Everyone knows the Smoking Ban is killing our Pubs and Clubs but why worry. The coalition have promised to Reform Labours Nanny State and to protect Businesses, so we can look forward to the Pubs and Clubs being allowed to Choose to be smoking or non smoking,what a wonderful concept. Fairness in Britain. Its a win-win situation for the coalition,not only will they honour their promise to the public and put Fairness back into Britain,they will also save our Hospitality Industry and Thousands of jobs.
Lets All hope that the coalition does not let the Country down.

Leaving Bluewater, it struck me how differently its story and that of the town emerging around might have been. In Crawley in 2004, a trio of middle-class British Asians took up the Islamist cause, with plans to blow up Bluewater and the “slags” at the Ministry of Sound in London. Had this happened it’s doubtful that Ebbsfleet would have risen from the dust, blood and ashes. Yet it wasn’t only potential terrorists who saw Bluewater as the epitome of western decadence. “Many of us share the Crawley terrorists’ dislike of Bluewater,” wrote Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett. “But that is not to say we have any interest in their plans to improve it.” In the London Review of Books, Ian Sinclair wrote that visitors to Bluewater “wander… under the soft cosh of muzak, feeling the life-force drain. These are the retail undead.”

Isn't it just another attempt by image consultants to get people to form an opinion (and here we are) in what is otherwise an over-saturated pool of well-rinsed, bland, formulaic, meaningless and inconsequential crud? As a whole heap of manufactured pop manekins and rappers can testify, notoriety sells records - especially to the thirteen year olds who buy most of this piss poor crap - a sales tactic going right back to the fifties.

As has been said about small traders, some are most definitely shits, but some are just people trying to survive, escaping having a boss, are avoiding paying taxes, etc. or even just trying to have some creative control over their working life. They are, much like skilled tradesmen (and women), a reflection of life I guess. Like every business, they set themselves up to make money and inevitably become a target for expropriation in one form or another.

PS Does there really need to be a line on everything, even Rihanna?

cashmere grey jumper, blue shirt, black rubber-strap watch, brown leather belt, vans

Intellectual Opportunism

The implication is usually that ideas are no longer being pursued because of their intrinsic merit or worth, or out of a genuine concern with what is at stake in an argument or idea, but only because of the instrumental value of ideas, i.e. the selfish advantage that can be gained from pursuing some ideas in preference to other ones. Observably ventilating or "advertising" suitably formulated ideas is then merely a means or a "tool" for self-advancement or the promotion of a group or organization, giving rise to accusations that the real intention of particular ideas is being twisted around to serve an alien or improper purpose. The general outcome may be that the ideas involved, though plausible at a superficial level, lack any deeper coherence, the coherence being ruled out by lack of regard for relevant principles.

rather like Owen Jones. He can write, and while I tend to raise a weary, seen-it-all, cynical eyebrow at the sort of left agit-prop he tends to come out with, it’s at least coherent and cogent, which makes it better than 95% of stuff that emanates from laptop and newspaper column

Labour gets its candidate – a Price Waterhouse corporate lawyer with a plummy accent and a Chelsea townhouse – elected on a turnout of 28%…..of which she got about half meaning 86% didnt vote for her…..factor in the 20% peoople not on register and she got under 10% of people in Feltham voting for her.

ANTI-POLITICS

"Anarchism is not a beautiful utopia, nor an abstract philosophical idea, it is a social movement of the labouring masses."
–--Dyelo Truda Group

When we start to fight against the conditions of our lives, a completely different kind of activity appears. We do not look for a politician to come change things for us. We do it ourselves, with other working class people.

Whenever this kind of working class resistance breaks out, politicians try to extinguish it in a flood of petitions, lobbying and election campaigns. But when we are fighting for ourselves, our activity looks completely different from theirs. We take property away from landlords and use it for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and end up fighting with the police. We form groups where everyone takes part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our country. We fight for ourselves. This is not the ultimate form of democracy. We are imposing our needs on society without debate—needs that are directly contrary to the interests and wishes of rich people everywhere. There is no way for us to speak on equal terms with this society.

This tendency of working class struggles to go outside and against the government and politics, and to create new forms of organization that do not put our faith in anything other than our own ability, has at times been called anarchism.

The EU is not something you are ‘sceptical’ of.

You might as well be sceptical of the Income Tax, or Death, or the Atlantic Ocean, or sleet. It exists, no question of that. The difficulty is, what do you do about it? And the choice is simple. You stay in it, as it is and will always be. Or you leave.

I've come to dislike LinkedIn. It's like a perpetual class reunion.

Bunch of people you used to know, waving around their electronic cocks and bragging about their new promotion or how much they earn. The whole premise to the site is that you are your CV - that you're defined by your job title.

You're not a person, with ideas, interests, relationships and feelings. You're a Managing Director, or Burger Boy. That's your entire purpose in life. It's just another continuation of the modern trend to shoehorn people's entire existence into a job that they do. YOU ARE YOUR JOB. YOU ARE YOUR JOB.

It's like some kind of mass patronisation tool.

Oh, and that's before I even get started on the recruiters. The slimy, lying weasels who act like your mate so they can sell you off like a chunk of meat. Meat that can type.

The labour party used to employ people like Prescott to do the dirty work of the bankers. He may have been a venal servant of wealth and privilege, but you could buy him for a pittance, and sell him to the proles as ‘one of them.’
Now even that subterfuge has been abandoned, and the billionaires who bankroll the party would rather represent themselves.