Albina Kumirova: an artist of our time

The Madonna Of Our Time, by Albina Kumirova is a stunning work in more ways than one. In its full original glory, it must dominate a room, not just because of its nine feet by five feet dimensions, but by the sheer power of its imagery. The artist has imagined the Madonna and Child, threatened as they would be in today's world by the bovine thuggishness of social workers and their hellhounds in blue.

The symmetry of the piece is almost perfect. The two creatures who face the viewer on either side of the painting are at once truly wicked, and at the same time completely indifferent to what is happening behind them. The policeman who stands with his arms folded, and the two on the right who are chatting to each other are likewise not responsible in their minds for the atrocity that is occurring in front of them. After all, they are merely officers of the law, there to ensure that a terrible injustice can pass off unhindered.

We can see the face of the Madonna quite clearly, as She and the Christ are the only figures in light. Within that light are what appear to be doves, or even angels, that are desperately trying to protect the Madonna and Child, but we can see from Her face that the darkness is about to envelop both of them.

Thus the road to Calvary goes through a social work office and police station.

Kumirova is an artist who makes the point in her works that evil is often not hot-blooded sadism. The worst evil is that which is carried out by people who are only doing their jobs. Such routine, banal evil is carried out by people in this work, called Professionals, which sums up such routine wickedness perfectly:

The faceless monsters who hold the blindfolded and naked  child, are not seeking to torture her. They might tell themselves that it is all for her own good, and the more honest among them will know that it is also about feathering their own beastly suburban nests, but none of that is uppermost in their minds. To them it is merely routine, the following of orders, because beyond order lies chaos, and they believe in the orders that they carry out. The fact that the child is being crucified by them is not their responsibility. They are merely professionals, doing their jobs.

Art in the service of a political cause is something that the Soviet Union excelled at. In Albina Kumirova, Britain has an artist schooled in that tradition who is weaving her magic in a noble cause, that of innocents caught up in the lunacy that is the British secret court system and its functionaries in the social work industry.

These works by Albina Kumirova can be seen on the 25 July, from 9.00am to 5.00pm at the Children Screaming To Be Heard conference, at 356 Holloway Road, London, N7-6PA. Speakers will include John Hemming MP, and the great Ian Josephs, a man who has helped to save many children from the social work industry.

Sunday Herald backs independence

The Sunday Herald is the first newspaper to break ranks and cast in its lot with the Scottish independence movement, and today's edition which broke the news has pretty much sold out everywhere. Until now, big business was pretty monolithic in its support for the union, but now that one brick has been taken out of the wall, we can expect to see others joining the independence bandwagon.

It cannot be long before the major unionist political figures in Scotland start to jump ship, with the betting being on some senior members of the Labour Party being the first.

You can understand their point of view. If Scotland votes yes then who would want to vote for a politician who did not support the people's will? The decision as to when and how the jumping will take place is going to be carefully considered, and I reckon that several will make the move together. There is safety in numbers and all that, and each politico will need to reassurance of a pack around them when the announcement is made.

The ground is starting to shift in the independence debate.

The social work industry is out of control

The social work industry appears to be out of control. First they preyed on the very young, with the press full of stories of them circling like hyenas around new born babes, seeking to grab them from their parents on spurious and trumped up charges. Now they are going after the elderly...

A 94 year old retired midwife has been banned from speaking to the press for the rest of her life because these creatures do not like what she was telling them. She had moved a married couple into her house, but Redbridge social work industry wanted to put her into a workhouse so that they could grab her valuable house, presumably to help balance their books, and then forget about her. The old woman fought back so the social workers essentially raided her property 12 times in nine months, always accompanied by police, presumably to protect them from the wrath of an angry old woman who just wanted to be left alone.

In court she raised herself out of the wheelchair and defiantly told the judge: "They think I am a stupid old woman and can do what they like and I want them out of my life." That does not sound like a mental defective to me.

Needless to say, the judge declared her unfit and she has been gagged for life. Presumably her house will now be seized once the council has got her into the home. Given all that the social workers have done to this woman, I think she will be lucky to survive until the end of the year - or maybe death will be a blessing for her.

Over in Swindon, 88 year old army veteran Allan Thipthorpe enjoyed nothing more than bringing a whore into his sheltered accommodation, only to have social workers object. They said that the trollop was stealing from him, only to have Allan tell them that she wasn't, and it was his money, anyway, and if he wanted to spend it by paying someone to polish his knob that was his affair.

Needless to say, Alan appears to have lost that battle as well, although he did punch a council pen pusher, which is not bad going for an old fart.

When my late father was almost Alan's age, 20 years ago, the Oldham social work cockroaches tried to force him into a workhouse and I took up the cudgels on his behalf. Using every councillor that I could think of as well as the local press I managed to get them to back off, and thoroughly enjoyed myself in the process. Sadly, for the last six months of his life, dad was in one of those homes where the elderly are sent to die, but the council had to agree to foot the bill, and dad for his part agreed to go in until I could return to the UK and get him out. Sadly, he died a few days after I flew into the UK to keep my side of the deal.

Would I get away with that today? Probably not, as all that happened before New Labour were elected in 1997. They gave the social work industry more powers, and as we have seen with the old midwife and soldier, if you give the state powers, then it will abuse those powers.

It's easy to blame overpaid, undereducated social work rabble with their pathetic polytechnic degrees and puerile desire for status, but they would not last five minutes if parliament was to vote to strip away their powers. Then they could go away and flip burgers and the rest of us could live our lives in peace.

We need to change the laws in this country of ours.

Vote No To Borders: An Astroturfing Site

Following on from my last posting, how does a grass roots pressure group that was only created on the 1st May manage to get a three minute plug on the BBC news channel at 8.30am the following day? Either the group is very lucky, or it isn't a genuine grassroots movement at all, it's an Astroturfing body.

Astroturfing is the practise of setting up a seeming grassroots campaign, which is actually nothing of the kind as it is invariably financed by business interests or major political parties. The name comes from AstroTurf, the artificial grass that American footballers play on, hence the idea of Astroturfing, which is about setting up an artificial grassroots' movement.

Vote No To Borders is one such fake site, something which the web discovered within hours. Wings Over Scotland has investigated it, as has Craig Murray, and then the Guardian joined in the kicking. The conclusion that they all reached is that VNTB is as fake as a pair of Gucci loafers bought on a market stall. 

So the BBC has either been duped into thinking that Vote No to Borders is a genuine grassroots body, or they are too lazy to run a full check on the people that they are broadcasting reports on. The other alternative is that Auntie is a willing stooge of a unionist Astroturfing outfit, which is not a conclusion that the Beeb will be happy for people to reach.

Best if they do a better investigation into this group.

How not to support the union in the Scottish independence debate

I cannot figure this video out at all. It was made by an outfit called Vote No To Borders which presents itself as a grass roots alternative to the various nationalist groups, and claims to be presenting a positive set of opinions as to why Scotland should remain within the UK. It was set up by a John Malcolm, who comes over as a comfortable businessman who knows where his bread it buttered. 

Watch the video, which shows a fellow named Edward, and which only runs for 90 seconds. Edward is a husband, father and worker, and for the first minutes he comes over very well. Then he makes a point about playing golf with a nationalist friend who was "going on about unis, and further education and the health service, stuff like that." Meanwhile Edward was "just trying to beat him," at golf. In other words, he does not seem to care about his children's future, at least that is the impression given by his own words. And this site is all about getting people to support the union?

My first reaction was that this site was a gamer, set up by the nationalists to further discredit the unionists, but Craig Murray has spent a happy morning investigating Vote No To Borders, and it seems that the site is sort of genuine. 

That is to say it is a unionist site, but there is nothing grassroots about it. The company behind it is registered in London, with two directors: Malcom Offord, who has donated at least £120,000 to the Tory Party, and Fiona Gilmore, who is an executrix of a PR company which specialises in "country branding." Finally, the domain was registered by Gary Waple, a right banker who is employed by the Prudential Regulatory Authority of the Bank of England!

Back to the drawing board, folks!

Scotland Yet: A film about independence

A few days ago I posted about how the Scottish independence campaign is a grass roots movement that involves thousands of ordinary people who are willing to take a chance on a better tomorrow with independence, instead of continuing with the awful life that they endure today.

Scotland Yet: a film about independence is part of that movement. It was funded by donations and is due to be released in July this year. The film is currently in post-production and needs more contributions to ensure that it will be ready on time.

Please click this link to read more and donate.

How Cyril Smith got away with it

In the 1970s I was involved with a Manchester based alternative magazine called Mole Express. Although I no longer wrote for them by 1979, in late April of that year I wandered into the Mole's offices to kill an afternoon with Mike Don the rag's owner-editor. I found him alone in the office chortling over the latest copy of the Rochdale Alternative Press (RAP) which had just arrived in that day's post. All the alternative magazines would send free copies out to one another, before they were distributed to the public, so it is highly likely that Mike and I were the first people to see the May '79 edition of RAP and its two page spread entitled "The strange case of Smith the man."

The story of Smith and his spanking proclivities were set out for all to see, and I can remember Mike's awe-struck words that this story meant either the demise of Smith's career or the bankruptcy of RAP when Smith sued the paper into the ground.

Actually neither happened and in the May 1979 general election, just a week or so after the story broke, Cyril Smith increased his majority in Rochdale, The next edition of RAP contained a bemused editorial which pointed out that only Private Eye had carried even a summary of the RAP exclusive, with the rest of Fleet Street ignoring it. 

I think that two things came together to kill the story stone dead. The first is that reading the account again - and you can read both the May and June stories reproduced at this link - it is obvious that RAP only concentrated on the accounts of the spankings, rather than playing up the homosexual abuse angle. One can understand why they did that because they had hard evidence of the former that would stand up in court, but the sexual abuse side was speculation and they would probably have lost a libel case had they alleged that he was getting his rocks off with teenage youths.

The second factor which killed the story was that the people of Rochdale were so indifferent to it that they sent Smith back to Westminster with an increased majority. People just believed that Big Cyril was doing the right thing by teaching young tearaways a lesson. Parents would actually call Smith in to take their sons in hand when they were out of control!

Had RAP presented evidence that this was sexual abuse then the matter would have been different and Smith's career would have been over, but they didn't, so the story ended up as being one about Cyril Smith giving yobs a damned good hiding - and Rochdale approved of that wholeheartedly, as did the rest of Britain which is why the press ignored it.

I suppose the moral of this tale is that the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there.