Watch: Clarkson says strikers should be shot
Today, Jeremy Clarkson – when asked his opinion on the strikes, said: “I would have them all shot”.
He added:
I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.
I mean how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed, while the rest of us have to work for a living.
Does that look like comedy?
I have two issues here.
First, the BBC has major voices on the right that regularly opine about national politics (Andrew Neil, Jeremy Clarkson, Nick Robinson) – and those are just the major ones – while there are hardly any similar left-wing figures. The only ones you occasionally get (Armando Ianucci, David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker) – are explicitly non-partisan, mostly anti-establishment in general and pointedly comedians. The first two also voted Libdem (as I did) at the last election, not Labour.
Mehdi Hasan has written about the myth of the left-wing BBC too, and this continuously grates on me. The BBC’s willingness to take Clarkson’s seriously is not balanced at all by an equivalent left personality.
Secondly, this isn’t really a joke – because he repeats with quite a serious face the lie that they have ‘gold plated pensions’. There was nothing funny in it.
It is a naked attempt to push the debate even further to the right, in the way that Republicans in the US keep repeating the lie that Obama is a Marxist-socialist. We take it as a joke because we know it rubbish but it’s a dog-whistle to a whole bunch of people out there who hang on to their ever word. It matters because extreme stuff like this becomes part of the national discourse on the right…whereas if anyone left-wing says anything vaguely controversial they’d be sacked from the BBC.
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PS – Let’s not have Tories complaining about ‘PC gawn mad’ and ‘have a sense of humour’ when they get so uppity and annoyed at even small jokes themselves.
The union editorial that the Sun refused to run
contribution by Brendan Barber
Yesterday the Sun asked the TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber to write 200 words setting out the case for the day of action. They are not in today’s paper. We publish them here instead.
This government cancelled the tax on bankers’ bonuses. Instead it has brought in a nurses’, teachers’ and lollipop ladies’ tax.
continue reading… »
Racist tram woman: best video remixes
The racist woman from #MyTramExperience has officially become a meme now that she has a website dedicated to her.
But a whole bunch of people on YouTube have also re-mixed her original rant. Here are some of the best ones.
Auto-tune remix
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Re-mixed with the infamous ‘Muslamic Ray Guns’ track
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Racist lady vs Mr T!
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What did she say??
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The obligatory Downfall parody
Even the OBR doesn’t believe in Osborne’s predictions
The Chancellor was keen yesterday to push his latest plans for growth:
- Increasing the supply of credit and money to pass those low rates on to families and businesses.
- Rebalancing our economy with an active enterprise policy and new infrastructure.
- Help with the cost of living on fuel duty and rail fares.
continue reading… »
Video of ‘racist woman on rail’ No. 2 emerges
Another video of a woman having a loud racist rant (at some Arab men I think) on a train from London to Manchester was uploaded to YouTube yesterday.
via @gift_of_the_fab
The Sun has jumped on this video today too, reporting:
She jabs her finger at the victim and unleashes a string of obscenities, while other passengers beg her to stop.
The new footage emerged as a woman appeared in court after allegedly hurling racist taunts on a tram in Croydon, South London.
In the latest attack, on a London to Manchester train, the drunk, dark-haired white woman repeatedly yells: “You’re in my country now, talk my language. Don’t ******* talk your ****, talk my language. You ****, ****.” Her face contorted in rage, she mimics a Middle Eastern accent, adding: “Don’t look at me like I’m a ****.”
Is there a virus going around?
For the first time, George Osborne is failing
This government will not lose when it fails on Labour’s terms. It will not lose the next election on the NHS, cuts to frontline services or climate change – despite conspicuous failings on these three fronts and many others about which we care deeply.
They won’t fail on these terms because at the last election, and for at least six months after that, we let the Tories convince voters that the deficit was the single most important issue.
To stomach the “nasty” party they needed the huskies, the NHS pledges, the hoody-hugging. But once those votes were cast, people didn’t want to think they were wrong in the choice they made.
continue reading… »
New publication on ‘culture beyond oil’
If you happen to be in the London area this week, Platform, Art Not Oil and Liberate Tate are launching a new publication, ‘Not if but when – Culture Beyond Oil’ on the evening of Tuesday 29 November.
The publication features art work that people have made in response to oil companies and their impacts, as well as a series of articles examining the issues in greater detail.
Like the title of the publication states, it’s not a question of if, but when oil-sponsorship becomes socially unacceptable, in the same way that tobacco sponsorship did a few decades back.
In the last two years, art-interventionists Liberate Tate have been doing a great job of creatively bringing this tension to the surface through a series of high impact, direct action performances in gallery spaces that have propelled the issue into the mainstream.
If you accept the need to draw some sort of line about what is and what isn’t ethically acceptable, then we need to renegotiate exactly where thNose lines are in light of our awareness of the role that oil companies are playing in dragging us to the edge of climate catastrophe.
There’s a growing sense in the cultural sector of this being the case. Apart from letters signed by hundreds of people in the arts Liberate Tate and Platform are sending round a petition calling on Nick Serota to end the relationship with BP.
There’s been a great response to it so far, but we’re still hoping to get a few thousand more signatures on to it before we present it to the Tate board. Click here to sign it, and please share it with other people who you think might be interested.
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Follow ‘End oil sponsorship of the arts’ on facebook, and @platformlondon and @liberatetate on twitter, to stay up to date with this campaign.
How the decision on Trident is being stitched up by the MoD
contribution by Kate Hudson
Caroline Lucas has exposed a further £2bn of government spending on a new nuclear weapons programme to replace the current Trident system. This brings the total spending so far to £6bn on a system which has not yet even been authorised..
On the day when George Osborne is defending his failing austerity programme and trade unionists are preparing to defend their pensions, it is hard to see how such unauthorised profligacy can continue.
continue reading… »
Play the #OsborneBingo during his speech
Chances are you’ve been looking forward to George Osborne’s 2011 Autumn Statement even less than he has, so this year we thought we’d make it a little more interesting.
The New Economics Foundation have pulled together a list of words and phrases that might just crop up in his annual defence of government economic policy.
Get ready to score them off from 12.30pm this afternoon! Also see the #osbornebingo hashtag on Twitter.
How suspicious of foreigners are the British? #MyTramExperience
The appalled reaction to the racism of the woman on the Croydon tram suggests that such attitudes are no longer accepted in Britain. But then that reaction was expressed first and most prominently on Twitter, which is hardly representative of wider society.
Indeed it’s barely 18 months since the Mail on Sunday printed one of the most xenophobic headlines of recent years: “His wife is Spanish, his mother Dutch, his father half-Russian and his spin doctor German. Is there ANYTHING British about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg?”.
But recent polls suggest that most Brits are far less suspicious of foreigners than the Mail on Sunday’s headline writers would have us believe.
continue reading… »
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
» To win London, Ken Livingstone has to step outside his comfort zone
» This trade agreement with India will destroy thousands of lives
» UK debt hasn’t hit £1 trillion – mostly because of QE
» The benefits of being a “burden” on society
» Today’s economic figures will simply confirm UK’s “lost decade”
» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
» Want a more responsible capitalism? Reform how pensions work
» The world is entering the third phase of the crisis, warns ILO
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