The high moral ground on the left

Well, it's no surprise that Saint Jezza is cleaning up with a certain sector of the body politic. For those whose hearts swell in righteous anger at the murderous, sub-human, cruel and vile Tory; those who like nothing more than a big march through a metropolis and those who feel that it's only good and fair to terrify baristas on minimum wage and bank staff trying to get through the day by smashing windows, throwing trash around and burning things, Saint Jezza is in fact the perfect inspiration.

A kindly-looking, avuncular man who has followed his own moral code all his life, with a belief in the correctness of the ends justifying the means, he has set an enthusiastic and adorable example to thousands of acolytes. For example, his belief in the cause of Palestinians has allowed him to justify turning a blind eye to overt and covert anti-Semitism wherever it may find him. His belief in the cause of a unified Ireland allowed him to ignore the ruthless murders and maiming of innocent people.

Lately, his belief in the non-existence of the Srebrenica massacre meant that it was cool to spend the dinner on the evening of the anniversary of this ghastly slaughter scoffing pizza with a vocal Srebrenica massacre denier.

On the anniversary of the massacre. Let that sink in. I mean, if Theresa May did something like that, the outrage on the left would be able to power London for weeks.

But because Saint Jezza has always been on the right side of history, it's all good. His morality is unsullied by the fact that he's forever hanging out with murderers, terrorists and people with the most hideous of views. His blithely ignoring open Jew-hatred on Press TV, Iran's state broadcaster - that's Iran, that kills people for being gay - in exchange for money, is nothing of import.

John McDonnell and Saint Jezza earn proper fat cat salaries, just like Len McCluskey, but of course that's perfectly OK, because they're all on the right side of history. They all earn their money literally being parasites on the working man, but of course that's perfectly OK, because they're all on the right side of history.

(We will ignore for the moment the slight issue of revisionism transforming things like "overt support for an IRA by any means necessary" into "a vital part of the peace process" when we talk about the "right side of history".)

We are already seeing Stalinist putsches of soft-left MPs, for not toeing the line sufficiently. I'm sure Saint Jezza would never ask for such things, but he's not exactly falling over himself to stop it, is he? He isn't even Secretary General, er, Prime Minister, and already Labour is behaving like a Stalinist party.

Because the ends justify the means.

So here we are. Saint Jezza's fans are clearly quite comfortable with all these things.

They also believe "if you are not with us, you are against us," therefore if you're not an uncritical worshipper of Saint Jezza, you are sub-human and not worthy of civilised discourse. You're a Nazi. You can be, should be and probably will be subject to physical violence.

Of course, worst of all are the venal, Blairite traitors on the soft-left. Their ideological impurity is a stain on the left, that must be expunged even more vigorously than the evil Tory scum.

For those of us on the right, being regarded as sub-human by people on the left is nothing new. Their astonishing arrogance in knowing that their political beliefs make them morally superior has been a source of endless insulting behaviour in the past. Of course, now that the most active and virulent form of left-wing politics has taken over, it's a schadenfreude treat to see Blairites who used to have exactly the same attitude (sans the violence, of course) discover what it's like to be regarded as sub-human by a thug with a different opinion.

And these people are, in their hearts, thugs. I make no apologies to any Labour voters I offend. You regard violence as an acceptable form of political bargaining. If you didn't, you wouldn't have voted for someone who says emollient things but does not do anything to stop Jew-hatred, violence or abuse.

If you're hard-left, at least you're being congruent with your beliefs. This doesn't make you a good human being, though.

If you're soft-left and you voted Labour at the last election, I can only describe you as a self-hating, tribalist moron. Your party hates you more than it hates the Tories. Your blind adherence to "I must vote Labour" is self-defeating stupidity.

Look at the spread of abuse, violence and hatred in politics. Look hard at yourself. If you think that actively hating someone or abusing or committing violence on them for their political beliefs is somehow OK or if you voted for these people, then you're all the problems with society today. You personally. It's not "capitalism" or "free markets" or "bankers" or "Tories" or "libertarians" or "evil right-wing media". You have no right to look down at anyone. You have no moral high ground. Your beliefs or your blind loyalty to a party are poisonous and dangerous.

It's you.

You are the problem.

Don't feed the trolls

I know a bit about trolling, I used to be one. I also spent a lot of time on the receiving end of possibly the best troll the internet has ever seen (anyone heard from pneawf lately?)

I was but an amateur, more of a wind-up artist than anything else, and I still am, online and in real life. My favourite TV show is The Mentalist, especially the early ones, because the character is a massive cunt and a wind-up merchant.

But I did learn from some awe-inspiring trolls, which is why I can spot one so easily.

And it annoys the fuck out of me that mongoloid fucktards with IQs of 7 and one track minds spouting mindless abuse get called trolls. They aren't. They are stupid, pointless bullies who don't put the slightest effort into winding people up, they just make shouty threats of violence when they see someone that they think can easily be bullied.

They are no different to Liverpudlians who perceive a slight on Liverpool; like wibbling leftards; like Terminators: they cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be bargained with and they will absolutely not stop until they've hounded you off the internet and shut down your voice.

But what they are not, are trolls.

Trolls will put a bit of effort in, will wind you up in several different ways, often without saying an unkind or improper word and leave you raging while chuckling to themselves.

Trolls do not shout mindless abuse.

However, the psychology of dealing with abuse and dealing with trolls is very much the same, and unfortunately it is not in the nature of those being trolled or abused to respond correctly. But it is simple to deal with a troll and probably equally simple to deal with an abuser:

Do not rise to the bait. If you suspect you're being trolled, or you have a shouty abuser on the line: DO NOT RESPOND.

If you don't respond to a troll, it frustrates the fuck out of them and they move on looking for a new target. If someone shouts abuse at you and you don't respond, they will get bored and look for someone who does.

Speaking as someone who has been on the end, ironically, of both the Scouse hate mob AND Old Holborn's pack of windowlickers, I'm quite certain that someone who actually wants you dead, assaulted or raped is not going to warn you - they're just going to do it. All they're trying to do is make you feel scared.

It's simple, it works and it pisses them they hell off. What's not to like?

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.

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.

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?

Actually, let's NOT "privatise" the NHS, shall we?

I realise this is probably going to come as a bit of a shock to everyone, given that I hate socialised anything, and my experience of the NHS has been universally depressing and distressing and frustrating.

But I've just realised the outcome of "privatising" the NHS is not going to be loads of independent surgeries and hospitals all competing openly and honestly, driving down costs and improving the experience of healthcare for everyone; it's much more likely to be like public transport, with large, bureaucratic corporate companies gobbling up regions of healthcare and providing de facto (or even worse, de jure) monopolies in each area.

It's a measure of just how useless government is and how reluctant it is to relinquish control of anything that the only model they have for privatisation is to farm the services out to a couple of their mates so that it's easy to "nudge" them in the "right" direction, rather than opening things up to the market and leaving them to sort themselves out. This despite the repeated and rather obvious failure of the model to provide any cost savings or a genuine improvement in service.

We might as well save ourselves the inevitable arse raping (without lube) that is going to happen, since government won't actually privatise the service, but rather just outsource it.

I can't really tell the difference between fascism and modern corporatism.

Can you?

A brief brief and beef about beef

If we ever needed proof that regulation is a tool of big business and not for the protection of consumers, the horse / beef fiasco proves it.

A massive infrastructure dedicated to making sure that our food is good and safe has failed, despite the regulation applied specifically to large corporate suppliers and supermarkets. Every day seems to show another crack in the edifice.

And what are consumers doing? Well, those who can afford it have always used butchers. Parsimonious types are now migrating to butchers where the food chain is known by actual people and not by regulation.

I strongly contend that people who actually know the food chain and the history of the food being bought are far more trusted than any ticked boxes or paperwork that has been completed. Regulation is no substitute for knowledge.

But no, for the average statist, there is no substitute for more regulation, no matter that the failure of regulation is evident to all, the answer is always more regulation.

Well, I'm fucking stunned

According to this piece of genius journalism, Europe's carmakers are yearning for the Obama touch.

As bailed-out US manufacturers recover their poise and markets at the Detroit motor show, jobs and plants across the EU are vanishing due to falling demand

O RLY?

Just guess* which of the lines above represents the company that got the biggest bailout?

All the bailout has done is postponed the inevitable. In much the same way as Gordon Brown's desperate reinflation of our bubble led to a massive economic collapse, in much the same way as QE has failed completely to fix anything, Obama's "touch" is just another politician's "Reverse Midas".

Government wealth transfer from bottom-of-the-pile taxpayers to failing multi-billion dollar corporations: how does this make sense? What can possibly go wrong? Why do lefties shout for more tax on companies while simultaneously demanding that the same useless fuckers who can't actually make stuff that people want to buy MUST be propped up by people who can't afford to feed their kids?

Is there some kind of special medication that these people take or what?

Cunts.

Ze Chermans

Look, I like a good bit of casual racism and xenophobia as much as the next man, but can we PLEASE stop this shit that Her Maj is German?

She was born in Mayfair, in London, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. If she's German because of that, does the fact that my dad was born in Hammersmith make him fucking Spanish? And what I'm I? Icelandic?

Cunts.

The Lesson of Hillsborough

As might well be expected, the official report into the Hillsborough disaster has revealed the South Yorkshire Police to be massively corrupt and engaged in a massive coverup.

As might well be expected, the twitterati are fulminating with wrath, spouting with calls for heads on pikes and all the usual shit. Especially lefties.

As might well be expected, these exact same people will then be the ones telling me that civilisation cannot exist without the state and is minions and that the police have to be funded from tax extortion to protect us all fully.

The lesson of Hillsborough is not what you might expect.

The lesson of Hillsborough is that even after being clubbed in the face with clear proof that the state is not to be trusted, people will still defer to the state and tell me that I'm the crazy one for wanting to do things differently.

Why "renewable" sources of energy don't work in the real world

The issue here is incredibly simple: predictablity.

The whole point of renewable energy sources is that we want to use them instead of conventional power generation. So the ideal situation is that we want to get the power from a renewable source and while we're getting that, we want to scale down the power we get from conventional energy and when the renewable stops providing, we want to scale the conventional energy back up.

Now, if you look at turbines, the picture is terrible. The wind is incredibly capricious and turbines can only operate at best 30% of the time. But which 30% of the time is completely impossible to tell.

The same applies, to a lesser extent, to solar power. Clouds may or may not have an effect on the capability of the panels, a snow dump could close them off for an unspecified period and if you place them in areas that have good weather and are more reliable, you generally lose a massive amount of power transmitting it to places that it's needed, completely subverting the value of the energy generated.

Even wave power can be significantly affected by the weather and time of the month. Although it will almost always be generating some power, it will almost never be consistent.

So why is this a problem? Well, with current power stations it can take hours or even days to adjust the amount of energy that is being produced.

If the wind is blowing sweetly, waves are nice and even and the sun is shining and we're getting a massive spike of "free" energy, by the time we've slowed down our existing coal and gas and nuclear power supplies, the situation will have changed completely and there will be blackouts all over the country. There would be chaos everywhere, every day.

People are working on this, but even if we were to decomission all our existing power stations and replace them with these which would require more than 200 of these power stations to be built (at a non-trivial cost) plus the cost of decomissioning existing power stations, all of this would probably bankrupt the UK.

And let's assume we beat Denmark's generation of renewable power and get to 30% of power being generated renewably. Given that a reasonable estimate of Britain's energy capacity at the moment is about 100GW, that means that 30GW could be provided renewably at any one time. This means that even using the latest whizz-bang technology, and assuming a completely even distribution of renewable power, there could, at any moment, be a 6-minute period where the entire country shuts down.

In practice, it simply means that we would either have to still massively over-provide electricity capacity, and that areas which have more access to renewable energy would be much more likely to experience an outage.

It doesn't matter how much power wind farms et al generate: if they can't generate the capacity predictably, then even while we're getting that power, we can't reduce the amount of conventional capacity we generate, so we can't reduce our horrid "carbon footprint" no matter how many cunting turbines we ruin the cuntryside with.

Update: This may have potential. (OK, that was pretty shocking. I'm sorry I didn't offer more resistance. Etc.)

Banning always works

I don't really have anything to add to this fantastic blog post which highlights the gap between the nobility of intention of stupid politicians and the harsh truth or the real world.

Other than, perhaps: WHY DO YOU FUCKING CUNTS NEVER LEARN?

@LouiseMensch is a fucking idiot

I had an argument with a fellow twatterer about his MP. He said she was one of the good guys and wouldn't hear a bad word about her.

I, on the other hand, explicitly distrust anyone who goes into politics as being someone who thinks they know better than anyone else how we should live our lives. And if you climb the greasy pole far enough to actually become an MP, then you must be a mendacious, bullying cunt of the highest order.

And so it came to pass. First we had:

Northamptonshire Police advise me that much of their time and resources were wasted answering false alarms due to soc media rumours.

Then:

Twitter regularly down for maintenance, and if in a major national emergency police think Twitter and FB should take an hour off? So be it

(Firstly, Twitter doesn't fucking regularly go down for maintenance, you daft bint, it's a 24x7 operation that isn't supposed to go down AT ALL. Likewise Facebook.

Secondly, the only way you can stop access to Facebook and Twitter is to completely disable access to all websites. I'm not even sure this is technically possible. It would certainly destroy every online business in the UK.

Still think it's a good idea?)

Then:

I don't have a problem with a brief temporary shutdown of social media just as I don't have a problem with a brief road or rail closure.

See above.

Then:

If short, necessary and only used in an emergency, so what. We'd all survive if Twitter shut down for a short while during major riots.

How often are you expecting major riots, Louise? Are you privy to some information that us plebs aren't entitled to?

Anyway, there more stupid tweets about maintenance and stuff, and then we get this gem:

And really, stop w/ all the dramatics. Nobody is talking about "shutting down Twitter". It's about listening to police & a couple hours off.

So here we have it: one of the "good guys" in politics thinks it's absolutely fine that the police (the fucking POLICE!) should have the power to shut down everybody in the UK's access to social networking because of a few miscreants that they can't handle. Never mind that in doing so they'd have to cut everybody in the UK off from the web completely. Never mind that it would lay waste to every online business in the UK at the same time.

If that's what a "good" politician thinks, can you imagine what the rest of them think?

It's so true, scratch a politician, any politician and you'll find a closet fascist.

Words fail me, again

Listen to this.

I have no words.

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.

Labour, as ever the party that champions civil liberties (for @lukeakehurst )

Recent comment on twitter, by Labour NEC member, Luke Akehurst:

Dog Control Orders being discussed now - serious issue in Hackney's parks and open spaces

My rather inevitable response to this further encroachment of the state into things that are really not any of its fucking business was:

Oh for *fuck's* sake. What a load of utter cunt!

Luke then asked:

any particular reason for that reaction? "Status dogs" owned by gang members r serious menace in local parks

Dude! Seriously?

do you *really* think a gang is going to pay any fucking attention?

Luke's devastating response:

they will get fined if they ignore it

Right, so a gang member that is quite happy to own an illegal dog and possibly train it to be an attack dog is going to be so fucking terrified of a doggy ASBO and a fine that he's going to turn into a productive member of society instead?

Really?

Are you fucking serious?

These are the same people who collect ASBO's as a badge of honour. They are absolutely unafraid of the ASBO system. Do you not think that perhaps they may regard a doggy ASBO as a badge of honour for their dogs?

Do you really, REALLY think they're going to give a flying fuck about your stupid fucking nanny state horseshit?

Christ. Is there no end to human stupidity?

Words fail me

Twitter is full of mongitude today:

I really dislike the Gates-sponsored brand of voluntary philanthropy. Poverty should be fought by mandatory taxation #newsnight

I scarcely know where to begin with this insanity. Voluntarily caring for people is to be discouraged. Only money extorted via the state is sufficiently holy to actually do anything with.

What a massive insult to anyone who gives of their time or money to help the needy. And if the state was that fucking pious, why have they not already solved all these problems despite having even more money than fucking Bill Gates?

Jesus. I wonder if this stupid cunt can actually breathe without Labour Party approval.

Update: The bigger we make a war, the more ethical it becomes.

Dear God!

Steve Jobs spends his days coming up with new ways to enslave consumers to AppleCorps. Bill Gates spends his own money curing kids. #WINdows

Someone who has clearly missed the last 30 years of computing completely.