Blanket repeal bill

The single most brilliant legislative idea I've heard in thirteen years.

And Jeremy Clarkson suggested it first

Enough to drive one to drink

The British government plans to lower the drink drive limit to less than a pint of beer.

You can, however, have as much Soma as you like.

Update: The Great Police Terror.

Update: More than meets the eye.

The religion of Conservatism

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Especially animals who aren't conservative or Christian.

New Labour Chapter 13 Verse 3

And Mrs Harriet Harman said unto the people of Airstrip One Britain, "Thou shalt not mock Vegans, for that is an abomination unto me."

And the people of Airstrip One Britain said unto Mrs Harman, "If we didn't mock Vegans we wouldn't have anything to say to the hypocritical, self-righteous, little nut burgers."

Second class is for little people

From The Times:

MPs have demanded the right to first-class train travel in a new system of allowances drawn up in the wake of the expenses scandal.

It isn't often that one sees a dead-flat learning curve.

Interlude

And now. let's all take a breather. We've earned it.

A matter of perspective

The BBC looks at "the world's longest suicide note" and concludes that, "See, it isn't so insane after all" instead of, "My God, have we gone so insane that we actually ended up implementing most of this drivel and added on a couple more levels of daftness for good measure?!?"

I particularly like this little gem:

(S)omebody calling for the government not to renew the Trident missile system, might not be viewed as a left-wing idealist.

True, "irresponsible, possibly pacifist, but more likely self-loathing Marxist nutcase who wants to work out his issues with his father by placing Britain at the mercy of her enemies" is more likely.

Killed by the safety regulations

From The Times:

An injured woman lay for six hours at the foot of a disused mine shaft because safety rules banned firefighters from rescuing her, an inquiry heard yesterday. As Alison Hume was brought to the surface by mountain rescuers she died of a heart attack.

A senior fire officer at the scene admitted that crews could only listen to her cries for help, after she fell down the 60ft shaft, because regulations said their lifting equipment could not be used on the public. A memo had been circulated in Strathclyde Fire and Rescue stations months previously stating that it was for use by firefighters only.

New Labour may not have achieved much in thirteen years, but they have managed to badger the British people so badly that they'd let a woman die in slow, lonely agony rather than cross their masters' insane whims.

Don't hold your breath

Remember last year when reports circulated about HP face recognition software having trouble with darker faces under certain lighting conditions? How this sparked cries of racism? Now Edinburgh University claims that voice recognition software has trouble with male voices.

Stand by for cries of sexism in 1, 2, 3..... 482964, 482965.....

Michael Foot (1913-2010)

Mr Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour party, has gone to his reward.

I never cared toffee for Mr Foots politics. I regarded them as wrong headed, inimical to human freedom, a threat to any hope of national prosperity, and a disaster for his own party. They didn't call his 1983 manifesto the "world's longest suicide note" for nothing. Worse, he was either a Communist fellow traveller or the most unobservant man in history–one who couldn't possibly have remained oblivious as Labour was infiltrated by the KGB and its leaders went to Moscow cap in hand to have their policies vetted by the Kremlin. Not to mention that in matters of party discipline he was as effective as Helen Keller at a skeet shoot. On the other hand, Mr Foot was a man of convictions who could always state them clearly, a master of the English language, and was never willing to sell out his principles in order to merely win an election, which even in his most ignominious defeat gave him the air of a man who would have charged the guns at Balaclava without hesitation.

Compared to his successors, a self-serving rabble who utterly lack principles or even respect for the Britain itself, this eloquent, well-read, tragically deluded, slightly comic man comes off looking like a pillar of respectability.

Sleep well, sir.

Confusing the general with the particular

South African President Jacob Zuma showing off his usual tact:

You British think Africans are barbaric

No, Mr Zuma. We do not think Africans are barbaric. As to what we think of you, on the other hand...

Ambiguity in the Argentine

Gads, this photo is like backing naked into a steam radiator.

Mrs Hillary "Rodham" Clinton effectively shafts Britain and sides with Argentina over the Falklands.

Is it another example of Mr Barack Hussein Obama's anti-British prejudices coming to the surface again or of his and Mrs Clinton's basic diplomatic incompetence?

Tough call.

Another nail

Tetley's Cask Ale leaves Yorkshire.

Excuse me while I find my black armband.

Social engineering by any means posssible

Janet Daley in The Telegraph looks at New Labour's attempt to undermine the very identity of the British people.

I've said it before and I'll keep on saying it, this government made war against the British people by deliberately promulgating the invasion of an alien culture and is guilty of treason. What sticks in my craw is not only are they traitors, but they're cack-handed traitors who couldn't even do it right. Bring in hordes of Muslims to act as a solvent to dissolve British culture so Tony Blair et al could remould it in their image. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Waiting for the other half

From the BBC:

An influential Muslim scholar is to issue in London a global ruling against terrorism and suicide bombing.

So far so good as it stands. The "influential" Muslim scholar has condemned the Jihadists' methods, but is he also condemning the goals?

RoboThespian

We'll let you know.

Does Mamet by night, hunts for...Line!

Snacks of Satan

Having solved all other food-related problems, the Food Standards Agency harangues the masses about the evils of concession snacks at the cinema.

Dear Lord, who buys a giant tub of popcorn with extra butter under the impression that it's remotely healthy?

Update: Sensing that they're on a roll, the FSA also says that CCTV 'should be installed in slaughterhouses to ensure animal welfare'.

In other news, Ephemeral Isle calls for CCTV be installed in the offices of the FSA to ensure that they're not acting like a load of jumped up, self-righteous busybodies who imagine that they have a right to stick their noses into other people's business.

Greasing the slippery slope

Break out the prejudometer. We're deep in Peter Simple territory here.

Times headline:

'Choose women, gay and disabled judges over white, middle-class men'

How can we suffer such timid half measures in a go-ahead, non-judgmental, tolerant, post-modern society? Why not just bar white, middle-class men from being judges at all? Better yet, make it illegal for them to vote, own property, hold any public office, or any private executive position? Or indeed, to show their foul, racist, class-ridden, patriarchal faces in public under any circumstances?

Universal castration and selected street executions for the least enlightened will, of course, be phased in gradually.

Then, and only then, will we have Social Justice.

In related news: In the words of Dr Heinz Kiosk, his eyes revolving rapidly in opposite directions, WE ARE ALL GUILTY!

The circle is complete

Local councils ticket their own cars, then refuse to pay, then sue themselves.

Brain... about... to.... explode!

But hijabs are just fine

British schools may no longer be able to require girls to wear skirts because it, I'm not making this up, discriminates against "transsexual children"–whatever those are supposed to be outside the demented mind of a commissar rights activist.

Remember when human rights was about protecting people from being lorded over by tiny minorities? Now it's about aiding the neo-artistos in their lording.

Hijab hamlet

Tower Hamlet sets a new low in dhimmitude as it plans to use £1.8 million to put a hijab on the whole of Brick Lane.

Next up: Bradford gets a burkha.

Death by policy

A five-year old girl remains in critical condition because damnable "health and safety" regulations prevented rescue crews from saving her.

If she dies, someone should go to jail. And I mean the pencil-pushers behind this obscenity.

Doctor Who: Militant Tendency

Sylvester McCoy says that during his turn as Doctor Who the production crew filled the episodes with Leftist propaganda that would have made Militant Tendency proud. Not surprising with the likes of the script editor, who at his interview said,

I’d like to overthrow the government.

Their efforts included a story that was a thinly veiled call for Margaret Thatcher to be overthrown by a worker's revolt and an anti-nuclear speech delivered by the Doctor courtesy of CND.

The amazing thing about this story is that it claimed that nobody noticed at the time. If so, it can only because they didn't see the episodes, because I did at the time and being hit over the head with a clown hammer would have been more subtle.

The only thing sadder than Doctor Who limping toward its grave in the late '80s was watching it do so while squeaking pathetic Trotskyite tirades.

New Labour's secret war against Britain

Further evidence that New Labour did not have a botched immigration policy, but rather secretly promoted an invasion of Britain not seen since the days of the Saxons in order to further its social engineering agenda.

I am not anti-immigration (just anti-uncontrolled immigration), but when a government deliberately conspires to import an alien culture for its own ends while lying that there wasn't anything they could do about it, then why Mr Gordon Brown et al aren't cooling their heels in the Tower is beyond me.

Robomilker

Automatically milks cows and mucks out after them.

Highly unlikely to find Sarah Connor.

Update: More here. I particularly like this bit (emphasis added):

Today, they manage their operation using both a traditional 40-unit rotary dairy, which is milking 239 cows twice a day on their home farm, while 171 cows are milked through their robotic dairy on the recently-purchased country.

A traditional rotary dairy? I'll have you know that back in 1939 the rotary dairy was known as the Rotolactor; and as for traditional, it was the centrepiece for Borden's Dairy World of Tomorrow at the New York World's Fair.

Have people no respect for the dreams of Future Past?

Pensiongate

They're coming so fast you can hardly keep up with them. Climategate, then Glaciergate, and even before I had a chance to comment on Africagate we have Pensiongate.

The "settled science" of global warming is leaking out through more gates than Rome.

Dr Spacely-Trellis, call your service

It's an historic moment as the go-ahead Church of England bellows "screw Christian doctrine!" and thunders off into irrelevancy.

Expect joyous guitar strumming and tambourine banging at churches interfaith and non-faith, LGBTQQSAAATSQED-friendly, vegan, non-judgmental, dolphin-safe, gun and nuclear-free, carbon-free, sustainable community centres* across Britain.

*Those that still haven't been turned into coffee shops or mosques, of course.

Quiche crackdown

Apparently, you now cannot buy a quiche in Britain without presenting identification.

This is clearly vital because the public needs protecting against... against... I have no idea.

Bias blinders

To say that the BBC has a left-wing bias is like saying that killer whales are a very unfortunate thing to find in one's bath tub. Whether it's radio or television or the Web, if you tune into a BBC programme, you can be fairly sure that it will cover all sides of the issue: Left of centre, left, and far left with anything to the right of Clare Short reserved for the more exotic anthropology documentaries.

That's fairly sure, but not absolutely certain. That's because we're talking about "bias" here, not lock-step ideological conformity. Even the BBC can't afford to employ enough commissars to vet every second of airtime for ideological purity–not and pay their executives and, for want of a better word, talent the sort of salary the BBC condemns in every other industry. For that reason, Jeremy Clarkson has not been taken out by BBC snipers, Gordon Brown's face does not stare out of the telescreens ala Big Brother (and I don't mean the reality show), and the occasional report on global warming sneaks past that hints that manmade global warming might not actually have been pronounced true on golden tablets presented from the hands of Blessed Gaia herself.

That, however, isn't good enough for some people. Back in the 1980s, when the Grauniad was baying for Margaret Thatcher's blood with great passion and minimal copy editing, there was a cartoonist called Steve Bell whose Trotskyite strip "If" denounced all of the British news media as being firmly in Maggie's pocket. Aside from reasons that involve a lack of medication, Mr Bell seemed to base this opinion on the dismaying lack of inclination by everyone down to the junior copy boys to demand that the entire Conservative cabinet be drawn and quartered as part of coronation ceremony of King Arthur Scargill the First. Anyone who didn't agree with the agenda was clearly a raving Fascist with a picture of Ian Smith in his wallet.

Now those days are back with Sunny Hundal in the pages of the Guardian railing that the BBC is a hot bed of global warming "denialism" on a par, if not below, 9-11 truthers and holocaust denialists. Why? Because even though the Beeb never met a global warming scare story they didn't like (Yesterday they claimed it was killing off wolverines) the Corporation is clearly an implacable foe of Blessed Gaia. It's obvious; editors who allow a story or two that isn't a spit-lathered warmenist screed are clearly stooges of the Earth destroying capitalist death machine.

Keep taking the tablets, Sunny.

Piston prince

The Prince of Wales is having the pistons from his Aston Martin DB6 Volante made into cuff links to raise money for charity, though what the attraction is in having a couple of dirty great pistons dangling off one's sleeves continues to elude me.

Quooker

Is this the "kettle killer"?

Since it costs £800 and requires installation, I'm guessing no.

Jet Jaguar

Britain dusts off the old JET-1 for another go.

It's being produced by a consortium led by Jaguar Land Rover, so the prospect of a jet-powered supercar is at least real enough to daydream about.

Anarchy in the UK

Britain has gone from a nation with few laws, but are broadly obeyed to one with many laws that are routinely broken out of necessity.

Well done, New Labour. You've managed the impossible. By trying to micromanage everything down to and including their bowel movements, you've destroyed the British people's respect for the law.

Update: Now even blowing your nose is a crime.

It Happened Here

If you look up the 1965 release It Happened Here in the Guinness Book of Records you'll discover that it holds the record for the longest film production: Eight years with another year's wait for it to hit the cinemas.

It's a story that deserves to be turned into a movie of its own. Produced, written, and directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, who were 18 and 16-years old when they started work on the film, It Happened Here doesn't seem very impressive in its opening scenes; a load of stock footage carefully selected to give the impression of a successful Nazi invasion and occupation of Britain in 1941. Unimpressive, that is, if you don't know that Brownlow and Mollo didn't use an inch of stock footage, but got their effects by using a 16 mm camera to shoot their huge cast of hundreds that included only two paid actors. The rest were volunteers; many of them science fiction fans who were willing to give up their spare time out of fascination with the film's alternative history plot line.

Ostensibly, It Happened Here is the story Pauline, a district nurse who is evacuated to the "demilitarised" city of London after resistance fighting breaks out near her village. Once in the half-destroyed capital, which has Germans the way some people have mice, Pauline discovers that the only way she can find work is by joining the local Fascist party; a step that brings her face to face with the horrors of the new order while alienating her from her old friends.

All that, however, is just a framework on which Brownlow and Mollo can hang their extended scenes of Britain under Fascist rule. It's a world of hordes of Wehrmacht soldiers sightseeing around London, relentless martial music of Prussian stridency, and endless speeches by blackshirted English fascists (a couple of them the real thing!) as they harangue the masses about Jewish inferiority and the unbreakable bond of Anglo-German friendship. These scenes are a mixed bag and often go on far too long. I came away thinking that the simple image on the DVD cover of German soldiers parading outside the Palace of Westminster had far more impact because of its economy. Despite having spent eight years, Brownlow and Mollo weren't entirely certain what the film was about. Was it a story of Britain conquered by the Nazis or was it an examination of Fascism? In the early part of the film it seems the former, but the latter dominates the last half of the film as we're shown an England where the population grab onto Nazism with such enthusiasm that they make the Vichy French look like the Finns as Englishmen left and right start sieg heiling, rounding up Jews, joining the Wehrmacht, and committing genocide with the worst of them. What the British government in exile or the Royal family were up to while these shenanigans were going on it left unexplained. At some points, it reads like those insane "histories" of the war written in the '80s that, with a straight face, condemned the British for the crimes of collaboration that they didn't commit because they weren't conquered.

Still, this is an important film. Not only are many of the images unforgettable, but it stands out as the first of the alternative history dramas that would soon lead to more polished works like An Englishman's Castle, Fatherland and a very cool Doctor Who episode that featured not only British Fascists in eye patches, but subterranean werewolves.

What more could you ask for?

US legalises haggis

The United States has at last rejoined the rest of the civilised world by lifting its ban on importing haggis.

An' sae oan thes Burns nicht, lit us aw clutch a volume ay th' poet's wark an' raise a glass ay single malt in silent cheers.

Mind you, the impact of all this will be considerable. The ban lifting will inevitably result in increased haggis exports, which will lead to higher prices and this will cause more haggis poaching. Not only will this endanger Scotland's stocks of wild haggis's, but also a bagpipe shortage because poachers rarely save the haggis skins from which bagpipes are made.

None of this helped by the fact that haggis's have tartan fur, which makes them dead easy to pick out on the moors where you can hear their plaintive droning and squealling.

So what's your point?

Paul Mendelle, QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, is opposed to the Conservative proposal to bow to both sanity and morality and allow homeowners to defend themselves against intruders. According to Mr Mendelle, this would lead to burglars being killed.

And the problem with this is...?

Impossible temptation

BBC headline:

Engineers 'can learn from slime'

Must...resist...Gordon....Brown...joke.

Butter ban

They can have my butter when they
pry it from my cold, greasy fingers.

Cardiac surgeon and staunch defender of individual liberty Shyam Kolvekar of London's Heart Hospital calls for an outright ban on butter.

That's it. Time to raise the barricades.

The Infidel

Satarist David Baddiel makes a comedy mercilessly mocking Jihadists.

That sound is his enormous brass balls clanking together.

The BBC: No white men need apply

Still "hideously white".

In a Telegraph interview with Michael Parkinson, we find this interesting little statement by a "senior BBC source" regarding Jonathan Ross's replacement:

We’re desperate for anyone that isn’t white and male. It’s difficult in entertainment because the options are so limited. Diversity is a big issue and they’ve over-relied on men for a long time.

When I read this sort of jaw-dropping bigotry, I think that the only way to handle the BBC is not with reform, but by frog marching everyone out of the building and starting from scratch.

Blue pencil time

Grammar check:

From The Times:

A priest has failed to in her bid to become Britain’s first woman bishop.

Correction:

A priest priestess has failed to in her bid to become Britain’s first woman bishop.

Where are the great copy editors of yesterday? One with Nineveh and Tyre, I'm afraid.

Aston Martin DBS Volante

The Telegraph has pictures of the new Aston Martin DBS Volante.

Twenty years ago, I'd have jumped at the chance to own one of these–especially if it was in British Racing Green, but now I'd just look like a middle-aged pillock in an Aston Martin.

I'm Spartacus

Identity cards: Perfect for finding the leader of the slave rebellion.

What makes these little totalitarians so terrifying is that they're so infernally clueless.

What's the alternative?

Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of MigrationwatchUK, is less than completely confident about Mr David Cameron's stand on restricting immigration.

Given how New Labour conspired to make war against the British people on this issue and then bragged about afterwards, Mr Cameron would have to lead a Red Chinese armoured column off Brighton Beach to do any worse.

Priorities

The Royal Navy is facing cuts so severe that its very existence is at stake, but they're thinking of allowing women to serve on what few submarines are left, so there's nothing to worry about.

Sir Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson cops a knighthood on this year's New Year's Honours list. Me? Not a sausage–again! I'd even settle for an OBE at this point.

Bloody favouritism, that's what I call it.

Edwina (1987-2009)

The oldest duck in Britain has gone to that great baking tin in the sky.

Briton of the Year

Joanna Lumley is chosen as The Times' Briton of the Year.

I'd have given her the title back in 1975–though for entirely different reasons.