Apologies for a somewhat enforced silence over the last few days - my PC’s had a bad bout of the technical lurgi and is only just coming back into shape.

However just to wet the appetite for things to come, I’ve got a couple of new videos in development, one on the effects of British foreign policy in the last few years (pretty grim as you might imagine) and the other an extended workout that I’m current calling ‘David Cameron: The Opera’, which will feature a soundtrack including, amongst others, The Beatles. Stain’d, Puddle of Mudd, Frank Zappa, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and The Tubes and will offend Tories the length and breadth of the land.

I’ll leave to guess exactly which songs are going on the soundtrack…

Bloody hell, I’ve been meme’d not once, not twice but three times in a matter of days - twice as a ‘thogger’ (Thinking Blogger, apparently) by Paul Linford and DK, and once by Bob Piper who, courtesy of Tim Ireland, wants to know if I can remember what I was doing four years ago when the invasion of the Iraq was launched.

The answer to the latter is ‘buggered if I know’ - probably shaking my head ruefully in anticipation  of the complete screw up to come, as for the former, it seems I’m required to nominate five other ‘thoggers’, which is rather more difficult than you might think as many of the best out there (Mr Eugenides, Jim Bliss, Chicken Yoghurt, Chris Dillow et al) have already got multiple nominations - but none the less I’ll give it a go and nominate the Yorkshire Ranter and UK Today for starters, add Brian Barder, whose ephems are a must-read, and express some small measure of amazement at finding that neither Obsolete or Phil Edwards have been tagged as yet.

There are numerous other I could mention, but I expect the meme will get around to most of them before long.

All lefties, I’m afraid (no I’m not really), although not for the lack of trying to come up with one but having decided I’d only nominate bloggers who hadn’t already been tagged it didn’t take too long to run through the list of readable right wingers and find they’d already been nominated at least once.

So much for the right stealing a march in blogging, eh? Only if you ignore the lousy signal to noise ratio.

Light bloggage this week due to workload and the impending onset of a head cold, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to comment on the vote to ‘in principle’ commission a replacement for Trident and Tom Watson’s suggestion that the following, heavily fisked, points make the argument in favour of this expensive commitment.

1. We live in an uncertain world. No one knows what enemies we might face in the next 30 years.

Sorry, Tom, but that’s too much of a straw man not to be challenged.

The world is full of uncertainties - it always is. And that’s why your statement is, frankly, absurd, because the same thing could have been said 50 or 100 years ago years ago and will, no doubt, still be said in 50 and 100 years time. You might as well argue that we need to upgrade Trident because the sky is blue or because the moon has a synodic period of 29.5 days or thereabouts for all that it informs the debate.

We may not know precisely who are enemies may be over the next 30 years but we can make some reasonable predictions about the general direction that the world is heading over that period in geopolitical terms.

China will grow to rival the US in terms of its economic power and has also shown a willingness to turn that to its political advantage in Africa.

Russia will remain a major player on the strength of natural resources and the position that gives it in the global energy markets and, again, has shown that it is willing to use that economic power as political muscle/leverage.

India will also become a major player - not to the extent that China looks likely to attain, but certainly on a par with the major European economies (UK, Germany, France), as may Brazil.

Over the time-spans we’re talking about here, those are the major issues that we should be factoring in to our decisions on policy in this area.

The nuclear era may have coincided with a period of marked ideological conflict - first the ‘Cold War’ and latterly the emergence of political Islamism as an ideological force and political antagonist - but the true lesson of history is that ideological conflicts are both a relatively recent invention and, if one takes the long view, a transient phenomenon. What is a constant in human history is conflict over control of territory and resources - if you want to know where the long-term tensions and geopolitical fault-lines are likely to emerge then you simply have to remember that ‘Its about the economy, stupid.’

Such enemies as do emerge over the next 30 to 50 years will come from, or as a byproduct of, economic and political rivalry between the major powers, rivalry that centre’s squarely on access to and control of key strategic resources, chief amongst which will be the world’s hydrocarbon resources, particularly oil and natural gas. That alone suggests that the Middle-East and Caspian basin will remain the focal point of ‘Great Game’ and the primary theatre of conflict during this period as the major powers vie for access to and control of the region’s natural resources, simply because it is one critical region, in resource terms, that is not fully under the control of one of major contending powers.

2. Such enemies could be armed with nuclear or other mass-destruction weapons.

*cough*

Other mass-destruction weapons?

Surely you’re not trying to suggest that the use of nuclear weapons would be a proportionate response to an attack by a ‘rogue state’ in which chemical or biological weapons were used?

In all seriousness, let’s try not to conflate the question of the future of Britain’s nuclear deterrent with that of other types of ‘mass-destruction weapons’, especially chemical weapons where any moderately industrialised nation could rapidly develop a basic, if crude, capability within a matter of months simply be retooling part of their existing industrial capacity.

Sorry, but you cannot realistically draw comparisons between nuclear weapons and crude mustard gas/chlorine-based weapons, the technology for which belongs to the 19th Century.

Let’s stick to the question of nukes, here, and leave out the issue of biological and chemical weapons. Its a debate worth having, but its its a different debate to that currently at hand.

3. Aggressive dictatorships have few scruples than liberal democracies. They are far more likely to use nuclear weapons if they possess them.

Pure assumption.

Sorry, Tom, but it does remain a fact that the only nation to actually use nuclear weapons, the USA, is a liberal democracy and not an aggressive dictatorship (despite what anyone might actually think of its current president).

That’s not the wisecrack that it might, on first sight, appear nor am I intending to take a crude ’shot’ at the US, here. My reason for noting that only the US have ever actually used nuclear weapons is to make what I consider a very serious point - if and when push comes to shove, scruples have little or nothing to do with the decision to deploy nuclear weapons or not.

If one deploys the argument that we live in an uncertain world and cannot predict who our enemies might be in 3o years time then, if one is being honest, one has to take the view than any nation state that possesses a nuclear capability is a potential threat - and that include current allies like France, and yes, the United States of America.

And before anyone even thinks of starting off down the ‘anti-Americanism’ road, let me just point out that all I am saying here is that if we cannot predict the future then we cannot say with absolute certainty what America or Britain may be like in 30 years time or how our relationship with each other may change during that time. Its a matter of simple logic and a modicum of applied realpolitik and nothing more - however its spun for a domestic audience, foreign policy is still a dog-eat-dog business in which its every nation state for themselves and the devil take the hindmost.

No matter how strong the UK’s ’special relationship’ might be at the present time the future offers no guarantees it will remain that way or even that we will not become enemies in the future. And if one is making policy decisions about the UK’s defensive capabilities that stretch 30-50 years in the future then, in purely rational terms, one has to concede that, over that kind of timescale, America is as much a potential enemy as any other nation state on the planet.
Getting back to the main point, Tom’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ argument about aggressive dictatorships may be rhetorically useful for a politician speaking to a domestic audience but in terms of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence it is a complete irrelevance.

Nuclear deterrents do not operate on the basis of scruples or of nominally assigning degrees of risk to potential enemies based on the political character of their government. They operate simply by ensuring that potential enemies understand that you can hit them just as hard as they can hit you, if not harder.

In real terms, what we’re dealing with here is pure gangsterism, albeit on a global scale. What kind of government an enemy has and how aggressive or dictatorial that government might be has no real bearing on whether they will or will not deploy nuclear weapons - all that matters is whether or not that course of action would amount to mass suicide, which is precisely what possessing a nuclear deterrent is designed to do, ensure that only some who is completely suicidal would ever use nuclear weapons against a similarly-armed enemy.

Citing the potential threat offered by aggressive dictatorships as justification for maintaining a nuclear deterrent may be politically expedient when talking to a domestic audience, but in reality any nuclear power, even one that is currently our closest ally on the world stage, is a potential threat and it would be more honest and more illuminating, I think, to admit that and permit the public to chew over its implications.

4. No amount of conventional force can compensate for the military disadvantage faced by a non-nuclear country against a nuclear country.

Again, that’s not strictly true, Tom.

Destructive as nuclear weapons are, the extent to which they act to counterbalance a marked inferiority in conventional forces still depends very much on the type and number of weapons that a country has available for use and the kind of delivery systems they have in place. There is a world of difference between facing off against a country that has a modern strategic thermonuclear capability (i.e. ICBMs and H-bombs) and one that possesses a very limited number of short range tactical fission weapons of a conventional design - and without open assistance from one of major powers, any new entrants to the nuclear club over the next 30 years will have access only to the latter and not the former.

The biggest ‘threat’ in terms of nuclear proliferation lies not in states seeking nuclear capabilities for offensive purposes, to establish regional pre-eminence or even, as one suspects is the case with North Korea, as a vanity project for a dictator of questionable sanity, but rather in the massive imbalance in conventional forces vis-a-vis the United States. The sad truth is that there is no greater incentive for smaller nations to seek to join the ‘nuclear club’ than the overwhelming might of America’s conventional forces .

Where we’re moving towards is an era of asymmetric deterrents - smaller nations like Iran (and others) seeking to develop a tactical/battlefield nuclear capability in order to deter the possibility of an attack by conventional military forces several orders of magnitude above anything their own conventional forces could hope to defend against.

America is the current focal point for this kind of thinking, not just in Iran but in other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, but as and when China starts to approach the US in terms of its economic, political and military muscle, we may see much the same thing amongst nations bordering their traditional sphere of influence. India and Pakistan, of course, already have their own small nuclear capability, but one could well see that countries like Malaysia and Indonesia considering taking the same road in future if they begin to perceive China’s growing influence as a threat to their national interests.

It’s against that background that we need to making our assessments of whether we need a nuclear capability in the future and, if so, what kind do we actually need.

Giving up the nuclear deterrent would entail a massive gamble that this country will never face a nuclear strike or attack by a major military power. It’s a risk that no responsible government should ever take.

We agree on one thing, certainly. Giving up our nuclear deterrent would entail a massive gamble. Like it or not, the nuclear genie has been out of the bottle for more than sixty years, and there’s no putting it back in. Nuclear weapons and a nuclear deterrent are a fact of life and, being realistic, the only feasible way of moving to position in which nation states do not possess such a deterrent would be to develop a global deterrent under the aegis of a supranational organisation like the UN or a very unlikely future NATO that included in its membership all five of the original nuclear powers (USA, Russia, China, France and the UK).

One of the paradoxical aspects of this whole debate, in terms of opinions within the Labour Party, is that one suspects that of those who are most vocal in their opposition to the renewal of Trident, or even the retention of any independent nuclear capability, are also those most likely to castigate the present government (with some considerable justification, admittedly) for having been to slavish in riding the coat-tails of US foreign policy.

In reality, in a ‘nuclear world’, a genuinely independent approach to foreign policy is possible only by one of two routes, either one gives up any aspirations of being a significant player on the global scene, or one accepts as a matter of necessity, the shelter offered by someone else’s ‘nuclear umbrella’, with all the constraints and strategic limitations that go with it.

That’s not the real question here though, Tom. The real question is whether a replacement for Trident is kind of weapons system we actually need and should be committing to - and that where the government should have consulted much more widely and committed themselves to an open public debate.

Trident is a strategic weapons system, designed and developed to fight (or rather deter) enemies with a similar capability. It a product of the Cold War and of Cold War thinking, pure and simple.

The problem I have with our committing to its direct replacement is that its value as a deterrent only makes sense if we suppose that our hypothetical future enemy will come from amongst the very few nations that have their own strategic weapons systems; namely the US, France, Russia and China.

If we leave France out of the equation, the reality is that if push really did come to shove, our own independent deterrent offers only a limited compensatory threat to any of the ‘big three’, the US, Russia and China.

It’s a question of scale. Given the size of population, territorial area and nuclear capabilities, we could thrown everything we’d got at any one of those three countries and while they’d take far bit of damage, they’d survive the attack. On the other side of the equation, any one of the three could easily nuke the UK back to Stone Age and, as a small island, we don’t have anywhere particularly where we can run and hide until the shooting match is over. In rational terms, maintaining a strategic deterrent makes no real sense at all, as when it comes to the kind of shooting match in which strategic weapons are deployed, we lose no matter what we’ve got.

What I can see is an argument for maintaining an independent and flexible tactical nuclear capability based around a mix of cruise missiles and short-medium range battlefield systems. That, in the context of the kind of enemies that may emerge over the next 30-50 years whose capabilities are of an order we can ‘deal’ with makes a lot of sense. There are strong, and I think winnable, arguments, for the retention of that kind of capability both in military and political terms and, of course, the cost of such systems would be substantially less than Trident’s £65 billion projected costs for the thirty-year life of the system.

This should have been debated more fully, not because we should be deciding whether or not to maintain an independent nuclear capability but because we should be taking very careful and well-thought decisions about the precise type of capability we need as deterrent in the 21st Century and, as I’ve explained, I’m not convinced by any means that Trident, or rather its replacement, is the right weapons system for our needs.

I am open to be convinced otherwise - feel free to try, Tom, if happen by - but based on my own reading of the main trends in international relations and foreign policy, I suspect that what parliament has agreed in principle this week is the wrong system for the wrong vision of the 21st Century.

Well, well, well… what are we to make of yet another story of a Tory-in-a-tangle over a race relations matter?

According to Iain Dale, while Cameron was right to sack Patrick Mercer from his, now former, front bench position, there are things to be said in mitigation of his remarks:

He would be the first to admit that his remarks today were naive, insulting and unwise. I say this with a heavy heart because I do not believe Patrick to be racist, but if I had been in David Cameron’s position I would have fired him too.

And, you know, having got around to reading what Mercer actually said I can’t say that I disagree overmuch with Iain’s take on events. Naive and unwise sounds about right, but as for insulting…?

Well, this is what he actually said…

“I had the good fortune to command a battalion that was racially very mixed. Towards the end, I had five company sergeant majors who were all black. They were without exception UK-born, Nottingham-born men who were English - as English as you and me. They prospered inside my regiment, but if you’d said to them: ‘Have you ever been called a nigger,’ they would have said: ‘Yes.’ But equally, a chap with red hair, for example, would also get a hard time - a far harder time than a black man, in fact,” he said.

“But that’s the way it is in the Army. If someone is slow on the assault course, you’d get people shouting: ‘Come on you fat bastard, come on you ginger bastard, come on you black bastard.’”

Mr Mercer added that he knew soldiers from ethnic minority backgrounds who used racism as an excuse for poor performance.

“I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless, but who used racism as cover for their misdemeanours,” he said.

“I remember one guy from St Anne’s (Nottingham) who was constantly absent and who had a lot of girlfriends. When he came back one day I asked him why, and he would say: ‘I was racially abused.’ And we’d say: ‘No you weren’t, you were off with your girlfriends again.’”

Condemning the announcement of the formation of a new trade union proposed by Marlon Clancy, a serving soldier who was recruited from the Commonwealth in 1999 and complained of several incidents where he was racially abused, the MP for Newark said: “Absolute nonsense. Complete and utter rot.”

He added: “In my experience, when you put on the uniform then all differences disappear. If you are a good soldier, you will do well. If you are a bad soldier, you will leave prematurely. There is a degree of colour-blindness among the vast majority of soldiers.

“I never came across a piece of nastiness inside the battalion that was based exclusively on racism.”

I don’t know about you, but what I see there is much more after the fashion of Colonel Blimp than it is the Ku Klux Klan.

Mercer’s error here amounts to one of indulging in injudicious generalisations - ‘I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless, but who used racism as cover for their misdemeanours’ - and yet in there, there lies a grain of truth. There are people within ethnic minority communities, in all walks of life, who will throw around claims of racism as nothing more than a means of covering their own arse - the fact that in many cases the racism that people experience is real doesn’t not mean, in itself, that the Ali G defence - ‘is it because I’s Black?’ - is a figment of peoples’ imagination. The difficulty, as ever, is in distinguishing accurately between the two.

The simple fact is that, to some extent, I can see his point here. Certainly, when I was younger (at sixth form college) some of banter than routinely flew back and forth across the common room was far from politically correct, but it took place in amongst people who took it for what it was, a bit of banter amongst people who operated under a mutual understanding that there was no racist intent behind it.  In the case of a couple of guys who were the firmest of friends, every morning stated with pretty much the same ritual greeting:

 ’Mornin’ Honky Bastard… Morning, you dumb Paki…’

Having said that, had anyone else spoken to either them in the same way then they’d have almost certainly got a battering from both, but that’s one of the reasons why these issues are so complicated. Customs vary, as they say. People naturally develop and establish their own social mores and its can often be the case that what, for some, would be consider a mortal insult would, for others, be no more than a personal in-joke.

If Mercer is generalising to poor effect, then very much the same can be said of the comments of Michelynn Lafleche, chairwoman of the Runnymede Trust:

“That is an entirely inappropriate response,” she said.

“This is entirely the sort of thing that we have laws in place to deal with. Racial discrimination and racial harassment are against the law no matter who you are, and that means the Armed Forces as well.

“Other organisations have taken racism very seriously such as the police, as well as the Army and the Navy, in fact. Mr Mercer’s reaction is entirely inappropriate, completely unhelpful, and really quite shocking.

“They are certainly inappropriate for an MP who is meant to be representing a constituency in which, I am sure, ethnic minority residents live.”

Mercer is certainly wrong to dismiss, out of hand, the motives of Marlon Clancy in setting up a ‘union’ to represent Commonwealth soldiers, although judging from his remarks one has to serious wonder quite whether Mercer was given the full context of Clancy’s actions before being asked to comment:

The controversy came after Mr Clancy, who is from Belize, said he was setting up his trade union because the 6,000 serving Commonwealth troops in the UK were being treated as “third class soldiers”.

The union will not have the right to strike under Armed Forces rules, but will be able to confidentially advise ethnic minority servicemen and women in the event of discrimination or other problems, he said.

“Commonwealth soldiers are third class soldiers. First you have British-born white soldiers, then you have the British-born black soldier, then, last, you have the black Commonwealth soldier,” he told the BBC.

“I am hoping this will open up a doorway for the Army to let these people know of their rights and give them what they are entitled to, and the justice they are entitled to as well.”

Mr Clancy said that he had decided to launch the union after his complaints - including an attack by fellow soldiers dressed in Ku Klux Klan outfits - were ignored by the Army chain of command.

“As a serving soldier I’ve gone through the chain of command time and time again within the seven-and-a-half years I’ve been in the Army and time and time again the chain of command has failed me,” he said.

That’s something that, probably, only Mercer knows - unless word has reached Iain through his own channels - but it wouldn’t be any great surprise to me if what was put to Mercer was only that the formation of this ‘union’ was taking place, without the additional context of Clancy’s apparent experiences. To my mind, context is vital is fairly and accurately assessing Mercer’s comments - for him to have been so dismissive in the full knowledge of Clancy’s background and complaints would be a very different matter to his being dismissive simply of the formation of such a union without it having been explained to him why that had come about and that, in turn, may have had a considerable influence on his response.

Who knows for sure - not me, certainly, and that’s why I find it impossible to unequivocally condemn Mercer for his remarks, foolish and insensitive as they were, without knowing the full context in which they were made. To borrow a phrase from the Scottish judicial system, it’s case ‘not proven’ on the evidence I have to hand.

Michelynn Lafleche is quite correct in noting that racial discrimination and racial harassment are against the law - but then, for the law to become involved there must first be a complaint from a victim, and that’s where things become rather more complicated because what one is relying on, there, is someone seeing themselves as having been discriminated against, harassed or victimised.

Undoubtedly there are some Black soldiers who would, and do, take a very dim view of being referred to as a ‘Black bastard’… and then there will be others who see their  RSM’s use of the phrase in much the manner that Mercer suggests, as being of no more significance that other ‘comparable’ phrases like ‘Fat Bastard’, ‘Ginger Bastard’ or ‘Scouse Bastard’. Like it or not, the ‘culture’ that exists in the Armed Forces  is very different from that in ‘Civvy Street’, and necessarily so because of the role that the military plays and the context in which it does its job.

Part of military training, certainly when it comes to front-line, especially infantry, troops, is a process of breaking down and rebuilding their character - in psychological terms, soldiers are quite literally ‘programmed’ by the Armed Forces in order for them to be able to do what they do - and that kind of programming comes at a cost both in terms of the impact it has on the individual  - its why many soldiers struggle to adapt to civilian life on leaving the armed forces - and on society. One simply cannot evaluate the prevailing culture of the Armed Forces in quite the same way that one looks at wider society - its social and cultural mores are different, and its that point Mercer seems to be trying to get across, albeit rather badly.

Somewhere in all this, there is a sensible, rational debate to be had but one, sadly, that isn’t going to be happening any time soon because both ’sides’ are too fond of their of own generalisations and too certain of their own claims to the moral high ground to even concede that the other might just have a point or two worth considering.

IDIOT, n.

A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

Ambrose Bierce - The Devil’s Dictionary

No. Strangely enough I’m not referring to Praguetory this time, but rather his pedomorphic (look it up!) political compatriot, C4 who blogs at complete train-wreck he calls ‘Conservative Mind‘, on which he describes his ultimate ambition as being to become ‘a great and influential international statesman and Cabinet minister‘.

Mwahahahaahahahahahaha!

Let’s give you the back story. A while back - can’t be arsed to look up exactly when, C4 made a dumb comment over at Bob Piper’s blog that, IIRC, came in response to one one of Praguetory’s period whinges about being ‘outed’ - I expect it while it was being pointed out that PT’d outed himself.

Whatever.

The upshot of the comment was that I decided to see if C4 was anything like as dumb as dumb as his ‘friend’, with the result that 5-10 minutes later - and based on information from one blog post of his - I managed to trace, amongst other things, his full name, date of birth, current and most recent previous address and even a letter he’d written to a local rag. Only the fact that he’s not worth the additional effort and expense prevented me from obtaining a credit report, etc.

Now, we’re I truly a malicious character I could easily have gone on to pull all manner of stunts - everything from sign him for every junk mail provider in the UK to having all sorts of unwanted crap delivered to his home address, but as that’s not my style I simply left him a bit of an oblique hint and left it at that.

Shuffle forward a few weeks, and C4 is posting crap like this over at PT’s blog:

If he tried his crap with me, he’d be collecting disability benefits for the rest of his miserable life.

You can imagine how I chuckled at his bravado, safe in the knowledge of just how exposed he actually is… oh, the temptation.

But no, idiot that he is I’ve no particular beef with him that’s big enough to justify blowing the guy of the water as badly as I could, given the information I have to hand, so instead I decided to level with him:

You obviously didn’t take the hint I left for you over at Bob Pipers’ blog but so we’re absolutely clear here, based on nothing more than one piece of information that you’ve posted on your own blog it took me a matter of 5-10 minutes to trace your full name, current and previous address, a letter you had published in you local press and - if I could be arsed to spend the money - I could get a credit report as well.

I’ve had that information - oh, for well over a month and haven’t done a damn thing with it. And despite your half baked threats, I would even be happy to point out exactly the information that you need to remove to cover your tracks - privately by email, of course - for no better reason that I don’t have any particular beef with you anyway.

Now I can’t say fairer than that, can I? All he has to do is provide a private contact and I’ll point him to the information he needs to make disappear to cover his arse… but no, here’s his reply:

Don’t sing it *****-Boy, JUST BRING IT!

Perhaps you should rename your blog Pravda, because just like the newspaper’s first editor, a certain Iosef Koba Stalin, the pair of you are commie bullies, hypocrites and liars.

Jeez, when they were giving out brains, this guy was obviously still in the dinner queue!

That’s over at PT’s, since when the idiot has heaped imbecility upon stupidity by posting a ‘message’ at his blog consisting of a crap wrestling promo and the ‘legend’, ‘Don’t hunt what you can’t kill’.

A few years ago that would have been enough to ensure that he’d be getting unwanted pizza deliveries for a month and half the contents of the local Curry’s superstore delivered to his doorstep. Today, I’m older, wiser and rather more sanguine - simply knowing the chaos I could easily pitch the guy into is satisfaction enough, but…

…if I found it so easy to trace that much personal information about him, so can anyone else if they have a mind to - and someone else may not be quite as relaxed about things as I am.

So, for now, the offer still stands, but if C4 prefers to keep on showboating then he’s welcome to take the chance of getting his life fucked over.

That’s his problem, not mine.

*quotation - H L Mencken (naturally)

We will respect MPs’ decision on Lords, says Straw

Jack Straw today vowed to respect the decision of MPs in creating a wholly or predominantly elected House of Lords.

The Commons leader rejected claims that last night’s historic vote in favour of a wholly elected upper chamber was compromised by opponents voting for it as a sabotage ploy.

From Iain Dale I discover that:

The Thatcher Foundation website had just made available a series of videos featuring the great lady.

Hehehe… One version of ‘The Aristocrats‘ down… only another 74 to go.

Seriously… this time its not a mistake. My source is 100% reliable, of completely unimpeachable character and has seen this with their very own eyes…

…Margaret Thatcher is completely bereft of life.

…

…

Yep, it doesn’t matter what you do to that fucking bronze statue that they’ve installed in Parliament a week or so back, it won’t move one fucking bit.

It is absolutely dead as a fucking door-nail… No, seriously - my source has checked and he’s pretty fucking sure.. well, he knows a bronze statue when he sees one..

You can shout at it…

You can scream at it…

You can kick it…

You can punch it…

You can even wave a carton of milk under its nose without any fear of the damn thing snatching it off you.

That statue is 100% dead and there’s absolutely no mistaking it.

The story so far…

Journalist ‘friend’ sends a late night spoof text message to Recess Monkey announcing that Margaret Thatcher has finally turned up her toes and gone to meet Beelzebub.

RM fails to double-check that they really have staked the bitch down and destroyed all remaining portraits and blogs the fake story, then fucks off to bed.

Tory bloggers go into a complete self-righteous meltdown…

RM gets up, finds he’s been had big time and made a bit of an arse of himself and posts a retraction.

End of story…

…well, apart from some incessent whinging from the usual bunch of Tory gobshites because RM had the temerity to refer to the former Wicked Witch of Finchley as ‘Milk Snatcher’ in his original post, a reference, of course, to her tenure as Education Minister in the Health Government wherein she presided over the withdrawal of free school milk from 7-11 year olds - her wholesale withdrawal of milk of human kindness from the rest of UK came rather later.

At least the ever reliable DK managed to see the funny side of RM’s self-inflicted predicament.

Mmm… hubris indeed - although judging from the some of the overheated reaction amongst Tory ranks I’d venture that Eurypedes’ gods have been royally fucking about with rather more than just the one blogger.

On this occasion I can only partially agree with Mr Eugenides in his observation that ‘its the sheepish but graceless retraction this morning that makes this funny’ - RM’s embarrassment is but a mere trifle next to the seamless segue into Angry of Tonbridge Wells mode effected by a number of Tory bloggers, including (not unexpectedly) Praguetory, who manages to beat even his own usual standards of pompous twattery on his own blog…

The jibe hasn’t been edited out - it is the title of the picture he posted! Recess’ selfish desire to be the first blogger to get the news out first trumped any sense of decency which would have stopped any normal person from shouting a story from the rooftops before corroborating it. I wander whether he would like to hear about the death of someone close to him from some pondlife crowing from a blog.

…and even his graceless remarks on RM’s blog…

Fuck off back to bed you chimp. I’ve written up your obituary you disgusting creature - and yes you have edited the previous post.

…with this absolute gem posted in the comments at Iain Dale’s…

I’m calling you naive. You should sue him for the damage caused by his negligence.

Hey, PT, you seem to have something wrong with your head…

…it’s stuck firmly up your arse.

Mwahahahahahahahaha!

For fuck’s sake, what a pretentious cunt, writing up RM’s ‘obituary’ and suggesting he should be sued for being dumb enough - or maybe pissed enough - to fall for a practical joke. Still, I suppose it makes a change from writing his own fucking obituary and ‘outing’ himself and then whinging incessantly if anyone mentions his real name.

Fuck me, the dumb cunt still appears not to have figured out that your identity can’t be ‘outed’ byanother blogger when you’ve already been dumb enough to out yourself before you even started fucking blogging and any twat with access to Google and a modicum of patience can find you doing it.

Mind, at least he only told RM to fuck off and didn’t get around to issuing threats like this, which was posted ‘anonymously’.

Thanks for passing your screen save to M O T. I won’t forget that act of kindness. He censored the information about **** *****. My contact who was at uni at the same time at **** ***** made some very serious allegations about ** ***** - well beyond the normal university experience. This wasn’t something I waished [sic] to bring into the public arena, but I will be seeing my source to see whether he is open to that suggestion. Again, thank you for your kind act. It will not affect me, but will rebound on your party (especially in Birmingham). You have an opportunity to get MoT to take down his post forthwith.

Seriously, that was posted in the comments of another Labour blog after I publicised PT’s George Osbourne gaff and suckered him into confirming what he’d written, posted and then fairly rapidly tried to delete - quickly enough not to have the full page cached but not so quickly that Google’s search engine spider failed to index the post in question.

What a self-important twat, eh? Not only will my ripping the piss out of him ‘rebound’ on the Labour Party in Birmingham - as if he’s that fucking important in the first place - but the blogger in question was also given the ‘opportunity’ to get me to take down my post ‘forthwith’.

Mwahahahahahahahaha! Listen to Mr Big Shot, eh? (I have used the right vowel there, haven’t I? Oh well, make you own mind up).

Just what is it with some of the whining Tory twats who’ve crawled out from under a rock into the blogosphere of late? One minute they want to play as being fearless defenders of free speech and the next it’s all ‘ you can’t say that, its… its.. its… just not decent. Fuck right off you hypocritical bunch of cunts. If you don’t like what you see then fuck off and let the Daily Express rot your brain instead, because I really don’t give a fuck what you think anyway.

So before any of that bullshit starts up over here, let’s answer the Tory’s number one harumph - Have you no sense of decency?

No. Now fuck off and cry somewhere else, you twat!

Let’s get something straight here - no matter how much some of you Tories would like to see Thatch’s eventual demise turn in some half-arsed Diana-style display of public grief, replete with the usual wailing, gnashing of teeth and obscene profits for Interflora, that just ain’t happening round here. In fact I’ve got my celebratory video ready and waiting for the big day - a collection of Spitting Images’ finest Thatcher gags set to the tune of ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ - and that’s about as sombre and mournful as it’s going to get.

Whether you like it or not, a large section of the British public - most of it North of the Home Counties - loathe the bitch with a passion undiminished by the passage of time and would happily salt the ground she’s walked on, never mind volunteer to dig the bitches’ grave - and fill it in over her head, which would be even more satisfying.
You know it. I know it. The whole fucking world knows it and there’s no fucking point pretending otherwise, so let’s just forget the faux outrage and fuck-witted moralising - you cry if you want to, this blogger’s not for crying, in fact the toughest decision facing many of us Labour ranks is going to be to decide which would be more fitting tribute to Thatch…

…a dance floor or a public urinal - preferably sited over the grave.

A lot of people in this country haven’t forgiven and haven’t forgotten, and if Thatcher’s death doesn’t give them cause for celebration it’ll at least give them the quiet satisfaction of knowing she’s gone and gone for good. That’s just way it is and no amount of whinging or overblown outrage in Tory ranks is going to change that one bit, so shut the fuck up and get used to it.

If there’s one thing more fucking tedious than a whinging Tory gobshite, its a moralising, whinging Tory gobshire.

By popular demand (it seems), I give you Hazel Blears, Cartman and, almost certainly, the sack if you get caught watching this at work…

…seriously, this is NSFW