Reggae Blegging

I am mindful that my life lacks reggae. However, most of the compilations I can buy are filled with dreary pap. I have Natty Dread and Legend by Bob Marley, Bass Culture and Forces of Victory by Linton Kwesi Johnson and I have enough UB40 to be getting along with. Shamefully. I also have a decent ska collection, so I don't need any more of that.

I'm not desperate to buy vast swathes of albums, but I'm looking for interesting individual songs, I suspect that stuff from the early 70's to the mid 80's is probably a sweet spot.

As clues, I quite like Sinsemilla by Black Uhuru, Heads High by Mr Vegas, You don't love me by Dawn Penn and Montego Bay by Freddie Notes and the Rudies apart from the aforementioned bands.

I'm looking for stuff with a good beat and some kind of "hook".

Can anybody recommend their favourite reggae tracks?

Streets of Dreams

Can I really face it though?

I can feel it. I'm getting sucked back into the world of trying to explain to people that we don't need a government with a gun to our heads to make us all get along.

I can see the endless, circular arguments because people are so terrified of not having someone to mollycoddle them.

Do I really want to get back into this?

Stairs

Blogging, like tweeting, should never be attempted while drunk.

Firstly I'd like to thank all the people who made sympathetic or helpful comments online, offline and elsewhere, as well as those who made slightly less sympathetic comments.

My post was not ultra clear, I accept. The key point that I was trying to make was about addiction, rather than about anything else. I've always suspected that I would be susceptible to dependency, which is why, as much as anything, I've lived a much more teetotal life than most people.

The reasons why people get on to that staircase of dependency vary from person to person. But once you're on it, it's fantastically seductive.

Anybody who has known me for a while would be amazed at the amount of alcohol I consume, and equally amazed at how tempted I am to start the day off with another glass of wine, rather than my patented arse-kicking, bowel-emptying coffee. If it's safe to do so, sometimes I do.

I'm still managing to balance the seduction of dependency with my legal responsibilities and the rest of my life, so maybe I'm not really addicted at all, maybe I'm in no position to opine.

But the truth of the matter is that whereas I used to be unable to understand how someone like Winehouse or any other intelligent person with talent and success and other good things in their life could succumb to that destructive spiral and throw it all away, when I look at it now, I can now see how perfectly sensible, desirable and indeed inevitable it seems.

I've looked at the "quick and easy" option, and it's way too hard and scary. This is just one small step at a time, a Fabian process to easing your pain, if you will.

I guess I'm right at the top of the stairs at the moment, so I can be a bit more objective. But when it comes to people who "have everything" and "throw it all away", I've certainly become a lot less judgmental.

Torn

I know it's Amy Winehouse who's dead and not Natalie Imbruglia. But I do feel torn, because part of me feels that we all have responsibility for our own lives, while part of me understands very fucking well indeed what it's like to lose control of your life and everything spirals out of your reach and to reach for something that will take the pain away, even if it's for a while.

I don't mind mentalist jokes and abuse, indeed, absolutely nothing matters to me any more, and I suspect Amy felt the same. Yes, it's sad for those left behind, but they were unable to feel Amy's pain and there was nothing they could do to help her.

It's a shit crumb of comfort to take away, if you actually knew Amy, but at least she has peace now.

I can't tell you how much I crave that myself. Peace. No more pain. No more despair.

But equally, if she was anything like me, I don't expect or want some well-meaning, better-knowing cuntwaft to come in and sort it out for me. It can't be done. The damage is all inside me, nothing outside can touch it, let alone heal it.

I'm standing at the top of the same staircase she was. I've take a few tentative steps down in to the comforting darkness. I'm on my own. No-one can hold my hand and lead me out. The damage is done and the only person who can decide which way I'm going to go, every day, is me. All the love, all the pills, all the money in the world can't drag me up again.

It's all in my head.

Either I escape, or eventually, the pain gets too much and I get my peace.

Either way you win.

Administrivia

The more astute of you will have noticed that I've updated the look of the blog. I did this for two reasons, I've decided to get rid of some of the crappy buttons I've had for years and Blogger has done away with my original template. I know it's still around somewhere, but I quite like the new one I've chosen and it's not too busy.

As a result of reverting to the standard template, there are also a whole bunch of sharing buttons and rankings of my posts that can be done. I'm interested to hear what people think about these, whether they "add value" or not.

I've always believed blogging was about the content not the look, I like the simple look and feel of this template, and I've managed to get the twitter feed to look like it belongs quite quickly.

I've ditched the "Google connect" widget because it was clearly slowing the page load down a lot, and in the current world, it simply doesn't mean anything any more. Links between people with blogger ID's has quickly become passé in a world of Twitter and Facebook and Googleplus.

Various other dead bits of clutter are also going, like the LPUK news feed.

I've lost the "Labels" widget because it's just so big it doesn't have any use. The "Blog Archive" thingy is useless (I think!)

I've consolidated all my "awards" into a single blog post to remove the space they take.

I'm seriously contemplating the twitter widget, because it seems to be quite slow as well. Any comments on this would be especially welcome.

And finally, I'm also trimming my various blogrolls, because a lot of them appear to point at dead blogs. If I remove you and you are still blogging, just lazy, let me know and I'll put you back. Also, if anyone wants to be on my blogroll (which, let's face it, is also pretty passé!) then let me know.

My Moral Compass

My Political Views
I am a far-right social libertarian
Right: 9.69, Libertarian: 8.48

Political Spectrum Quiz


My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -6.49

Political Spectrum Quiz


My Culture War Stance
Score: -3.63

Political Spectrum Quiz


Just moved this from the sidebar to tidy up my blog.

Historical awards

Lest I forget:

First Month Awards (2008):

Top 100 Right Wing Blogs: 81

2009:

Top 100 Right Wing Blogs: 13

Top 20 Libertarian Blogs: 4

Top 20 Political Blogs: unknown

2010:

Top 100 Right Wing Blogs: 13

Top 30 Libertarian Blogs: 4

Top 50 Political Bloggers: 25

HOT 200 Political Twats: 4

100 Worst Political Blogs: 5

2011:

Top 10 Libertarian Blogs: 10

Top 10 Libertarian Bloggers: 8

Thoughts on Norway

It's all a bit numb, isn't it? Norway, where is that, somewhere near Sweden, right? And there was a bomb, but there didn't seem to be too many casualties and everybody immediately assumed it was bearded darkies and it all seemed to fit into the Al Qaeda narrative.

I certainly sighed heavily and expected the security forces to ratchet things up a notch in response to another vague threat of "Muslim extremism". (Indeed, the "Helpers of the Global Jihad" were said to have claimed responsibility via some secret squirrel jihadist website. Which then turned out not to be the case.)

And then came some reports of shootings near a youth camp. It turns out that the youth camp is where the Norwegian "Labour youth" hold training camps.

Now, leaving aside the dubious idea of a "Labour youth training camp" for the moment, what happened here was actually the more disturbing of the events. Apparently, this bloke coldly went round a youth camp shooting kids, basically. Numbers are unconfirmed, but it sounds like more than seventy young people were systematically shot in cold blood.

That leaves even me a bit stunned. It's one thing to plant a bomb and walk away and maybe some people will die (although I couldn't do that) but to walk around an island and shoot more than seventy people? That's not mad. That is something else.

At some point you might imagine Raoul Moat shooting a couple of people before it all got too much. You could imagine a couple of mad, hormone-warped kids shooting at seventy people, missing some, hurting some and killing some. But to shoot, in a single sitting, more than seventy young people to death, hurting God knows how many others and missing how many others ... that takes a level of dissociation from reality that is just beyond anything I can imagine.

Inevitably, people have rushed to analyse his motives, with the usual tired old bollocks about his religion, his politics, his interest in freemasonry, his TV habits and his gaming habits coming to the fore.

But this is all bollocks. There is nothing in his interests that justified what he did. I know dozens of ultra-fundamentalist Christians and not a single one of them would dream of planting a bomb, let alone shooting dozens of kids in cold blood. I have never met anyone further to the right in politics than me, and I wouldn't dream of doing what this guy did. All the freemasons I've met have been beacons of caring humanity. My daughter watches Dexter, it bores me shitless. And no gamer I've ever come across has ever even hurt another person.

None of these influences offer any kind of justification for what he did.

There is no point trying to ascertain his motives. Motives are for rational people. And there is no kind of rational thought involved in methodically chasing down more than seventy young people and shooting them to death. Since he was caught, he may well even profess motives and who knows, he may even believe them. They may even make a kind of "sense".

But the truth of the matter is that nothing this man can say can make any sense. You cannot ever explain or rationalise what he has done. Sometimes people just flip a mental switch and terrible things happen as a consequence. You can never predict something like this and you can never prevent it happening.

That is why I am so heartened by the response of Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian Prime Minister, who has called for more democracy and more openness, rather than immediately calling for borders to be closed and a police state. Sometimes shit just happens and you need to keep an eye out for it, but calling for pogroms of people and raising suspicion and divisiveness helps no-one.

Quite unlike the increasingly despicable cunt Obama, who immediately leapt in with

"It's a reminder that the entire community has a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring."

You can't, you fucking twat. Not without creating a grey, drab, miserable existence for everyone, where we all walk around naked and eat beige pablum porridge provided by someone who could still kill us all by poisoning our oats.

So, you stick to your guns* Jens. Shit has happened and it was fucking terrible. But don't try and do something about it "for the children". Because if you do, this madman will have won and everybody else in Norway will lose.

(And can I just say that "lefties" really made me want to punch them yesterday when the news broke. Seriously, what kind of utter fucking cuntstain wishes the victims of this kind of bloodbath "solidarity" when commenting on it.

Solidarity? That's what you offer someone on strike. You don't fucking say "solidarity" to survivors and the families of the victims, you insensitive fucking unspeakable fucking mongs!)

*I realise this might not be the best choice of phrase, but shit happens.

Has your twitter account been hacked?

If I've sent you to this post, let me first start off by saying you're a cunt. You've clearly clicked on a link and given authority to a dodgy application without thinking what you're doing. So you're a cunt.

When people point this out, you will invariably rush back to Twitter and change your password, because not only are you a cunt, but you're a stupid cunt. Stupid because changing your password will do nothing to stop someone accessing your twitter because Twitter has an authorisation mechanism that persists beyond password changes. But that won't mean anything to you, because you're a stupid cunt.

So instead, here's how you actually fix it (in "new" twitter):

1. Log in to your Twitter webpage
2. On the top right of your page will be your name. Click on it.
3. Choose "Settings" from the menu that appears.
4. Click on Applications.
5. Click the "Revoke Access" on all applications you don't use all the time. It's quite possible that the naughty application will be the first in the list, but not a given.

In "old" Twitter:

1. Log in to your Twitter webpage
2. Click "Settings".
3. Click on Applications.
4. Click the "Revoke Access" on all applications you don't use all the time. It's quite possible that the naughty application will be the first in the list, but not a given.

The problem should now be gone.

PS You're still a cunt.

The horror that is the free market

Imagine, just for a moment, a world without a government to protect us, to compensate us when Shit Happens (we will come back to this in a moment, I'm sure).

In such a world, there would be no statutory regulation, no minimum wage, no closed shop unions, no vested interests that exist precisely because government enables it.

In this appalling world, markets would be truly free. And a free market is an interesting thing. People speak about the "free market" (which absolutely does not and cannot exist in a world which contains statutory regulations) as though it's some sort of evil monster that can "fail".

Such thoughts fundamentally and profoundly misunderstand what a free market is. A free market is merely the recording of prices for the exchange of goods and services when there are no legislated barriers to entry from either the supplier's side or the consumer's side.

It has no power, it is merely the recording of the price agreed when two parties freely agree to trade.

Let's assume (in the world without government) that you are walking along a beach on a hot, sunny day and you come across a lemonade stand. You have no idea how the lemonade is made, but you're hot and thirsty and the vendor wants a pound for a glass of cool lemonade. You buy it and drink it. He has a pound in his pocket, you are refreshed, both parties have gained from the transaction, both parties are happier than they were before.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the absolute horror of the free market in action. The thing that socialists blame for the collapse of the world's economy.

Of course, it gets more complicated. I think I can make a better lemonade for the same money or even less. So the next sunny day, I make up a batch of lemonade and I go set up a stall next to him. I want to get customers to buy my lemonade (which I think is better) and so I sell it for 99p, or 95p or whatever. I still make a decent profit at this price, and because my lemonade is nicer, I sell out quickly and the other vendor is forced to either bugger off, or lower his price to 90p. He's still making a profit, and although my lemonade is better, he grabs back more market share. If I don't sell out my batch of lemonade, I am forced to cut my price so that my price is the same as or better than his, or so that the price difference is so small in my favour that people don't mind paying the difference for my lemonade and I sell out.

At the end of this round of horse trading, we stabilise at about 80p per glass for him and 81p per glass for me, because it costs us 50p to make it and neither of us is prepared to do it for less than 30p per glass profit. Someone else comes along and decides, he's prepared to do it for 25p per glass profit, or he has a source for cheaper ingredients and so the battle starts all over again.

At no point in this bloodthirsty, violent struggle has any of us lost out -- we are all still trading voluntarily, and more importantly, the people who walk on the beach are having their wants met for a lower and lower price. Everybody is still happy. At some point, one or more of the vendors may fold, or may go off somewhere else and the whole dynamic will change again. But everybody is still buying what they want for a price they're prepared to pay and the vendors are all still making enough money for it to be worth it for them.

After a while, a devious vendor appears. He starts casting aspersions on existing vendors, claiming that their lemonade made him ill. Or maybe it's true, who knows? We certainly don't! Anyway, he creates "The Guild of Lemonade Vendors", which mandates basic requirements for GLV-approved lemonade, which also means they can charge a higher price.

Customers can now choose from existing lemonades or lemonades that are pricier, may not taste as nice, but are "certified" as good. Vendors can choose to join the Guild (which will probably mean paying something which increases their costs and reduces their margin), create their own "Society of Lemonade Vendors" or remain unaligned and trade on their existing customer base and reputation.

Eventually, this horrific, brutal struggle to deprive the consumer of their hard-earned money will reach moments of stasis, where no-one sees any benefit in entering the market, but then everything will change again. The price of lemons (in itself a free market) could collapse, leading to cheaper lemonade for all or it could rise sharply, making lemonade more expensive.

But at no point does anyone stick a gun at the customer's head saying they have to buy lemonade. The customer may not have enough money on them, and the vendor may or may not be susceptible to haggling or a freebie to win over a repeat customer. It may not be warm enough that people will buy. So other "sweeteners" may be offered to get customers to buy, which may or may not work.

Shit Happens.

All the free market does is measure the prices at which people make mutually beneficial trades, completely removed from the burdens of externally-imposed constraints.

Terrifying, isn't it? And aren't people who believe in the free market heartless, unfeeling bastards?

Enough with the gossip! (for @BBCLauraK )

Chris Bryant tells me senior figures at Buckingham Palace warned David Cameron's team about taking Andy Coulson into no 10
-- BBCLauraK

This really got on my tits today. It's not that I particularly object to anonymity for sources, God knows no real scandal would ever break without it. But this is not a breaking scandal, it's well and truly broken, and an MP who let it happen on his fucking watch is now trumpeting anonymous sources which may exist only in his own head purely for his own party's political gain.

This isn't what people pay their license fee for, Laura. This is you being led by the nose by a partisan mong who knew about this shit for ages but did fuck all about it.

Shame on you.

Update:

RT @MatofKilburnia If the pissing Windsors were commenting on government appointments they would be in breach of convention #guillotine
-- House of Twits

Apart from the rather liberal and tolerant idea that "breaching convention" merits a death sentence from a liberal and tolerant lefty who blocked me because he didn't like my sense of humour, this actually is quite the bit of news. If the Windsors, who have steadfastly remained out of government affairs (much to the detriment of Britain's politics, I think!) actually took the rather unprecedented step of themselves telling Cameron not to get involved with Coulson, that would be political dynamite.

But I stand by my original statement. Talk "senior whatever sources" is just bullshit.

Yah! Boo! Sucks!

Jesus, watching any kind of political debate on Twitter really makes me want to commit violence. I'm not even sure what program is on, oh, apparently it was Newsnight. But just compare these tweets:

Nick Boles terrific on #Newsnight reminding Harriet high horse Harman of Brown's links with News Intl -- Tim Montgomerie, Tory

vs.

The #Tories really ought not let Nick Boles speak for them in public. @HarrietHarman easily knocking down his angry rants. -- PeterL_77, Labourite

Really? Is that the standard of political discourse among educated, grown up people who are really interested in politics? "My guy is saying it best! Your woman is an idiot!*" "No, my woman is saying it best! Your guy is an idiot!**"

Can none of you understand that your partisan, uncritical, blind loyalty to your party is what gifts lobby fodder scum decades at the trough? It is why politicians get away with things that their party is ostensibly totally opposed to.

"My party, right or wrong" is the validation of every bad idea, every cruel policy, every innocent killed abroad, that politicians want. It is the thing that destroys the very limited value of democracy.

The next time any politician does something wrong, ask yourself: "What is more important: my principles or my party?" And if you can't honestly say that it's your principles, then you need to know that one of the gravest, most insidious heaps of rotten decay in the body politic looks at you in the mirror each day.

*Technically, this is actually true.

**Technically, this is also true.

The Wisdom of Governments

The next time you think the government can spend your money better than you can, think about this.

I knew there was a reason I gave up caring about politics

I did, for a while, genuinely lose interest in politics, because I found something that mattered more than politics. But since I no longer have that happiness, I've started to look back at politics, and once again the sheer hateful stupidity of it all stands before me:

Lord Glasman, the leading policy adviser to the Labour leader, said the country should “draw the line” on immigration and even renegotiate EU rules that allow free movement for migrant workers.

He told The Daily Telegraph that Britain is “not an outpost of the UN” and the needs of the British people must be put first.

The comments are the most drastic yet for any of the major political parties and would effectively end immigration in to the UK.

However, the Labour party was last night quick to distance itself from the suggestions, insisting Lord Glasman’s views were “his own”.

Immigration has been thrust back on to the political agenda by both Labour and the Conservatives.

Now, it's absolutely true that I have, in the past, railed on about immigration, but it's more that it's a symptom of the welfare state that I despise, than that I have an issue with immigration.

And the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of immigrants who come to the UK get jobs (that feckless British cunts don't want to do), pay their taxes and get on with their lives. There are also some genuine refugees and then there are also some weapons-grade motherfuckers who come here to sponge off the state.

The cost of the weapons-grade motherfuckers is easily outweighed by the sheer benefit of people picking up the shitty jobs that are beneath the dignity of the noble Briton, a race clearly designated for only fulfilling, high-paid jobs and nothing menial, OK?

Never mind that they chip in disgracefully high proportions of their income into the saintly NHS or gold-plated pensions for fucking useless civil servants.

Immigrants are a nett benefit to British society, end of. It doesn't matter whether they're Somali cockwashers, Polish builders or Australian IT twats. They come here, they either pick up shit jobs or bring skills we don't have. They endure taxation without representation. They are A Good Thing(TM)

Yet here we have an experienced and educated man, elevated to a peerage, advisor to a man who would rule us, representing the "party of the common man", who wishes to encourage this fucking bollocks because it resonates with people who have been encouraged to believe this fucking bollocks.

God forbid anyone should have an intelligent debate on the real fucking reason immigration is bad: it's bad because it puts more strain on housing and public services.

Why does it put a strain on housing? Because it's in the government's interest to keep house prices disproportionally high which they do my invoking the sacred "green belt" mythology. House prices are kept artificially inflated by regulation and the encouragement of NIMBYism.

Immigration is really not the factor it's made out to be here.

And immigrants do not place any more stress on "public services" than the rest of us, if they are allowed to work. Once they can work, they can pay taxes. Fucking bullshit laws that make it difficult for immigrants to work mean that the fucking government is forcing them to be a drain on public services.

And apart from that, the generosity of the welfare state is hardly the fucking fault of migrants who come here specifically not to suck at the state's teat but come here to work and earn an honest wage, nor is it even the fault of migrants who come here specifically to suck at the state's teat. The state designs, maintains and operates the welfare system. Is it really the fault of some uneducated, filthy foreigner from Outer Krapulastan or The Republic of Bongobongoland if they can look at it and think "I can have these guys for a decent lifestyle"?

Nah, fuck it,immigration is just another fucking bogeyman that the political classes use to frighten us all into voting for whoever is going to "take the strongest line" without being "racist".

So fuck you, Lord Cockmong, and a hearty fuck you to all the imbeciles who have leapt on to his bandwagon. I hope you all fucking die of face cancer.

Update: Snap!

In which Steve Richards shows what a fucking idiot he is all over again

I've noticed quite often that lefties can be quite astute at describing concisely, what things actually are like. But when it comes to identifying the root cause and especially when it comes to fixing it, they get it completely fucking wrong. So it is with Steve "Dick" Richards in the Indy today:

Power in Britain is distributed widely and erratically. Yet on the whole we report and scrutinise decisions, events and public personalities on the assumption that most power is concentrated in the hands of politicians in general and ministers in particular. Around the clock, politicians are held to account, even though most of them wield virtually no power at all. If anything happens anywhere, the instinct of the media and the gladiatorial parliamentary culture is to hold the Government to account almost alone. Weak-kneed elected politicians feel compelled to respond.

And thank fuck for that, even if the mendacious bastards just lie through their teeth all the time.

This form of robust accountability is largely healthy. To reverse the proposition and argue that elected figures should not be held to account would be deranged. But the consequence of an excessive focus on mainly insecure, scared politicians has led to a distorting lack of accountability in relation to non-elected institutions that wield power with anonymous, and often unjustified, self-confidence. Few voters had heard of the senior bankers who were leading them to the edge of the precipice until it was almost too late. And yet the likes of Sir Fred Goodwin, who steered Royal Bank of Scotland towards catastrophe, had far more power than most elected ministers who were regularly attacked on the front pages and summoned to explain their timid, powerless behaviour at 8.10 am on the Today programme.

It is healthy. And Richards skirts around the very edge of the real problem here. But being a lefty, he can't face the truth of the matter, because it would totally uproot his weltsanschauung.

Similarly, only now is more intense scrutiny being applied to the activities of the Metropolitan Police and the quality of some of its senior staff. The accountability of the police is highly sensitive and complex, but some senior figures in the Metropolitan Police have sheltered under convoluted lines of scrutiny. Both the Mayor of London and the Home Office have theoretical powers, while police retain operational independence. In fairness, the head of the Metropolitan Police is a public figure and extensively scrutinised, but it was alarming to watch the Home Affairs Committee interview a former assistant commissioner, Andy Hayman, and a current holder of that rank, John Yates. How did such cocky mediocrities rise to senior posts, ones that gave them responsibilities for handling the threat of terrorism? No elected minister would get so far up the Cabinet in the way that unimpressive duo rose up the hierarchy of the police. The media and parliamentary scrutiny would have exposed their different flaws long ago. Yates wields more power than most ministers, and Hayman used to.

So close. So very close. Will he grasp the nettle? Of course not!

Some media organisations, but most specifically Rupert Murdoch's, have become the most extreme example of this trend towards unaccountable power. Murdoch rarely gives interviews.

Disaster neatly averted. Attention diverted to the bogeyman du jour.

So, let's talk briefly about senior figures in private companies being held to account. In essence, that is what shareholders do. Sometimes it's difficult depending on the structure of the shares and who holds the shares, but in general, any company with a public shareholding is compelled by law to allow shareholders with even a single share to propose motions and argue against actions taken by the company, to vote against the appointment or reappointment of directors, etc. In general, if the company is making money, shareholders will be happy. But there will always be people with particular bees in their bonnets and companies are legally obliged to hear them out, no matter how blatantly vexatious they may be. I own some shares and every year when the AGM comes along, I get to vote, democratically, on things that shareholders and directors propose. I always take this seriously and I always vote, because it's my money that's at stake.

People being interviewed by the press is a load of bollocks for accountability. The only reason an exec would ever voluntarily agree to an interview is the chance to raise his profile and that of the company he works for. It's true that occasionally some senior exec will be shredded by the press, but it's usually a sacrificial goat situation, not that the company is being held to account as such.

Murdoch doesn't do interviews because he doesn't fucking need to. He owns newspapers, he doesn't need to raise the media profile of his company and he's rich enough not to need to raise his own profile. So let's just park the stupid idea that the press (or anyone else) needs to, or even can, hold executives to account.

The real issue that Richards skirts around here is the real unelected, unaccountable power in the country. He touches on it with the police, but inevitably he pokes at a couple of people, rather than the systemic failure.

It's true that the police wield lots of direct, unaccountable power. Don't ever piss a cop off, because they can make your life a fucking misery without you ever being able to prove it or stop it.

But the real problem, the thing that Richards cannot face or admit to is that the entire civil service is stuffed with faceless, unaccountable people who have power at various levels and degrees.

Stalin was partly right when he said that it doesn't matter who can vote, power rests with those who count the votes. But in Britain's completely fucked political system, the power does not rest with the elected policy makers or even the vote counters, but rather with those who get to implement (or not) those policies.

Ministers propose legislation at the broad brush level. The nuts and bolts of implementation can align with the intent of a policy or completely undermine it. The people who decide how and when a policy get implemented are completely unaccountable, completely hidden from scrutiny.

Another fine example of how unaccountable people in state employ are can be found in the latest issue of Private Eye (issue 1292), where the saintly NHS is exposed in how it hides avoidable deaths and punishes those who try to expose its failings.

It is true that journalists do terrible things in pursuit of stories. But it's equally true that they do these things in response to a demand from the general public, who are desperate to read disgusting tittle-tattle. So I do not really subscribe to the current froth of high-minded criticism of journalists. They wouldn't do those things if they didn't sell papers as a result of them. And crucially, newspapers do not fuck up thousands of lives every year or kill 25,000 people a year needlessly.

Belatedly, a strange sort of enforced accountability is taking place as parliament reasserts its right to stand up to non-elected institutions that function in the dark. Some commentators suggest that this is a sinister development, possibly leading to excessive political interference. Such fears are unfounded. How can it be sinister when those we elect challenge lawbreaking by a non-elected organisation?

Two words: parliamentary expenses. What do you say now, Steve? Or do you think the MP's got an unfairly rough ride there?

We need to know a lot more about the activities of bankers*, powerful business leaders, senior civil servants, police and, of course, what is happening behind the closed doors of media empires. This is a story about who runs Britain, and as light is shone we discover horrors. The light must not fade again.

All our public institutions deserve much tougher scrutiny than they get and at all levels, not just the police or "senior civil servants". And I wonder if the "media empires" will include the saintly Independent.

But of course, this will all blow over, much as the expenses scandal did. We can always count on occasional tweets and press releases from MP's moaning about IPSA to reassure us that they are learning their lessons and that they're never going to do this kind of thing again. Until the next time.

(And if you're that fucked off about what News of the Screws did, why are you railing at them for supplying something that millions of people paid to read week in and week out? Why aren't you attacking the people that wanted those dire little titbits?)

*Banker bashing. Yawn.

A tale of two brains

With great thanks to CynaraeStMary.

Thoughts on hacking Milly Dowler's phone

Predictably, the Twitter has exploded. Left, right and centre are apoplectic with rage. Calls for Rebekah Brooks's head, Andy Coulson's head, Rupert Murdoch's head, Jeremy Hunt's head and the death of the monarchy have all crossed my timeline.

And The News of the Screws was bang out of line. Whoever was in charge at the time (I really don't give a flying fuck who it was) should grow a set and take responsibility.

But I do wonder about the rage. Milly Dowler clearly doesn't give a fuck. And really, I don't think the largely left-wing clitterati aren't normally unduly vexed about the government doing things like this, or about the papers doing this sort of thing to other people.

Nobody's complaining about the Police being implicated in helping and / or covering up journalists doing this.

And I'm amused to see that other papers are generally not being too savage in their reporting of this, I can only assume they don't want to crow too loud lest it wake skeletons in their own closets.

I also don't recall this fulminating lefty hatred for Murdoch when he was in Tony Blair's camp.

Let's face it, this was disgusting and shameful. But I bet it's no more disgusting or shameful than stuff all the papers get up to every single day. They're all at it. The government keeps equally invasive tabs on us. The police do it to suspected criminals and if those suspects are exonerated, fuck all gets said about that.

And the idea that Rupert Murdoch personally knew about it and approved it is laughable.

Nah, fuck it. This is just a convenient excuse for some moral outrage, the lefties are using it as a hook to beat up a media mogul because he's not on their side any more.

Everyone else who is outraged seems to think it was because a dead girl it's somehow worse than hacking a live sleb or listening in to John Prescott's pie orders.

It's a load of shit. It doesn't matter any more or any less than any of the other hacking or any of the other manufactured bullshit of manufactured personalities devoured avidly by vacuous tits who can't think beyond the latest issue of Heat magazine.

All of the people frothing at the mouth are exactly the same low-life twats who are so obsessed with Peter Andre and Katie Price and Ryan Gigg's sex lives that they drive this kind of demand for salacious titbits.

We get the government we deserve. We also get the media we deserve.