How to make a girl feel special

You've probably been thinking that the Duchess of Cambridge is one special lady, you don't know how true this is. Not content with marrying the future King of England she also insists on being part of our literary history by being related to Jane Austen.

Of course it's oh so obvious when you think about it. Miss Daily Mail Reporter puts it best;

That's right it's there flowing in her red (not blue - as the papers are keen to tell us she's common is Kate) blood.

Her great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather is the same person as Jane Austin's great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

This astounding fact is something that she shares with only a handful of people, well a Kenny Everett vicar handful anyway. If we're conservative and imagine that Henry Percy (their mutual descendant) and each of his offspring had a couple of kids she shares her uniqueness with 33,000 people.

So she's not even one in a million. That is common.

Queuing for cake at the
Austen family reunion.

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The sun always shines

Climate change is a crazy socialist myth, of that there is no doubt to the Daily Mail, and that's not just because they get a tiger token for every story they publish reflecting this point of view.

Additionally you'd have to be Neil from the young ones to imagine that you can create energy from anything that's not black and is flogged by a Texan, Russian or Arab. With this truth firmly in mind I can fully understand the reason for these two stories of grave public interest.

It's all a con. Now get down the Esso and buy some petrol or else people will think you're a Communist.

Unless of course you're selling the solar panel and have paid for a little slot in the LIVE magazine. In that case Solar power is the future man. Neil from the Young ones knew the score - now catch up and give these people your money.

It works - any storys published in newspapers saying it doesn't weren't exactly lies more...erm..well don't you worry your pretty little head about those. The sun's quite a complex scientific phenomenon and includes many difficult ideas and...OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE GIVE ME YOUR MONEY! Tweet

Moral Support

A blog, I read and admire for it's thoughtful and informed criticism of poor journalism, has today been threatened with legal action by the Daily Mail for something written in 2009.

In the entry Kevin Arscott rightly lets rip against the opaque racist agenda of the paper, demonstrated in the  routine Mail story about how there's too many darkies in the country, and focuses on the man who sets that agenda; editor Paul Dacre.

Some people have said
Paul smells like an old lady

The blog entry in question was pulled but with the internet, as I've mentioned before, what has been seen cannot be unseen and so you can still read the what the comb-over king of old London town is threatening legal action over here.

Queue up to shit on his grave. Classic. Tweet

The war on Vulpus continues

It's been a couple of months but in the background the war has continued unabated. This week our nemesis Mr Brush stepped it up a notch by nipping in for an Italian.

The skill set of these urban warriors has multiplied since we last looked into this. A deep understanding of the cat flap technology is only the start of it. Campaigner Mrs Keeler, from Lambeth, who is a victim - probably generally, but also specifically of vermin intrusion - tells of their wiles.

And Mrs Keeler has has a variety of animals break into her house. In 1998 two sika deer spent three days living in the cupboard under the stairs. However getting them out of the house was child's play compared with a fox. Once in a house foxes are harder than a shoddy double glazing salesman to shift.

They'll leave quietly
when asked

Thankfully people are beginning to see the dangers these would be child eaters pose, as these comments show the tide is turning.

As I've been saying for some time now, chubby drunks, sweating horses and angry dogs are the best way to deal with these wild animals. That's right wild animals, it's strong language I know but a fox is a wild animal like a Jaguar, a Killer White Shark or a Black Mamba - they know no mercy.

Even more heartwarming are the glad tidings that David Cameron is taking a lead against this insurrection. The Coalition has agreed there'll be a free vote on repealing the Hunting ban this parliament and the PM has promised his vote to our gallant defenders the Countryside alliance.

As the Daily Mail's brave commentary on the never ending attacks shows; this repeal can't come too soon for the sake of our children, our fee paying foreign students and our oversize red jacket manufacturers. Gawd bless em.

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Oh the shame...

I can picture him now hiding under the duvet blubbing and dreading going into work tomorrow. Poor Nick Clegg has been humiliated by the nasty nasty Prime Minister and is probably right now trying to get his wife to ring in sick for him.

What I hear you ask is the cause of this gross humiliation? Has Dave found a baby photo of nick without his nappy or is it more likely him and George Osbourne persuaded Nick to play one of their old Eton dorm games and is now threatening to put the video on Youtube and tell his wife it was her shoes they used.

A game that got out
of hand

Nope it's neither of these.

How's he going to show his face in public now that Ken Clarke's idea to save money is not going ahead? As far as I can make out it doesn't seem like Nick gives a scabby rats ass whether it's this policy or another that saves the £100m the Justice ministry's got to dig out. Far from humiliated I'd imagine he'd feels a little more perplexed at this story; well the headline anyway, the story offers only this flimsy evidence of his shame.

What the journalist James Chapman's done is mistake the word Liberal meaning "favourable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs." with the Liberal Democrats, meaning "favourable to sandals and eating tofu in Cornwall"  It's an easy mistake for anyone to make, words can be very confusing. Deaf & Death sound very similar but mean very different things, I remember having that circled in red in a story I wrote in junior school.


So in James' Cinzano addled mind this confusing word mingled with Cameron telling radio 2 he'd be a right hard bastard if it wasn't for Nick holding him back telling him it's not worth and added up to a humiliating day for the Lib Dems.


What Mr Chapman actually missed was the humiliation of a government announcing another shiny policy to the world only for it to be ripped to pieces by people asking a few rudimentary questions. The Prime Minister insists that ""The tough, strong thing to do is to say, 'Yes, we can make these plans better,'" when your daft ideas are held up to scrutiny. That may be the strong thing to do, but surely the clever thing to do would be keep your schemes to yourself till you've thought them through. So when you think flogging off the forests or the NHS, or taking free milk from kids or housing benefit from long term unemployed or letting rapists halve the time they spend in prison why not talk them through with a grown up before announcing them to the public?


Thatcher famously told a Conservative conference that "This Lady's not for turning" whereas Dave seems to prefer a page out of Ann Widdecomb's Viennese waltz text book of twirls.

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Ethos of the Mail

The Prime Minister announces he's going to spend money that will save 1.4 million lives a year. Good or bad news?

Lets look at the scores on the doors...

Seven hundred and four people think Man_Gaz is wrong, it is quite easy to complain about vaccinating underprivileged children.

One hundred and sixty five people agree with Lee in Bradford that there's already too many people in the world and wasting money to stop them dying of a infectious diseases when they'll only end up starving to death anyway is like burning fivers.

There in a nutshell is the whole ethos of the Daily Mail reader. Given the choice between saving a kitten in a tree, a boy stuck down a well and a little old lady from a house-fire he'd rush into the phone box, change into his pin-stripe suit and swoop headlong into Barclays bank to pay off his car loan.

The Mail's kind of
superhero.

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Flogging a dead horse

I thought the fight was over. I thought the general election and local elections rubber stamped the official history. The reason we're in economic plight is solely down to spending more money than we had during the Labour years. This is the accepted truth by the vast majority of the country, I've had conversations recently and it's seen as the only reason we're in the shite. There's books about it and everything.

Yet there's still a slow drip of stories and commentaries in the popular press that seems to want to continually reinforce this truth, almost as if you stopped saying it it might prove to stop being the case. The Ed Balls documents leak has offered another opportunity to make sure no one forgets the truth.

This story in the Mail - copied from the original in the Telegraph - makes a big play of the comment "We're (sic) spent all this money, but what have we got for it?" More proof that Labour were spending way above their means and squandering the lot on diversity playground technicians and lesbian lessons for little 'uns.

However if you take a look at the actual documents, which the Telegraph has kindly uploaded (note to Mail -  in 2011 all online news should link to sources wherever possible), you can see the quote isn't really the hysterical screaming warning that the papers are touting.

It is in fact a sub-heading clarifying why the 2006 spending review should be looking at public sector productivity if they want to achieve flat spending. That is if the amount of money spent by the government is to remain at a flat 40ish % of GDP and not fluctuate depending on tax take and whims.

So it's just a policy suggestion, coming from the Treasury, asking for a predictable spend plan, not a cut in spending. This has been made to a Labour government who, I think, have the over-arching aim to stop wealth being sucked up from the bottom of society to the top and so are within their rights to ignore it; focusing on the benefit to society instead of the benefit to the economy. It's a matter of ideology how closely you feel these two things are linked.

Strangely the prediction made in the document of a spend of 42.4% GDP in 2007/08 was way out the, actual spend was 38.9%, things aren't as bad as they thought they could be.

Not being an economist my take on this is likely to be missing some important aspects but to take it as simply as the Mail readership tends to: You should only spend what you make. So what does the government make, whatever it taxes basically. This tends to be somewhere around 40% GDP mark - very similar to the amount it spends funnily enough!

As an aside the treasury takes around 40% of wealth generated in the country, yet I pay a lot more than that in total tax probably closer to 50%. Somewhere, someone is making money and not paying tax on it...

So if you subtract the tax take from the public spend it will show how out of control spending was and is. The data can be found easily enough on t'internet (here and here) and plotting them against each other gives this...

Basically put if the bar's below the line we're spending more than we're making and if it's above we've money left over.

Going back through time Wilson pissed cash against the wall through most of his time in office as did Heath, Wilson again and Callaghan. Thatcher spent less than she made, but Major splurged. Blair liked what he saw Thatcher do and saved more than he spent. The current controversy surrounds Brown. As I said earlier popular opinion is that he spent like a 10 year old with his parents iTunes account password, the graph seems to show this isn't quite the case. His strategy was to spend what he made. Not borrow or save, he seemed to control it more or less as closely as possible, up slightly one year down a bit the next.

So if the truth is that the state of the economy is more complicated than simple excessive public spending why is there the continued drip, drip, drip of copy saying that it is that simple?

We've a conservative government and ideologically they believe that it's better to live in the best room a Travelodge has to offer rather than pay more and have a smaller room at the Ritz. So if we cut the spending, get rid of the deficit we'll be left with a glut of cash. What do you think that'll get spent on, hospitals, nurseries and care homes for the elderly or getting rid of the upper tax band?

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