Can the Sun get any worse? Of course.

Deprived of any real news this Saturday morning, what better than something about kids - SHOCK HORROR - having fun. Yes, that's right, the fact that...

THE youngest son of Professor David Nutt - sacked as government drugs adviser - has posted pictures of himself on Facebook apparently smoking dope.

... is apparently newsworthy in the Sun. Professor Nutt's children's sins include appearing...

ZONKED in other snaps on the site

Maybe he was just tired after a long day. His son also commented on facebook…

"Steve Nutt thinks his dad is probably more famous than he'll ever be, BARRING A TERRORIST ATROCITY THAT IS... "

It's true, and slightly funny. Ok, not very funny, but what has off key humour got to do with Professor Nutt's sacking?

Shockingly, instead of sticking a portrait of himself in his "profile" photo slot like most Facebook users, his image is of an orange labelled "product of Israel" - one half of which is a GRENADE.

I'm still struggling to work out why this is relevant, possibly a little offensive but it makes a bit of a political point. It isn't something put up without any thought.  About Nutt's other daughter the Sun postures that...

Photos show her and girl pals cavorting with a bottle of spirits in hand - and were uploaded two years before she turned 18.

People before the age of 18 sometimes drink shocker.

Meanwhile older lad Johnny, 26, has posted photos of himself prancing NAKED in the snow in Sweden.

Sounds fun... I don't know about you, but I've failed to find anything relevant to Professor Nutt's sacking/resignation or anything that's offensive or abnormal about his kids lives. Maybe this is just another poorly done hatchet job.

What do we want? People to stop taking the piss out of student protest

That means you Tom Harris MP, remember the party whip isn't controlling your blog (or is he?) and the government have no policy of unfair and stereotypical blog posts against students (or do they?)

Quite frankly, this is stereotypical and unfunny and quite what an MP is doing posting it is beyond me. I generally like reading Harris' blog (even though sometimes it is a walking advert for New Labour) but this is an aberration and I hope he'll notice soon.

However this is just part of a general prejudice against student protest, i.e. that they're all a bunch of layabouts who have nothing better to do. In this case protesting against drug policy the implication is that they're all druggies, similar to the idea that anyone who challenges the status quo on immigration is a racist. Student protest however can be a very powerful thing and the party leaders would do well to give it a bit more consideration.

Oh and for the record, the fact I didn't get up until nearly midday today does not make me a layabout. It's the weekend. 

Spot the white supremacist making a youtube video

Oh... here he is, and he's taken to the streets of Peckham to make a propaganda film for the BNP





It's just complete bollocks, I've reported it to YouTube because it's clearly hateful and abusive content, and racist. The content of the video is not the main reason why I've flagged it, the main reason is the text that accompanies it.

A walk through the main shopping street in what used to be Peckham.

Oh, so because there are black and asian people now it's not Peckham.

The Third World has come to London

So, all foreigners are from "Third World" countries. No? Oh, I get it, just the non-white ones.

If I lived in Somalia or Pakistan, I'd be underneath the first lorry coming this way too! 

So all Somalian or Pakistani immigrants come in illegally. Funny that, I have a Somalian friend and he came here quite legitimately.

The indigenous white population have been replaced by a largely African population who buy their goods from Kurds, Afghan and Iraqi Muslims, many of whom ran for cover when they saw the camera. 

Probably because most people, whatever their skin colour don't like to be filmed going about their daily business by some random stranger.

Peckham now has one of the highest rates of HIV infection and street crime in Europe and the schools are 'no go areas' for indigenous white children.

I can't see where the person has got these figures from, or the point they're trying to make. Surely they're not saying that all foreigners bring diseases or that they're all criminals? That's exactly what they're saying. Also note a very BNP use of the word indigenous to supplement white.


All in all, a load of crap, and tagged with 'BNP' and 'Nick Griffin'


Update:The video has been removed from YouTube for 'terms of use violation'. It's good to see that I make a difference occasionally (not through the blog, but by flagging the content)

The Nutt case gets nuttier

The real problem – and it may be quibbling over details – is not that the government ignored the drugs advice, but it’s that they failed to offer any other explanations other than health issues as to why cannabis has been reclassified as a Class B drug.

If Alan Johnson had been able to find a convincing reason why it should have been reclassified there would be no reason why he shouldn’t have. As it is though, he hasn’t and Gordon Brown has crossed the line in pontificating about the science, which he doesn’t understand

In 2007 as Brown came into government saying that cannabis in the form of ‘skunk’ was lethal, something that Nutt denies completely. Nutt was never saying that cannabis isn’t harmful or should be legalised, rather that because the large majority do not have any harm caused to them by it that it isn’t as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco.

Over the years various governments have reclassified and reclassified over and over again cannabis to no effect. The government is legally bound to consult and take into account the council’s ideas, clearly in this case they have undermined its authority and broken the terms of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs act and in this case they have thought that they can pronounce on science better than real scientists.

This whole thing is a complete mess caused by policy that is patently wrong, Nutt hasn’t criticised them for ignoring their advice, he and many others are criticising the government for their policy making lacking any kind of evidence.

Rich people defend other rich people getting richer

So, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs and (surprise, surprise) former adviser to Thatcher and now conservative peer Lord Griffiths has said that the public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses

Well, excuse me if I thought that there should be some kind of reform after excessive risk taking fuelled by the lust for bonuses caused a recession. Excuse me Lord Griffiths for thinking that we should take a more prudent approach to banking and take steps to stop us inflating another debt bubble that will burst again in ten to twenty years time. This time it really has to be an end to boom and bust.

Griffiths seems to be promoting the idea of ‘trickle down’ economics, a theory which is dubious at best. Even through the Blair years, where wages steadily increased, the gap between rich and poor continued to rise. There is no evidence whatsoever that exorbitant bankers bonuses are good for society as a whole and the poorest people in society.

Even worse is his pathetic patronising idea that because his father and grandfather were miners he knows what inequality is like.

His reasoning for not stopping bonuses is that companies would move to low tax countries such as Switzerland. Well why haven’t they so far? Britain already taxes far higher than countries like that, so the must be something else keeping big corporations here.

There have been some very good ideas about how to deal with bonuses including, taxing them heavily – I suggest 95%; a global tax on financial transactions that goes to help the poor (far too utilitarian to ever be taken seriously, mores the pity); banning bonuses over a certain amount, or as my dad suggested “Make bank payouts over a certain percentage of salary non tax deductible for the bank.” I’m not quite sure what that means, but he used to be an accountant so I’ll trust him.

What is clear though is that reform is needed, and radical reform at that. What Lord Griffiths is proposing is that we all turn a blind eye to what the banking industry is doing and has done for the last 20 years and wait for the next recession.

The Jan Moir saga... it gets worse

The pathetic attempt at an apology from Moir is almost as offensive as the original article. The full statement reads...

"Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions. However, the point of my column -which, complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. 

"Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition. 

"The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned.

This just makes it worse, what was previously just insinuated in the original article has now become painfully explicit, Jan Moir thinks that being "intimate with that stranger" i.e. in a homosexual way has in some way caused his death.  

This vile homophobic rubbish is supposed to be an apology? She didn't take back any of her offensive comments and didn't even express regret that she offended people. That, combined with her suggestion that gay sex killed Stephen Gately is only going to make things worse.

A couple of stupid Mail things

The story about the ‘supercop’ making 1000 arrests in 18 months brings to mind the phrase ‘quality not quantity.’ Maybe the Mail should look up which police officer brought most people to trial or had the most successful convictions. Unfortunately that wouldn’t fit with the Mail’s tub-thumping anthem about the bravery of this police officer.

A new BBC ‘row’ which is complete rubbish. A new 50p coin design was chosen from entries to a competition which closed in March, in May the finalists were chosen, in June the winner was chosen, and in July the winner’s father was appointed as the new boss of the BBC Natural History Unit, Andrew Jackson. The Daily Mail have construed this as the father using his influence at the Natural History Unit to choose the winner of a Blue Peter competition a month before he was appointed. That takes some doing.  

Britain is in danger of going bust. Where to start? We are about mid table in the percentage of debt to GDP and the budget deficit being one of the highest in Europe for this year is not going to change this hugely. The article shows that our budget deficit is quite high but fails to explain in any way how we are in danger of going bust. More tabloid fear-mongering I’m afraid.