Speaking as an idiot...

It's around fifty years since the coming into force of the political law of identity, where all pretence of principled solidarity was discarded in favour of outright factionalism. It is an extremely misleading coincidence that over this period, we have been more prosperous, inclusive and peaceful than at any previous point in recorded history. These things are not positively correlated. I hate identity politics and not just the crazy-eyed personality cult "call me Tony" nonsense.

I hate that there is thought to be such a thing as the Black Community, the Scottish Perspective and the Arab Street (why do Arabs just get a street by the way?). Regardless of subtextual slights, the whole idea is nonsense and is based on the idea that genetically similar people must think along roughly the same lines. 

And it's not confined to race. A close relative of mine who otherwise has an extremely sophisticated sense of his own racial identity, told me recently that Dundee United supporters are all wankers. 

The lesson of the enlightenment is that the ancestral paths of thought are not necessarily the ones to which we are most sternly attached. At age 8, I was shown a diagram and explanation of the Big Bang and some luridly coloured illustrations of the formation of our galaxy. This single intrusion into my anthropocentric universe eventually led to my studies in Celtic origin myths and fractal infinity theory (I prefer this latter term to chaos theory - fractals are not chaotic and nor do they sound like a 90s pop-punk band).

The point is that although gene theory suggests that our actions are conditioned on the preference for the survival of our closest genetic relations, this does not mean that our intellectual understanding of life need be similarly hamstrung.

And yet I have participated in seminars devoted to 'queer theory', 'postcolonial theory', 'marxist theory' and 'femenist theory'. As if a straightforward Historicist approach to the problems would not have turned up the shock result that women, homosexuals and former subjects of the empire had been oppressed and persecuted by the forces of capital, phallocracy and theism.

Each of these seminars were marred and stultified by a continuous choir of people offering points no more detailed than 'Speaking as a <insert identity group here>, I think <insert author/politician here> is a desperate bigot.' Well of course they fucking were!

Closer to the present we have Tories in the present government insisting that the reason for their continual local election defeats is the failure of their leadership to adhere to the interests of their core voting bloc... Or the far-right view in America that Obama retained everything except Indiana because of moral weakness on the part of a minority coalition who want 'stuff'. In these cases the identity group responsible is, the white nearly-poor who have been around forever but are transitioning into a new political identity. In truth the enduring popularity of their old-guard Conservative leadership is close to unbelievable and seems to be only attributable to a headmasterly demeanour that seems to play on the old class system. It's like Richard Curtis had written a Prime Minister/President and plopped them down into their respective cabinet rooms.

My point is that when we come up against someone whose motives and character are similar to our own and who comes to different conclusions, we must think 'Are they in the right?'.

This is good. A sign of sanity even. The problems arise when those who have not thought too deeply about anything, ever apply this type of thought. The calculus changes from 'has this person come to a better conclusion than I have?' to 'is that the conclusion I would have come to had I actually thought about it?'

One may spot such malingerers in the public discourse by their propensity to start their contributions with the words, 'Speaking as a... <insert identity here...>' I don't mean to point fingers at any particular group here. In the West we are preoccupied with race, gender, class and occupation. If, for example you are one of those people who believe that the moral health of the nation requires that the Doctor regenerate into a woman, stop it.

If you believe that it is the turn of a black person to lead one of the major political parties in the UK, stop it. There are no turns. To believe that there are is to reinforce the myth that the rules of natural justice exist independently of human conceit. To believe this in turn is to believe that exploitation of the weak by the strong is something that will sort itself out by itself. How has that worked out in the Congo or Somalia or the Russian Federation?

The gains of the past fifty years were achieved in a very short space of time immediately following the horrors of the Second World War. A war entirely caused by a sense of an injustice imposed upon a particular national group that was warped into a teleological race myth. Every step we have taken back towards identity politics since then has been a step back into the quagmire of early 20th century, modernist loathing and separatist ideology.

We have every right to say that we and our fellows must be treated the same as you and yours. We do not have the right to say, we and our fellows are facing a problem therefore the solution applies to all.

#NudePhotoRevolutionary

Very rarely does a subject come up where the right and wrong sides are so clearly demarcated and yet a debate goes on. Aliaa Magda Elmahdy is a young Egyptian woman who, in full control of her senses and with the intention of making a point about her freedom to do so, posted a photo of herself, wearing no clothes bar a pair of stockings, on her blog.

http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com/


Clearly this has caused a fuss among those who say that the bodies of women are profane by nature, but frankly; fuck 'em. What really concerns me is the pseudo liberal attitude that says, 'This girl doesn't know what she's doing - this will only inflame anger.' You're damn right it will. That's why she did it and yes, she did understand that that's what it would do. She is now a known dissident. Her blog has now been viewed over 2,600,000 times and the counter is rising all the time. That's what I call getting your point across.

If you are tempted to downplay the significance of this, then let's remember what censorship and sexual repression did to the UK. The Victorian era saw examples of the most hideous immorality and cruelty it is possible to imagine. It took eighty years for the people warped by that sensibility to die and leave us alone.

Who misses that era? Who misses jail for homosexuals? Who misses the requirement to cover their flesh? Who misses the terrifying otherness that a female body represents to a young man before he discovers their touch?

Yet these oppressions and worse are being foisted upon people every day of their lives in countries of conservative culture and law. In the article below, Mona Eltahawy gives an account of the cases of women who live their lives under the rule of men. I don't really have the stomach to describe it here. Suffice it to say that it involves one of the most shameful combinations of two words imaginable: 'virginity test'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/18/egypy-aliaa-mahdy-patriarchs-mind?newsfeed=true




As Bill Maher has been shouting at anyone nearby the last couple of days, the only adequate moderating influence on the reptilian instincts of the male brain is the presence of empowered women. Look at the industrys, institutions and cultures where women are marginalised. Leave aside that particular injustice for a moment and then look at the health of the subject. Catholic Church, anyone? Football? Freemasonry? Investment banking?

What is finally going to lift the middle east out of its two hundred year spiral of decline is the empowerment of the other half, not the restoration of a lost empire. That's what lifted the UK out of the exhaustion of the postwar era and it is the only thing that has ever healed an injured society anywhere. So show some solidarity with Aliaa Elmahdy. She's exposed herself in more ways than one.

Killing Bin Laden and Taking it Personally

On September 11th 2001 I was 17 years old and was exposed - along with the rest of the world - to an act of televised, real-world atrocity. It is one of those moments that instantly transcended the experience of living through it. In the hours and days following, I thought I had witnessed a cultural paradigm-shift.

Murder like this, I thought, has never been witnessed in such a way.

Within that one day, the nineties seemed to become history. Embarrassing uncle Tony Blair became midlife sanctimonious nutter, Tony Blair. Perhaps because that was also my last year in secondary education, the before and after were so stark that I became intensely fascinated with the event and its repercussions. I read books about neo-imperialism, the Mujahiddeen, Arab cultural sentiment and Islamic beliefs. And Michael Moore (blush). Anyone slightly younger than myself would have no memory of the pre-2001 perception of Islam. Does anyone else remember the soft-focus, celebrity-led BBC documentaries about the rich tradition of faith and peace? I sometimes think I made it up.

In any case, the irony to me has always been that the actions of 12 men, funded and supported by a tiny proportion of the Islamic hard-right changed the world. It was the direct confirmation of Margaret Meade's (disputed) quote:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

It was at that age and in that time, that I started to suspect that life was not going to be as much fun as I thought. And so it was to prove. Having meticulously plotted out the course of my life up to my mid-thirties, the noughties saw each step of my road map besieged by disappointment, dullness and incomprehensible fatuity. In politics, in art and in life.

But most of all in the internet. If there is one thing that kills curiosity, it is keeping your newspapers in the same place as your porn. And not just porn - sitcoms, almanacs, horror movies, home movies. Do you remember how little of a life these things took up before they were all available in one place? As broadband followed dial-up and fibre followed DSL, we are getting ever closer to the point of critical videomalaise.

The larger point, which I'm failing to get to is that the War on Terror(TM)and the internet grew up together. Bin Laden was the internet's first big shot at propaganda and it performed admirably on every side. It spread the message at and from every angle. There was the White House youtube channel, the jihadist websites, people going to jail for sharing information and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.

Having been hungry for information, I took active interests in every opinion I could locate. Did I get wiser and gain a mature understanding of the situation? No. I got into a funk of hatred, doubt and self-aggrandising social networking.

In a way that my education is supposed to resist, the turn of the century is fixed in my mind as a genuine point of paradigm shift. Digital photography brought about an exponential boom in the presence of imagery. The advent of broadband then acted like the nuclear reaction at the centre of this boom. The majority of life (work, consumerism, socialisation, education, curiosity and correspondence) was absorbed by the new, digital platform. But the platform is abstract. Non-tactile. Insubstantial. Two dimensional. (Yes, I struggled to find the right synonym.) Ultimately, the digital platform is shallow.

And how were we to defend ourselves against the accusations of the Bin Ladenists (and incidentally the Russians and Chinese) that the European and American cultures had become decadent and superficial? The President of the United States should have been the one winning the argument on our behalf, but in the case of GWB his mere existence seemed to lose it. We began to feel guilty for the attacks ourselves.

The governments of the west had declared the end of history in 1989. Triumphalism had trumped relief in the zeitgeist and suddenly a liberal utopianism settled over us. The dotcom boom and the mapping of the human genome seemed to confirm that the end of overt hostilities had unbound us to view the future as a limitless canvas for our vindicated genius and virtue.

Meanwhile, back in the actual theatres of war where our proxies had been destroying their neighbours on our behalf... they were abandoned. Their wars were not over and the sores of conflict became infected with new bacteria. Iraq was being driven into the ground and (yes I'll say it) the Hussein mafia had allied itself publicly with the jihadist movement. Yugoslavia too, descended into atavistic barbarism.

It's one thing to say that they were necessary to resist the Stalino-fascism of the Soviet Union, but it's quite another to say that our governments are absolved of responsibility for these conflicts. On a sidenote, we intervened in Bosnia where the muslims were slavic, but the darker your skin, the less likely we were to consider your conflict worthy of attention.

Out of this chaotic disenfranchisment of the warrior caste, emerged the perfect enemy. Osama Bin Laden. I never hated Bin Laden. He was doing what he was asked to do. What he was feted as a hero for doing (not least by agents of our side) and what he believed to be right. The effect of what he did however, was to sicken me deeply inside. I'll never be the same person who spent the afternoon of September 11th 2001 (we weren't told anything at school) rehearsing for a doomed production of Return to the Forbidden Planet. I'll never again be honestly able to say that nothing can touch the heart as powerfully as art. I'll never be able to write a story about a child with an unexpressed crush on his friend (this project was abandoned around a week later).

As I began by saying, the attacks on the twin towers felt like a trigger. Like a beginning. But that was because I had no idea where this attack came from or who Bin Laden was. Now his death is being paired with the Arab Spring to imply that this narrative has come to an end, but it hasn't. The horror will go on and on until Niall Ferguson owns up about how much of a cock he is. This nightmare will not end.

I'm not a historical determinist. I believe in free will, but I'm also realistic about the hierarchy of wills. At the top of that particular pyramid lives a group of sociopathic olympians who actually enjoy the historic nightmare from which the rest of us are trying to awake. Bin Laden was a minor adept of this cult and has already been replaced by Ayman al Zawahiri, an equally grotesque harbinger of armageddon.

So we shot him in the face. Fine. I still saw it. Over and over again.

Two Weeks Out - A Short Precis of the Scottish Parliamentary Elections

Say you're a straightforward Social Democrat with radical opinions about the role of the financial sector in the global economy. Well...? Go on and say it.

Good. Now that's out of the way, assume you're also eligible to vote in the Scottish election on May 5th. Chances are then you hold a political belief system equivalent to mine. Who do you vote for?

I've been arguing against the SNP with friends and relatives for months. I'm not comfortable with the notion of a Scottish National Party because it is not committed to any brand of politics besides identity politics. Their ideological framework seems to derive from Hume's common sense approach, which is fine except that it means that when circumstances require it, they can perform a complete u-turn at any point and on any issue except independence (and they can do little shuffles around in there too).

This argument against shrivels the moment you perceive that the same is true of any party on the ballot.

So - I would vote Labour because the Scottish party is grounded in the SD values that I share. Great! But the current Labour candidate sheet is seemingly made up of idiots, cowards and villains. Dammit!

Right, so I look at the Lib D... oh. Right.

Greens? Well... yeah, but they are smuggling a sheer Socialist agenda under the foliage and I'm not interested in that any more. There is an argument for saying that a regional list vote will exert a small gravitational pull which is probably worthwhile, but really we're talking tiny units of force.

So let's break it down to what I want from Holyrood. Firstly, the independence referendum: let's get this done and out of the way. Is it not time? The Nationalist movement dogged us throughout the last century and shows every sign of dragging us into fantasies of the paragon state for the next one. Let's get the decision made and go on with one reality.

Second: Renovation of education. From early secondary onwards, I was misled about what I was working towards. I think that we need to demarcate whether we are pursuing an academic, a technical or a physical form of education. They are different things and the fact that they have been merged into one catch-all stream, is damaging to the effectiveness of all of them.

Third... third?

There isn't much of a third policy-wise as the pressing policy issues of any given time period will always fall under the powers of the UK Government. Financial reform has to be carried out globally to mean anything. Foreign policy is reserved to the UK. So what I really want is simply for things to work.

On these grounds, it can only be the SNP that one votes for. They have proven over the last parliamentary term that they are orders of magnitude more competent than Labour. They are also willing to work with any part of the political consensus to achieve progress. In their approach (if not their stated philosophy) they are shown to be progressive.

So it's Flash Alex again. Close your eyes and think of England I suppose...

What Freedom Means

I'm dealing at the moment with a crucial decision that thousands of people have to make every day. The last of my vices. Am I going to give up smoking...?

STOP! COME BACK!

I'm not writing about me here - it's just a way into a larger subject. As one of those insufferable indie cindies who identified themselves at the start of the last decade as a 'Libertine', I've always defined the principle human right as freedom. I still believe this, but at the same time, I've come to my senses when it comes to what that means.

What it doesn't mean is the right to indulgence. That right exists (just) and it should be expanded, but it has little to do with the concept of liberty itself. That the current beneficiaries of liberty utelise it to get shit-faced is understandable and for a long time, I've been unable to overcome this logical dead-end myself.

What I took so long to understand is that the revolutionary ethos, was not primarily aimed at emancipation from the current nanny state with which we're so familiar, but from monarchy, oligarchy and theocracy. It was these powers that represented the fundamental yoke on the aspirations, yearnings and ambitions of the human heart. They were the ones who emplaced the societal structure, which ensured that the people remained in their places. The structure of these institutions was based on the unquestionable order that had come into being at the will of the instigating force, or to give him his street name, 'God'.

This iron-fisted shepherd had made certain that everybody was living exactly the life that was due to them and if anyone refused to take up the set task then they had best make sure that they were prepared for an afterlife in Max Mosely's basement. Social mobility then, was an act of political and spiritual subversion. The only safe ways to achieve it were the patronage of the nobility or the church. Commerce and art were what changed this. Where skill became an imperative in the business of the state, suddenly the chinless and intellectually moribund agents of church and gentry were no longer helpful at the top of society.

It was a generation of self-made Tamburlaines that took the Western world into the modern age and who defined freedom for our modern world. So before we started taking it for granted - before we were subdued by the 22 grand job, what was it we were looking for in the term 'freedom'? What was it that we wanted?

'All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.' - John Locke

'The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.' - Thomas Paine

'All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.' - Benjamin Franklin

'But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.' - Edmund Burke

These selected founders of the age of freedom, lay their emphases on the idea that humanity is moving within a common labour of creation. That the point of freedom is to create tomorrow and to make it better, wiser and more human than today.

Coming to an understanding of this has been incredibly difficult for me. Freedom means work? What kind of bullshit is that? And yet... the freedom that I have pursued for the last decade - the freedom of folly and vice for the most part - has left me in a bad place. I've pursued learning, but I haven't gained anything satisfactory from it because once my learning is done, I've gone and gotten lashed. I haven't applied it in any constructive way at all (unless you count blogging and you shouldn't).

Thankfully however, I'm past the point of living for the routine session. Don't get me wrong about this - a night spent in the company of friends having an adventure under the influence, is among the finest of things. However, once you have narrowed these occasions into the exceptional bracket, how does one reap the fruits of liberty? Once you cease to use the freedom to indulge, it feels to me like you might as well be living without freedom if the only other active use of it is work.

And here is my point. The above has only become my view through the sickly lack of ambition that the self-destructive impulse has wrought on my brain. The vast majority of us (by which I mean my peers) saw nothing in the world we were born into that merited the the application of our labour. Any institution we thought of as attractive turned out to be booked up for the next thirty generations. Which is why we work in call centres then (when we wake up) go out to seek dodgy-looking vendors in the corners of crusty pubs.

So what do we work towards? How do we work as we can? And for whom?

Recent thoughts have included the Libyan rebels, Avaaz, The Big Issue and other, equally pompous and futile daydreams. I used to ask the question rhetorically, but now I really want to know - what is there worth working for? My liberty depends on an answer. Otherwise, I'm going to be stuck under the tyranny of nicotine forever.

Fiona Sturges and the Women

In the scheme of things, female empowerment is just kicking off. Now that the Gaia principle has been safely miniaturised into girl power, there is space for an honest-to-God female middle class to take up their rightful places.

I've met a representative sample of the first-wavers and they are entrancing people. They have a sense of the mysticism of their accomplishments and generally exist completely outside of popular culture. If they hadn't they wouldn't have made it - unfortunately many of them never bother to reproduce.

Today, Fiona Sturges, a fine journalist, managed to completely miss the vital points in her i-arts column:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/why-does-reality-tv-hate-women-2213740.html

In it she lists the numerous indignities and chauvinisms of reality TV and chastises the programme makers, erroneously implying that shows such as Wife Swap, How Clean Is Your House, How To Look Good Naked etc. are male fantasy projects.

I have never met a heterosexual man who regularly watches anything like this excreta. I can list for you (if you care to contact me privately) around twenty women I know who do. This is not anecdote or skewed male superiority talking. Look at the ratings demography. This is female fantasy.

The point of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, is to allow women to feel superior to other women. This isn't strange or new. This phenomenon has been around forever and isn't going anywhere. Let us take (for my convenience) the works of Moliere and Shakespeare. These are among the earliest European works I know that employ the feminine character I mean to bring to your attention.

My favourite Shakespearean woman is Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing. She is witty, beautiful and is resolved never to marry. But when it comes to the matters of life, death and love, she goes full-on Gypsy:

Is a not approved in the height a villain, that 300
hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman?
O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until
they come to take hands; and then, with public
accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour,
--O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart 305
in the market-place.

MAAN - IV, i

The purpose of this display is not just cathartic. By acting in such a crazed fashion, she goads her suitor Benedick into mortal combat with his friend.

In Moliere's Misanthrope, Célimène with whom the protagonist Alceste is in love, seemingly spends her entire day performing spirited diatribes against the last person to attend on her for the benefit of her present attendee.

It would be very easy to say that these examples represent antiquated forms of female behaviour. They do. That in itself doesn't mean that it isn't also a contemporary form.

It would also be very easy to say that they have no relationship with the spectacles of reality TV. Unfortunately, they do.

Feminism began with the critique of patriarchy. Men were exposed as a bunch of sex-obsessed, neurotically competitive tribalists with a master-slave concept of romance. So we did our best to change. Where was the critique of the matriarch? Were the women of the past blameless? Or were there collaborators? To their credit, Fathers in the latter 20th century usually stepped back out of the way of our daughters. But what about mothers? What did they do?

Well lets see... dressed them in pink, bought them the same old kitchen-toys, taught them to cook, discouraged sport or books... and generally drummed it into them that they had far too many privileges to ever complain about anything.

This is anecdotal: I saw this all throughout my childhood and later in life. Women of my generation seemed nonplussed by an ineffable unhappiness that haunted them even though they had exceeded all the achievements of their mothers by their early twenties.

And who is it that watches the shows of Gok Wan and Shitface McKeith? UNHAPPY PEOPLE. Unhappy people looking for consolation in the deeper misery of others. I think it's time that Sturges revisited Feminist philosophy to take a closer look at the repressive influence of the matriarch.

How Manuel is responsible for the Coalition

I blame Andrew Sachs. I blame Andrew Sachs for the impending Murdoch takeover of BSkyB. I blame Andrew Sachs for the fact that I can't listen to Jonathan Ross on a Saturday morning. But principally, I blame Andrew Sachs for the current public-school junta who are occupying the front benches in Parliament. If he had turned up to talk on that fateful morning there would have been no credible structure upon which to build the fictive governing consensus.

I don't know how well you remember it, but at the time DC was little more than a young looking facsimile of Ken Clarke with none of the personality. Even up to the date of the election there was complete confusion as to what he intended to do on 99.9% of government business.

His problem was that Conservatism itself is unpopular in Britain. It has been since '84 with only the end of the Cold War buoying them up into the '90s. There are very good reasons that the right were marginalised over that last 20 years or so. They are, briefly:

• Belief in the 'invisible hand' theory, which became completely nonsensical when the market globalised.
• Intolerance for all who are not stick-up-the-arse, middle-class reactionaries.
• Contempt for those who do not subscribe to a material conception of well-being.

and

• Contempt for the institution of Government.

If Conservatives had their way, Government would be limited completely to international relations. There would be no welfare state whatsoever. The only concession Cameron has ever made from a Thatcherite agenda is that even if homosexuals and urban youth are totally vile, they may yet find redemption. Thanks Dave.

So how has this Government maintained any vestige of legitimacy? Andrew... Fucking... Sachs.

Sachsgate was the opening salvo of a media war which sought to portray good, old Blighty as being under attack from satyrs and sodomites. People with no respect and no morality. As if alternative comedy were somehow up for discussion after 20 years. Overnight, Frankie Boyle went from the funniest thing since funny began, to a villainous and hateful gargoyle. He was forced out of his job on Mock the Week regardless of how it was later explained.

The fact that Boyle's type of shock-comedy has its roots in left-wing politics was the subtext that underlay the sham outrage. It led to a parade of Liberal politicians being forced to deliver completely disingenuous condemnations. It’s not like Brand hadn’t spoken about shagging Fergie’s daughters on his show before... it was just a matter of what he had said or done most recently.

Meanwhile the Conservatives, who were ‘offended’ by it, were able to sincerely (and fatuously) express themselves. We hadn’t done that kind of moral outrage for a long time in Britain and the fact that the debate raged on for so long, despite a complete lack of interest from anyone outside power, is a powerful indication that this was a generated spectacle.

And now the BBC is being eviscerated. The grand old Tory press have been publishing stories along the lines of... I don’t know... Marxist conspiracy of lefty salon-dwellers controlling the airwaves... for years. The difference was that the contract for the services of the Murdoch media changed hands from Left to Right.

Paxman recently interviewed Brand and showed him a form that BBC talent must now check to ensure that their content remains within taste guidelines. The problem with Conservatism in culture (as well as politics) is that anything which is not dull is a threat.

This sentiment radiated from the media for so long, it would be easy to confuse the perpetrators with murderers or despots. The fact is I like Jonathan Ross, Frankie Boyle, Russell Brand, Sacha Baron Cohen and Simon Amstell. I used to enjoy watching the BBC. The value of their work is that by expressing an outlandish idea, it puts the reality in proportion. You don't then have to believe in that expression or act upon it. You certainly don't have to if you weren't the one to express it.

Having moments ago Googled the most recent attack on the BBC, I find that the Telegraph has aided the odious Mumsnet to attack a recent cot-death storyline on Eastenders. The story seems to have been that one woman’s baby tragically passes away and in her grief, she swapped the dead child with Kat Moon’s baby. Apparently, no one is capable of telling the difference between the children. This is terrible in the traditional sense in which all soap plotlines are terrible, but there are people out there who are claiming to be offended by it. They are not offended by it. They are part of an organised effort to neuter the greatest media institution ever to have existed.

And what was the material damage done? A couple of stomachs were turned. The same effect as a slightly milky cup of tea.

What this has given the Right is a platform of moral outrage, which allows them to imply their real prejudices without actually having to state them. If they were honest they would say, 'We don't like Russell Brand because he was a promiscuous drug addict and he proves that promiscuous drug addicts are not demons.' Alternatively they might say, 'We don't like the BBC because most of their content is based on progressive, liberal views.'

The reason for this is that creative people are instinctively liberal and compassionate. I can't authoritatively say why this should be so, but even in Murdoch's own companies, the truly creative content is statedly anti-Murdoch.

What the coalition have done is express nothing but the most banal and uncontroversial sentiment while in their actions they have pursued the most extreme right-wing agenda in 20 years. They have sought to distort reality in order to materially, intellectually and spiritually impoverish the United Kingdom. The very opposite of what the performers did comedically.