The day Jim Murphy met The Pope.

A question has been going the rounds ever since this photo of Jim Murphy, Labour's Scottish leader, emerged a while back. Was Spud dumping his load or shooting his wad when the shutter clicked?

The people in Scotland demand answers to these pertinent questions.

Natalie Bennett and her brain fart interview

Following right along from today's earlier posting about the bourgeois wankfest that is the Greens, Natalie Bennett the party's leader has just given  what is probably the worst interview that any party leader has ever given in the history of British politics. If you don't believe me, just click this link and listen to it for yourself.

The web is roaring with laughter at Natalie's brain fart, but I am still inclined to think that it will make no difference to hardcore voter turnout for this collection of posturing ninnies. The reason as I said earlier today is that Greenery is little more than the pose of that section of the middle class that really wants the Tories to win, but don't have the nerve to vote for Cameron's gang. 

However, people who are leaning in the Green direction will be reminded that if you have half a mind to vote Green then that is all you need. If that happens then with luck the poseurs will drop down to a more acceptable three to five percent of the vote, concentrated in the wealthier suburbs where Labour does not feature anyway. 

For the rest of you, there is no no excuse whatsoever not to vote Labour in England.

Why we cannot afford the luxury of voting Green

Thoughtful Tories are clearly concerned that UKIP will take enough votes off them to allow Labour to come through the middle and grab a few seats in May. Given the rise in support for the Greens, Labour must also be worried that the same thing will happen to them. It is a ridiculous situation, with the Tories worried about a party that wants to take Britain back to 1950 and its one television channel and Labour fearful of a party that hankers after 1450 with every house having to keep a cellar full of turnips in preparation for the next famine.

Back in the day I voted Labour because I wanted to keep the wages up and the management down. Becoming unemployed in the early 1980s, I wanted Labour to retake power so as to restore the status quo ante, and in the meantime fight to keep my dole payments up to scratch by opposing Tory cuts. Today, as a disabled man reliant on benefits, I want a Labour-led government that will cease the Tory war against all claimants.

All good bread and butter stuff. The same type of things that led people in Scotland to switch from Labour to the SNP, because the latter has banned the sale of council houses, and kept such payments as Education Maintenance Allowance alive north of the River Tweed when the Tories scrapped them in England.  

If I still lived in England I would vote Labour, without a doubt. Of course I would like to see a referendum that would hopefully lead to British withdrawal from the European Union, and yes I am gagging for levels of taxation that would see the middle class taxed to the levels where they have to pimp their daughters, but I also accept that neither of these policies is liable to happen under Labour. So I would grit my teeth and take the best that is on offer.

 The Greens do not offer an alternative that appeals to many people. Instead what they offer is an opportunity for a well-fed section of the middle class to play posture politics and allow the Tories to snatch a seat or two by taking votes off Labour. If you think that I am being alarmist, then just yesterday I was reminded by an old friend in the United States of just what can happen when bourgeois posturing  gets out of control. Back in 2000 the American Greens ran Ralph Nader as their candidate for President of the United States and he took just over 97,000 votes in Florida. That state went to George Bush by a mere 537 votes, giving him the White House.

Nader and his followers have argued that they are not to blame, and the fault lies with the right-wing shift in the Democrats, but that argument ignores the possibility that had the Democrats moved leftward, they would have lost votes on their right flank. In a two-horse race, both parties are giant coalitions, and people have to make the compromises necessary to ensure that their team wins so that they get some of what they want.

Under Miliband, the Labour opposition prevented the Tories from obeying the Americans and going to war against Syria. The party has now pledged to introduce a mansion tax to fund further NHS spending, something which is a good in itself, but made even nicer here by the fact that it will hit the aspirational scrote element in London especially hard. As revenge for the 1980s goes, the mansion tax proposal isn't much, but it is something the cheer for, and more than people will get from any other party in England.

If there is something to vote for with English Labour, why are around eight percent of the population seemingly determined to throw away the chance to be rid of the Tories? I suspect that some of them are just mental defects, but the bulk do tend to come over as people who are well cushioned economically, but want to pretend that they are right-on and radical. In other words they are middle class crap who have done well out of globalisation, but who want to pretend that they are part of the proletariat. Voting Green gives them the best of both worlds: a Tory government that they can pretend that they did not vote for.

Voting Green anywhere in Britain is nothing more than a posture, and those who thus posture need to be treated with derision and contempt by everyone who wants to see an end to this Tory government.

CitizenFour is a worthy Oscar winner and wakeup call to us all.

CiizenFour won the Oscar for best documentary at last night's award ceremony, and if you haven't seen it yet, do so as quickly as possible. Trust me, it does for mobile 'phones what Psycho did for showers.

The film follows the first eight days that Edward Snowden spent in Hong Kong with the film-maker  Laura Poitras, and the Guardian journalists Glen Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill. It is obvious from the start that neither of the two reporters has any clear idea what Snowden is talking about, which is good because most of the viewers won't either. Instead of explaining it all using a voice-over, Laura Poitras allows us to realise the terrifying implications of what Snowden is saying through their eyes. 

We learn not just that the state spies on us, but that it spies on pretty much all of us via the mundane items that we take for granted, such as our mobile 'phones. Prior to 2013 when these Hong Kong interviews took place, few of us realised that the Anglo-American states had taken surveillance to levels that the old East German Stasi could only dream about.

To make matters worse for the British viewers, whilst the Americans still have some protection under their constitution, the British have hardly any protections from their own state, which is why Laura Poitras has decided not to visit this country for the time being.

If that sounds alarmist, then towards the end of the documentary we are reminded of just how the British version of the old Strasi pulled in Glen Greenwald's boyfriend under the all-covering excuse of terrorism.

My only criticism of CitizenFour is the fact that it ends just as Ed Snowden is about to leave Hong Kong, and it doesn't follow the next week which saw him leave for Ecuador, only to become trapped in Moscow. That said, Laura Poitras became certain that she was being followed so it made sense for her to vanish back to Germany with her reels of film. By the way, she edited everything in the German capital for fear that if she took the raw footage to the USA it would be seized by America's home-grown Securitate.

Another point that the film might have made is that Snowden is not the leftist that many people in Britain think he is. Actually, he is a libertarian admirer of America's Ron Paul, who began his road to whistle blowing by objecting to Barrack Obama's desire to ban the sale of assault weapons.

Small caveats aside, the film did clear up one matter that had stuck in my mind ever since this story broke, which is that Lindsay Mills, Snowden's delightfully exhibitionist girlfriend, did manage to join him in Russia. He had left her in the house that they shared in the USA with just a note saying that he would be away for a few days on business, and the first that she knew about anything was when Uncle Sam's Securitate began banging on the front door.

As a lesson in the raw power of the United States, and the craven desire of the British ruling class to grovel to that power as a kicked dog whimpers at its master's feet, this film cannot be matched. It needs to be watched by everyone who has ever thought that they are safe from prying eyes, especially those people who think that British sovereignty needs to be saved from Brussels. Sadly, it has already been sold to Washington. 

Press go into self-righteous mode over Manchester bus brawl

The press are making a big play on this fairly typical 5.00am Manchester bus brawl between four cocky, pissed as farts, Wythenshawe chavs and two Spaniards. Well, it is reported that they were Spanish, but I couldn't hear the accents so will have to take that on trust. I suppose tales like this provide cheap space fillers for the papers as well as giving them another chance to scream "wacism" and "homophobia." Quite how a spat between Europeans can be called racism is anyone's guess, but the precious metropolitan souls who write this drivel were probably doing it on autopilot.

Here's the video:

What can we say about the delightful combination of cheap lager,  bags of chips and rampant chavery that all came together on an early morning bus to that centre of urban sophistication known as Wythenhawe?

I suppose that the first thing that comes to mind is that Wythenshawe really was lovely half a century ago when my parents took me there as a Sunday treat to visit my two aunts, Back then everyone had a job because when the estate was built in the 1920s the city council ensured that space was provided for light industry so that the new residents of Wythenshawe had new jobs as well as light, airy new homes.

Those light engineering firms went the way of everything else during Thatcher's War, and that left the people of Wythenshawe high, dry and with their dicks in their hands. The Labour council then encouraged technology firms to move in, but needless to say, none of them provided anything other than the odd cleaning job to the army of unskilled and semi-skilled people who lived in the area. Also needless to say, Wythenshawe quickly began its death spiral to become the shithole that it is today. Nice work, Labour.

That doesn't justify the piss headery that we can see on the video, but it does go some way to explaining it, which is more than the press are doing with their idle chants of racism.

Funnily enough - actually it's more than funny, it's seriously hilarious - if you can read Spanish you might want to visit the YouTube page where the video is hosted. Scroll down to the comments, and you will find any number of Latin-Americans piling in to defend British chavdom against the descendants of the wicked Spanish colonialists.

The self-loathing metropolitan middle class may like to keep that in mind before they start squealing again, but they probably won't.

I think that I'll leave the last word to the insouciant Manchester police spokesman who said that, "It's not been reported to police, but if it is we will investigate."

Welcome to urban Britain, in other words. It's what the middle class wanted and voted for.

Social work industry objects again to people's politics

Just when you thought that the social work industry couldn't get any more retarded in their desire to attack political thought, up they come with another example of their jaw-dropping stupidity.

Two years ago they tried to stop a couple in Rotherham from fostering children because of their membership of UKIP; now they have tried to forcibly adopt a child in Darlington because his father is a member of the English Defence League.

The mother of the 13 month old baby in Darlington does not live with the father and supports his wish to have custody of their child. However, the parasites of social work then got involved on the ludicrous grounds that the EDL is "immoral." They added to this the fact that the father a decade ago when he was 17 was foolish enough to have sex with a 13 year old girl. He wasn't prosecuted for that, probably because even Mr Plod isn't daft enough to try and drag a teenager to court for doing what all teenagers do these days. Nevertheless, for Darlington social work industry that was evidence that he was also "immoral," and grounds enough to seize his child.

The case ended up in the High Court before Judge Sir James Munby who ruled: "The city fathers of Darlington and Darlington's director of social services are not guardians of morality." He went on to say: The justification for state intervention is harm to children, not parental immorality."

I have asked this question many times before, but it is always worth repeating: what do we think that we are doing even listening to the knuckle-dragging, educationally subnormal members of the social work industry, still less providing them with cushy numbers on the local government gravy train?

By the way, as a rule when I post about the latest act of madness by these fuckwits, an army of them crawl over here from whichever sewer they inhabit to take over my comment box. Please don't this time, as I am really not in the mood for being nice to any representatives of British headbangery.

Channel 4 give a lesson in how not to smear UKIP

Did anyone watch the Channel 4 mockumentary tonight? In case you missed it don't worry because it was appallingly bad.

Satire involves mockery, but there was nothing to laugh about in this po-faced account of the horrors that awaits the UK if Nigel's gang take power in May. The script was banal and the ending obvious. Pulling holes in the story is a waste of time as there were too many to list, but the one where a newsreader announces that sixty-eight percent of the population support the new government's drive to kick out illegal immigrants sticks in my mind because minutes later we are treated to riots in the street. Trust me, if such a big percentage supported our Nige then the couple of hundred remaining Trots in Britain would be back at daddy's Surrey pile shitting their loads.

What made such a good idea so bad? It seems as if the grandsons of the late Sir Bufton Tufton converted to New Labour in the 1990s and their children are now making TV programmes of which this is a fine example of the genre. These wealthy children of the Metropolitan elite have convinced themselves that UKIP means the end of civilisation as we know it, probably because it is unique in being a mainstream party that is not run by them or their friends.

Dear God, UKIP really is a party that is made up of small town cardigan wearers who seem to have been asleep since the League of Empire Loyalists folded in the 1960s.  They are ripe for mockery and deserve to have to piss taken out of them on so many levels.

This just isn't one of them.