Daily archives: April 25, 2015


The Gordon and Dougie Show

Gordon Brown and wee Dougie Alexander once bestrode the world, bombing much of it. Now these mighty egos are confined within Elderslie Village Hall.

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The problem is, the average member of the population does not have a high opinion of the dynamic duo. So it is essential that they are kept away from average people, and instead paraded only before vetted audiences of Labour activists. There are not very many of those; so the venues are tiny, with a small number of carefully bunched people holding silly placards, photographed by a compliant media only from carefully prepared angles.

Now I plunge happily into politically incorrect ground. As normal people have abandoned it and Labour has come down to the core of its core support, it is truly striking how remarkably ugly its hardcore activists are. I don’t mean that in any metaphorical sense. I mean that they are an aesthetic disaster. It is not a product of poverty, as the core support are all well employed as research assistants or doing pretendy youth work jobs for Labour councils. Other parties do not have such challenging physiognomy. It is very seldom you can look at a room and say Gordon Brown is one of the best looking people there. Perhaps Blair’s crimes have been written on the faces of all the complicit.

Douglas Alexander not only facilitated the use of Diego Garcia for torture and extraordinary rendition, in an act of extreme hypocrisy the evil little shit also declared a “marine conservation area” around it. In the 1960’s Britain forcibly deported the entire population of the islands to make way for the US Air Base. Faced with a continual political and legal fight for them to return, Alexander sought to make it impossible with his “marine conservation area”. There is nobody who better represents Scottish Labour’s loss of its soul than Alexander. If Mhairi beats him I shall be extremely happy.

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Miliband Goes the Full Henry Jackson

Full on neo-con philosophy underpinned Miliband’s “speech” to the Royal Institute of International Affairs yesterday. Miliband acknowledged that our bombing of Libya back to the stone age was the root cause of the boat people crisis.

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But Miliband was not admitting that the Guernica style massacre was wrong – he voted for it. No, he was going the full Henry Jackson and arguing that what had been needed was neo-colonial occupation of Libya in order to reform its institutions – precisely as had been done in Iraq. And we all know how that went.

This is a blow to those who believed that Miliband was different from Blair, Brown, Murphy and his brother. In fact, the entire “speech” could have been written by the Henry Jackson Society. It bemoans the decline of the authority of international institutions like the UN and International Court of Justice, but states that this is because they had failed – and failed in particular to back western military intervention everywhere. Miliband argues that the solution is for individual states to take unilateral armed action abroad, but bemoans that this is more difficult because of cuts in western defence budgets. He wants increased defence spending to fund increased military intervention abroad. He does not acknowledge that it is precisely unilateral western military action in attacking other states which has destroyed the authority of the UN in the first place.

The “speech” is in fact a series of slogans, loosely connected. Both the content and the style say a huge amount about the depths to which our civic society has sunk. The prospect of this intellectual midget and neo-con lickspittle becoming Prime Minister is frankly appalling.

The RIIA, better known as Chatham House, does not normally hear lectures written by somebody incapable of constructing a paragraph of more than ten words. It would give me great pleasure if you would be so kind just to glance at the lecture I gave to Chatham House eleven years ago. Of course it is on a much more specific subject than Miliband’s neo-con declaration of faith, but I still feel I come rather well out of the contrast.

Rather like those Soviet parade photos where the nomenklatura got airbrushed out after execution, all trace of my lecture has disappeared from the Chatham House website.

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