Nigella contretemps

Let me start this by saying that I don't know whether Nigella was assaulted by her husband. If he did, then I have absolutely no fucking time for him whatsoever and he deserves whatever's coming to him after due process.

I do not condone domestic violence, I despise anyone who picks on someone unable to defend themselves. I despise the mental abuse that accompanies the physical violence in these situations.

And yet, I have to say that I don't really think ANYONE has enough evidence based on the pictures to form an opinion.

Let me just say this: a Labour-supporting newspaper publishes a set of photos depicting someone who helped the Tories in an unflattering light. We don't know how many photos there are, the person who could have submitted only some of the photos or the paper could have chosen the photos to fit a certain narrative. The article is full of irrelevant bollocks, disparaging innuendo passing as comment and "onlookers said". The assaultee seems to have carried on living with the assaulter and seems perfectly happy. There have never even been rumours of marital

Based on the photos, the body language for an assault is entirely wrong. I've seen similar role-playing behaviour between consenting adults.

I'd have absolutely no trouble believing that Saatchi was a dom and that Nigella was a sub. And if you didn't know what goes on in the world of BDSM, you would quite likely freak out if you saw it being enacted in public. But the key difference between kink and domestic violence is the issue of consent. And if two consenting adults choose to do things that you or I find incomprehensible, does this mean that the police need to be involved?

So I'm not going to say that it's not assault, but I'm not immediately convinced that it is. I'm certainly not going to rush to judgment on the basis of those photos.

If it was a bit of hanky-panky, I'm bloody sure they both regret it; if it was assault, it's surely her decision to make something of it, or not.

I'm unsurprised that feminists have been jumping up and down about this, immediately calling it domestic violence, demanding police action and making snarky remarks about anybody with a contrary opinion.

However, I've been fucking horrified by "anarchists" calling for the police to get involved in the private affairs of a successful, powerful, adult woman. It's almost like they don't think she's capable of cutting his balls off with a deft twitch of a kitchen knife or, you know, going to the police herself.

The whole thing is profoundly depressing to me.

Update: I spoke to a professional domme about this. She says that the body language is not fully the language of someone who's enjoying it. But even she isn't sure that it's not a bit of roleplay. She thinks that Mr Saatchi may be a bit unpleasant. The jury is still out on what happened, but no matter what the truth is, it's none of our fucking business unless they choose to make it public.

Second update: Apparently Mr Saatchi is a cunt who has accepted a police caution for assault. So that's me told.

@OwenJones84 is a shameless hypocrite and a knave

I'm sure that it will come as absolutely NO surprise that I disagree with Owen Jones on matters political. But his latest heap of festering faeces unequivocally demonstrates the destructive nature of his argument.

What do I mean about abolishing the Oxbridge system? I don’t mean bulldozing the universities – and their beautiful quads – into rubble. There is an argument about transforming the universities into purely postgraduate institutions, and I am sympathetic to that.

But, to begin with, I would dispense with the interview system, which is biased towards the more articulate – and the more articulate are those who tend to be more middle-class and have benefited from “cultural capital” passed on from their parents. They are not, necessarily, automatically brighter than those who have benefited from far fewer resources.

Then I would completely overhaul the admissions system. George Monbiot suggests offering a place to the top one or two every school in the country. That’s a good start to the debate. I remember one privately educated fellow Oxford student (who had been rejected the first time he applied) suggesting that comprehensive school students like myself only got in because of quotas. In actual fact research has shown that students from comprehensives do better at Oxford than those from public schools. More widely, research has shown state students do better at university than those who were privately educated.

But, as well as redressing the balance with the types of schools, admissions needs to take account of class. The top percentage of those who were once eligible for Educational Maintenance Allowance or on free school meals should be offered automatic admissions, for a start.

It’s not just Oxford and Cambridge this should apply to: all the top Russell Group universities should be made to follow suit.

Above all, Oxford and Cambridge should be normalised as universities. The best tutors should be encouraged to disperse across the university system – perhaps with incentives. It is right to have a top tier of universities catering to the brightest students – particularly when they are forced to reflect society as a whole, rather than the brightest rich kids: and that is the model that should be promoted.

But Oxford and Cambridge should no longer be regarded as the nation’s top universities. It’s time to leave the Oxbridge era behind us.

I can see lefties nodding their heads like Churchill the insurance dog at these wise words. But you're ALL entirely wrong.

If you want to know why you're wrong, let me ask some simple questions: given the unlimited financial muscle of the state (with our money), the fact that comprehensive teachers are heavily unionized and largely toe the left's line and given that we had 13 years of Labour paradise with Gordon Brown pissing our money away at the left's tropes du jour:

• why the fuck ARE public schools still so much better?
• why DO the top teachers and top tutors flock to public schools and Russell Group universities?
• why does Oxbridge retain any cachet?

And more importantly, why does someone who would have been a complete and utter non-entity but for his Oxbridge education want to deny other people the same thing?

At no point in his tedious, right-on cockwaffle does the dreadful scumbag attack the heavily unionized teaching profession and the overwrought polytechnics for not getting better so that public schools don't have an advantage or raising the standard of "David Beckham Studies" to compete with a PPE.

It's all about destroying the great to make everyone a nice anodyne shade of beige, with a smug side helping of "I'm alright, Jack, I've been and got all the perks, but heaven forbid anyone else should get a look in."

Unlike Owen Jones, I don't have the advantage of an Oxbridge education. But I don't begrudge anyone else the right to it.

If I was going to bitch about education, I'd be asking why the people who absolutely love sucking Owen's cock are not asking why state education should not be made better, rather than why public school and Russell Group universities should be torn down to the mediocrity that Owen seems to think the rest of us should be moulded to.

Tax is theft

This is a guest post from @VendettaBeretta

Tax is theft.

Don't believe me? Read on....

The following is taken from an email sent to me by a poster on Twitter.

I first took an interest due to a tweet that read

"grrrrr now I will go for a cold shower, as the Inland Revenue have taken my bathtub (really)"

Now, you can probably see what caught my attention. The Inland Revenue wouldn't actually remove someone's bathtub, surely? Guess again. And her underwear. Not sure what the resale value is in worn pants these days, but I'm sure there's probably a market for it in the office of HMRC anyway.

Anyway, to the email.

"they suddenly gave me a tax bill of £125.000.00 - yes £125k and it was outrageous given that I mormally paid about £10-12k a year. my accountant told me to ignore it as it was wrong - so I did but I telephoned them to say so. they changed the bill from 125k down to 88k then 55k then 35k but all the while they had my bank accounts frozen and they had out liens on my property - i had 2 properties, they took one property and i went ballistic - then 18 months later they took my mnain business property - I owned both these buildings with no mortgage. I am now living in a flat with a mortgage but since they bankrupted me I have been on the dole and now the mortgage company are repossesing this flat - and they have kindly agreed to wait till after I have had 2 knee operations. but my time is running out I will be evicted soon - god help me - I have lived here for 10 years. the main reason why they took all my property is that they kept me bankrupt for over 3 years and (you might not know this but) every single week the IR keep you bankrupt they charge you (or me) £1000.00 administration costs - so I didnt have a leg to stand on. every time I filled in forms or went for an interview - they told me they would have to look into in it - it took them 6 months to get my bank statements (they would not asccept them off my accountant or me) so in that 6 months - I was billed for 26k in admin costs - thats the way trhey play and its DIRTY and very very unfair - i fought like hell but i had no credit cards and no cheque books and - after 3 years they had accunilated almost £200k in administration costs -thats when the bill was brought down to 33k but with the admin costs - they seized my property and contents - and left me with nothing - not even any clothes - its a bad story. I NEVER thought my country could do this to me."

The highlights are mine.

The point I'm raising is not just against the clearly incompetent accountant, who should have advised against ignoring HMRC demands, but of the conduct of HMRC throughout this affair.

How does a demand for £125 grand turn into £35 grand? On what formula is this based? Does this sound like a professional government agency, or gangsters demanding protection money? The taking of two properties? The admin charges of £1000 per week would make Wonga blush.

Tax is theft. You can keep your bullshit about fair shares and tax avoidance. You can claim it to be part of a social contract if you like that sort of statist newspeak. You try not paying the tax man, and he'll be riflling through your knicker drawer like your babysitters 15 year old boyfriend.

Here's a little addition to this story.

The lady in question employed 21 members of staff. All of whom lost their jobs. She is about to be evicted from her flat. She's also now unemployed. The irony in the state stealing from her, and making her reliant upon the welfare system hasn't been lost on me. This is the new way comrades. Turnips for all.

Why would anybody need an automatic rifle?

A lot of fuss has been made about the apparent insanity of Americans with regard to gun control. There is no reason, people argue, that private individuals should have automatic firearms with clips that can fire off tens or hundreds of rounds.

Well, here are a couple of reasons:

• Why should I, a sane, balanced individual who has never harmed anyone in my life, not have such a weapon for my defence or indeed my pleasure, if that is how I want to spend my time? I mean, people collect stamps or do morris dancing or watch cookery programs for fun. I can't understand doing any of those things for fun, but it doesn't mean I think they should be banned.
• "Nobody needs more than 30 rounds to defend themselves." Perhaps if you're John Rambo, or Ethan Hunt; but in the real world, things are very different. It's surprisingly difficult to shoot a moving target, even for trained professionals like soldiers and the police. I was once involved in someone running a road block with a car, where around 80 rounds were fired and only 3 hit the car, none hit any of the occupants. (I wasn't shooting mind, if I had been, no rounds would have hit the car!)
• "There is no need for anyone but the government to have such powerful weapons." This fundamentally misunderstands the skeptical view that the Founding Fathers had of government. It is precisely because the government has such powerful weapons that the common man should have them too, to be able to bear equivalent arms against the state. You need to keep the state's monopoly on violence as weak and counterbalanced as possible.

So there.

The S-word

I am profoundly depressed today: the aftermath of the Boston bombing has left a truly awful taste in my mouth.

The reaction of (some) left-wing people (Owen Jones, Maria Eagle, amongst others: I'm looking at you) has left me profoundly angry: they used the "s-word".

Solidarity.

Just roll the word around your mouth for a moment.

Solidarity.

A word redolent of union activity and collectivist thinking and utterly bereft of humanity. The sort of word that RMT committees might use to indicate moral support of a strike by the NUT. A word, charitably, that communists might use to express their support to workers exploited by capitalist running dogs.

But is it really the word to express your sympathy and empathy to victims of an atrocity? Do you really think such a politically loaded word is the right thing to say to someone who has suffered such violence? You're not standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle against the exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie here. These people are frightened, angry, hurt, grieving, anguished.

Where is your humanity, your heart, your compassion, when you all can offer is the tepid, banal solidarity of the proletariat?

Maria Eagle particularly got up my nose with the implication that there was some mileage in levering in the Hillsborough disaster into the frame of this most recent tragedy.

But of course, the masterclass in hypocrisy had to be Gerry fucking Adams expressing his "solidarity" with the people of Boston, who have, ironically, funded him generously to bomb the fuck out of the people of the United Kingdom.

There is no mileage to be made out of scoring points on the back of a tragedy, particularly when nothing is known about who or why it was done (something a lot of people pointing out the previous irony seem to have forgotten by going on to say unpleasant things about Bostonians deserving this tragedy.)

But there is hope among the bile, vapidity and stupidity: thousands of Americans (those callous, heartless bastards) have opened their homes to victims and their families to help them get through this.

It just goes to show that when you let go of party political bullshit, people can do the right thing without the state forcing them to do so.

Police State Klaxon

The Met Police have, quite frankly, excelled themselves here:

The Metropolitan Police has asked groups planning to demonstrate during or in advance of Margaret Thatcher's funeral to make themselves known to officers so that their "right to protest can be upheld".

I'm sorry, what?

What fucking shit is this? Why the fuck would the police need to know who wants to protest so that they can "uphold" their right to protest? See that fucker over there protesting? Uphold his right. Jesus.

The next thing you know, people will have to apply to the police for permission to protest. Oh, hang on.

Look, Thatcher was a flawed politician, any politician is flawed. I also remain unconvinced that her "achievements", good or bad, were down to her alone. Unlike Blair, she still believed in having a cabinet where relevant ministers made their own decisions. That the mines closed down and industry was gutted was much more down to the unions having no business sense and believing they could leech indefinitely more and more off a failing, sickly host. So I'm not convinced that her veneration by the right is justified.

I can understand the hatred of the left, however, because it's much easier and more desirable to blame someone external for your own complete, abject failure than to look at yourself and say: "We fucked up." The petulant, pouty lip of people who weren't fucking born or were still in nappies when Thatcher was ejected from power is ludicrous, but typical of the whingeing lack of responsibility of communitarian, authoritarian leftards.

But having said all that, if people want to protest her, they should be free to do so and the police's burgeoning contempt for the Peelian principle of policing by consent needs to be slapped down very soon.

A new religion

A couple of days ago, it dawned on me why religion is becoming less relevant in our lives. It isn't. It's just that the god we worship is no longer the abstract skyfairy YHWH or his myriad descendants and variants, but the equally abstract (yet much more apparent) state.

Authoritarian worshippers of the two main factions (the Left and the Right) argue violently about which of them holds the keys to the True Way Forward To Holiness by insisting their grip on the levers of the state will lead to a path of plenty and righteousness.

As with most religious beliefs, the opportunities for apparently sensible, intelligent people to talk utter bullshit in defence of their religious hierarchy and slant on what the state should be are no more illogical and incomprehensible than Catholics refusing contraception in an era of HIV:

Funnily enough, last year one of those sympathetic to Brown had a very different take on a 17-year old tweeter. Graham Linehan noted in the case of “@Rileyy_69”, who was arrested for tweeting abuse (and a lame death threat) to Tom Daley:

As a symbol of free speech, Riley69 is not Lenny Bruce. He’s not even the EDL. He’s a teenager going through that thing a lot of teenagers go through where they seem unable to feel empathy. This kind of temporary sociopath can be very dangerous and using these new tools they can wreak havoc more efficiently than ever before.

He was all for Riley’s arrest - there was no ‘oh teenagers!’ on display here. Yet Riley69 wasn’t a public figure, just someone who had tweeted idiotic comments to a celebrity. If Tom Daley had quickly blocked him, almost no-one would have ever heard of him. Instead Daley alerted his followers and we ended up with people like Linehan defending Riley69’s arrest. The logic, then, that it’s simply awful to bring to light the casual homophobia/racism etc of a newly-pointed police figure but fine and dandy to arrest someone of the same age for their idiotic tweets seems rather…pained. It’s for this reason that I have zero doubt that, had Brown’s tweets not came to light via the Daily Mail but rather (say) through some left-wing blogger who presented them as highlighting her use of ‘faggots’, the response from many would be very different.

People on the Left will grumpily endorse actions from their bishops that would drive them insane if called for by the bishops of the Right and vice versa.

It's also ironic how many left-wing "atheists" will happily venerate the state to irrational heights. In a sense, I'd regard the Left as the devout Catholics of statism, and the Right as milque-toast CoE. The Left seem to have a peculiar belief in the holiness of the state: philanthropy and charity of individuals is shameful, the Holy State should provide for all from its extortion. The Right still go to church, but they've jettisoned some of the more ludicrous aspects of the theology.

Irrational, prone to violent and unreasoning reaction to heretics, filled with internecine squabbles and ridiculous sects, governed by arcane rules interpreted by people of dubious morality using their shamanic powers to hide disgusting deeds: religion has not gone away at all, the world has just adopted a hungrier, more violent god.

Rust In Peace

Well, Margaret Hilda Thatcher has finally succumbed, and from the clamour on both sides, you'd think it was a current serving prime minister who had popped her clogs in office.

I look at the right and I see beatification of someone who ultimately believed that the state had a purpose, even if it was a different purpose than what Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband would expect. From the left, it's like Adolf Hitler had been toppled by people beating him to death with rolled-up copies of the Socialist Worker.

Her policies broke the mould of a nation that was still, 35 years after the event, shaped by the attitudes and experiences of a war that everyone else in the world had left behind.

Today, Britain is still largely defined by what she did. For all the talk that I hear from "the left", the only way Labour came to power was to embrace Thatcherism and evolve it very slightly.

I think Thatcher's real legacy is not her considerable achievements for both good and bad as a politician, her immense climb to power at a time when sexism was still rampant and she was not of the Eton / Bullingdon elite or the strength of the mutual bond that she forged with the US that no subsequent PM matched, or indeed anything else that she did.

Her real legacy was to show the poverty of British politics, where leaders who are not merely mediocre dross, leaders with actual ideas and the will to take them forward come along only once in a lifetime.

Before Thatcher, everyone was still living based on the war, weak, tired and stultified while the rest of the world surged past. Thatcher may have broken the old, comfortable, "clubby" Britain, where your club was either the Bullingdon or the local working man's club, but she also opened Britain up to the rest of the world again.

How depressing that people on the left and the right have got nothing better to offer than evolutions of, or rebuttals to, Thatcherism. It was nearly a quarter of a century ago that she was in power, more than a quarter of the average person's life, and still politicians have nothing more to offer us than what she had.

Ultimately, by dishing up increasingly hair-splitting variations on what Thatcher left behind, British politics is starting a massive race to the bottom.

The empire is over. Britain's first world status is severely at risk and old ways and reversion to some golden era are just not going to happen. Stop dwelling on what's been and start looking to the future, or another 35 years will have gone by and Britain will become an irrelevant museum again, this time the museum of Thatcherism.

Gothic policing

I see the rozzers have decided to start record attacks on goths and emos as "hate crime".

Sorry. I just had to stop and sit with my head in my hands for a moment and think about how fucking stupid that is.

Apparently, this is because someone got killed because they looked a bit different.

Sorry, I had to stop and rock back and forth again, keening.

I almost can't work up the strength to blog about this stupidity. All this kind of thing does is to encourage people to focus on their differences, not their common humanity.

All this is going to to is to validate the sick fucks who go around looking for excuses to beat people up. Society gives preferential treatment to one group, which makes people not in that group resentful. This then validates them when they express their frustration.

I find it odd that people who support things like quotas and "positive" discrimination never work out the consequences. By highlighting the differences between people, you diminish the things we have in common. Adding to the pool of differences simply adds to alienation. "I'm not in one of the approved groups, so I'm not worth as much as a human being."

The only upside I can find to this is that if this divide and conquer bollocks is taken to its natural conclusion, ultimately we will all end up in some "preferred" group or t'other.

But we could short-circuit that process and immediately focus on that ultimate minority: the individual. Treat every crime against people as an affront to the person, not to some specious, artificial group.

Or is that too much to ask for?

Philpotty

So, the Daily Mail has done it again: trolled the chattering classes into a good old froth.

Vile product of Welfare UK: Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them

Apparently, the word "bred" offended one frother. Well, yes, but he wasn't exactly guilty of "fathering" them, was he? He did absolutely treat them as cattle. He may have shown them affection from time to time, but so would any farmer of milk cows. Just because they were human beings, doesn't mean he treated them as such.

Furthermore, it's hard to say why Philpott isn't the product of Welfare UK. He was definitely a weapons-grade cunt, but if he didn't have a benefits system he could milk to fuck he'd have had to become a criminal or work. The Welfare State may not have made him a complete cunt, but it certainly enabled him.

To be brutally honest, I've personally met more people who milk the benefits system and more people who have been completely let down by the benefits system than I've met people who have been helped by it, by about 5 to 1.

I notice, too, that the much vaunted social care that the saintly state provides completely bypassed all these poor children, despite the minor red flag of him bragging on national TV about what a cunt he was. Well, I guess that's a bit subtle.

As an inquiry was launched into the case, it also emerged that:

• ‘Shameless Mick’ faces a fresh police investigation for allegedly raping a woman who went on to bear one of his children.
• He was jailed for trying to kill a schoolgirl lover, stabbing her 27 times after she ended their relationship.
• Philpott plotted to ‘get rich quick’ – turning funeral funds donated by the local community into Argos vouchers.

God only knows what those children would have turned out like with that as a role model, though.

And God help the rest of them.