Yeah, Good Luck With That

All that carefully crafted 'the BNP aint racist' bollocks, how's that going Nick?

British National Party (BNP) chairman Nick Griffin has defended a party leaflet which says that black Britons and Asian Britons "do not exist".

The BNP's "Language and Concepts Discipline Manual" says the term used should be "racial foreigners".

In a BBC interview, Mr Griffin said to call such people British was a sort of "bloodless genocide" because it denied indigenous people their own identity.

A couple of years ago Channel 4 showed a documentary called 100% English which featured such illustrious individuals as Gary Bushell and Carole Thatcher outlining their own prohibitive conditions under which a person should be allowed to define themselves as English. Mostly the criteria seemed to revolve around not having any dusky skintones or speakers of exotic languages in your family tree. Hilarity ensued when they discovered a whole bunch of foreign in their recent ancestry and subsequently, under their own definitions, could no longer claim to be English.

When will the mass DNA screenings to seek out these perpetrators of the ridiculously monikered 'bloodless genocide' commence? Obviously it must be a matter of the utmost importance to the nation that these murderous 'racial foreigners' be identified and 'voluntarily repatriated' as soon as possible. Perhaps Mr Griffin will be prepared to have his own genetic history investigated, you know, just to make sure he's not, a-hem, one of them coloureds foreign sorts that have been slowly murdering all those 'indigenous' Germanic Anglo-Saxons, Frenchy Normans, Vikings and their mixed-up descendants through the years, what with their incessant being brown and whatnot.

100 dollars to get the ball rolling.

[Hat-Tip Rhetorically Speaking]

Ruined by The Wire

I just can't enjoy t.v. anymore. I mean, I can watch re-runs of Quantum Leap or the odd British police procedural with something approaching enjoyment, but generally I find t.v. a barren wasteland of tedious simplistic drivel.
This wasn't always the case. I used to be able to sit through nearly any old shit. Nearly. I mean, I made it through Naked Jungle and the sight of Chegwin's junk without any irreversible trauma, but I drew the line at Hollyoaks. You have to maintain some standards.
But this was all in the before time. It may say 2009 on my Fluffy Puppy Calender, but in my heart it is the year 7 ATW. 7 years After The Wire came into being.
Yeah, yeah. The Wire's meant to be the Greatest TV Show Of All Time. You've been told over and over again. That's not really what this post is about. Well, maybe a little bit. Mostly, it's about the fact that I am finding it almost impossible to enjoy any of the other critically lauded American t.v. shows that the box is heaving with these days.

I abandoned Lost after 5 episodes when it became clear that the entire premise of the show was, well, bollocks. Plus I had a sneaking suspicion, one that according to My Life Partner apears to have been borne out as the programme has progressed, that the writers were making up the plot as they went along. Heroes appears to be suffering from the same affliction. Over-written and over-staffed and apparantly hell-bent on undermining it's own story with every new plot-twist, I managed to stick with it, under some duress, until early series 3. There's only so many identikit blonde super-heroes my brain can deal with before it shuts down from the tedium. Fringe is a dull X-Files rip-off. 24 a parody of itself and the people that draw inspiration from it. Mad Men is so slow-moving I appeared to black-out for an hour whenever it was on. Also, does Mad Men have anything like a plot? I'd appreciate knowing what it is, having struggled through the entire first series and some of the 2nd before conceding that I just don't get this show's appeal.

I like Sci-Fi and that, so you might suppose that I'd be all over Battlestar Galactica like a red-clad Amazonian Cylon hotty on a sweaty little english fella. Nope. Despite assurances from a range of people that BG is an intelligent multi-layered drama dealing with religion and politics and yadda yadda yadda, I was digging my nails into my palms out of irritation by episode 2. Two-thirds of the way into series one I yanked the dvd player from the wall and chucked it into the street. Anything to ensure I never have to hear the word 'frack' or witness a red-clad Amazonian Cylon hotty licking the face of a sweaty little english fella ever again.
My main problem with BG though is, well, it's not The Wire. It's well reported that The Wire is hard work. You have to make some effort to break through the seemingly impenetrable accents and colloquiallisms to get at the sweet and juicy stories beneath. You're expected to figure stuff out for yourself. And for fucks sake, pay attention because back-story and pertinent information is not going to be repeated over and over in every other scene. In BG, you get to sit through a recap every episode, followed by 25 minutes of making sure you get that the 2 folks named Adama are related. I'm sure that if I'd watched BG in the Before Time I'd have accepted it for the awesome show that everyone else seems to think it is. But I've been ruined by The Wire, T.v. is wasted on me now.

Try Sticking The Handbrake On

Really Mr McKeevor? This is what you're going with?

“A lot of that is based on people taking ill-informed positions. Demonstrations like that are extremely difficult to police and a lot of the criticism has been very unfair. There is a broad-ranging bandwagon rolling and it is of concern. There seems to be a disconnection between commentators in the media and the public, and what it is that police officers do.”

You don't think that recent murmurs of concern coming from the public and parts of the government over the style used to police the recent G20 protests may actually have some basis in fact at all? I don't know, maybe you've been too busy thinking up your little defensive speech there to take a squint at some of the videos, pictures and accounts that have been pouring into places like the IPCC. Maybe you should have a quick peek. You see, otherwise, it sounds a bit like you think whacking people in the face with riot shields, or dishing out back-handers to feisty bystanders or shoving sauntering men to the pavement is all a reasonable part of policing legal and overwhelmingly peaceful protest.

The fact that the metropolitan police described themseves as 'up for it' before G20, that officers were largely dressed like a cross between the racing car baddies from an A-Ha video and Deathstar storm-troopers, that officers concealed identifying numbers and covered their faces, that they were rather too free and easy with the old nightstick, surely that is actually relevant to some of what took place during the protests? It can't really be that difficult to imagine that footage of police misusing the Public Order Act to order the press to clear an area for no reason other than 'we say so' might leave people feeling a touch uneasy about the direction policing might be heading in? And looking beyond G20, I don't think that questioning the pre-emptive arrest of protestors constitutes unfair criticism.

I do actually have some sympathy for the police. I'm sure it is difficult to police a large, increasingly (if understandably) hostile crowd of people. And some of the videos and photographs alleging police brutality are pretty ridiculous, perhaps even lacking any merit at all. But let's face it, there wouldn't be a fucking 'anti-police bandwagon' for members of the public to jump on in the first place if the police hadn't provided the materials themselves and then got busy with cobbling the vehicle together.

(Hat-Tip Chicken Yoghurt)

Totally Unrelated Events

Sometimes you read a newspaper and you find stories like these;

The Telegraph, 2001

'Man of principles' dies of heart attack after robbery
....we are treating this as a murder inquiry.

Daily Mail, 2007

Pensioner dies of heart attack from shock of doorstep robbery
...The Metropolitan police have launched a murder investigation into her death

The Times, 2007

Children stoned man to death as he played with son, court is told
...A gang of children aged as young as 10 stoned a father who died of a heart attack as he played cricket with his son
...They are jointly responsible for this attack and jointly responsible for his death

I reckon PC Shovemaniac might want to get himself a lawyer.

Nothing To Fear

A month or so ago I planned on travelling into London to catch the end of the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library. I'd suddenly got it into my head that I just had to have a look at the Magna Carta before it got chucked into a furnace or wherever it is the government plans on taking it to be destroyed. I'd even talked my mum into coming with me and before I knew it a day out had been planned.
The day I intended to go was the day after the Convention On Modern Liberty and it was partly that event that had inspired me to attend the exhibition in the first place. It was also indirectly responsible for me abandoning all my plans and going to a craft fair instead.
A couple of nights before we were due to go, and after having read some of the articles and blog posts folks had written in the lead up to the convention, I suddenly became frightened about going to London. It wasn't a sudden horror of being blown up by terrorists on the underground that got my stomach churning. It wasn't the prospect of aggressive beggars that sent my heart into palpitations. Nope. I was terrified of being stopped and searched by the police.
Initially this fear seemed absolutely irrational. After all, I've nothing to hide, right? I don't have a beard. I prefer a small shoulder bag to a gigantic rucksack. I carry a mobile only under duress. Why on earth would the police be remotely interested in me?
But the thing that kept gnawing at me was that I do not own anything even vaguely resembling i.d. If I was stopped and searched at the train station, as I believe the scuffers now like to do I couldn't produce i.d. even if I wanted to. And I gradually convinced myself that the simple fact I wouldn't be carrying any identifying information would be enough to get me carted off to Paddington Green.
Of course, I was being ridiculous. Right? There's no law that actually compels me to carry i.d. whilst travelling (YET)But there's also no law against photographing drain covers and that still gets a fella arrested. There's also no law against lighting a fag near a police van but that apparently get's you smacked with a big stick, knocked to the ground and denied appropriate medical assistance.
The point is that the prospect of an unlikely, but still entirely possible encounter with the police, no matter how minor, left me feeling so fearful that I abandoned my plans. The possibility of not being able to defend perfectly run-of-the-mill aspects of my life in the event of police questioning worried me so much that I chose to avoid London altogether.
And if I could be put off simply travelling into London to go to a museum based on a few Henry Porter articles and youtube videos of people being threatened with arrest for asking questions, then imagine how much easier it will be to frighten people out of attending protests or other high profile events if you face the prospect of kettling, being arrested on spurious terrorism charges and "polite, proportionate and pragmatic" policing in the form of a baton in the back of the legs and a hard shove to the floor.