The passing of wood through glass is a remarkable feat. There are those who believe that royalty can perform miracles – there is a well developed cult around the vain and vicious Charles I, for example. It now appears that the presence of the future Charles III also has the ability to suspend the laws of physics.
The police have now issued extensive CCTV footage of the attack on the vehicle of Charles and Camilla on the fringes of the anti-tuition fee demonstrations, and the media have been replete with more nonsense about Camilla being poked with a stick. Yet of all the CCTV footage and numerous photographs, there is no evidence at all of this attack and all the images show the car windows to be closed – as they would be. One gets cracked but not holed.
There is in fact no evidence at all of any intent to harm the persons of the expensive royal layabouts, as opposed to discomfiting them and damaging their vehicle. It is fascinating that the media continually repeats the “Camilla attacked with a stick” line when it is so blatantly untrue. There appears to be a closing of ranks by the whole Establishment to perpetuate the myth – both the Home Office and St James Palace have deliberately fostered the myth by refusing to confirm or deny.
Personally I would not touch Camilla with a bargepole. I dislike violence at demonstrations. Demonstrations, good, riots, bad is my basic mantra. Attacks on people in a civil demonstration are always wrong, including attacks on the police unless in self defence. I did not join in the outrage at the prosecutions of violent demonstrators after the big Lebanon demonstration in London, because I personally witnessed the group hurling dangerous missiles at police who were neither attacking, threatening nor kettling them. That is absolutely unacceptable.
But a policy as appalling as the withdrawal of state funding from university teaching, carried out by Nick Clegg by one of the most blatant political breaches of fatih with the public in history, , is bound to provoke huge anger. The government reaps what it sows. Demonstrators should not set out to hurt people. But all the evidence shows they had no intention of hurting Charles and Camilla.
I have personally worked closely with the royal family’s close protection officers in organising two state visits abroad, and plainly they too could see there was no intent to injure – that is why weapons were not drawn. They deserve commendation rather than the crap spouted out by Sky News, who seem to think they should have gunned down the odd student.
All of which serves to take the focus off vicious police attacks on students and the use of kettling to detain people who were seeking peacefully to express their views. Kettling people in extreme cold and with no access to toilet facilities raises questions on illegal detention which genuine liberals in government would wish to address. What is it? Is it a form of arrest? What is the status of the fenced pens into which people are herded? Should they not be formalised as places of police detention, and individuals booked in and given access to lawyers? If that is not possible, this detention – which can be for many hours – is not lawful.
Glenn – I agree that wresting further control from the ordinary man on the street is in the interests of the elite financial class. But I don’t see that as the aim of the pundits on Fox – you’re simultaneously granting them too much intelligence and discounting their own lust for a share of power. In theory, right-wing pundits should be in favour of small government – but as we know, Fox/Bush et al is in favour of huge, overbearing, surveillance government – a powerful force to buffer the elite class from the workers they exploit.
Meanwhile, the pundits on Fox News are often useful idiots too – they are wealthy and comfortable in relative terms, but if they could see the income of the class whose interests they inadvertently support!
@Vronsky – interesting. Are you suggesting that there is something prevalent in US culture or mass consciousness that discourages making that link? Why does that happen over there, but to a lesser degree in the UK, for example?
JACK STRAW ALERT
Ref the disgusting racial typecasting of Pakistani young men by the execrable Straw, erstwhile war criminal and election fraudster, this came up. Talk about calling the kettle black and what an absolute hypocrite. I realize he is not his brother’s keeper but he should have kept his mouth shut especially referring to the girls as ‘easy meat’.
How vile he is. Why does Blackburn re-elect him. It can’t just be the ‘treating’ of the electorate.
http://forum.mpacuk.org/showthread.php?p=719025#post719025
Well… the TV show hosts are actually extremely rich by the standards of anyone but multi-billionaires. Beck is on about $30M a year, the pig-man Limbaugh is on a $400M contract, and the likes of O’Reily gets somewhere between $10 and $20M. A year. Now that might not sound like much to you, but it puts them well outside even the dreams of your average teabagger. Clearly, they promote the interests of the super-rich and get well paid for it. I don’t see how I’m contradicting myself there.
Of course genuine conservatives would like a smaller, less intrusive government, and that’s what the teabaggers claim too. The opposite has – as you say – taken place under neocons, to the extent that teabag candidates want the government to enforce and monitor every pregnancy to ensure it reaches full term. (They couldn’t give a flying hoot about it after that, of course.)
Look at the people running Fox – it’s a Murdoch operation chiefly run by Roger Aisles, who’s sidekick (and frequent Fox contributor) is Carl Rove. Aisles and Rove, you’ll recall, were prodigies of the exceedingly evil Lee Atwater, a man who became terrified on his death bed because he was convinced he was straight off to hell because of his deeds.
Fox News is everywhere – bars, hotels, truck-stops, it is bundled into every cable deal. It’s becoming the ubiquitous news source, as the dreadful Sky News is doing in the UK to a lessor extent. It’s as if the dominant news source was the Daily Mail, only with a much less sober reflection and regard for the truth!
@ somebody
I doubt Jack will stand for election next time, there must be a seat in the House of Liars with his name on. He won’t have to cowtow to his muslim or white working class electorate for much longer. I bet he can hardly wait !
With regard to the war criminal Straw suggesting white girls are “easy meat”… isn’t he right? Girls in the west are sexualised from an obscenely young age, girls are encouraged to dress like hookers for a casual night out, and sex-sex-sex is all the tabloids, trashy magazines and half of down-market TV shows talk about. Look at any lads-mag and you’ll see that women are appreciated for one thing only. Our society says that women have little value if they are not sexually attractive. Getting a boyfriend is _the_ most important thing a girl can do, and clearly sexual activity is top of the list when you get one (however briefly).
Is it not unsurprising that the targets of this message bombardment are rather more likely to “put out” than those of more restrictive cultures?
Suhayl Saadi Jan 8 9:00 AM
Suhayl,
Regarding the other part of your question, on wealth distribution in Switzerland ?” when I was living there it certainly felt a lot more egalitarian as a society than the UK. However, I haven’t been able to find statistics that clearly support this. Plenty of data were compiled by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better “. Switzerland always appears to be in the middle of all the graphs.
One statistic I found very telling though, admittedly by now more than 10 years out of date, from a book by Gregory Fossedal called “Direct Democracy in Switzerland”. The Swiss apparently suffered their worst ever unemployment level during the Great Depression when it stood at something like 4-5%. For most of their modern history the unemployment rate has been bouncing around 1-2%. For comparison, the UK’s BEST EVER unemployment rate is about 4%.
Just to feed my tendency to confirmation bias some more ?” I suppose it is possible that the usual measure of wealth distribution, the Gini Index is imperfect and does not reflect the reality very closely. Or that assorted Phil Collinses, Tina Turners and other rich tax evaders domiciled there are skewing the figures to a large extent. The Swiss are a small nation.
Yes Glenn all that is true but aren’t you obscuring Straw’s racism and giving him some sort of a get-out?
@somebody, definitely. It is one thing to make a point about structural flaws within a community, but the kind of language used is important – does it aim for balance, or does it get ugly? The print edition of the Daily Express recently carried an awful piece on this topic, and it dripped venom and spite, and gleefully regarded the racial background of the appalling men involved as the primary focus.
Jack Straw is as de based as his brother.
He had 3 years as justice minister in charge and has done absolutley nothing on this specific issue which has plagued his own home constituency for as long as he is an MP, for 31 years.
Apart from making noises on arranged marriages and how good it is that a Pakistani girl is not allowed to marry another fellow country man until they are 21.
Then there was the Hijab bohaha, spreading prejudice all over Europe, France burkha ban, Germany ,even enticing our Swiss friends to compare Minarets to missles on their propaganda/referendum leaflets, acting up to verse like a dove takes to the air.
Think point is Straw’s statement was a publicity seeking hound of a statement, a howling cry for some kind of media attention. ‘Easy meat’ indeed. In his dreams. I’ve known white ‘Christian’ men expect to shag women after a night at fecking Wetherspoons, never mind weeks of assiduous dating. ‘Grooming’, is it?
“I regard kettling as counterproductive – why wind up protestors when there’s already an adversarial relationship between them and the police already? Unless that’s the idea, of course – provoke protestors into something they can be arrested for.”
Yes. That is the intent. The clue is in the name ‘kettling’.
Kettles if left boil over; that’s why they have escape values to release the pressure. Kettling seems to be specificly designed to cause an explosion.
Vronsky, the disconnect between beliefs, actions and consequences – I think it may be related to scale. In a local situation, with few enough people involved that they can be known personally, conscience works better than when consequences are enacted by other people who are mostly unknown.
This is a trend in the commercial and commercialised world. I used to be able to ‘phone a company and ask technical questions of their engineers. Now, I stand no chance of getting past a “Customer Services” call centre, where staff parrot company propaganda straight from their PC screens. Such departments rigidly enforce company policy, including the policy that “customers” may not speak to the makers of policy. The policy makers conscience (such as it is) is insulated from their customers.
This is part of Americanization.
Human behaviour is influenced by reinforcement and experience. If you’re continually lied to, you come to expect it, and expect that others expect it, so you worry less about lying. If your job all day is to tell the company’s lies, you get plenty of practice at lying. If the primary value of your society is commercialism that bends the truth as much as it can legally get away with, truthfulness – the correspondence between description and reality – becomes devalued.
‘somebody’ – Sorry, I should have made clear that this is not an excuse for Straw, and he had no business bringing Muslim men into it. They should have been totally different discussions. And technicolour, you are absolutely correct, picking up some drunk woman without even bothering to pay for more than a round or two, and expecting a no-strings shag is hardly exclusively an Asian male propensity.
Clark: interesting. I haven’t been lied to by staff at the call centres I’ve called recently, but then I bank with the Co-op.
And why would you worry less about lying, just because other people lie? As my mother always says, if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do it too? I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t; you seem to chart your own course.
I could also add that picking up some drunk man after a few drinks and expecting a no-strings shag is not exclusively male territory, either.
Suggests that liberal western society hasn’t got sexuality right either, I agree. Surely it is all about relationships, and their natural growth, and any force upon them (whether proscriptive or reductive) inhibits that.
As for jack straw, I despair.
@paul at January 10, 2011 5:31 PM
Thank you for pointing out the meaning and significance of the word ‘kettling’. The police intent is quite undisguised, when we see terms like that.
@jon
“Are you suggesting that there is something prevalent in US culture or mass consciousness that discourages making that link? Why does that happen over there, but to a lesser degree in the UK, for example?”
It is only, as you say, to a lesser degree. We never see promo shots of our politicians with guns, though. Oh, wait…
preview.tinyurl.com/6g4ajlk
@evgueni
“Selection of representatives “by lot” is not such a daft idea”
Have I found an ally? Selection by sortition. I occasionally cast that pearl here, but the swine splash on by (please read humorously).
@technicolour
“I bank with the Co-op”
The Co-op sponsors New Labour parliamentary candidates. Still think it’s an ethical bank?
Evgueni, thanks very much again,yes I thought that about Switzerland’s wealth distribution.
Yes, Straw is arguably a war criminal. But just because he (and the predictable tabloid/right-wing elements in the Press) may wish to instrumentalise an issue for his own, self-interested reasons doesn’t mean that issue doesn’t exist. It does exist and it needs to be dealt with. Read Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on this. She’s no pal of Straw or the Right and she’s been writing about it for years. Ann Cryer also tried to get people to address it, years ago. Ziauddin Sardar also writes well on the subject.
Yes, Pakistani people in the UK once again all will be painted with the same brush and will be demonised (they have been for ages, so what’s new?). But let’s not allow the behaviour of self-interested politicians and the Ravid Right to obscure the actions of the ‘other’ Rabid Right – in fact, they feed off one another, don’t they?
Reasoned and honest analysis is reqd here, not apologetics by the ‘usual suspects’ (and by that I mean certain other politicians and public figures) and rabid self-righteous gnashing of teeth from the other usual suspects.
Vronsky, no-one is perfect.
would anyone here know whether it’s the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or the Ministry of Defence that decides on military aid to other countries?
Somebody: Re. the undercover cop who allegedly ‘went native’, it seems clear to me that has stolen one of my best hats!! The cheek of it!
He is attempting to resemble Bruce Barthol of Country Joe and the Fish.
I thought going native was going without underpants!
Vronsky – The Co-Op generally are mealy mouthed whatnots. I contacted them about the stocking of mislabelled Israel goods ie grown or made on stolen Palestinian land, when we were contacting all the other supermarkets in a BDS campaign.
Expecting them to agree to cease the practice, they wrote back with all the stuff about giving customers choice and all their products being ethically sourced. I boycott them personally now and find that ad – gud with fud – very annoying.
well, i also bank with Triodos. Who else do you suggest, Vronsky, somebody?
Somebody, I hadn’t heard of the phrase being used in that context! I just thought it derived from the old and somewhat anti-colonial narratives of excellent 1940s monochrome Graham Greene/Trevor Howard films. That’s useful to know, thanks.
Yet PC Mark Kennedy’s face seems familiar, somehow… he needs to remove the sunglasses, though, don’t you think? So we can all look deep into his eyes.
As for undercover cops on these boards, well, Steve has been very open and honest about what he does for a living. But if there are any undercover ‘Mark Kennedys’ hereabouts, one can say only one thing:
“Allo’ Allo’ Allo’ What ‘av we ‘ere then?”
£250,000 a year Stone cost us. £250,000 a year. To spy on pacifists! No wonder poor man seems to have had a breakdown.
…it was probably all those vegan lunches 🙂
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhai-brown-jack-straw-is-right-to-ask-hard-questions-about-asian-men-2180318.html
Good article by a courageous woman in today’s Independent.
On another note, PC Kennedy is lucky he was found out at his home by pacifists and not by outlaw bikers or one of the many mafias.
10 years is far too long for anyone to work undercover. However, his undoubted talents would have been far better applied to the City of London. Are there ANY undercover cops operating in the City of London, one wonders? And if there are, should they ‘uncover’ the massive now-legal crimes that the City perpetrates daily, will anyone, anywhere do anything about it?
Rhetorical question, obviously.
Btw, I want my hat back, buddy. And my sunglasses, too. Thank you.
“I thought going native was going without underpants!”
somebody, maybe you’re thinking of “going commando”.
“The term is theorised to be related to the much earlier term ‘going regimental’, which refers to wearing the kilt military style, that is, without underwear.”
Lots of comments I’d love to engage with … but I’ll be offline for a while for medical reasons. Back soon, I hope. Lovely to see such a ‘tidy’ comment-thread! Well done, Jon. See all y’all later.
dreolin, all best wishes for a speedy recovery – and come back soon, mind!
“Going commando”, etc: I knew it had to do with kilts!
@glenn – thanks for the info on Fox News, especially the salary brackets. I had no idea – perhaps these sociopaths are closer to being part of the elite than I thought. Thankfully, I’ve not watched Fox in years.