that’s the least of the problems that we face. The entire great online chimp project may be under threat. That’s right, the greatest experiment in the combined histories of sociology and economics may be destroyed by the evil forces of capitalism.

Admittedly, I’m basing my panic on an unverified claim made on a message board, but it’s a while since I’ve had a good panic, so I’m sticking with it.

According to someone off the internet, facebook only allow real name accounts, and will close down anything they think is a fake account. This may not be entirely true, as my main facebook account is friends with a Comrade Stalin, and that can’t be real.

Nonetheless, as online chimps we can only respond to this threat in one way. Even if, as I’ve said, I’m decreasingly convinced by its plausibility. Our only response must be to run around in circles, jump up and down, screech, use primitive tools, and fling shite.

Offline we have more options. I advocate waiting to see if facebook have the balls to make the first move. Remember that chimpanzees have testicles four times the size of the average human ones. This means we’ll win this contest unless it degenerates into a comparison of penis lengths. Humans have the advantage there.

But I digress. If facebook do move against us, and let’s face it, they won’t, but if they do we’ll have to go nuclear on them. We’ll contact the tabloids, the animal rights idiots, the local radio stations. Any British chimps should target their local MPs, particularly if you live in a marginal constituency where a swinging tire full of votes could wield serious power.

It’s time for us to defend our natural right to be chimps on the internet.

Who among you is prepared to stand along side me in this, the greatest battle in the history of the internet and chimpanzees?

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April 5, 2010

The Great OnLine Chimp Project.

I must say, this one took me by surprise. In yesterday’s article I suggested that we all start creating chimpanzee accounts on facebook, in an attempt to discover how long it would take for advertisers to start targeting chimps.

Much to my surprise, people started creating chimpanzee accounts on facebook, in an attempt to discover how long it would take for advertisers to start targeting chimps. I honestly hadn’t expected this.

So I must take this opportunity to thank mongychops and Theoban, who can normally be found on b3ta.com for acting as midwives to this experiment.

At this point I felt obliged to get involved, and duly created the account for Noam Chimpsky. The trickle of new chimps soon became a slightly larger trickle, and before long I noticed that somebody had created a fan page for “Primitive Tools,” which are very important for the young chimp about town.

Since then more fan pages, and a chimp group have been set up, and I’ve long since lost track of who these damned chimps are in real life. The whole project is working exactly like facebook for humans, except that the status updates tend to revolve around termites, hitting things with sticks, screaming, and so forth.

And we’ve already had a false positive, with Clyde Chimperson sending  a screen grab of an advertisement for a facebook game based on animals. I’m sorry to say that this doesn’t count as specifically chimp targeted advertising, as the game, and its promotional campaign, existed prior to our experiment beginning.

It really wouldn’t be a stretch for me to point out that this experiment is the most important event in the history of the internet. Also the implications for both sociology and economics are on a scale not seen since the heady days when young Marx and Engels were scribbling away furiously.

However, we still need more chimps. This is your opportunity to advance the interests of both humans and our closest relatives, as well as engaging in the only experiment involving chimps that doesn’t actually involve the ludicrous expense of buying chimps, feeding chimps, housing chimps, and defending yourself from idiotic animal rights nutters.

Create a chimp today. If not for my sake, then for the sake of your children.

See you on facebook.

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