A Tale of Two Letters

Since I've been walking to walk for the last month, I've unsurprisingly stopped reading the Evening Standard. And a good thing that is too, being as it is the printed minutes of Boris Johnson's campaign headquarters. But on Monday I did pick up a copy - a shitty journey back from Guildford left me feeling like catching the fastest tube back home rather than bothering to walk.

A couple of "opinions" on the letters page caught my eye. Why am I only writing about these now? Only the voices in my head know why. And they won't tell me.

Here they are [emphasis mine]:

Light entertainment at the BBC in the Eighties was a very different place from today - with a culture centred on the bar, full of characters and an almost anarchic sense of fun, with the producers themselves often larking about. 

I recall the rumours about Savile but they also flew around about lots of other people, including BBC executives. Isn't there the risk of everyone with an axe to grind now jumping on the bandwagon? A well-known actor threw a bacon roll at me once: should I launch into print and say in hindsight it was an assault? And how can George Entwistle, a director-general who has been in post five minutes, chair an enquiry on the issue?

The BBC has been showing us how Britain fed itself during the war. I can only assume this is government propaganda bracing us for the shortage of land caused by its reckless immigration policy.

I play a game called "Two a Day" with the Metro and the Standard. Every single day there are two letters (or texts) which are so far to the right they're off the lunatic fringe. And Monday was no exception. But it was special in how hard these two people had to work to get their absurd ideas out.

Jeanette Eccles from N7 had to compare child molestation to having a bacon sandwich thrown at her in order to dismiss the possibility of investigating the Saville affair. And Vanessa of no permanent address had to spend the last few years ignoring the fact that net immigration is negative (that is: more people are leaving than coming in) just in order to hold on to her opinion for this long. Then she had to come up with one of the most awesome non sequiturs I've seen in the Standard since they had Theresa May write an opinion piece about terrorists.

Congratulations Jeanette and Vanessa. Your prize for today's piece of gibbering, frothy-mouthed hatred is my ire. Go wallow in it.

BBC News' Rose-Tinted Glasses

BBC News website has run a hauntingly saccharine look at what life was like in 1952, the year the Queen was crowned. It's called You in '52. It covers thing like how you may have dressed (if you were rich), the music you might listen to (were you able to afford a wireless), and the food you would eat (assuming you had the wealth or connections to avoid the still-in-place wartime rations).

Aah, you may say, a return to the life of those days would be nice. Don't you wish for the family values? The happy children playing in the street? The gay men imprisoned and chemically castrated for their "perversion"? The black people racially abused and still treated as second-class citizens? The women treated as unpaid house-staff, unable to work for themselves with any measure of economic freedom once married? Or the unmarried women, derided as unlovable spinsters? No? Okay, then.

The Olympics Think I am Unemployed

Or so rich that I have my own butler. Actually, on second thought, that's more likely. Since the roads are only going to be used by 'VIPs' anyway during the Olympics, and mostly the only people who actually got tickets are the ones who avoided the lottery altogether and instead got the London Olympic Committee to simply give them all the tickets they want via the company they happen to be a director of.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Olympics. Obviously I oppose the Sound Cannons, the Surface to Air missiles, the freebies for the rich, the special roads that the poor aren't allowed to use, and the fact that we (read: the Coalition) are spending ridiculous sums of money on a two week long party for Visa directors while simulaneously fucking the poor, the old, women, workers, the disabled, anybody earning less than £45,000 a year, families, young children, small business owners, the sick and anyone who wants to make life better for others.

At the same time, I know I'm just going to enjoy every moment of the sport. I'm fully prepared - holiday booked for the entire period, all important engagements cancelled, cupboard stocked with Doritos, and all my comfortable tracksuit bottoms washed and ready to go.

I fully expect to be well-versed, by the end of it all, in the ins and outs of Algerian judo, in Usain Bolt's favourite pair of shoes, and in the environmental ramifications of competitive skeet shooting. I expect at least once to burst into tears seeing a plucky underdog, from some tiny country, wearing a burlap sack, win a gold medal against all the odds in his/her nation's home sport (I don't know what yet, maybe Klondike, we'll see).

So after all the cognitive dissonance, detailed above, which was necessary to get me actually fucking excited about this Olympics; and after all the elation I felt at winning some tickets (2 tickets to see two games of the qualifying rounds for the basketball, thanks for asking), it somewhat irked me to receive the following email from London Ticketing:

Dear Tim,

Your London 2012 tickets

The Olympic Games are just around the corner, and soon you will be holding your Olympic tickets in your hand.

Tickets will start to be delivered from late May with deliveries continuing into July. This email tells you everything you need to know about how to make sure you get your tickets safely.

Your tickets will be sent using Royal Mail‘s Tracked® delivery service. You will receive a notification by email and/or SMS (if you have provided your mobile number) from Royal Mail on the day your tickets are due to be delivered.

Someone will need to be there to sign for your tickets. If nobody is there, Royal Mail will leave a 'Something for you’ card. You will also be notified of the delivery attempt by email and/or SMS. Your ticket package will be returned to your local Royal Mail delivery office and held securely for 18 days.

You can visit the office to collect your package, or contact Royal Mail to arrange a redelivery to the same address. In the event you don’t collect your package, Royal Mail will send you a reminder notification by email and/or SMS before it is returned to London 2012.

If you have changed address since 6 February 2012 or have any further queries regarding ticket delivery, please visit the FAQ section on the London 2012 ticketing website.

[Emphasis mine]. Note the three sections I felt important enough to highlight.

Tickets will start to be delivered from late May with deliveries continuing into July

Okay, not so bad, essentially a 2 month window for my tickets to arrive in. There's a lot of tickets to send out, and it's a big logistical challenge.

You will receive a notification by email... from Royal Mail on the day your tickets are due to be delivered.

Again, how very nice of them to tell me, at least that way when I get home from work I'll know to expect them - I wouldn't want them to go missing, after all.

Someone will need to be there to sign for your tickets.

Wait, WHAT? So someone needs to be at home on the day my tickets arrive, a day which I won't know about until ON THAT DAY ITSELF. So I may need to spend a day at home waiting for a delivery on any day between late May and "into July", but have absolutely no idea which one. What to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games think I am? Rich enough to afford a dogsbody?


Bloody Nora, I thought the crackdown of freedom of speech through suppression of protests was bad, but this really takes the biscuit.

__________________________________

Addendum to above post:

I apologise to all unemployed people for the title, now that I think about it. We all have much better things to do than sit around waiting for tickets for two months, and given the number of hoops people who are unemployed have to go through to receive even the pittance that prevents them from starving while searching for work, it's kinda thoughtless to assume they have it easier than I do.

So, sorry to you all.

Are wealthy MPs at a disadvantage?

No.

This post from Left Foot Forward puts forward the idea that a study shows that voters find excessive riches distasteful. And then tries to spin it into a narrative of the rich being discriminated against in parliament.

I was just thinking that we don't have enough millionaires in Parliament. Maybe we should try to shut the poor out of politics to even the balance? Throw in a few unpaid internships to make sure that only the rich can afford to join the legislative class. We're overwhelmed by the poor in politics and I, for one, want to see an end to it. What happened to the days when our aristocracy had a divine right to treat us how they pleased? I'm pretty sure we were all happier then.

AN END! To the poor and the middle-class in politics! This is our mantra! Who wants elections these days anyway? What an absurdly excessive spending of public funds, when we could be passing on the savings as tax breaks to fracking companies.

Or maybe they should all just fuck right off. Left Foot Forward is supposed to be a blog of the left. The mainstream left make me sick.

The Trayvon Martin Shooting

Being here in the UK, some of you may have missed the Trayvon Martin furore. This would be because there's been essentially zero coverage of the whole thing. You'd be shocked at the date that the actual shooting occurred (26th of February) given that only now are we hearing about it.

Others have explained far better than I the facts of the case (here's a good starting point), but I wish to begin with a brief talk of the UK media's reaction.

None of the mainstream UK media covered the case until mass protests began.
The first BBC News TV article, as far as I can tell, was on the day of the protests. First, that proves that protests do work, and that protests have value beyond making lots of noise. I didn't see a newspaper article on the subject until the day after. Granted, I only read the Guardian, the Times and the free commuter papers, but surely at least one of these would cover it...

Every article is repeating the lie that Zimmerman was a neighbourhood watch volunteer.
Read James Fenton's article, the relevant BBC article on the subject. The truth is that Zimmerman wasn't a member of any neighbourhood watch scheme - he was a self-appointed neighbourhood watch volunteer. And he's made massive numbers of calls to 911 pointing out suspicious (i.e. black) characters. He was also carrying a weapon, which he's not supposed to do if he's in the neighbourhood watch, and he followed the guy. That's not just something neighbourhood watch officers aren't supposed to do, it's the thing he was explicitly told not to do by the 911 operator.

Zimmerman's actions have been condemned by the National Sheriffs' Association which sponsors the US's nationwide neighbourhood watch programme, a crime prevention scheme that allows local volunteers to patrol the streets. 

It said it had no record that the community involved was registered with the NSA programme, calling Zimmerman a "self-appointed neighbourhood watchman". 

“The alleged participant ignored everything the Neighborhood Watch Program stands for and it resulted in a young man losing his life. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of Trayvon Martin during this terrible time,” said Aaron D Kennard, the NSA's executive director.

Bastard.


The far-right wing seem to think Obama's involvement made this falsely about race.
This is an America article which the far-right blogosphere in the UK is currently circulating. There's a couple of things in here which are just wrong, and I found it pretty instructional to understand them - it helps me understand the mindset of the far right a little better.

A Hispanic man shoots a black kid where no one knows the exact circumstances in which the shooting occurred and where we are likely never to know what happened. Instead of waiting for the facts, narratives have replaced truth and we have a full blown racial incident when it isn't even clear that race was a factor.

Again - this kid was armed and ready. With a bag of skittles and a drink. He was 17. He was alone. He was followed by a man with a track record of making 911 calls to police of other suspicious (once again, i.e. black) characters.

He was followed by a man who was carrying a 9mm handgun (or as I call it, a "magic death button"), and shot dead. He put up the hood of his hoodie because he was scared he was being stalked. We have that from a tape of him with his girlfriend.

How will he look if it comes out that the shooter was justified in defending himself?

We know better - besides, what could he possibly be defending himself from - are the red ones in a Skittles packet particularly dangerous? Obama has weighed in because of the massive outcry that justice has not been done. Nobody has even tried. Obama came down on the correct side, because a man has shot an unarmed child, and has not even been investigated by the police. This is sick. This is exactly the institutionalised racism that we in the UK think has gone away now we've convicted Stephen Lawrence's killers.

It has not.

Politically-aligned blogging

I've recently unsubscribed from Progress, whose tagline is "News and debate from the progressive community". A quick perusal of their website will prove that's not the case - in fact, the first sentence you read will explain that Progress is a new Labour pressure group with a logo disturbingly similar to the current designs of the Democrat/Republican mascot animals (a donkey and elephant respectively - we know who won that PR battle).

That wasn't enough to put me off. I read vile bigot Guido Fawkes and viler bigot David Vance of Biased BBC, and I'm still subscribed to their sites. Their blogs, despite being devoid of anything approaching a redeeming feature still elements which I, as a genuine progressive, actually want to read.

These two bloggers, in their dismissal of anyone trying to help others, have a deep-seated distrust of the left. They spend huge amounts of time looking for every failure the left ever makes. And that's good. Without vile bigots watching our every mood, we'd still be believing that Labour are fighting in our best interests. We'd still be under that horrible misapprehension of having a political party that actually serves our interest.

Progress is different. Have a read through their last 5 posts. I guarantee you'll find:

• A labour councillor explaining how a Tory policy will mildly harm people within their constituency
• A prominent Labour MP with a 4000 essay on their latest policy which will almost certainly never make it into law
• A vague attempt to discredit the coalition as infighting instead of trying to stop their genuinely damaging policies
• An appeal to give to a person's pet charity, with the vague implication that only those with the guts to be out and out Labour supporters are generous enough to truly care about others

The issue here is not necessarily the motivation - Tory policies are causing real and measurable harm to a massive majority of people, and people should be given to charities. But the posts are essentially a mouthpiece for the Labour top- and mid-level leadership to have a mouthpiece, to provide the false impression of grassroots support.

Truth be told, Labour aren't the party of Labour any more. Their constitution no longer covers it, and they haven't fought for it for far too long. Even their rhetoric is anti-Labour, despite a massive portion of their funding from a traditional relationship with the unions. But every article is told within Labour's own image of itself - as a party in opposition it sees itself as the voice of the people, standing up bravely against the combined forces of the coalition as they try to destroy Britain as we know it.

But they're not. While the real progressives fight for our rights, and people like me sit at home and type, the Labour party fight every movement until they succeed before co-opting the movement's rhetoric as their own. For all that the Conservatives are bastards and the Lib Dems shills, the Labour party have become the worst kind of class warmongers, smiling about equality while supporting the 1% every step of the way before claiming every minor civil rights victory as their own.