Facebook & the Pope's visit

There has been a great deal of froth about that pope fellow hasn't there? Personally, despite being the kind of "aggressive atheist" that the Pope's advisers are worried about, I think far too much of it has been anti-religious and anti-catholic rather than anti-pope.

(Note - I mean anti-pope, not antipope!)

Just look down your facebook newsfeed, and I'm sure there will be at least a couple of people spouting bile about the Pope's visit. Just to cheer you all up, here's the best linking of Facebook & the pope I've seen:



I've tried to be moderate - but to be fair I had a pretty snarky facebook status for Hu Jintao & King Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz too and b.) I'm fairly sure my (anti-pope rather than anti catholic) FB status is something that even if Herr Ratzinger saw, he's probably say something like, "ACH, JAH, ZE ENGLANDER IS GANZ CORREKT! ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! SPITFEUER!!!"

Well, maybe not the last bit.

For a more erudite critique of the Pope's visit, I'd refer you to Hobbes' Leviathan:

.. from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

The language also which they use, both in the churches and in their public acts, being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?

The fairies in what nation soever they converse have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.

The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and churchyards.

The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which, in what town soever they be erected, by virtue of holy water, and certain charms called exorcisms, have the power to make those towns, cities, that is to say, seats of empire. The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts, that domineer over the regions round about them.

The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.

The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief.

In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical.

When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.

The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.

The ecclesiastics take the cream of the land, by donations of ignorant men that stand in awe of them, and by tithes: so also it is in the fable of fairies, that they enter into the dairies, and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk.

What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story. But the ecclesiastics in their receipts accept of the same money that we do; though when they are to make any payment, it is in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.

To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this, that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets: so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion) consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications, upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture.

It was not therefore a very difficult matter for Henry the Eighth by his exorcism; nor for Queen Elizabeth by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yield him little fruit, may not return; or rather, an assembly of spirits worse than he enter and inhabit this clean-swept house, and make the end thereof worse than the beginning? For it is not the Roman clergy only that pretends the kingdom of God to be of this world, and thereby to have a power therein, distinct from that of the civil state. And this is all I had a design to say, concerning the doctrine of the POLITICS. Which, when I have reviewed, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my country.


The above is of course courtesy of eminent materialist philosopher Will Jones Thomas Hobbes.

See you all for the resumption of normal service on Friday!

The Financial Crisis 2 - now in 3d!

In many ways we've learned nothing from this financial crisis - or indeed from any previous one. As a victim of Bernie Madoff, I was particularly enraged to see loathsome sleazy two bit fraudster Azil Nadir crawl out from under his Cypriot rock last week.



Above: A sleazy old pervert.

The above Pervert (Asil Nadir) was a major player in the City in the 1980s and early 1990s. He took a small east London textile firm called Polly Peck, and through a series of takeovers and canny deals he turned it into a serious conglomerate. It owned a slice of the Del Monte fruit canning brand, a majority stake in Japanese electronics company Sansui, and also owned companies making colour televisions and Betamax video recorders.

Wait, Betamax? The man from delmonte, he say, bad investment.

Still, like shoulderpads, hairspray, and movies with volleyball & fighter jets, it was all very, very impressive in the 1980s.



Above: Some things that looked good in the eighties look less good now.

Shareholders flocked in, quicker than you could say "Asset Bubble". If you bought into Polly Peck early enough, say, in the year Top Gun came out, you could turn a £1,000 investment into £1m - a huge return even by the champagne-soaked Square Mile standards of the day.

But to cash in, you had to know when to sell.

The downturn started when Nadir tried, and failed, to take Polly Peck off the FTSE 100 and back into private ownership. The party was really over when the Serious Fraud Office raided the company that ran his family's financial affairs, called South Audley Management. Six weeks later, the administrators had been called in.

The UK authorities moved with their traditional speed, and it was just three short years later that Nadir was facing the prospect of 66 charges of theft and false accounting involving £34 million. Instead, he hopped on a flight to Paris, and was soon in Northern Cyprus - a territory with which Britain does not have an extradition treaty.

There he has stayed. Until last week.

He's now back.

Prosecution lawyers and Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigators must now trace 183 witnesses, some of whom may have died since Nadir fled. Zillions of documents have to be recovered. In the meantime, he remains on conditional bail under curfew and, despite his lawyers' objections, electronically tagged.

A £250,000 bail security has been deposited with the City of London magistrates, and he must reside at his £20,000-a-month rented Mayfair home, where he is subject to a midnight to 6am curfew. He must report each week to Chelsea police station, and has already surrendered his Turkish and British passports.

I think this is ludicrous. He should be in a cell. Preferably sharing a bunk with a glue sniffing violent delusional transexual rapist. Well, that's not quite fair. And Michael Barrymore isn't in prison anyway.

But the truth is, we definitely shouldn't be letting Nadir keep his house, and generally lord it up while on remand.

Why?

Because fraud is a rational crime. It's not as though you turn around and steal £36 million through a complicated share swapping scheme in a moment of passion. Deterrence works well on rational criminals - especially ones in it for the money, who understand delayed gratification. If you think, well, "even if I get caught, I may only do seven or eight years in what amounts to a poor quality golf-club", then it's not nearly enough of a penalty to make them think twice.

On top of the deterrence factor, we treat white-collar criminals far too well - we as a society do not extract nearly enough retribution from them. The damage they wreak is enormous. The cost isn't in millions of pounds - it's in marriages broken up, houses lost, suicides, failed businesses, misery for thousands. The societal cost is at least as great as for acts like robbery - and robbery carries a minimum 20 year sentence.

Of course, this kind of white collar crime is going on all the time. No, really.

For example, recently JP Morgan won an award for providing the following service:

The process of rehypothecation allows institutions - in many cases hedge fund clients - to extract greater value from their collateral by reusing this collateral elsewhere in the market, increasing liquidity and reducing collateral costs.

Against this backdrop, JPMorgan's forward-thinking Rehypothecation Program stood out, directly addressing market misgivings regarding the practice while simultaneously allowing the practice to be safely extended to the benefit of clients. Winner of both this year's Chair's Choice and Innovation in Custody and Securities Services, JPMorgan Rehypothecation Program supports the multi-asset class, unlimited re-use of collateral.

Yes, unlimited re-use of collateral. Or, in other words, taking out as many loans as you can on a single asset. Disastrous? Short-Sighted? Of course. Sadly, they are unlikely to land up in jail - and lets face it, even if they do, they can probably evade justice as easily as Azil Nadir probably will.

Some people I know said to me recently that they didn't feel we didn't get enough concessions out of the banks during the financial crisis. To them I say, "don't worry - there'll be another one along in a minute".

Duke of York's (Eton) Mess

I attended a public school called the Duke of York's Royal Military School for a while, back in the 90s. Recently, the Duke's came third from bottom of the school league tables with an average pass rate substantially lower than that of the average state school.

Ahem. So, here's the public schoolboy dessert from a graduate of school whose pupils are very unlikely to ever threaten the global financial order.

Duke of York's Mess




Preparation time: less than 15 mins
Cooking time: As quickly as you can tip it into the glasses.
Serves 6


Ingredients

A big bag of pre-made meringue nests - at least 10 individual nests.
Pint double cream
Vanilla essence
2 heaped tablespoons caster sugar
Punnet of strawberries, sliced
Punnet of Raspberries
1 teaspoon good-quality balsamic vinegar
A half glass of port
Fresh mint leaves

This is a cheating version, but a.) cheating is all part of the public school ethos and b.) this is a super quick dessert

Whip the double cream with the vanilla and 1 tablespoon of your sugar until you have soft peaks. Don’t over-whip it or the cream will go thick and cloddy – you want it to stay light and delicate.

Take half the strawberries and half the raspberries and put them into a bowl with the rest of the sugar and the balsamic vinegar & port. Mash up with a fork.

Serve Eton mess in individual glasses. To assemble it, first, smash up your meringues. I find putting them into a bag and swinging it into a wall a few time produces a nice and suitably random mix, with some shattered to dust, and some almost whole and crispy.

Make SURE you hide the evidence of the pre-bought meringues - real public school guests/girlfriends will look down on you for not having your butler make your own meringues. On an aga.

Fold the vanilla cream and mushed-up fruit together till well mixed, then sprinkle in the rest of the fruit and fold again. Layer your crushed meringues and fruity cream into your serving dish or glasses, then sprinkle with the mint leaves as garnish.

Put everything together right at the last minute so that the meringue won’t go all soft.

Serve while commenting on an article you just read in the Economist on why poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough in Chinese slave-mills.

Carnival causes blogger to lose focus.

I swear, the peacock came right for me. It was huge. As big as a man. Full of the demon rum.




Apologies for the lack of a post (again!) on here.

It's easy to get out of the rhythm of blogging - this week the Notting Hill Carnival intervened. Still, I'll be back on the case soon, I promise!

Just one more snap from NHC to give you non-londoners a feel for it:

No Post this Week.

Due to an outbreak of weddings & charming American guests, there will be no blog this week. Congrats to Hannah, Phil, Rachel & Allan on their fabulous weddings. Normal service will resume on Friday!

Africa, War & Child Soldiers you've never heard of

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post - it seemed rude to write personal stuff when I had 9,000 words of work to produce. Fortunately, that's all out of the way, so now I can catch up. I assume most of you read it sneakily on Monday mornings at work anyway!

So, this week, in between producing large reports for work, I was bloody annoyed that a war crimes tribunal is devolving into what amounts to a bitchy fight between two talentless slags.

I am of course, talking about the Trial of Charles Taylor. He's currently on trial for a wide variety of assorted war crimes - most of which feature a recurring theme of recruiting of child soldiers, then either supplying them so badly they are forced to loot and/or commit cannibalism, all the while using them to guard the slaves digging your diamond mines &/or rape camps.



Above: Maybe if the child soldiers were white, there'd be more coverage.

The world's news media has decided that two not-even-that-famous any more celebs arguing over what happened at a particularly squalid dinner party is more important than the trial of man who has been accused of-

• Five counts of war crimes: specifically, terrorizing civilians, murder, outrages on personal dignity, cruel treatment, and looting;

• Five counts of crimes against humanity: specifically, state-sanctioned murder, rape, sexual slavery, mutilating and beating, and enslavement; and

• One count of other serious violations of international humanitarian law: recruiting and using child soldiers.

To quote one other witness, Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, one of Taylor's erstwhile military commanders, "We executed everybody – babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all." Taylor had encouraged his commandants - usually former child soldiers themselves - to cannibalise victims, in exchange for $200 of "cigarette money".

It is the prominence given to this squalid dinner party compared to other testimony from the trial that feels odd.

Both Sky News and the BBC News channel cleared their schedules for over an hour and a half, thus devoting more coverage to Naomi Campbell than to the whole of the rest of Taylor's trial since 2007.

In fact, Sky have not covered any of the other 90 witnesses – not even Taylor himself. The Guardian website & the good old Beeb led on the trial when the former president testified, but other outlets - ranging from the Today programme, Channel 4 News & even debaters-bible The Economist have all ignored the trial while in session.

This is at all surprising, but nowhere near as shocking as the lack of attention given to another child-soldier fuelled conflict, that has been rumbling on since the overthrow of appalling dictator of Congo Mbutu Sese Seko in 1997.

Congo's history often seems like an uninterrupted tale of woe. After decades of often brutal foreign rule, first as the private possession of King Leopold II of Belgium and then as a Belgian colony, Congo won its independence in 1960. But within months its first elected Prime Minister had been murdered by Belgium- and U.S.-backed opponents because of his growing ties to the Soviet Union, an assassination that eventually opened the way for army general Mobutu Sese Seko to grab power.

A U.S. favorite during the cold war, Mobutu presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in African history, siphoning off billions from state-owned companies and allowing most of the country to languish in poverty & disorder.

In 1996 neighboring Rwanda and Uganda jointly invaded Congo to eliminate the Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe, that had been responsible for the Rwandan genocide and were hiding in Congo's eastern forests. As the invading armies advanced across the country, Mobutu fled, and the invaders installed a small-time rebel leader named Laurent Kabila as President.

But things got worse. In 1998, after Kabila got too friendly with the Interahamwe, Uganda and Rwanda invaded Congo again, triggering what became known as Africa's first world war. The scramble for power and resources dragged in forces from at least eight African neighbors, spawned a myriad of Congolese factions and set off campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Kabila, as nasty and corrupt as his predecessor, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards in 2001. His son Joseph, 29, has ruled since.

In Congo, a nation of 63 million people in the heart of Africa, a peace deal signed in 2006 was supposed to halt the war between nine countries, in addition to 20 separate private armies of indigenous Congolese. In short, you probably needed more space in the signing box than for the average, standard form peace treaty.

The war produced a record of human devastation unmatched in recent history. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since 1998, making it the world's most lethal conflict since World War II. But you never even heard about it.

The suffering of Congo's people continues. Fighting persists in the east, where rebel holdouts loot, rape and murder. In particular, I was personally involved with a project to protect, arm & train the Northern Pygmy alliance from being preyed upon by militias who regarded them as "subhuman" - with some believing that eating pygmy flesh can confer magical powers. But you never heard about that, either.

The Congolese army, which was meant to be both symbol and protector in the reunited country, has cut its own murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing hundreds of villages. Even deadlier are the side effects of war, the scars left by years of brutality that disfigure Congo's society and infrastructure. The country is plagued by bad sanitation, disease, malnutrition and dislocation. Routine and treatable illnesses have become weapons of mass destruction.

According to the IRC, which has conducted a series of detailed mortality surveys over the past ten years, 1,250 Congolese still die every day because of war-related causes--the vast majority succumbing to diseases and malnutrition that wouldn't exist in peaceful times. In many respects, the country remains as broken, volatile and dangerous as ever, which is to say, among the very worst places on earth.

Yet Congo's troubles rarely make news headlines, and the country is often low on international donors' lists of places to help. After Sudan, Congo is the second largest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, a land so vast and ungovernable that it has long been perceived as the continent's ultimate hellhole, the setting for Joseph Conrad's 1899 book Heart of Darkness.

It is in part because of that malign reputation--and because the nation's feckless rulers have consistently reinforced it--that the world has been willing to let Congo bleed. Since 2000, the U.N. has spent billions on its peacekeeping mission in Congo, which is known by its French acronym, MONUC, and it is at the moment the largest U.N. force anywhere in the world. However, the troops number just 17,500, a tiny force to secure a country almost the size of the EU. Many of the battalions are besieged in their bases by the resurgent militias. But you didn't hear about that.

In February, the U.N. and aid groups working in Congo asked for $682 million in humanitarian funds. So far, they have received just $94 million--or $9.40 for every person in need. By comparison, Oxfam estimates that Haiti appeal last year raised $550 for each person. But you didn't hear about that - and they don't have a former member of the Fugees running for President to make headlines - so you probably won't.

In short, the message from The Hague today is you can have as many child soldiers as you like, but if you really want to impress the 21st-century western media, then no matter how brutal your crimes you do need to have a celebrity on board.

Depressing. What we need is a celeb to take up the cause...

Get Him To The Greek Opening - watch more funny videos

Of course, if you are interested in Africa, I can't recommend a better blog than the excellent Will Jones' "My name is not Muzungu"...

African Panga Stew

This is a stew recipe taught to me by an old friend, who I used to debate with.

He was a Ugandan, and had spent some of his childhood as an abducted child soldier in the Lord's Resistance Army. There are few University Debaters who are genuinely imposing; very few who you really believe when they talk about the problems of tiny African countries. However, there is something very convincing about having a 6'6" Ugandan who's eyes wordlessly proclaimed "real machete experience" telling you the way it is.

By the way, he advised getting a Panga, rather than a machete - they are bigger, even scarier knives that look a bit like this:



For a team from a tiny university in the middle of a glum swamp, we did pretty well. But there would always be a point where we'd have to discuss Africa, and then things would go horribly wrong. Some bespectacled Oxbridge gnome would insist that the problems of Africa were easily solved by a more neo-liberal economic outlook or something, which would prompt from my debate partner "the speech", as we called it.

This would usually start with the phrase "You - white man - want to tell ME how to solve the problems of AFRICA?!?!?" Then there'd be a story about growing up in the third world, told with a frankly terrifying chopping action with his hands. We'd often lose that round, usually at a crucial part of the tournament. Long on charisma and gut-wrenching terror, short on analysis & facts, tragically.

Looking back, I am impressed by the integrity of the judges - I'd have given him a string of firsts, just to avoid the possible bloodsoaked freakout on telling him he came last. Usually, after we got back to Bristol, the gentleman in question would cook me this stew - based on a recipe his mother taught him, improvised from easily available UK ingredients.

It's delicious, warming and spicy - it also spends a large amount of time unattended on the hob, so it's perfect for entertaining at short notice, or alternatively for saying "I can't believe the judge in round four gave us a third!"

Panga Stew

Serves 4

Olive oil
2 red onions
4 cloves garlic
6 sausages – about 400g
One pack of Supermarket Chorizo
Cheating lazy chillies - English Provender company does the best, in my opinion.
A glass of dry sherry, vermouth or Dry White wine - my chum was quite the Sherry drinker, oddly enough.
5 or 6 decent-sized tomatoes - or a couple of cans of tomatoes.
2 x 400g tins chick peas
small bunch parsley



1.) Warm the olive oil in a deep pan. I use a cast iron casserole. Peel the onions, roughly chop them and add them to the oil, stirring to coat them, then letting them cook. Peel the garlic, slice it (with a panga, if you like) and stir it into the onions. Cook until the onions are soft.

2.)Cut each sausage into about three fat chunks. Mix these in with the softened onions then add a teaspoon or so of the chillies. Then stir in the chorizo. Pour in a glass of dry sherry, vermouth or white wine and bring it to an enthusiastic bubble. Chop the tomatoes roughly, add them and bring them to the boil, then add the chickpeas, drained of their canning liquor and rinsed, then pour in a can of water, then season with salt and black pepper. Bring to the boil then turn down to a simmer and leave to cook, slowly, half covered with a lid for 45 minutes.

3.)Stir from time to time, and check the liquor levels. What you want to end up with is a brick-red sauce with a wonderful spiciness from the chillies and chorizo. Chop the parsley, but only roughly, then stir into the stew.



Serve in shallow bowls, making certain everyone gets a fair bit of sausage. Otherwise, there may be violence.

Porn; or, the CPS - keeping you safe from ...yourself?

It's been pointed out to me that my blog, while well written, could use some search engine optimisation. That's why I'm going to write about Porn. Steamy, dirty, nasty porn. The sort of thing you might buy in this wonderfully named shop in Soho:



If you're not a fan of Porn, please feel free to not read this article. Instead, you can click on this link - it leads to a video of a baby panda sneezing. (Honestly. It really does. You do trust me, right?)

Of course, if you're not a fan of Porn, that's statistically unlikely.

Porn isn't a small business. It's a major industry. Pornography - particularly on the internet -is now estimated to generate around $14bn worldwide, roughly the same amount as Hollywood's US box office receipts. The US leads the world in pornography (USA! USA!); about 211 new films are produced every week. The Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and most of those in the trade are perfectly respectable citizens. Admittedly, they tend to have more surgery & fake tan than most, but they pay their taxes, and are citizens just like everyone else. As are the consumers of their products.

It's not just an American phenomenon. In the UK, we spend more money at strip clubs than we do in the West End, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined.

Of course, there's all kinds of other sexual stuff on the internet that you don't have to pay for. Indeed, one of the people I used to work with on Bizarre magazine used to say "you aren't a real pervert if there's a pay-site for what you're into".

On websites like deviantart and in chatrooms like mIRC, you can find pretty much any fetish you like. While working my stint at Bizarre, I did see some stuff that made even me blanch - from women who liked to have sex with men dressed in werewolf costumes, to men who were unaccountably attracted to balloons. There are even whole websites devoted to people who find Sarah Palin attractive.

People who are into this sort of thing are, by definition, perverts. But is that a bad thing? Sadly, the UK's CPS prosecutors seem to think so, and don't worry, they are "protecting" us. Mostly, it seems, from ourselves.

Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it illegal to use the internet to send or receive a message or communication which is any of the following:

- grossly offensive
- indecent
- obscene
- menacing
- annoying
- inconveniencing

Yes, saying annoying things on the internet is illegal in England.



I'll just give you a second to digest that. Just have a quick flip through the Guardian Comment is Free while you think about it. Then call the Police, and have the writer of this article arrested.

Of course, I don't really want him arrested. He's wrong, not a criminal. Free speech anyone?

Clearly, the people who framed this law should probably not spend five minutes on any internet forum, or read the comment pages of any major newspaper - indeed, reading the speeches of contenders in the Labour leadership contest is probably an absolute no-go area for most people, as in many ways, offence is in the eye of the beholder.

Of course, this could just be an obscure law no-one cares about - there are plenty of those on the statute books. But the CPS are pushing this one to the hilt. For example, this year a clearly jokey tweet was held to be "menacing" under this act, and the tweeter was sent to prison. Ridiculous.

However, an even more egregious case has come to my attention.

The saga began last summer when, following an anonymous tip-off, police raided Andrew Holland's home looking for indecent images of children. They found none, but they did find two clips, one involving a woman purportedly having sex with a tiger, and one which is believed to have depicted sado-masochistic activity between consenting adults.

Holland's was charged with possessing extreme porn, and denied access to his children as a result, despite the fact that there was no suggestion anything paedophilic was involved. Would this happen to a Burglar? To a fraudster? No, of course not - but once a "crime" is defined as sexual, all rights go out the window.

In a first court appearance in January of this year, the "tiger porn" charge was dropped when prosecuting counsel discovered the volume control and at the end of the 7 second clip heard the animated tiger turn to camera and say: "That beats doing adverts for a living" - it was an cartoon spoof of Tony the Tiger from the Frosties cereal adverts.

The clip was therefore deemed to be "unrealistic" and out of scope as far as extreme porn legislation was concerned. The court then turned its attention to the allegedly more serious clip involving adult interaction.

In March, following advice from his legal team, Holland pleaded guilty to possessing one extreme porn clip and was stunned to be told that he might face a prison sentence. Holland then spoke to members of Consenting Adult Action Network and sexual rights organisation Backlash, who put him in touch with their legal adviser, Myles Jackman of Audu and Co in King's Cross, London.

Jackman, a solicitor specialising in extreme pornography offences (I bet that is a great business card), advised Holland that contrary to previous advice, there were grounds for pleading not guilty. On this basis, Holland took the unusual step of applying to the court for permission to "vacate his plea". This is a technical device whereby an individual may go back on a guilty plea at any time before sentencing.

In May a judge granted Holland leave to vacate his plea from guilty back to not guilty. Holland was therefore due to stand trial again. The CPS, however, declined to offer any evidence on the day (yeah, fucking it up for free as usual), and the matter is at an end - at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the taxpayer. The CPS has not yet commented on this matter, or on the fact that on each charge, it was not until the day of the court appearance that they decided the evidence to hand was inadequate.

I assume putting out a statement saying "Basically, we are really, really incompetent" is just too humiliating.

Of course, had Mr.Holland not contacted Backlash in the first place he would have been sentenced for an offence which other people have not only escaped prosecution for, but in fact have made fortunes over in the Libel courts. Yes, I'm thinking of you, Max Mosely.

Why should we criminalise relatively odd porn if we don't criminalise the sex acts themselves? Of course we should criminalise some sex acts; but if the acts are legal (or impossible), why is it right to criminalise seeing images of them? I just don't see a harm to it; certainly not one which justifies spending a fortune and hugely limiting liberty. Fortunately, Mr. Holland has since be reunited with his children.

Other cases have not ended so well. For example, Kent Police are in the process of using the Obscene Publications Act as a means to prosecute an individual, Gavin Smith, of Swanscombe for publishing obscenity in respect of a log of a private online chat he had with another individual. This case marks an extension of the law into an area that its originators could never have envisaged – text chat. Most internet users would regard it as person-to-person conversation.

The legal principle at stake here is whether internet chat constitutes "publication" in the ordinary sense of the word, or can be treated as private conversation. If the former is the conclusion, then anyone with even a passing interest in unusual sexual fantasies may need to be very careful in respect of any online conversations they have in future.

IRC will no longer be quite the refuge of the bizarre and the outlandish it once was. In my opinion, that's a shame. There's a case for the state to legislate to outlaw some things - but private conversation and private, harmless fantasies should not be one of them.

So, in short, we live in a country were the CPS are willing to prosecute a man for being a bit kinky, but not willing to prosecute a man who beat someone to death. Not for the first time, I do worry about the country.

Juicy Italian Sausage, spurting with thick, white sauce - Oo-err missus!

Well, I need an innuendo filled recipe to fit in with the above. Hmmm. Hard.

(See what I did there?)

Italian Sausage in a White Wine & Cream sauce


What you need



12 Italian Sausages (.com?)
One Red onion, sliced
Half a bottle of wine
One tub of single cream
Half a punnet of mushrooms, sliced
300g of Penne Pasta
Olive oil

One large pan for the sauce, one large pan for the pasta

Cooking time: 30 minutes (15 minutes prep, 15 minutes cooking)

Serves:4

Method

1.) Slice the skin of each sausage, and slide the skin off, leaving you with a large pile of sausage meat. Bring the pasta pan to boil while you do this, but do not add the pasta yet.



2.) Add the onion to the pan, and fry in the oil until the onion becomes tender. Then crumble in the sausage meat. Fry the sausage meat until all the flesh looks cooked; try to avoid it forming balls or clumps by vigorous stirring.



3.) Add the pasta to the boiling water.

4.) Add the mushrooms in to the sauce mixture, stirring them in until they begin to take on a golden yellow hue.

5.) Add the wine. I've said use a half bottle, but you generally want to cover the meat rather than drown it. It's generally a judgement call. Simmer this for about five minutes, until most of the alcohol has burned off the wine, but a reasonable amount of liquid remains.



6.) Turn down the heat, then stir in the cream and the basil in to the sauce.



7.) Drain the pasta, then stir the pasta into the sauce.

8.) Serve to middle class dinner party you have invited your cute-but-sleazy bohemian friend to. Orgy optional.



Hope you enjoy it!

Savage Cuts

Lots of people this week are lamenting the end of the UK Film Council.

I'm a fully paid up cinephile - I'm probably in the cinema twice a week, splitting my time between my local beret-and-turtleneck arthouse (The Curzon on the Kings Road) & the much more low rent picture palace just along from it, which shows an assortment of hollywood shlockbusters - I'm sure I'll trot off there to see this cinematic maserpiece:



As I write, Facebook, Twitter, an online petition and the letters page of The Guardian are alive with calls to save the UKFC. Am I disappointed by the end of the UK film council? No, because it represents exactly the sort of cuts that should be made.

To understand last week’s move, you need to know that last August Labour culture minister Sion Simon proposed a merger of the UKFC with the British Film Institute, the country’s other big film body, which manages the National Film Archive, runs BFI Southbank and organises the London Film Festival. The plan (despite Labour's shrieks of disgust this week) was to cut costs and prevent overlap. Neither did it help relations that the UKFC’s execs were on far higher salaries compared to those doing similar jobs at the BFI, but were to be the ones who were to be kept.

The BFI were horrified. They were going to be subsumed into an ugly New Labour quango, which was obsessed with pumping lottery money projects like Harry Potter and then claiming it as a "British Triumph". To claim the Harry Potter film franchise is a British Triumph is akin to claiming Monopoly is just like real bond trading. It looks sort of like it on the surface, but really is nothing of the sort. All the money, all the profit, flowed back to the USA.

People are talking about £15 million pounds being removed from UK film funding - that's not correct. The £15 million figure was amount of Lottery funds disbursed by the UKFC - minus the £6 million plus combined staffing cost of the 75 people who work for the UKFC.

The lottery money - which was often blown on shit films like 'Sex Lives of the Potato Men', 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' and 'The Parole Officer' is still there. It's just now in the hands of the eminently more reliable BFI - who have a far better track record than the UKFC - ‘Dog Soldiers’, '28 days later' & ‘Slumdog Millionaire' all started with BFI seed money.

Certainly, the UKFC did have a hand in some good films - notably 'Hunger' - but for the record, its last disbursement was for two street dance films in 3d, both of which utterly bombed at the box office. Of course, Hunger bombed at the box office in comparison to Harry Potter too, but it had the saving grace of being artistically brilliant.

So, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the UKFC were not. The french new wave, the UKFC was not. UK film funding has not dropped; we fired £6 million pounds worth of bureaucrats. This is no reason to weep. We need to take this sort of action across all the areas of the budget.

On this topic, the treasury recently set up a website, by which you could suggest ideas for cuts that the government hadn't thought of. Nice idea, but predictably, it had to be removed, as it swiftly filled up with lunatic racist rants - as anyone who has ever posted a youtube video or read the brilliant Speak your Branes would have been able to explain.

In the absence of the website, some of the things I'd like to see cut are:

Civil Service Pay

The Civil service is ludicrously bloated. There are 525,000 of them, out of 6 million public sector employees. Civil servants are on incremental pay scales, which rise automatically. They need a pay freeze. Now. If it was down to me, I'd also impose a 15% salary cut on all civil service salaries over £25,000, with some sort of phase in at the margin.

On top of that, there are hundreds of civil servants languishing in non-jobs, because they are too expensive to make redundant. Why? Because of the crippling cost of making them redundant. Civil servants have one of the most lucrative redundancy deals in the country, a system which Labour tried but failed to scrap. The terms of their redundancy deal is extraordinarily generous, with many civil servants eligible to receive about six years’ pay if they are made compulsorily redundant.

For example, a 46 year old earning £40,000 who had been a civil servant for 25 years could enjoy a cash payment of about 6.2 years’ salary on retirement, or around £300,000.

We literally can't afford to sack them, but cutting this to an (eminently fair) one year's salary as redundancy payment would save 6 Billion pounds over 10 years. If the unions strike, will the public support them in claiming this outrageous gilded perk? I doubt it.

Second, the civil service offers a pretty ridiculous pension scheme. Contributions to the premium scheme are only 3.5%, but the employer (us) is charged another 22% on top - and we have to maintain that pension, index linked, until death. We should renegotiate their contracts, making it clear they can quit now, or accept a deal which is fair to the country.

No Tax cuts

There are some taxes I loathe. Inheritance tax in particular. Sadly, the truth is, we can't really afford any tax cuts until the titanic deficit is cleared. Don't worry, in 2015 I'll start banging on about why it's unfair.

Means test all Benefits

Means test all benefits, especially child benefit. There's a whole plethora of universal benefits like this - for example, a couple of my friends who are reasonably well off recently had a baby, and the government sent them child toothbrushes and a teddy bear - plus they claim the £20 a week in child benefit.

This is a couple who aren't short a bob or two - he's an oil engineer and she's an oncologist. There is absolutely no way that people earning £100,000 a year should be entitled to free toothbrushes, teddies or cheques. This isn't an isolated case - other deeply middle class friends get child benefit, and I see no reason that the state should subsidise people buying Glyndebourne tickets (or whatever else they spend the money on).

Benefits are meant as a safety net, not a perk you get for citizenship.

Pensions

Equally, there's no way people with over £300,000 in assets should get the old age pension - why not means test it? Secondly, why don't we raise the retirement age to 70 for people currently 30 or under? All of us are of the "screwed generation" who had to pay to go to university - this has inculcated in us a feeling that we cannot rely on the state. We will have forty years to prepare for retirement. The saving from pushing our pension entitlement back would be tremendous - billions and billions of pounds.

Citizen allowance

There are 55 benefits for being out of work or on low income at the moment. ESA, JSA, New Deal, LCA, Income Support, ALA, Incapacity benefit, tax credits, housing benefit. Every single one has an office of bloodsuckers assessing claims, while picking their nose on the telephone.

Why not replace all these benefits with a single welfare payment to all unemployed people (pensioners, the sick, the incapable, the lazy - everyone), regardless of why they are unemployed? It would let us get rid of literally thousands of assessors and would have the tremendous advantage of greatly simplifying the benefits system, making access to it easier for those in need.

This was actually one of the quite a few parts of the Green manifesto I really liked, but more on that some other day...

Defence Cuts

Something has to give. We aren't a great power anymore. If we want nuclear arms, conventional weapons will have to go. If we want to maintain a decent conventional airforce, army and navy, our ocean-going holocaust delivery systems are going to have to be scaled back or cut altogether.

Another discussion for another blog post I think.

Centralisation of all Services for all Local Authority Back Offices

This isn't a very sexy cut. There aren't any movies with machine guns or aircraft carriers or middle class people using benefits to buy champagne & opera tickets. But it is vital.

Every local & county council up and down the country has rooms and rooms full of worthless pen pushers in Billing departments, Accounting departments, IT departments, HR departments & Procurement Services.

These are broad areas whereby each local authority manages the services independently (read:badly) and where the jobs are the same but managed locally by local authorities within local budgets. I can't see any reason why most of the above cannot be centralised. In particular, centralised procurement on major contracts would yield huge savings.

Conclusion

These cuts are probably further than the coalition will go - but they should be pushing this far.

These cuts are relatively painless; which will be crucial for maintaining the mandate of the electorate. To maintain support, the coalition has to cut the deficit, while not letting the axe fall on the weakest in society. We have to maintain the NHS; we can't let benefits fall too far.

In short, don't be distracted by all the noise around the UK Film Council - it was a room full of bureaucrats. More of those need to go.

Chicken - With savage cuts

With all this theme of savage cutting, I think it's probably wise to do a recipe that a.) involves cutting and b.) is suitable for these frugal times.

Chicken is getting increasingly expensive, especially if you're going for leg or breast meat, or organic birds.

I find a much cheaper alternative to buying large amounts of chicken precut is to joint your own chicken. This also means you can roast it all together remarkably quickly, with the bones in for flavour.

There's also a part of me which rebels at the idea of getting meat without realising it comes from an animal - I think far too few people actually think about what they are eating. Chicken is particularly bad for this; I often end up buying chicken breast, and can't help but compare the pink, skinless things under the cellophane to buying a tray of baby rodents or something.



Above: Less like a rodent



Quick Roast Chicken with Savage cuts

Preparation time: 15 minutes the first time, 5 minutes with practice
Cooking time: 30 minutes



Ingredients:

1 Chicken
Olive Oil
2 Cloves of Garlic
A Lemon
A glass of White wine
A handful of Basil

Tools:

One big sharp knife
A Roasting tin
A lack of squeamishness

Preparation:

1.)Cut through the skin between the leg and the breast. Feel like a manly hunter gatherer as you butcher the beast.

2.)Bend the leg back as far as possible, so the end of the leg bone pops out from the socket. Feel powerful as you snap the creature's bones with one mighty blow. Just like being the Hulk.

3.) Cleave the leg away from the body with one mighty blow. Repeat on the other side. Imagine you are a Samurai while doing this.

4.) Cut through the joints connecting the drumsticks to the thighs and separate the two different bits. Just like being Quincy, MD.

5.) Back to Samurai mode, and slice off the wings.

6.) To serve the breasts off the bone, cut either side of the breastbone & then carefully remove the breast meat from the bones with your sharp knife. If serving on the bone, turn the chicken over and cut through the centre of the breastbone to separate the breasts. Yes, breasts. This is a manly dish. Phoar, etc.

Voila! You have 8 pieces of chicken, for far less money than you'd otherwise spend. If you like, you can even use the carcass to make stock, but we'll stay away from that for now.



Cooking:

1.) Season the Chicken, add your handful of dried basil, and push garlic under the chicken skin, then and put the pieces in the roasting tin.

2.) Pour enough olive oil over the chicken to ensure all the pieces are lightly covered - enough so a shallow pool forms.

3.) Quarter the lemon, squeeze lemon juice all over the chicken, then bung in the lemon bits.



4.)Roast for thirty five minutes on gas mark 6/200 degrees.

5.) Remove from the oven, tip in a glass of wine (pictured wine is very firmly Eastern European, called something like Château T-34), and heat the roasting tin over a low heat on the hob until the wine bubbles. Then remove and serve with a green salad or vegetables.



Delicious, quick, and probably cheaper than a Kiev.

CPS Pusillanimity, Police Brutality & the future of Demonstrations

A few weeks ago, when the story broke in the Daily Telegraph about a senior CPS prosecutor being bribed £20,000 to throw a case. As a former criminal barrister, I cynically remarked "I wouldn't have bothered; in my experience they normally fuck it up for free."

Sadly, I have been proven entirely right by the CPS's absolutely farcical handling of the Ian Tomlinson Case.

There are three problems here - the way Police forces have become corrupt, the deeply unbalanced way the CPS is handling cases, and the impact this has on demonstrations.



Above: The TSG engage in some modern community policing.

Police Brutality

There is a huge problem with the Police - particularly with the Metropilitan Police's Territorial Support Group (TSG), the "elite" unit trained to deal with "Domestic Extremism & terrorism". The conflation of these two things under Ian Blair, Labour's favourite Policeman - legitimate civil disobedience and protest mixed with terrorist outrage - has turned this unit into a self-righteous bunch of thugs.

This poison has seeped into other police forces too, as the TSG provide training to other forces to deal with this sort of incident.

According to The Job, the Met's in-house magazine, TSG officers - who are known as the 'tough guys and girls' of the Met - can be identified by a "U" on shoulder epaulette numbers.

Of course, the question is, can you identify them? When a police officer hides his face & removes his identification number, how can you tell who is who? Speaking off the record to people I know in the Met, there is prima facie evidence of a conspiracy - that the TSG are regularly instructed by their immediate superiors to systematically hide all identification.

Of course, it's not the people behind desks giving these "orders". It's sergeants, the people actually going out in the vans, with the batons and the riot gear. It reminds me of my father telling me that in Northern Ireland, the "policy" was to always shoot first, and then everyone in the platoon would "confirm" you gave the mandated three warnings.

This is creating a huge problem for civic society. Not since the Life on Mars days of the 1970s have we seen Police corruption on this scale. Policing doesn't work unless people respect and support the Police - and increasingly, the actions of the TSG are turning more and more people against them.

I worked with a director at the BBC who exposed lots of the Police Corruption in the 1970s. At its root, he explained, there was always a conviction that amongst the Police that they were doing the right thing. They felt they knew who had done it - who the villains were. That all they had to do was beat a confession out of this scumbag, plant some evidence here or there and justice was done. That attitude was ultimately what lead to the murder of Blair Peach, by the fore-runners of the TSG.

That is exactly the problem with the TSG. They consider themselves an elite; they are almost certainly opposed to everything the protesters stand for. They don't consider any of this to be wrong. The reason they keep doing it is not because they are evil - it's much worse. The reason they keep doing it is because they think they are right. All these petty things like displaying badge numbers, the IPCC and so on, are just lefty-liberal concepts that "get in the way of justice" in their eyes.

I know many police officers and have a great deal of respect for them - they are doing a dificult job. However, like others in positions of trust such as teachers, doctors or catholic priests, 'rogue' squads of police officers leave a terrible stench - especially when the establishment closes ranks to protect them.

I say rogue, but this attitude goes right through the Met - it has been rotted to the core by Ian Blair's tenure. You only need look at Blair's own statements about Jean Charles de Menezes - that he would not revoke the shoot to kill policy, his assertion that the Brazilian was the 53rd victim of the 7/7 bombers & his statement that if Mr. de Menezes had been a terrorist, his men "would have got medals".

This is madness of the first order. Firstly, if Raoul Moat's victims had been Hitler, Goering & Ming the Merciless, then he too would have got a medal. This does not change the fact that instead of those individuals, he shot innocent people. Just like the Met's officers did. The refusal of the high command to accept they did anything wrong is absolutely damning, and sends a terrible message to the rank and file.

The very least that should happen now is that the internal police enquiry should find a reason to sack this officer without compensation or pension, and while they are at it they should look at all the officers who removed their ID and take action against them.

The Metropolitan Police Website says "All employees of the MPS, whether they wear a uniform or not, are in a position of responsibility and trust. As such they should be law-abiding citizens with proven integrity." It is about time the started acting like that.

One law for them, One law for us.

There are countless cases where the CPS has taken decisions quickly, in equally confusing circumstances. For example, in this case involving a similar set of facts.

But the CPS seems to take leave of its senses when it comes to prosecuting the Police. How can it be fair for Sergeant Delroy Smellie walk free after savagely beating someone without cause while a 19 year old dental student with no criminal record gets 2 years in jail for throwing an empty plastic bottle at the Israeli embassy.

It defies belief that bungling in this case has led to a criminal getting off scot-free. A corrupt police force needs to be taken to task; clearly, the CPS are not up to the job, having serially dropped the ball.

Protesting in the Future.

As I mentioned above, the Ian-Blair-inculcated attitudes of the TSG have spread far and wide, through the TSG being deployed as trainers to other forces. They have led to minor incidents, like this young man having to stand up to his rights to more serious issues, such the police covering up a massive overspend by pretending 70 officers were injured by protesters at the Kingsnorth power station, when in fact all the "injuries" sustained were totally preposterous - for example, "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured by seatbelt while sitting alone in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back".

These injuries were trotted out to try to justify a massive police presence. All of the apparatus of anti-terror surveillance was trotted out.

This is all down to a wilful attempt, aided and abetted by the previous government, to define all dissent as "domestic extremism".

The term "domestic extremism" is now common currency within the police. It is a phrase which shapes how forces seek to control demonstrations.

There is no official or legal definition of the term. Instead, the police have made a vague stab at what they think it means. Senior officers describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups "that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process." They say they are mostly associated with single issues and suggest the majority of protesters are never considered extremists.

It has led to the personal details and photographs of a substantial number of protesters being stored on secret police databases around the country. In this era of enhanced CRB checks, anyone who goes on a demo not only risks their health from thugs with batons, but also risks their future career in any sensitive area. Anyone who wants to be a teacher, a criminal lawyer, to serve in the forces, or to join the police, is taking a chance if they stand up for what they believe in.

This is a disaster for civil society in the making; by adding barriers to protest, you confine protest to only those willing to suffer serious penalties. You create a culture of demonstrators expecting violence and mistrusting the police.

You push the right to demonstrate out of the hands of legitimate protestors into the hands of extremists. As citizens, that is something worth marching against. Even if we do risk being attacked by thugs or recorded on databases.

The Dress Code is - Flak Jackets for Brazilians

Hiya,

instead of recipes, as I promised when I started the blog, I'm going to occasionally throw in a series of restaurant reviews. Obviously, to tie in with the post above, I've picked locations where you are least likely to be hassled by the filth.



Above: Avoid McDonalds at all costs - it really cuts into your protester credibility.

Breakfast:

Roast - Roast is an absolutely amazing restaurant situated over Borough market, just near London Bridge Station. The whole menu is incredible - picked freshly from the market, no less - but I particularly want to flag up their incredible breakfasts.

Between 7 and 8 am, they do a breakfast for two for £15. This is incredible value; both myself and the ladyfriend were unable to finish the wonderfully presented full English breakfast we had. For a good breakfast in Central London, £7.50 a head is a steal, particularly in contrast with hotel breakfasts.

Perfect for building up your strength before being kettled all day.


Lunch

I'd recommend Menula, a fantastic Sicilian restaurant on Charlotte St. Why? Well, have a look at the disclaimer on the bottom of their menu...



Yes, it says "Please note healthy options are available - please ask to see the manager". In other words, they have an absolutely no holds barred approach to Italian cooking. Healthy, it is not. Splendidly cooked, with wonderful service, it absolutely is. In particular, the seafood is spectacular.

If you're taking your life in your hands, why worry about eating healthily? At any moment the Met might beat you to death or shoot you.

Dinner

For a reasonably priced meal out in London, you cannot go wrong with Studio 6 on Gabriel's Wharf, near Waterloo station.

Despite the slightly shabby state of the building, the food & service are outstanding. On a sunny day, the terrace outside is beautiful to sit at and watch the world go by.

However, the area it really excels in is price. All of the main courses are under £10; you get literally some of the best food in London for not much more than you'd pay for a Whopper meal at Burger King.

It's a great first date venue; perfect for taking that special girl you just met while shouting "Nazi punks, Nazi Punks, Fuck off!"...

The famous five and the mystery of the Psychic Octopus

A scots friend recently shared with me an excellent joke:

When asked whether Paul the Psychic Octopus could predict the result of the Labour leadership election, he replied "Predict it?! He could win it!".

This is absolutely true.



Above: How much would this picture be improved by an Octopus?

All of the candidates (apart from Diane Abbott) are absolutely awful. And none of them are psychic.

They are all creatures of the Blair years - in Abbott's words "all male, all white, all former policy wonks". The Labour party - the self-proclaimed party of the working class, the immigrant, the woman, the left - has rolled up the representation of all of its core constituencies into one ultra-token candidate: Abbott.

For a party obsessed with "fairness for all", they struggled to get someone representative and likeable on to the ballot. Even the champion of feminism, Harriet Harman, who nominated Abbott, is on record as saying she will not vote for her. Ironically, Abbott is the only one who could command mainstream support from the country, but the least likely to win within the Labour party. None of the other candidates is capable of attracting support from anyone who isn't a tribal Labour voter. None of them are credible candidates for PM.

There's also some irony in a field of candidates for the party which espouses "class war", having the most 'Ghetto' amongst them singled out by the fact that he studied English at Cambridge rather than PPE at Oxford.

That said, graduates of the Cambridge English department assure me it is "Well Ghetto".

Labour party members (not to mention the electorate) were all crying out for fresh thinking, but the four main candidates are well placed to deliver only one thing - more of the same.

Not one of them has broken free of the shackles of New Labour. Unsurprising, considering this is the first Labour leadership contest in 16 years - New Labour made these men as surely as it will now break them. Part of the reason this campaign resembles a dismal election for President of a Students Union is because of the intellectual straightjacket that Blair & Brown imposed - these people are conditioned to be minor figures. Medium sized fish in a big pond.

Balls

For Ed Balls probably (the individual mostly closely associated with the fag end of the Brown government), dumping the past was his most crucial task.

But he cannot help but be compared with Brown while he continues to defend the legacy the Brown (not Blair) government. When his strongest criticism of Brown is the unspecfic "Gordon didn't get everything right by any means and in the end he couldn't be the leader that people wanted" - it's hardly a differentiating, ringing admission of the were huge problems that culminated in an electoral defeat, is it?

When he goes on to say "what he [Gordon] did manage to do was get the Labour party to have confidence in itself, its values, its beliefs, its unity ", you can't help but see the lack of reality that bedevilled Brown.

How can he say that the dissent riddled Brown government, lurching from PR crisis to real, nightmarish, impoverishing crisis - to coup, after coup, after coup had confidence in itself? In its beliefs? In unity? It sounds very much like His Master's Voice.

Balls looks, acts and sounds like a bully. It is his reputation to such an extent that even Guardian articles begin by noting his tendency towards menace.

It's public knowledge that he has inherited the monstrous Brown negative spin machine, as personified by his chief backer, Charlie Whelan. Darker rumours suggest it was threats from this muck-raking smear bazooka that convinced left-winger John Cruddas not to stand. In the light of this, Balls reaching for the mantle of a centrist, peace-making leader is met with absolute derision.

By the way, having your thugs intimidate people doesn't help with the whole "perceived as a bully" thing, by the way, Ed.

Balls also isn't helped by the sentiment within the Labour party that his infinitely more talented wife should have stood in his stead, but he prevented her from doing so. Yes, it's true - Ed Balls is not even the best potential leader of the Labour party in his own bed.

Milliband the younger

The other Ed, Milliband, is doing his best to run the worst campaign in the history of the world. As a candidate bedevilled by accusations of nepotism, his first act was to hire Neil Kinnock's daughter as his head of campaign events. Is his slogan "Labour:Keeping it in the family since 1983"?

He's also hired useless press officer Ken Young to head his campaign. Young is famously one of the worst PRs in the world - a stock joke in the business - once wonderfully described as "omnishambolic" during his tenure as Brown's head of "gaffe monitoring and prevention.

Yes, he was head of gaffe prevention for Gordon Brown. Needless to say, he is unlikely to win any awards from PR Week for that role. He was behind everything from that youtube video on the expenses crisis to the election blowing Rochdale gaffe. Malcolm Tucker, he is not.

Still, unlike the mercenary Tucker, he's been hired because he is a Labour ultra-loyalist rather than for his competence. Notoriously, Young openly tells people that he styled his hair on Gordon Brown’s while chairman of Labour Students. It really takes class to stand out among Labour student activists as a massive loser.

Aside from the image of the campaign, and inept hires of useless staff, Milliband the younger has constantly missed open goals when offered them, with his constant unwillingness to commit to actually saying anything.

On Gay Marriage: "As someone who is liberal on social issues, I will listen to what people have to say on going further if there is a demand". What does that mean? Nothing. Analyse it - if there is a demand, I will listen to people. How is THAT radical? If people say things, I will listen to them. That isn't a political pledge, it's a basic social skill.

On Civil Liberties: "I accept that in government we were too draconian on some aspects of our civil liberties" Specifics? No. Where's the vision, Ed?

On Iraq: "As we all know, the basis for going to war was on the basis of Saddam's threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and therefore that is why I felt the weapons inspectors should have been given more time to find out whether he had those weapons, and Hans Blix – the head of the UN weapons inspectorate – was saying that he wanted to be given more time. The basis for going to war was the threat that he posed. The combination of not giving the weapons inspectors more time, and then the weapons not being found, I think for a lot of people it led to a catastrophic loss of trust for us, and we do need to draw a line under it... History will judge the outcomes for Iraq and that is important, but I think it is just clear to me because we went to war on a particular basis and when that basis turned out not to be correct even apart from the people that were against the war in the first place, that caused a big loss of trust for us: what I am not saying is that the war was undertaken for the wrong motives but what I am very clear about is what my position was at the time and the way I look at it in retrospect."


I've read that statement about 20 times, and I still have no idea what it means. There are too many caveats for it to say anything. Oh, and as for charisma? Winston Chruchill, he is not. Christ, Ken Livingston he is not.

To win the Labour leadership and then the country, a Labour leadership candidate needs to have the balls to stand up and say "We were wrong on Civil Liberties. We were wrong on Iraq." He or she needs to be unequivocal on issues, rather than running scared from the Daily Mail hate brigade. That is how to win back the five million voters who have deserted Labour since 1997.

On Policy, he is a disaster. Ed Miliband has ditched Labour's manifesto commitment to a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax rises, and has hinted he would prefer a 50:50 split. He hinted. In a campaign to be leader of the opposition. Wow. Bold.

This also means he is dumping the the manifesto that he himself wrote two months ago. Intellectually consistent.

Who? Oh, that other one who isn't a Milliband

Andy Burnham is a non-candidate. His campaign, masterminded by the unlikely combination of the former head of the Freight transport association (that's the Trucker vote in the bag!) and invincible poison dwarf Hazel Blears, consists of repeated assertions of the blandest nature. My favourite, when asked about Andy's vision, Blears responded "Andy [Burnham] believes in fairness". Who doesn't believe in fairness? (1) I mean really?

As for vision, get this from Burnham: "I can give the Labour Party something the Tories don't have: a leader that people can relate to . . . a people person." Well, that's a big idea, isn't it! As a Tory, I am literally quaking in my boots.

You know, I don't think I would mind a field of all Oxbridge candidates so much if they had a single original, intelligent idea between them. They are all well-educated, intelligent people... but the best they can do is "I am a people person".

The Front-runner - David Milliband

The final and most likely candidate for the Labour Leadership is David Milliband.

But the Tories & Jack Straw have planted a massive bomb under his candidacy. As foreign secretary, Milliband consistently denied to Parliament that rendition occurred, yet, curiously, denied a public enquiry into the matter. After having his attempted cover up been defeated in the Court of Appeal - Miliband even had the front to welcome the decision - it was established beyond doubt that the UK knew that Binyam Mohammed was being tortured by the USA.

The truth about the government's complicity in torture is becoming established beyond doubt. David Cameron has announced there will be an inquiry into British (read:Labour) government complicity in torture. According to the first tranche of government documents released yesterday, there was an overarching, ministerially approved policy to use intelligence from torture, which continued under Milliband's tenure.

The contents of these documents are truly shocking - for example, Jack Straw having been directly complicit in individuals being boiled to death in Uzbekistan. Milliband was responsible for the attempt cover up of this; the redactions of these documents and the repeated smearings of Craig Murray were carried out on his instructions.

The cynical would argue the Tory-ordered inquiry is just political point scoring - indeed, one can't help but feel it's convenient that the enquiry will start calling people just before the Labour leadership election goes to the polls. Maybe it is.

But the truth is, Milliband is the only person still standing in the Labour party with direct responsibility for the greatest shame of the Blair/Brown years - the brutal torture of hundreds of people. Milliband has said "we didn't lose the 2010 election on Iraq" - but if he's selected, (assuming he doesn't join Jack Straw on trial), then the stink of Iraq will be something Labour guarantees to carry into the 2015 election.

In short, as a Tory, I think anyone but Abbott (or Paul the Octopus) will be a positive benefit for the Tories. But oddly, I'm not happy about that.

For this week's recipe, in honour of the possibly socialist psi-horror, I've gone for Paul's favourite, Mussels...

1.) Sepp Blatter.