Mixed messages

It's not often you feel sorry for the average Daily Mail reader but today's coverage of the electoral change referendum must have left them scratching heads in confusion.

What the headline appears to be saying is that if we change (Which must be bad - unless it's a change back to something that involves regaining the right to murder or molest someone weaker than yourself in which case it's way over due) then the BNP will have more say. And although this is being portrayed as a nasty thing, deep down inside there's a lot of readers who are giggling like little school girls at the thought.

On the other hand voting Yes - according to David and/or Ed Milliband would be good for progressive parties. This means more squeezing of tax payers and free plasma TVs for unmarried crack whores. So that's a bad thing.

What to do?

Is it Ant or Dec?

In fairness the point being made is a legitimate one. Will changing to AV affect the lot of smaller parties in a positive or negative manner? I personally think it will mean less chance of them getting elected as they're unlikely ever to command the support of more than 50% of the electorate's second or third choices.

This isn't the concern being raised by this article though, the worry here is that after voting for the BNP and seeing them binned alongside the other monster raving loonies their supporters second choice will be taken into consideration, thereby giving the knuckle-draggers two votes.

This is a deliberate misunderstanding of the way AV works propagated by the No campaign. If no candidate is worthy of the support of half of the voters, in effect, another vote is called for with the real dross - and they must be bad - eliminated (Think X-factor). In reality this would be a nightmare to administer and cost a fortune and as no one's making money from a premium phone line it's not going to happen. So instead an imaginary one takes place.

In this imaginary vote it's assumed if your favourite candidate is still in the running you'll vote for them again. If your boy's been evicted you can choose who to vote for from the remaining chancers or not bother. If at the end of this vote someone's mustered up half the voters support they win, if not some other loser's kicked out and we go for a second imaginary vote.

So whenever someone's second preference is counted you've also had a vote counted again if you backed someone still in the game. Either no one gets two votes or everyone gets two votes, or three or four votes...

That's quite conceptual and takes some thinking about and so it's easy to spread the lie that some people will get two or three bites at the voting cherry and others only one.

I think it's clear that the Mail will be supporting the No campaign on the basis that AV will offer less opportunity for a landslide Conservative government - or a landslide any government to be fair. In addition it will set a precedent for electoral change that could set us down the road to proportional representation, and god-forbid we should ever get the government we voted for.

The biggest clue to the Mail's opinion comes in paragraph two.

Really? Continental style is it? The greasy frogs do this do they, and the krauts eh? Probably the EUSSR (See what I did there?) forcing it on us. Well I'll not let it happen not while there's breath in my body.

Of course it's bullshit though. The only continent using this system is Australia, that's what they must mean and I'm sure everyone reading it would be made aware of that at some point. Tweet

Stupid Fat Get

Minority Thought's already pointed put what the "BNP's recruiting sergeant" thinks about drowning Japanese children (Seems there are worse things...) but if you plough further through his rants about imams dressing as lady Gaga and his lack of opinion about Libya you'll find yourself a pearl of racism / stereotyping that gives you the impression he's been doing research (Yeah that's likely) by watching cine-films of Love thy neighbour.

They are Siamese if you please, they are Siamese so you drown them...

It seems Mr Littlejohn was a bit put out that he missed the furore around Midsomer Murders as this was right up his street. Had he been in the office I'm pretty sure it'd have felt like Christmas (Had it not been banned by communist vegan bisexuals fighting for to stop the oppression of turkeys by Paxo).


Oh what we can't all be white together now? If I want to wear a pillow case and set fire to my carpentry project in my own back garden etc etc...


Luckily for him though an opportunity to have his say on the subject was presented by the bestowing of a post-code on the Olympic stadium; E20 - the same as Eastenders. That's a TV show too, and it's set where some of those bloody foreigners live. Fire up the typewriter there's rights to be wronged.

The Eastend has a high proportion of muslims, or as some people like to call them terrorists, yet the TV show has white people in it who are poor and downtrodden probably because of that. It is on the right-on BBC and although it did have some gays in it - and they're a bit like muslims or terrorists somehow - Ross Kemp does fight the Taliban in his spare time away from the square. Tricky, how is it possible weave this complex stereotyping into a fluid narrative. 

You know what, I've a new found respect for the talented journalist. It's quite a tricky subject matter to get your head around and not quite as simple as demonising someone and blaming them for all your problems like I first thought. You need to be able to offer up numerous targets to allow as many prejudices as possible to percolate through and leave the reader in no doubt that somewhere, somehow there's someone out to get you 'cos they're all evil bastards and you're alright John. That's worth £700,000 a year of anyone's money.

Barbara gets the Littlejohn world treatment.

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I do it Yes times a day

The Daily Mail is not afraid to ask the big questions, or the nonsensical ones. How much TV should your children be watching? Obviously less than the poor, but more than the aloof children of high court judges.

There has to be a happy medium somewhere, probably the best way to decide this is a poll. Let's do it, in the name of science (Not Global warming science, the other sort that proves cancer's caused by paying 50% tax or something). The Mail has embarked on such a momentous study.

I have two children (in a cupboard somewhere) one aged Yes, one aged No. Which one should have its own TV?

According to the wise readership the answer is...

Yes by a country mile.

I'm sorry Jeffery son you can't have your own TV, in your dank mouldy cupboard, until you come of age and can count off Yes birthdays. Something to look forward to I feel, until that day you sit and watch Jeremy Kyle mock the poor with me. Tweet

The Random Telegraph

Interested, as ever, to find out how our glorious leader wants to treat the NHS, or maybe wants us to believe he'll treat the NHS ("I haven't sold it to Sodexo!") I clicked on the headline below without reading the small introduction...

I was delighted! Instead of the promises to make the NHS world-class by introducing excessive competition (after all it worked so well with Telecoms, Gas, Electricity, Trains, Busses etc etc) I was instead treated to a quietly surreal article about agriculture and urban fox attacks being debated in parliament.  I heartily recommend it! Tweet

Mutton (Jeff & dressed as lamb)

I've spoken before about Liz Jones' decent into senility and it appears she's sharing more and more of her old age problems with the Mail's readers.

In today's paper she bemoans the posh people accent used by the presenter's on Radio 4. This is a fairly routine complaint, no one likes to be sneered at by the upper classes, but I don't think it's class oppression that's driving her anger. She hates chavs too, here's her celebrating the fall in sales at poor people's clobberer Primark.

Finally, Primark is on the slide Liz celebrates outside their Romford Flagship store

But it's not only the posh broadcaster Andrew Marr who gets her goat she doesn't like call centre accents either, struggles to hear what they're saying. Oh and shop assistants they can't make themselves clear either.

It seems like everyone's mumbling doesn't it Liz. I'm afraid it's either your old age catching up with you - time to invest in a deaf aid maybe?

Or maybe she just can't understand anyone who doesn't sing in the Welsh tones of her forefathers. It's a well known fact that Liz herself actually speaks in a delicate Welsh accent, like wot Windsor Davies does after a night of the brandy & cigars. Boyo.

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One day I'll shove this little piece of Blackpool rock right where....

++    Adored by millions, but George Formby's buck-toothed smile hid a life of misery at the hands of his frigid, domineering wife  ++ 

50 years ago this month the late great yet slightly scary George Formby strummed his Ukulele for the last time.  What better way to mark this than for the DM to celebrate his life by having a pop at his missus for being a cow or something.
FTA
" The truth was that, for almost 40 years, Formby was locked in an unhappy marriage to Beryl, who ruled him with a rod of iron. A tyrannical, domineering woman, Beryl was not just his spouse but also his manager. Through her vicious tongue, icy glares and savage willpower, she terrified George.

She would not let him have a drink in a pub or go out for dinner with male friends. She governed all the finances and gave him just five shillings (25p) a week pocket money. "

+ Paul from Barnstaple has the right sort of idea;  "Great entertainer, and inventor, I love our George Formby grill."

+ Creepy from Crawley has taken his research from a definitive source before commenting;  "It's always been well known that his wife was Hitler in Knickers. There was even a scene in "Goodnight Sweetheart" all about it."

Not wishing to disrespect the buck-toothed loon, but you can get it straight from the horses mouth here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1366310/George-Formbys-misery-hands-frigid-domineering-wife-Beryl.html

Thanks to GG for finding this gem!

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Take your medicine...

...Andy needs a new pair of shoes.

But unfortunately he's come up against a rabid left wing conspiracy theory to land him in trouble with his masters.

Those commie dogs the BMA (Think NUM with a guillotine) have dared to speak out against his plan to make the NHS great again by letting the lowest bidder put their instrument up your ass.

According to our friends at the Mail the 'most powerful trade union in the health service' have had the audacity to point out that none of the stuff Andy wants to do was mentioned by either the conservatives or the Lib Dems in their election manifestos. In fact the Lib Dem are particularly peeved, so much so that even Nasty-Nick had to say out loud that privatising the NHS is bad.

Who the hell do these cowboys think they are eh? And what do they know? They don't represent all the doctors in the country, only about 140,000 of them (There's about 220,000 Doctors in the UK and about 110,000 work for the NHS) and as a spokesman for the Dept of health says "The BMA's own survey shows their position is not representative of many of their members"


He's right the BMA's own survey of their members shows about a fifth of doctors broadly support the proposals, however over a third are against the ideas. In fact even amongst the supporters less than half of them think it will lead to a more effective health service and over half think it will lead to them spending less time with patients. Maybe that's the incentive for the pro-reformers. I wouldn't want to spend all that time studying hard only to have to waste each day listening to fat old men complaining about chest pains and then have to stick my finger up his bum.

So that's why a minority of patient-avoiding doctors would be happy with the changes oh that coupled with the Guardian's thoughts they might get paid a bit more, but why is Andy Lansley gagging for the change?

It can't be that he's getting money from a private healthcare company could it? No of course not, he's not a bent politician only in it for himself. They only exist in foreign lands, he's from Essex a county with a reputation for honesty. That's why there's so many second hand car dealers in Romford.



It's a coincidence that Care UK - a private healthcare company that's spent £3m on a clinic providing ultrasound diagnostics to anyone who wants to pay for them and another £2m for a specialist eating disorder clinic in the first two months of this year, just in time for an opening up of the NHS to private healthcare companies - gave him over £20,000 to spend on curtains for his office.

So obviously he's not doing this because he's corrupt. No he's doing it because he's a bastard.
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