There are few more distressing sights
than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap
Yeah, we'll die in the class we were born
That's a class of our own, my love

Sitting deep in conversation with each other in a suburban chain coffee bar, two PCSOs in uniform and presumably on duty, ingesting large hot drinks surmounted with volcanoes of whipped cream. In the lavatory, not 15ft away, in constant use by mothers and young children, a junkie’s used syringe rolling on the floor. Happy Christmas, anyway.

I try each day to dress like a pox-doctor’s clerk: bow-tie, waistcoat, regimental shoes,watch and chain. Such apparel actually got me out of the G20 kettle. I simply walked up to a line of security men and said: “Beastly situation, what?” Somewhat embarrassed they shuffled aside.
So let’s get some standards. If you’re in a squat put a bunch of daffs in the window, if you’re going to heave a brick tie try a ribbon round it first, smile at policemen, insist on a cubicle at the Job Centre…..

Yaxley-lennon’s speach in peterborough more or less stated that the protestors were the edl’s enemy, so that’s their stance on the cuts sorted. He also said physically attacking the police should not be tolerated. Odd from a man with convictions for assaulting the police. When asked why he invited pastor jones on c4 news he simply replied “for the publicity”. Honest at least.

I’ve just heard from dear old auntie B.B.C. on my little radio” Camilla has made contact with one of the protesters and Charlie Gilmour has made a statement”. All bullshit.
The propaganda of the media now is to try and bring it back to the celebs we all love so well. The old tart Camilla would have no idear how to speake to the unwashed . That spoiled cunt Charlie Gilmour also does’nt come from a world you and me would recognize . I hope the younger genaration dont fall for this crap like mine did. In the Paris riots of 68 the biggest fear of the state at that time was that students and workers would, eventually , unite. Maybe now the biggest fear for the state in dear old Blytie is young/old/middle and working class ( whatever that means ) or all the rest of us might join together. Well,it seems like we are joining up in our own little way. The lackey orgaisations of the past ,the T.U.C etc must be crying and shaking in their beer. Go for it kids and fuck ém all and be proud of yourselves with what you are all doing. Lots of love. Yours faithfully A Grandad ( TENA ngry brigade) or would like to be.

Liberty is priceless, for everything else there’s Mastercard

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/mastercard-hackers-wikileaks-revenge?CMP=twt_gu

Kevin Rudd (ex PM & current Oz Foreign Secretary) got couped out of power in Oz for trying to slug the mining industry with a tax to pay more more education and health services.

After Assange’s arrest the straight Oz media started running leaked Wikileaks material from US diplomats in Oz bagging Rudd when he was PM for dissing George W Bush (ie intimating that he was an ignorant fuckwit).

In response Rudd’s come out in Assange’s corner offering full Oz Consular support, pointing out that it wasn’t Assange that leaked, but the US that fucked up security-wise. A refreshing change from the usual spineless cringe posturing peddled by mainstream Oz pollies when it comes to the US alliance.

I agree that Assange’s a brave open source warrior whose finger is well on the zeitgeist (in cyberwarfare terms). He confounds the spectacle by subverting it. The man’s an inspiration. Wikileaks will ripple out regardless what happens to him in the hall of mirrors state forces have bound him in.

The only people that need slicing and dicing in the media and held to account for their crimes against humanity are the forces opposed to Assange.

Over half of the country’s leading news journalists were educated in private schools – which account for just 7% of the school population – according to the latest survey carried out by the Sutton Trust

are you suggesting this august journal simply reflects the narrow class interests of an unrepresentative ex-public school elite that sets the daily political agenda for their ex-school mates in the higher echelons of the civil service, the city, parliament and the army?

Why is anyone surprised it is the absolute base note of British society that public school educated children of the rich,successful and ambitious get the top jobs. What is there to say – it has always – quite deliberately been so. The mechanisms are numerous – quick look at CV’s boss sees schools he recognises and reserves them, old boy network, weird cofident voices adopted by public school educatees, weird confidence of public school educatees in which they believe they have the right to these top jobs etc etc

'He noted that a refusal of Megrahi's request could have had disastrous implications for British interests in Libya.'

Then the cable appeared to quote the ambassador saying: 'They could have cut us off at the knees, just like the Swiss.'

The warning is thought to refer to Gaddafi's call in 2008 for a jehad against the Switzerland when police arrested his son Hannibal and daughter-in-law Aline Skaf.

The couple were released and charges relating to an altercation with their servants dropped. However, Libya responded by withdrawing billions of dollars from Swiss banks, cutting off oil supplies, denying visas and recalling diplomats.

The importance of the general election context of the Alliance's proposed
programme cannot be overstated. We are fortunate enough to live in what is often described as, and I believe to be, a mature democracy. In a mature democracy political parties are entitled, and expected, to place their policies before the public so that the public can express its opinion on them at the polls. The constitutional importance of this entitlement and expectation is enhanced at election time.

98. If, as here, a political party's desired election broadcast is factually accurate, not sensationalised, and is relevant to a lawful policy on which its candidates are standing for election, I find it difficult to understand on what possible basis it could properly be rejected as being "offensive to public feeling". Voters in a mature democracy may strongly disagree with a policy being promoted by a televised party political broadcast but ought not to be offended by the fact that the policy is being promoted nor, if the promotion is factually accurate and not sensationalised, by the content of the programme. Indeed, in my opinion, the public in a mature democracy are not entitled to be offended by the broadcasting of such a programme. A refusal to transmit such a programme based upon the belief that the programme would be "offensive to very large numbers of viewers" (the letter of 17 May 2001) would not, in my opinion, be capable of being described as "necessary in a democratic society …. for the protection of …. rights of others". Such a refusal would, on the contrary, be positively inimical to the values of a democratic society, to which values it must be assumed that the public adhere.

Why does not half an hour go by that the high priests of the subsidariat, the BBC, can’t resist a snide reference to the popular press, again blissfully oblivious that all too often they are following agendas set by those very popular newspapers whose readers pay their salaries.

And it is Eady who, almost unnoticed here, has the distinction of having provoked the US Congress – in what’s dubbed the Libel Tourism Bill – to consider making English libel judgments unenforceable in America. This follows the judge’s decision to allow a Saudi banker to sue a New York author in the London courts even though she hadn’t published her book in Britain. Not for the first time, it seems that our colonial cousins can teach us a thing or two.

But surely the greatest scandal is that while London boasts scores of eminent judges, one man is given a virtual monopoly of all cases against the media enabling him to bring in a privacy law by the back door.

English Common Law is the collective wisdom of many different judges over the ages. The freedom of the press, I would argue, is far too important to be left to the somewhat desiccated values of a single judge who clearly has an animus against the popular press and the right of people to freedom of expression. I personally would rather have never heard of Max Mosley and the squalid purgatory he inhabits. It is the others I care about: the crooks, the liars, the cheats, the rich and the corrupt sheltering behind a law of privacy being created by an unaccountable judge.

If Gordon Brown wanted to force a privacy law, he would have to set out a bill, arguing his case in both Houses of Parliament, withstand public scrutiny and win a series of votes. Now, thanks to the wretched Human Rights Act, one judge with a subjective and highly relativist moral sense can do the same with a stroke of his pen.

Lord Bingham assessed the respective roles of Parliament, the executive, and the judiciary and decisively rejected a distinction which the Attorney-General had attempted to draw between democratic institutions such as the Immigration Service and the courts. It was

"wrong to stigmatise judicial decision-making as in some way undemocratic. It is particularly inappropriate in a case such as the present in which Parliament has expressly legislated in section 6 of the 1998 Act to render unlawful any act of a public authority...incompatible with a Convention right.

The greater the legal content of any issue, the greater the potential role of the court, because under our constitution and subject to the sovereign power of parliament it is the function of the courts and not of political bodies to resolve legal questions."

Lesson One: Brains and education have little to do with the craft of journalism which is to ferret for information and then explain it clearly, informatively and above all, entertainingly. Journalists are born, not made, and all the media schools in the world won’t change that. Also: dull doesn’t sell newspapers. Boring doesn’t pay the mortgage.

Are we still talking about that party that came a horrible third in the election and actually lost seats.

The problem is in the words of a famous psephologist, David Beckham, "we didn't get enough vote".

Combine this political and cultural position with the most radical constitutional reform since Cromwell, the break-up of the Kingdom, the destruction of the independent features of the House of Lords, the passing of reserve legislation which could turn the country into a dictatorship overnight, the creation of the surveillance society, the use of the terrorist bogey to convert the police into a state gendarmerie with unlimited power, the politicisation of the judiciary, the politicisation and centralisation of the police, the co-option of the BBC, the sidelining and isolation of the monarchy and the usurpation of its position, and the political domination of much of the media and almost all the universities, and put that next to the extraordinary moves to increase the power of the executive at the expense of the Cabinet and the Commons, and you have something really rather alarming.

If the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were a proper court of law, the charges against him would have been dismissed long ago. Unfortunately, it is a highly politicised organ, created on the initiative of the very states which attacked Yugoslavia in 1999, and whose judges have disgraced themselves by bending the rules to facilitate the prosecution's task. In 2004, the judges imposed defence counsel on Milosevic, even though the ICTY's charter states that defendants have the right to defend themselves, and even though they knew he was too sick to stand trial. On February 24 2006, at the prosecution's insistence, they rejected Milosevic's request to be transferred to a heart clinic: he died a fortnight later.

It is corrosive of the core values of western civilisation for the chief Hague prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, now to say that Milosevic escaped justice by dying, for this assumes that "justice" means not due process but a guilty verdict. The day we start to believe that we will have abandoned the rule of law completely.

I am surprised that a simple internet trawl qualifies as investigative journalism for David Aaronovitch (PR man to Europe's nastiest regimes, G2, November 30), especially since the "trails" he follows about me are ones which I announce at the bottom of my own articles.
But I wonder if Aaronovitch's Googling led him to use as a source an article entitled "Can a lobbyist for dictators work as a journalist?", a recently posted attack on me which is almost identical to his own. The home page, Ukrainian Archive, which has links to all the western-backed "pro-democracy" groups in Ukraine itself, also carries virulently antisemitic articles about the Jewish proclivity for rape, and about how the gas chambers at Auschwitz could not have existed. If I am being simultaneously attacked by a former communist who now supports George Bush's wars, and by raving Jew-baiting Ukrainian nationalists, I must be doing something right.
John Laughland

Why, with half our youngsters going to university, we still need to import migrants to fill all these skilled jobs.

‘That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal;
‘That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;

‘That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;

‘That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;

‘That election of members of Parliament ought to be free;

‘That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;

‘That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;

‘That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders;

‘That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;

‘And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.’

Or, from the Petition of Right: ‘No freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.’

All of this led to the USA's even harder, clearer and more codifed defences of free debate, protection against arbitrary arrest and the punitive billeting of troops, not to mention the right to bear arms which, technically, all British subjects still possess (though see my 'Brief History of Crime' for a discussion of how this important liberty has been bureaucratically revoked by stealth). And that is why, despite a startling Germanic culture of bureaucracy and over-willing acceptance of authority, English liberty has survived as well as it has (though now much under threat) in the USA. It has also survived (in different conditions and with different) in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The simple point is that humans can only be free where the state is restrained. 'Human Rights' being an attempt to codify a secular morality on the basis of competing group rights, actually strengthens the state by making the courts the umpires in this competition. It also gives the courts the power to legislate, because its showy vagueness allows them to 'interpret' various phrases to their own satisfaction.

Now, it is true that the US Supreme Court has managed to do this with bits of the Bill of Rights, notably the phrase 'cruel and unusual' (itself taken from the 1689 English Bill). But this is obviously intellectually shabby, as no serious person could imagine that the men who drafted this thought that the death penalty was cruel or unusual, or intended that meaning to be conveyed. But it is so much easier to do with the various universal declarations, European Conventions, Canadian Charters and now the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This last is full of horrible weasel phrases whose effect is often quite different in practice from its apparent meaning. Nobody may be deprived of his possessions ‘except in the public interest’ (Article 17) which is as tough as wet tissue-paper. The rights of freedom of expression and to privacy ('private life') inevitably conflict. The right to marry and found a family conflict with non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, which alter the meaning and status of the word 'marry'. The promises of religious 'diversity' make all faiths equal, thus diminishing the role of the one faith which has actually defined Europe and shaped its distinctive civilisation- Christianity.

For example, he argued that the loss of 100,000 public sector jobs would not have a huge impact on a 30 million-strong job market. We predicted yesterday that this comment would prove inflammatory; that does not invalidate the observation. As for Lord Young’s point that the cuts will only reduce government spending to 2007 levels, that falls into the category of speaking truth unto power. It casts doubt on both the Coalition’s references to a bold reduction in the size of the state and hysterical Left-wing claims that the public sector is being dismantled.

Is Jim DeMint fiscally conservative when it comes to fighting neverending wars and bailing out his vampire bats buddies in Wall Street?

Or does he just hate it when the poorest and the unemployed to have food on the table while having sex and not being married?

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Medical Law


This question of medical law concerns the specific issue of abortion law in the UK, with the other relevant legal system being the ECHR. Since the Abortion Act 1967, abortion has become more widespread in England and Wales.
The law provides a defence to medical practitioners carrying out abortions. The main condition to be satisfied before an abortion should be performed is that continuing with the pregnancy presents more of a risk to the mother/existing children’s physical/mental health than an abortion. An abortion might also be carried out when there is a substantial risk the child may be born with physical/mental abnormalities. The reality is that abortion is now easily obtainable in the UK. Do we now have de facto abortion on demand?
Within this context, there are those who argue that a simple, plain language reading of Article 2 ECHR would prohibit abortion unless much more serious and stringent conditions were to apply. Note that this is the case in certain other ECHR jurisdictions.

The European Convention on Human Rights 1950 does not specifically prohibit abortion. However, Article 2 seems to suggest the unborn child enjoys a right to life.
Critically analyse how in the context of abortion UK law balances the rights of the unborn child and the rights of the mother?
Guidance notes:

Introduction
The question is naturally focused on legal answers, but be aware that at least part of your analysis is going to have to address the policy and public perceptions challenges – in other words, what are the different arguments for emphasising the rights of the mother over the unborn child and vice versa? A comparative analysis with other jurisdictions will be particularly useful, both within the European continent, but also around the world.

Main Body
You may want to consider UK statute and case law on this issue.
There is some significant ECtHR jurisprudence as well as EU cases (particularly dealing with free movement rights).
There are regular proposals for reform which should be articulated. Consider what the proposers of reform are trying to achieve and why the reforms have not been adopted. You might also consider public opinion and what the prospects for future reform may be.
You should avoid getting bogged down solely in medical matters, such as when a foetus becomes a child. Although medical factors are important to answering the question and may be briefly considered.
You might also consider the arguments and concerns that are introduced by religious considerations. Different religions have different approaches to abortion, based on different definitions of the foetus and a different balancing of the rights of the two individuals.


Conclusion
We would expect some form of conclusion, there is no single answer to the question and the candidates should present an educated research analysis. Your conclusion is up to you. You should not be afraid of arguing for the position you feel passionately about, but it must be a legal argument, based on analysis and logic rather than emotion.

Riots in a free country are always just a bit of fun for those taking part.

'the cool, grown-up contempt many of today’s young feel for their babyish, spoiled, Sixties-generation parents.'
The 'spoilt boomer' myth is largely the creation of columnists such as Peter, who are in the small minority of UK baby boomers who were upper middle class and university educated. The vast majority of my generation left school at 15 or 16 and knuckled down to an apprenticeship or trade course rather than being drug-addled campus Marxist activists.
Spoilt? For crying out loud, UK boomers were born into post-war austerity! Rationing still existed until 1954 when I appeared. Lots of ordinary people didn't even indoor loos! There were housing shortages (possibly not unrelated to the recent blitz). Cars and TV sets were still luxury items in the 50s and early 60s.
Oh, and our World War 2 era parents and teachers were mostly firm disciplinarians who smacked and caned. Far from being 'babyish' , boomer youngsters were expected to be self-sufficient and self-disciplined.

Speaking as a former student rioter, who has repented of his ways, I would advise the Government to pay absolutely no attention to such people – let alone to accept the baloney that such events, mostly involving sons of the suburbs, are a sign of real discontent. Riots in free countries are not deep expressions of woe or oppression. They are a bit of fun for those taking part.

Edward Miliband and his Unwife are pictured with their new baby in posed shots. Father and mother are both, weirdly, wearing Remembrance Poppies on their indoor clothes (in her case, possibly her nightie).
Some questions arise. Why isn’t the baby wearing one? And are we supposed to believe that these people – one the atheist scion of one of Britain’s most glacially Marxist families, the other a pointedly unmarried London trendy – are wearing poppies because of their conservative pro-military patriotism? Or because the British Left have decided that this is a good way to try to fool people that they are really normal?
Personally I prefer the honest position taken by Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow, who says he will wear his poppy in church but not on TV.
In these days when parliamentary whips hand out poppies to MPs, and the BBC hands them out to guests, they are no longer a sign that you have given to the British Legion. So not wearing one (and this year I started to do so only on Thursday)
is not a sign that you haven’t given.

Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

Rather than looking at popular culture as a free exchange of ideas; a vast heterogeneous construction, Homi Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity” , rather he sees cultural development as the combined product of deliberate imposition by dominant forms and the marginalisation of cultural forms which do not coincide with the dominant order. Showing scepticism characteristic of conservative thinkers he describes this process as being disguised as “reform” and in the “best interests” of the people. This idea of a super imposed cultural transformation in the face of resistance, but presented as a transparent and natural part of “modernisation” may have been borrowed and expanded by other socialist writers and thinkers such as Naomi Klein. In the Shock Doctrine Klein argues that neo-liberal economic policies have been imposed on cultures in times of chaos, when people are “psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted” these proponents of change “begin their work of remaking the world” without consulting the people whose lives they are affecting.

This point of agreement between speakers from two sides of a notoriously polarised debate is particularly noteworthy in that the speakers find themselves joined together in taking a position which is starkly opposed to public opinion. Opinion polls have consistently found that people consider termination more acceptable in the presence of a disability (Lee and Davey, 1998, Lee 2000). Furthermore, their view is also out of line with contemporary abortion practice: between 1500 and 2000 terminations per year are performed for reason of fetal disability, with several hundred of them occurring after 20 weeks gestation.

Still more interesting is the fact that both speakers find themselves in broad disagreement with the current law in England, Wales and Scotland. The 1967 Abortion Act provides that terminations are only lawful where performed by a registered medical practitioner, and where two doctors agree that one of a number of conditions is met. One of these conditions, set out in s.1(1)(d) of the Act, is that abortion may be authorised by two doctors who agree that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would be 'seriously handicapped'. Since 1990, there have been no time limits for terminations performed on this ground. Likewise, the existence of a presumed fetal disability is also relevant in Northern Ireland, where the Abortion Act 1967 does not apply. Such terminations as are carried out there are done on the basis of R v Bourne [1938] 3 All ER 612, which holds that a doctor may lawfully perform a termination where 'the probable consequences of the continuance of the pregnancy will be to make the woman a physical and mental wreck'. Whilst it is not obvious that this should more readily support terminations on the basis of abnormality than on other grounds, nonetheless the majority of the terminations performed in Northern Ireland each year are performed for this reason (Lee 1995).

In fact, some men want the best of both worlds: a bit of fun with western women, then settling down with a traditional local woman.

Not some men, a lot of men. Exactly the same as muslims/arabs in the UK. They want all the things that they despise about the west: women, alcohol, drugs, gambling, but feel no shame in becoming a proper intolerant muslim later in life.

“Pep, zing, oomph, ker-ching. CoQ10.” March 15 2008. Sample quote: “Because they cannot find new treatments for diseases we already have, they invent new diseases for treatments they already have. Favourites include social anxiety disorder (SSRIs) and female sexual dysfunction (Viagra): problems, in a very real sense, but not necessarily the stuff of pills.”
“All bow before the might of the placebo effect, it is the coolest strangest thing in medicine” March 1 2008, about antidepressants, amongst other things.
“A quick fix would stop drug firms bending the truth” February 26 2008, critical of clinical trials of SSRIs, and regulation of the pharmaceutical industry in general.
“Washing the numbers, selling the model” January 26 2008, again about clinical trials of SSRIs.
“More than molecules – how pill pushers and the media medicalise social problems”, an audio lecture from January 2 2008

Don't assert your superiority. Others may not agree.
Don't advertise your shortcomings, others may not notice them.

Direct intention and foresight are different states of mind, in the
same way that love is different from acquisitiveness. Proving that a person foresees
a consequence as probable/highly probable is no more conclusive of an intention to
produce that consequence than counting an art dealer’s acquisitions can establish
his love of art. However much the dealer acquires the possibility is that he hates
art, but loves accumulating wealth. Similarly, direct intention cannot conclusively
be inferred from mere foresight of probability. It may help us make a pretty good
guess but guesswork is not the stuff of criminal convictions. Suggesting otherwise
fatally conflates intention and recklessness

Criticising the President in person is now specifically illegal, under Article 318 of the Kazakh criminal code. Even before this law came into force, writing a story for a magazine about the President’s private wealth earned my informant a menacing visit from the KNB, more or less the successor of the old Soviet KGB, but without the charm.

Monday
1. Squats or Leg press
2. Leg Extensions
3. Leg Curls
(women: for tighter buttocks replace 2 & 3 with Lunges)
4. Standing Calf Raise
5. Abdominal Leg Raises
Wednesday
1. Incline Bench Press (barbell or dumbbell)
2. Close Grip Bench Press (barbell)
3. Behind Neck Shoulder Press (dumbbell or barbell)
4. Side Lateral Raises
5. Dumbbell Biceps Curl
Friday
1. Shoulder Width Lat Pulldown
2. Close Grip Seated Pulley Row
3. Triceps Push Down
4. Crunches
5. Hyper Extensions
6. Shrugs

Noun - bien pensant (plural bien pensants)

1.A person who is bien pensant.
2.Someone who accepts and or espouses a fashionable idea after it has been established and maintains it without a great amount of critical thought.

There was a long apologia for the EU from Flackstein who thought it all a good thing and asked for an example of it behaving as a totalitarian dictatorship. Well, he might tell us how the British people may, by a democratic process, sack the Commission and replace it by one more to our taste. That body has the power to make laws we must obey. How do we change it or them? Nor was he right to say that we had a referendumn on the EU. We had a referendumn on whether to accept the renegotiated terms on which we had entered the European Economic Community.

Human Rights champ, the new Peter Tatchell.

What if someone was to say, a leader would emerge in Iran, an opposition leader, with genuine support among the intellectuals and — inaudible — and the downtrodden workers and peasants, who was to say, you know what? I’ve never believed a word of this story about the upcoming 12th imam and his reappearance and his bringing of a reign of peace and redemption to the whole human race. I think that’s an absolute fairy story, I think that’s got about as much chance of being true as Santa Claus. Would you not be rather relieved to hear that there was such a person? I submit that you most certainly would.

If you heard today that Bibi Netanyahu on yet another of his fraudulent trips to Washington to humiliate our president and our Congress had dispensed with the services of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the religious partnership in his coalition, who calls for God to smite the Palestinians with a plague, for example — that this man no longer appointed the person who is in charge of housing and settlements, which a matter of fact, he does. Would you not think that was a step in the right direction? I submit that you would.

So it may be rude to leave you with a question rather than proposing an answer, but I think you’ll see why I have done so, and I now make way for a younger and more principled generation.

I am a great detester of the Vermin Rights Act and the very, very perverse manner with which it has been implemented in this country.

The Vermin Rights Act is about protection of the individual and the individuals rights. So screw society as a whole and the practicalities of English Common Law based on hundreds of years of common sense. It is yet again a very unwelcome influence by Europe.

As suggested by Dave, London, had he turned around and belted one of them our great "justice" system would have thrown the book at him (the victim).

As Alan, London implied, given the obvious genetic make up of these sewer rats, no one will touch them for fear of being called racist.

Tough on the victims of crime, tough for the victims of crime. It seems the Con/Lib fiasco isn't going to change that, listening to Ken Clarke.

What cuts? My favourite two facts about British public spending are these. Housing benefit, probably the single most fraud­ulent and wasteful state handout ever invented, costs more each year than the Army and the Royal Navy combined.
And while Labour spent £600 billion (roughly £10,000 for every human being in this country) in their last year in office, the supposedly vicious cutter George Osborne plans to spend £692.7 billion (£11,500 per head) in 2014-15, after his alleged chainsaw massacre. Britain remains bankrupt in most important ways.

The division between left and right is now really in the areas loosely described as 'sex, drugs and rock and roll', plus of course the use of the education system to impose equality of outcome on its victims. And on the abolition of national sovereignty and its replacement by global or supranational governance, backed up where necessary with liberal military intervention.

This then is liberal Britain: a country where police responsible for over 50 million people fired guns in just 4 incidents, and where a large police force can go over 3 years without firing a gun at all.".

Just as well really since they seem to be able to raise a small army to deal with a drunken man with a shotgun trapped in his own house. Or they can shoot an innocent Brazilian electrician and get away with it, or a slightly inebriated man leaving a pub with a table leg under his arm, or an obviously unarmed man standing naked in his bedroom, or someone they 'mistook'for a wanted police murderer - amazingly he survived.

Of course no charges were brought and, if required to attend the inquest, they can expect anonymity. It can't get much safer than that on the streets.

For politics, 'middle class' is a person who essentially do...esn't want to pay tax, is concerned about immigrants, and worries about getting people on benefits off them so that they don't have to support them. They're nice and polite and less likely to join the BNP than their lower-paid equivilent but don't really want to contribute to their communities in any meaningful way. They're the revolutionary class, because until they want something (the end of the poll tax, affordable childcare) it doesn't happen.See more

For politics, 'middle class' is a person who essentially do...esn't want to pay tax, is concerned about immigrants, and worries about getting people on benefits off them so that they don't have to support them. They're nice and polite and less likely to join the BNP than their lower-paid equivilent but don't really want to contribute to their communities in any meaningful way. They're the revolutionary class, because until they want something (the end of the poll tax, affordable childcare) it doesn't happen.See more

For politics, 'middle class' is a person who essentially do...esn't want to pay tax, is concerned about immigrants, and worries about getting people on benefits off them so that they don't have to support them. They're nice and polite and less likely to join the BNP than their lower-paid equivilent but don't really want to contribute to their communities in any meaningful way. They're the revolutionary class, because until they want something (the end of the poll tax, affordable childcare) it doesn't happen.See more

He thinks once you have taken a public position, it is disgusting to change it – no matter how catastrophic it turned out to be. (A million deaths in the name of Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn't exist is a catastrophe by any standard.) Imagine if he had been leading Labour with that view for the next four years. And, please, spare me the weepy political obituaries. This is a man who, as Foreign Secretary, fought hard to cover up MI5's role in the torture of British residents abroad. I'll save my tears for the people who were attacked with drills and electric cattle prods, while he scrambled to keep it classified.

Burnham’s face is remarkable, he can go from looking reasonably normal to resembling a creepy Victorian sex doll that’s been dragged from a fire within the same sentence, here are a few other hastily thought out, badly worded ‘observations’:

- When he smiles, he looks a bit like a ‘Where are they now?’ photo-fit of Lord Snooty.

- His hair looks like it was chosen by a focus group.

The Jewish Chronicle still claims Mr Miliband is the first member of their faith to lead the Labour Party despite his professed atheism.



Also, he looks like a varnished jacket potato. His neck appears to join his face at the nose, with his chin effectively being an Adam’s apple.

The band was originally formed in 1980 as The Filberts (after local football team, Leicester City’s former Filbert Street ground), although they would also occasionally appear as The Psychedelic Filberts. Their main influences come from the West Coast sound of 1960s bands like Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield and Love. The main creative force in the band is Butler, who writes nearly all the band's material. Butler and Moth (who had also drummed for local Leicester band Gypsy) had previously played together in a short-lived band called The Flicks, releasing one album in 1979 called Go For The Effect. Three Psychedelic Filberts tracks were released - a cover of The Byrds' "Lady Friend" on the Obscure Independent Classics volume 2 LP, a cover of The Beatles "Rain" which was included on Yeah Yeah Noh's final release, the Temple Of Convenience EP, and "Atlantis 1968", which appeared on the He Didn't Even Draw A Fish On My Shower Curtain compilation.[1]

It is not the first time. Silly Labour Leftists and Tory golf-club twits, in a similar bout of delusion, jointly fooled themselves that Anthony Blair was some sort of conservative. While they did so, Mr Blair mounted a virulent attack on marriage and Christianity, destroyed rigorous education, encouraged mass immigration, raised taxes to unprecedented levels and vastly expanded the public sector, while handing over our powers and freedoms to foreigners.

Watch as the ultra-feminist sisterhood back away in horror from Sarah Palin, John McCain's new running mate.
Mrs Palin is technically female, but she's enthusiastically married, hates abortion and thinks criminals should not be the only people allowed to own guns. She's everything Hillary Clinton isn't. In short, she's the wrong kind of woman.

I've always been unmoved by arguments that immigration benefits' the country economically. Maybe it does, if you eat at restaurants rather than working in them, and then hurry away to expensive areas where no immigrants live. But for most people it's an unmixed curse.
For the migrants themselves it is often a journey into exploitation and squalor, miserable pay and ten-to-a-room living conditions. It holds down wages and puts unwanted pressure on services, transport and housing which are already under strain.
But there's something else about it that is profoundly, heartbreakingly sad. When so many of our fellow creatures don't speak our language, don't understand our laws and customs, don't know our history, can't read our facial expressions or work out when we're joking, we live at a lower level than we did before.

I think a lot of people miss the point about 48 Laws of Power, it isn't a 'how to' guide of how to win friends and influence people/become a captain of industry/manipulate others to get everything you want - its a guide book outlining the ways in which people have been manipulated throughout history, in order that you can spot them and realise what is going on and act differently. To know that you are being manipulated is the first step.

Hearing Mark Lawrenson talk about football as some binding force which can heal all social divides reminded me of that musical The Beatiful Game, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton - which suggested that sectarianism in Northern Ireland could be salved by playing football, actually football seems to me to exacerbate sectarianism and nothing else.

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; ..., it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Oscar Wilde

Home of: The "I Went to a Small liberal-arts College in Massachusetts" Douche
Affectations: Quiet sense of superiority; intense desire to be surrounded by 1,700 people almost exactly like you; Choate soccer jacket.

In ten years, will be: Smart policy guy at State Department that no one listens to.
Douchey mascot: Lord Jeffrey Amherst.

Problem with douchey mascot: Distributed smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans.

The metrosexual went out with the man-scarf last season and the rebirth of the retrosexual is sooooo 2010. So fellas, dust off the blue bonds from the rag bag and next time your walking down the street and see another image conscious "uptight, joyless wowsers" carrying the latest edition of Cosmo and the wonderful ideals that publication portrays women to be- give her a wink and say "G'day gorgeous"

Advertising and the Construction of Violent 466(10)
White Masculinity [Media Selection]
Jackson Katz
``The appeal of violent behavior for men,
including its rewards, is coded into
mainstream advertising in numerous ways:
from violent male icons . . . overtly
threatening consumers to buy products to
ads that exploit men's feelings of not
being big, strong, or violent enough. . .
.''

Re: Coulson + Hacking
* Calling someone's mobile, waiting for it to go to voicemail and then entering
their four digit pin (0000) is not hacking. Hacking is about circumventing
security, not being presented with them and passing them.

** Calling someone's mobile, waiting for it to go to voicemail and then entering their four digit pin (0000) is not tapping. Tapping is the covert act of real-time
interception of active communication links.

David Miliband is being funded by exactly the same interests as Blair. To pluck just one, David Claydon, a senior figure at the investment bank UBS, has handed him £50,000, as part of a gaggle of bankers who made it possible for him to outspend every other candidate combined. He is backed by all the senior Blairites because, like Dr Who regenerating in a bright white light, he is the same politics with a less lined face.

Those "charities" which have horrendous overhead costs have to be rebranded. After all, the money is supposed to go to charity, not to those who are raising money for charity.

Until they get their house in order, they have to be quarantined. In other words, not one bloody cent towards them, until they have reined in their overhead.

The fact is that the LimpDumbs have no-one fit for office, and they never expected to get it, so never it bothered them that they were a bunch of nutters.

I mean, just look at Cleggover, and Uncle Vince, not to mention the creep Lady Simone Hughes.

...not forgetting David 'rent rooms' Laws + Mark 'rent boy' Oaten

The way people dress is cyclical. The marks of rebellion and conformity flip-flop back and forth. For a long time, rebellion was a T-shirt and a trucker hat. Then, suddenly, that mess became conformity, and dressing up is now a way to differentiate yourself."

"You should think of a tie as a canvas—the one piece of a suit that can have color or fun or wit. A necktie can be bright pink or purple or have funny polka dots on it without being feminine."

"Plus, a skinnier tie just feels of-the-moment right now. It's not too mainstream and not too traditional. And there's less material, so there's less potential for a color or pattern to feel garish or offensive."

A couple of weeks ago, I was standing in line at a manned till in Sainsbury's. The checkout area supervisor approached me, waving vaguely in the direction of one of the DIY tills, and asked me if I would like to go there and scan my own shopping. I politely informed her that I would not, unless the store was going to offer me a discount for doing the till operator's job for them. This raised a small cheer from other shoppers, and left the supervisor looking non-plussed, before scurrying off back to her lectern..

Interesting, for the life of me I can't remember seeing the coalition option on the ballot paper and I've yet to meet anyone who desired a coalition government, but let that pass. Already several key conservative policies, which might have made this government more palatable, have been dropped and I don't doubt that quite a few more will be tossed in the rubbish bin in order to cling to power for a little longer. The government has just announced that it will allow European police forces to come over here and arrest anybody they feel like to rousing cheers from the Labour party, where did that come from? A group of young men, on the flimsiest of evidence, have been extradited to Greece to spend eighteen months, or longer, in prison before their case even comes to trial, if that's the best this government can do to protect its citizens, give me a pump-action shotgun and I'll look after myself.
"I'm certainly impressed so far with the reality they appear to be facing up to regarding the deficit and the economy in general.".
Ah yes the famous cuts which I predict will soon be watered down to nothing after mass protests from the Liberals. You can be sure of one thing though, those who financed Gordon Brown's largesse but did not benefit from it, will be the ones forced to pay to put it right.
As for local councils, it seems they do not have enough money to repair potholes and do other essential maintenance work which is really their only function no, the ever-rising council tax will go to fund ludicrous left-wing schemes which only benefit those who don't pay council tax and finance the inflation-proof pension schemes of council employees.
The country is awash with immigrants with no sign of a reversal, an ever-increasing number claiming benefits and a load of parasites working in the public sector. At the other end of the scale are those who have to pay for it all who are becoming evermore disatisfied. This is nothing like the SWP who wanted to bring chaos so that they could install a Marxist government, this is those who finance grandiose schemes that they don't want and subsidise layabouts that they couldn't care less about and, I sincerely hope, we are approaching the limit of their tolerance.
It really doesn't matter who you put upon the list 'cos they'd none of them be missed.

To those who have doubts over the guilt of Megrahi, I can say only that I know nothing more about that than is public knowledge, so I do not make up stories about it.

I agree that American senators would want to know the truth about the Lockerie bomber. That, however, does not give them any right to demand that our Prime Minister, who is responsible only to us, should dance to their tune. I will at some time see if their president will come to be grilled about the support given by American politicans to the IRA. I suspect the answer will be the same as I got from President Bush when I wrote to warn him that being photographed shaking hands with McGuinness was not compatible with a “war on terror”. I can assure you President Reagan did ensure that America helped us in the Falklands War. I do not think the State Department was happy about that, but then I do not think the Foreign Office was happy about the rescue of the Falklanders either.
Norman Tebbit

‘Dreams are what you wake up from’ (Raymond Carver).

This critique of the “commodification” of American life is evident throughout the novel, epitomised by the figure of ‘T.J. Eckleberg’ gazing over the ruins of “early twentieth-century commercialism”. In addition there is a veiled attack on how this commercialism ends up mechanising and undermining human life, highlighting the link between “capitalism and superficiality”. The fateful car is described in detail loaded with the sense of Gatsby’s extravagant wealth, as is the description of the dead Myrtle Wilson, body parts flapping and “swinging loose”, the futility of checking the “heart beat”. The human empathy is completely absent as she is delineated as a mechanised object. Simmel explores this notion of social deterioration in the context of free market capitalist societies, positing “the modern metropolis… is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness… and need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships”.

In Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ we see the Franklinesque dream and protestant work-ethic embodied in the context of an expanding consumerist culture and a time when “entrepreneurship became the primary model of American identity”. The broken refrigerator is one of several symbols of wealth and consumption with inherent flaws. By obscuring exactly what it is that Willie sells, Miller universalises the ‘salesman’ as a discreet entity, one which is caught between a dialectic of empiricism, and spirituality through personal achievement and self-fulfillment. Willie’s aspirations to fulfill his abstract conception of the post-war American dream have to be constantly reconciled with the material statistics of sales and profit margins. The marginalisation of the female presence and the collective narcissism of Biff and Happy are indications of the domestic and social implications of the American Dream.

Incredulity towards meta-narratives

Heavily influenced by Edward Said, Bhabha identifies as problematic the relationship between two totalising concepts of “culture” and the “state”, and this association, “often aggressive”, engendering a “degree of xenophobia” - He affirms that cultures are tolerated but within a kind of Althusserian ideological “grid” which effectively marginalises minorities by never ceasing to define them in terms of some dominant order.

In Deconstruction however this dominant order is illusory. Taking the Male/Female opposition in D.H Lawrence’s Son’s and Lovers as an example, where Mrs Morel plays a fully domesticated role in contrast to Walter Morels aggressively masculine working class depiction. For Derrida these “dichotomous categories” are intertwined because nothing can be purely distinct. It follows therefore that the male identity is inextricably bound up with the female identity. What Deconstruction is directly challenging is the Saussaurian idea of “difference” which assumes that one signifier is clearly distinct from the other.

This “theoretically innovative” approach in both feminist and postcolonial theory includes refusing to accept the “dialectical structure of European ideological confrontations”, (and in the case of postcolonialism) “borrowed from the very components of its racist syllogism” and represents a profound shift. For theorists to develop a more effective understanding of systems of patriarchy and imperialism, Bhabha proposes going beyond narratives of “orginary and initial subjectivities” and explore “cultural hybridities” and “new signs of identity” in society. Where theorists like Edward Said employed underlying binaries of East/West which are difficult to go beyond, Bhabha attempts to dismantle this and form an understanding of human culture as fluid and constantly being influenced by mutual “collaboration” and “contestation”. In this sense Bhabha demonstrates “incredulity toward metanarratives” a typical trend in poststructuralist thought.

Since it imports ideas of philosophy, psychology and history in order to understand literature, poststructuralism engages texts at different levels. Bhabha locates culture in a history of the world based on cosmopolitanism and continuous migration influencing all societies. This idea of culture being “hybrid” and multi-dimensional can be captured by the status of Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The fact that the text has little or no engagement with Heathcliff’s origins despite his background displays a tacit acceptance that “hybridity” is a part of culture.

It is here where Bhabha seems to depart from Edward Said. Where Said tends to focus on the mechanics of power in imperialism and the imposed stereotypes of the Orient, depicted by the West as ancient, mysterious and despotic; Bhabha, recalling Derridean deconstruction, both co-operates and contaminates these ideological binaries by showing how, through writers like Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, increasingly “‘national’” cultures are “being produced from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities”.

Uprisings against colonialism are not necessarily a result of, as Said would put it, the “grand-narratives of Emancipation and Enlightenment”, but represent instead the disassociation or deterioration of the “narrative function” and the empowerment of the “beyond” or ‘present’, “that moment blasted out of the continuum of history”. Frantz Fanon, a champion of the Algerian revolution, echoes this disillusionment with the humanist grand narratives of Europe, a Europe for Fanon that is “never done talking of Man, yet murders men everywhere they find them”. The sentiment captures one aspect of the “crisis” of grand narratives which poststructuralism tends to address and solidify.


The paradoxical nature of post-structuralism might be its own undoing. It will inevitably undermine itself by claiming no inherent privilege or validity even as it simultaneously undermines all other belief systems which do claim essential validity. As such we see this break down of moral and authorial absolutism the implications of which are vast and varying. It may be more effective to subvert meta-narratives of Capitalism for instance which is currently under profound pressure, by uncovering the contradictions in the overall structure and undermining it from within. Alternatively a rejection of any totalising belief system, by placing meaning in a “mobile, decentred location”, a kind of atopia, may stifle any endeavour to propose serious alternatives to our understanding of the world, of literature and notions of history and ‘truth’. What is apparent is that through poststructuralism, ‘theory’, “having deconstructed just about everything else”, had “finally succeeded in deconstructing itself”.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language

One of the funniest things about the internet is that no matter how much better it gets, how much more intellectual or culturally valuable, its primary use will always be pornography. I think of the web as an encyclopedia with a dirty magazine shoved inside.

I worked in a fish packing plant in Massachusetts, on the line with a sincere Jewish poet from Harvard and three lesbians; one was beautiful, one grim; both loved the other, who was intelligent. I loved her, too. I dreamed of violating her purity. They taked among themselves, in creepy whispers, always about Jung. In a dark corner, away from our line, old Portuguese men slit fish into open flaps, flicking out the bones. I could only see their eyes and knives. I’d arrive early every morning to dash in and out until the stench became bearable. After work I’d go to bed and pluck fish scales out of my skin.

PURISTS are already up in arms about the title of Harald Zwart’s remake of John G. Avildsen’s 1984 crowd-pleaser, which did much to popularise martial arts among children in the West. Strictly speaking, this new film has nothing to do with karate, so it should really be called The Kung Fu Kid. Or we could just bite the bullet and call it Will Smith’s Son Goes to China.

Yes, it was low budget. Yes, it was promoting China as a tourist destination!
A black kid - there has been skin-colour based racism in China for a long time. As a brown-skinned girl, I've seen it. But the Chinese know it's wrong, and what better way for the government to correct their ways than to make a movie promoting friendship between different skin colours.
Second of all, where did karate come from, I wonder? From whom did the Japanese inherit their martial arts? Could one argue that the original Karate Kid movies were little more than "Americans can indeed learn something from the people they obliterated in WWII? Peace, man!" propaganda?

Private Eye – always a useful source of behind the scenes chatter about the BBC – has an interesting little titbit in the current issue about Democracy Live, the BBC’s answer to TheyWorkForYou.com.

Ever willing to muscle in where others have already beaten a pioneering path the BBC, fat with our money, launched DL a few months ago. At it’s core it provides live video feed from parliament and national assemblies plus a search function linking video with Hansard.

DL, despite being developed by Autonomy and Blinkx (both closely associated with the iconic IT guru Mike Lynch) somehow appears unable to deliver data on MPs attendance and voting records – how convenient....

Any suggestion that the fearless BBC, by not including information about voting and attendance, is cosying up to MPs, can clearly be dismissed as totally without foundation...

Extract from Conrad- Politics, Subversion and Anarchy.

One of the effects of the Professor is to reflect the role of language and narrative function in the emergence of conventional wisdom. Whilst the reader is not inclined to endorse the Professor’s politics, his character speaks to the nature of conventional morality itself in that such a radical perspective can be elaborately articulated as to sound even vaguely comprehendible. He speaks of his opponents - “they depend on life, which, in this connexion is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex, organized fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.”

The conventional order in The Secret Agent is not an organic moral constant being attacked at the periphery by rebel forces, but a social metropolis of questionable morality itself. It consists of an establishment complicit in a horrendous crime (the foreign embassy’s false-flag operation which claims Stevie’s life); Heat’s unconventional policing methods, and instinctive view of thieving as appearing as “normal as property”. This is a vague allusion to the imperfections of industrial capitalism and its innate exploitative nature. Inspector Heat himself experienced a kind of “evil freedom” which was “rather pleasant”, upon entering an anarchist enclave with its inherent enigma. All these things constitute more of an open ended engagement with conventional thinking than is posited by Leavis. Furthermore the conventional criminal classes tend to have an ambiguous status as victims of circumstance. Heat displays a liberal sympathy with thieves, “they were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of an imperfect education”, and Winnie explains the role of the police to Stevie as being one of essentially protecting the rich from the poor. The fact that these perspectives can be traced through both sides of the political divide, (an establishment figure and the wife of a provocateur with anarchist ties) is significant and the moral nature of the text is left somewhat more nebulous.

This theme of isolation from the conventional extends even to “murderers”, indeed our sympathy with Winnie’s plight after murdering her husband stems from the fact that she is not a ‘conventional’ murderer, she has no criminal network to aid her – she “was the most lonely of murderers that ever struck a mortal blow” – it is this careful extraction from the mundane and the conventional of the spectacular and the unconventional which evokes, for Aaron Fogel, the “strong confusion of detachment and empathy” amongst the reader. This is also the reason for the multiplicity of potential readings making it difficult to argue that the novel has a potent moral message. For Fogel it is the “dramatisation of art as a non-transcendental process of inquiry, itself caught up within other inquiries” that is one of the main points of the novel.

Leavis’ reading of the text as a serious moral work perhaps neglects the element of fascination which is the residual effect of characterising the Anarchists as somehow outside the dominant conventional order. The fear of the revolutionaries amongst law enforcers is illustrated by Heat’s thoughts; “The perfect anarchist was not recognised as a fellow creature… he was impossible… to be left alone”. He is disarmed of the superiority which he would have enjoyed had he encountered any other member of the criminal classes. Here Conrad sets up a dynamic where the police officers and the criminal classes are part of an inter-dependant system whereas the revolutionaries occupy there own terrain engendering an aura of fascination and intrigue around a set of people Leavis characterises as “repugnant”. It is not clear that this is the perception Conrad intended. Irvin Howe in Politics and the Novel recounts a letter that Conrad wrote declaring that the ‘professor’ was not necessarily meant to be “despicable” but that he wanted him to possess “a note of perfect sincerity”. He goes on to say that he does not believe this came across. Nonetheless as long as this ambivalence exists it is an example of how Leavis’ approach precludes this kind of interpretation. Being opposed to literary theory he neglects the assumptions and values that the reader or critic may bring to the text.

With typical irony Conrad presents the novel’s most evocative political point through the medium of the atypical, inarticulate Stevie. Whilst in the cab Stevie sees the horse being whipped and then has to process the poor driver’s impossible situation. He says “Bad, Bad” then “Poor, Poor”, and finally “He got it at last. He hung back to utter it at once. ‘Bad world for poor people’”. It is difficult for the reader to process a response to a statement which simultaneously says so much yet so little. The sentence’s veracity cannot be denied, but as Fogel notes, it has no “verb”. Its fragmented status is suggestive of an absent ideological commitment. Stevie is yet another example of isolation from conventional society. The fact that he is evidently incapable of being in the throws of ideology and dogma, being unreceptive to normal thought processes, his innocence and sincerity is unquestioned. He is the only character untouched by the novel’s satirical tone. His outcry represents the most sincere and effectively apolitical message in the novel, which is ironically one of the novels most powerful political points. Namely whatever it is that “holds persons together, giving the political world the form it has, it is not accessible to sympathy’s verbless syntax.” This confirms the novel’s status as a “complex political” work “not reducible to political ideology”. His simplistic dialogue is also contrasted with the rich preponderance of the anarchists which despite their linguistic acumen are diluted of seriousness by the “thick fog of irony” that engulfs the novel.

Although there is this reluctance in the Secret Agent to embrace a coherent political perspective, stationed above all others, Irving Howe posits that the general impetus of both anarchism and conservatism is at bottom very similar and this is conveyed in much of Conrad’s political fiction. Both positions, from a philosophical standpoint, endorse a society where individuals are free to enter “direct relationships without the mediation of the state” . The novels political ambiguity stems from this “kinship of apparent opposites” . This is a characterisation which contests Leavis’ notion of the novel as an “organic” tapestry of “moral significances” . This is how the novel succeeds in depicting moral and political struggle in the face of alienation without a coherent resolution (the suicide of Winnie Verloc is an example of this trend).

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is Conrad’s acute ability to display the revolutionary mind. While the Professor’s ideals are nihilistic he demonstrates a logic and cynicism comparable to that of any political figure. He argues, “nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half the battle would be won then, the disintegration of the old morality would have set in its very temple, that is what you ought to aim at”. There are two things to note about this statement, first it is an example of what Leavis describes as the “obtuse assurance with which habit and self-interest assert absolute rights and wrongs”. Secondly it explicitly sets up Western morals and values as a distinct barrier to Marxist/Anarchist goals (a prescient allusion to the Frankfurt School and the cultural Marxists who recognised this problem and set about investigating it) . It leads on to the notion that moral perspectives in the novel are not just “contrasting” , as Leavis puts it, but incompatible. Conrad’s prose registers this oxymoronic aspect. He describes the city of London as representing the “majesty of inorganic nature”, and Winnie’s “disorderly formality” before she confronts her husband and meets her tragic demise. These themes of isolation and the struggle of incompatible currents (authority/anarchy, idealism/Realpolitik, revolution/order) foment a wide range of potential readings which are not easily reconciled. Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton are drawn to the text’s apparent lack of central moral or political ideology - moral “values” are “forced beyond the frontiers of the world, exiled beyond what can be articulated” – and this, for Eagleton, gives the novel its subversive aspect. Leavis on the other hand has precisely the opposite take, seeing its moral dimension expressed through its attack on self-interest and its “adequacy” in dealing with the “complexities of the real”. There is much traction in both readings and equally some difficulties, both of which have been made use of in this chapter.


Having discussed some of Conrad’s most politically infused novels and looked at a range of critical perspectives there is a sense that the general divergence of opinion still governs mainstream discourse on Conrad. Whether the critic endorses a kind of Leavisite moralism or Marxist cultural politics, it is a polarity that is difficult to transcend completely. Christopher Miller may represent a third strand of thought which incorporates disenfranchised voices by recognising a la Edward Said’s Orientalism, an Africanist discourse for example, in Heart of Darkness. Nonetheless this is an area where the “allegiance of the critic is likely to condition their argument” . I have discussed in my introduction why critics from different strands of thought are drawn to Conrad’s work. This is to do with its distrust of finalities and its political themes not constituting an overall ideology. At the same time I think I have demonstrated that this divergence of critical opinion is still useful in analysing the different aspects of Conrad’s political fiction. This speaks to its complex nature in being politically anti-political and anti-ideological while dealing powerfully with important political themes. Conrad’s most succinct and compelling statement about the interdependence of the artists’ and humanity’s concerns is highly instructive in this regard: For him, “the only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous, so full of hope”.