Democracy, Democracy, It's Good For You and It's Good For Me

Random thoughts on the upcoming British Election, because democracy

David Cameron could give two squirts of piss

For the first few weeks of the campaign the current PM really looked like he couldn't be arsed with the whole rigmarole. He refused to take part in debates, visibly irritated at being quizzed on his record and had a re-election strategy that consisted of jerking his thumb at picture of Ed Miliband and pulling a face and if questioned just honking 'long term economic plan' and looking smug (you can read more about the utter genius of that long term economic plan here) At some point around the halfway mark somebody obviously pointed out that this wasn't coming across very well because he subsequently appeared on telly waving his arms around and shouting 'by golly, I'm motivated' which, of course, convinced everyone.

Since then the Tory line of attack appears to be a three pronged approach of constant slandering of opponents, spending promises based on money that they have repeatedly and unambiguously said does not exist and suggesting that the votes of those people registered in Scotland are somehow illegitimate. While this may be enough for them to win in the short term, in the long term this is damaging to people's perception of politics, damaging to the economy and damaging for the union of crowns that less than a year ago the PM was getting all wobbly lipped about. The PM has been given a chance to communicate the ideals and principles behind his brand of conservatism and wasted it on short sighted politicking.

David Cameron wants to win because he doesn't want to lose, which, as far as motivation goes is fine when playing rugger or quidditch or whatever it is posh people do, but is nowhere near good enough when you're asking for the chance to lead the nation

Ed Milliband is not, and will never be, cool

The Tory press did kind of shoot themselves in the foot by portraying Ed Milliband as a man so inept and awkward it's a good day if he's put his trousers on the right way round. While it was fun during the life of the parliament, come the increased scrutiny of the election campaign anything shy of Mr Miliband transmogrifying into Some Mothers do 'Ave 'Em era Michael Crawford meant that he's exceeded expectations. Still the subsequent screeching U-turn depiction of him as a maniacal Marxist meddler determined to subvert the democratic process and impose Russell Brand on the nation's daughters hasn't really convinced either.

In my opinion Ed comes off across as a reasonably principled man, with a functioning brain in his head and with views that broadly coincide with my own. However there's a reason that the initial line of attack was to draw attention to his innate dorkiness and that reason is, at the risk of sounding redundant - the man is innately dorky. I would hasten to add that dorky is in no way the same thing as inept or weak willed, but there have been fewer moments more cringe inducing than when, transparently stage managed, he starts dropping his aitches, telling us that we've "gotta know, that ain't gonna happen" and then awkwardly eye fucking the camera. True, all politicians do this shit, but Mr Miliband is particularly bad at it and I wish he'd stop.

The man's both a gonk and a wonk and rather than trying to fight that he should own it. Besides, what other world leaders are there who are really, genuinely cool? Angela Merkel looks like she had fun once and hated it, Vladimir Putin has the air of a man who will send you unsolicited dick picks and I'm willing to bet money that Francoise Hollande owns multiple airfix models. sure, Obama could be perceived as possessing a somewhat louche charisma, but then you remember he answers to the name Barry and geeks out over Conan the Barbarian.

Scottish people don't count for some reason

You may remember back in September there was a whole referendum on whether Scotland would leave the union. In the end they opted to stay on the understanding that further powers would be devolved to Edinburgh and people were dead glad. Or they were for about a couple of hours until the PM decided to use the platform of the referendum result to attack the injustice of Scottish MP's having an influence in Westminster on legislation that only pertains to England and/or Wales. While there's a case to be made there it's complicated by the fact that, due to the disparity in population between the home nations, most laws effecting England will have a knock on effect in other parts of the kingdom. Suffice to say it's a complicated issue and emotive issue and there's a time and a place to raise it. Unsurprisingly this is not less than 24 hours after one part of the country was having a long hard think of buggering off and setting up it's own state. With blackjack! And hookers!

Since that time, against the backdrop of sky rocketing support for the Scottish National Party, there's been increasingly shrill suggestions that, because the SNP's raison d'etre is seperatism, they should not be able to make up part of any UK government - by which logic all UKIP MEP's should be resigning their positions.

The election on Thursday is a general election pertaining to the whole of the United Kingdom. Scotland is a part of that kingdom. If the people of Scotland should see fit to elect Bobby Davros and his ever so wonderful vibrating hula girls to parliament then to parliament they shall go, where they will have the same freedoms as any other political party, I've been to Scotland and the people there talk and write and say things and generally exhibit all the signs of being functioning human beings with a capacity for higher thought. It's therefore reasonable to assume the people there are aware that the party that many of them are voting for are mathematically incapable of forming a government by themselves and it's therefore reasonable to assume that there's a preference for a coalition (formal or otherwise) including the SNP. The main Westminster parties are free to reject such an arrangement, but to suggest it's illegitimate due to the provenance of one of the players is utter bollocks of the highest order.

The whole UKIP thing stopped being funny a while ago

The Hell in a Handcart gang were meant to be the main attraction in this election, storming the battlements of political correctness armed with nothing more than a pint of mild and good old fashioned common sense. Instead their performance has been somewhat ineffective and sad, like an old man shouting at the kid's playing outside his window, but who's too infirm to get up out of his chair to chase them off. Last year we had Mike Read's UKIP calypso (AKA the worst thing ever) which confidently predicted that Farage would form the next government, now it's entirely possible they'll come out the other side of the election with fewer MP's than they went in. In response the party's gone a bit tinfoil helmet, claiming that the bad polls and coverage are the result of liblabcon (sigh) conspiracy, reporting people who make jokes about the party to the police, going to "war" against the BBC (which doesn't extend to cancelling publicity appearances and interviews) and adding the Scots to the list of Nasty Foreigners Wot We Hate (please see above).

The kippers have always reminded me of a line from The Simpsons where Bart is running for class president: "My opponent says there are no easy answers. I say they're not looking hard enough!" Unfortunately there will always be a percentage of people who would like to live in a world where every grievance in the world can be put down to the European Union and immigration. Therefore I don't think UKIP will be going anywhere for a long time yet. Nor do I think Farage will dissapear if he fails to win his seat, rather he'll do a Putin and take a backseat role for a few years before resuming the leadership. What I hope is that 2014 will represent a high watermark for the party, although I am somewhat pessimistic on that front


This is going to drag on and on and on and on... 

What looks likely to happen this Thursday is that the Tories will win the most seats, but not enough to form a government, and with too few potential allies to get any legislation passed. Therefore Labour will form a government backed by an SNP who would do less self harm renaming themselves the Saucy Naughty Perverts than being seen to enable the Tories. While such an outcome is constitutionally legitimate and it could be argued that over 50% of the votes cast were for a progressive party of some stripe, meaning that such a government would be an accurate reflection of the result, the fact that the blue team got the most votes would held up as proof that the arrangement is all kinds of bullshit. Even if there's no loophole for the Tories to wrangle their way back into government or get a second general election called, the fallout from such a result will last far beyond the election, probably for the duration of the parliament. Even if Cameron concedes and goes quietly into the night I cant really imagine the Murdochs or the Dacre's of the world doing likewise.

Or, alternately the Conservatives will cobble enough support to form another coalition or govern as a minority in which case they can resume Operation Plebshaft. Four weeks in and I'm sick of the general election, but whichever way it goes I suspect the ball ache's set to continue for a while yet. The below's by Cassetteboy, I suspect most people reading this will have already seen it, but what the heck.

I completed the Sunderland 10k on Sunday despite some truly pissy horrible weather conditions. Thank you for anyone who sponsored me. You are not only generous, but devastatingly attractive.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Electioneering

The bi-decennial festival of equivocation, obfuscation and all round bullshit that is the British election is upon us, heralded this year by a series of television debates. The first was between the Prime Ministers and the leader of the opposition. Except it wasn't, as the PM outright refused to partake in anything resembling a one on one debate and what we got instead was two back to back interviews with Jeremy Paxman, a walking advert for the dangers of believing your own hype, and an audience Q and A featuring such hard hitting questions as "Who is your favourite Power Ranger, and you can't say the green one,' and  'Potatoes: roasted or mashed. Discuss.' The whole thing, therefore, could be written off as a colossal waste of time if it wasn't for the incumbent government's frankly bizarre strategy of depicting their opponent as a man so incapable he couldn't relieve himself in the wilderness without pissing on an electric fence. While the meme of Mr Miliband as an awkward dork didn't exactly spring from nowhere - please see literally any interview the guy's ever done -  the Ed as Mr Bean line of attack has been so overplayed that we've now reached a point where 'man answers question reasonably coherently' suddenly becomes a political turnaround on par with Marc Anthony's 'honourable man' speech in Julius Caesar.

Then, of course, we had the multi party debates or - as they were somewhat inevitably referred to - the massed debates, featuring every political leader in the land who A) have  MP's sitting in the House of Commons and B) aren't Northern Irish, because fuck those guys (apparently). 

For those who are A) unfamiliar with British political party leaders B) don't care C) are unable to recognise them from my shitty drawings - l-r we have David Cameron (Conservative), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nichola Sturgeon (Scottish Nationalist), Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) and Natalie Bennett (The Green Party)

Two observations about the gratuitous mass debating have already been discussed by far cleverer people than me at great length: that 1) when the full range of mainstream political opinion is given a platform it quickly becomes apparent that the UK is a lot more left wing than a perusal of The Sun would have you believe, and that 2) it's generally nice to see more XX chromosomes on the podium. For me though, the takeaway is - again -  how significantly our expectations have been lowered with regards to public discourse in this country. That UKIP's Mr Farage, a man who couldn't be more of a spiv if he grew a pencil moustache and began operating a coconut shy, and the physical embodiment of the sort of received wisdom that ascertains that Jews can hear gold and that Asian ladies have sideways fannies - is welcomed by the media as some sort of rebel voice, while Nichola Sturgeon, the leader of a reasonably progressive party with a solid record of competent governance, is regarded as a dangerous unknown quantity, depresses me more than I can articulate at present.

The other point I would make is that British politics has become so fractured that the first past the post system we currently implement is fundamentally broken. But that is rant for another time.

With regards to the above scribblings, I feel I should apologise to any supporters of Ms Bennett, who generally speaking, I have some time for. At the risk of explaining the joke, her line is a reference to a recent car crash interview in which she lapsed into an embarrassed silence when asked to cost some of her policies and later blamed this on a case of the sniffles.  

I also apologise for the reduction of complex political positions to infantile soundbites (although what's good for the goose...). I am to political satire what farting in the bath is to perfumery

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Paul Thomas: A Celebration

A couple of weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack I made a passing remark that, alone among his peers, the Daily Express editorial cartoonist Paul Thomas had failed to produce a piece that commented on the attacks in any way. Fast forward to this week and it turns out that he's been fired. I imagine this  has less to do with his failure to engage with topical events (because, seriously, have you  read The Daily Express) and more to do with the proprietor's attempts to turn the title into a newspaper that contains no actual news and can be created by feeding a few random press releases in to a machine and then pressing a  big red button marked 'OUTRAGE!!!!!'. I'm a fan of the often under appreciated art of the editorial cartoon in general, and have a soft spot for Mr Thomas in particular. His work was not particularly incisive, original, funny, well drawn, topical or even pleasant, but there was something in his depiction of giant headed celebrities juxtaposed with row upon row upon row of featureless bald men all pointing and vibrating and spouting reactionary platitudes apropos of absolutely nothing, that I find strangely endearing. By way of tribute, I present ten of the best examples of Mr Thomas's work, and by best I mean the handful I was able to source before I lost patience with the Express's absolute mare of a website.

10)

There's a certain breed of person, usually found in the comments section of news websites, who will attempt to shoe horn a reference to their particular bugbears regardless of the topic under discussion or the appropriateness of the comparison. Above we see a wonderful representation of this sort of tosser; safe and warm, vibrating with contentment, surrounded by the paraphernalia of a comfortable, middle class existence and accompanied by his beautiful wife (who is also vibrating). What cares he about the hundreds of lives lost and the millions in damage as a direct result of Hurricane Sandy? Just as long as he can day-dream out loud about, frankly, unlikely scenarios where natural disasters are harnessed to further the Europhobic cause. Paul Thomas hates this man, whose response to the boxing day tsunami was probably to wish that a similar event would wash Britain further into the Atlantic, and he wants you to hate him too.

9)

Poor Ed Miliband. The man can't eat a bacon sandwich without people pointing and laughing. Of course all this ribaldry masks the fact that Mr Miliband is, essentially, interviewing for the post of most powerful man in the land. You'd think it would therefore be constructive to look at the substance of what the man says, rather than his demeanour as he says it, but the media narrative seems forever stuck on weird and nerdy - to the detriment of us all. Mr Thomas apparently had enough of this and decided to create the most over the top anti-Ed cartoon so a line could be drawn under the whole thing and allow us, as a culture, to move on. He's foregone the usual depiction of a hapless dweeb and instead portrayed Red Ed as a sneering, overweight, drag artist. Topicality has been dispensed with and we're invited to laugh at the Opposition leader not for anything he's done or said he'll do or even seems likely to do, but what he might possibly do in an alternate universe where cats go woof, rain goes up and everything is different. And to top it off the chief piss taker is the normally avuncular Bruce Forsyth, which is kinda like resurrecting Mickey Rooney, specifically so he can tell someone you hate that they're a knob. I feel a trick has been missed by not including stink lines and an actual willy coming out of Mr Miliband's head, but then subtlety's not in my vocabulary. Which is why Thomas spent years being paid the big bucks and I'm sat here eating dry pasta and Oxo cubes.

8)

A skewering of that old standby of the hard of thinking knuckle dragger: 'I can't be a racist. I love curry.' It's obviously not occurred to the vibrating fuckwit, who instinctively reduces the entire output of the Indian subcontinent to vindaloo, that visiting a Tandoori restaurant in Britain that is, presumably, staffed by British citizens does precisely fuck and all to further trade between the UK and India. The cartoonist also perfectly captured the dead eyed smile of customer service staff who are obliged to swallow their contempt and affect an approximation of laughter at your shitty "jokes". And the whole thing's pink, so very, very pink.

7)

This cartoon came as the nation was working itself into a tizzy about the hordes of Romanians that were meant to be invading the shores of Blighty come Jan 1st 2014. In the end the invasion amounted to one confused bloke, who seemed quite nice and already had a job in place. Here Thomas provides the only plausible explanation for the missing hordes that we were assured would be landing. They're all still in Calais, staring impotently over the channel, utterly oblivious to the fact that an EU migrant and an asylum seeker are two entirely different things and that they can legally enter the country any time they feel like it. Alternately Thomas either completely misunderstands or is happy misrepresenting the immigration debate. To which I say, poppycock.

6)

Any American reading this will remember Harry Windsor's visits to the States, an event in their history up there with the moon landings and the Gettysburg address, like it was yesterday. Of course they didn't really replace the Statue of Liberty with one of a member of a royal family that they had a whole war to get rid of - that's what's know as comical overstatement - but it's really not hard to imagine them doing something similar. After all, how could read those words by Emma Lazarus (Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore) and not think of Prince Henry of Wales? Extra points for having the torch hand pointing for no discernible reason and the numerous forty foot American flags, without which I'd have no fucking clue where this cartoon was set.

5)

This rings so true. I have many fond memories of childhood visits to my grandparents. Me and my brothers and sisters would get up early to pore over the broadsheet financial pages, hunting for any positive news on the pensions market while we slurped down our coco pops. Then, pre-armed with evidence in black and white, we would rush over to the granny and granddad we now knew to be minted, in order to extort from them as much as possible. Because, as any fool knows, all relationships, even those with your nearest and dearest kin, boil down to series of financial interactions and anyone who says otherwise is a damn hippy who probably wants to marry a tree.

4)

I genuinely find this hilarious. Not for the joke, which is straight from The Barmy Boy's Bumper Book of Rib Ticklers, nor the fact that anyone who bothered to read Ms Mantel's comments would probably found them entirely reasonable, thus making the reaction entirely inappropriate. The cartoon's brilliance is that it conjures up  the image of the head of state and her two immediate heirs queuing for three quarters of an hour in a Barnsley Waterstones for the sole purpose of delivering an absolute turd of a zinger and then awkwardly shuffling off after a couple of seconds of embarrassed silence. I love it. 

3)

I had some difficulty locating an actual joke in this one. It's about Wimbledon and has something to do with the existence of foreigners,this much I know. But foreign nationals living in a city as cosmopolitan as London or their involvement in what is, after all, an international sporting event is so utterly mundane it really doesn't seem worth commenting on. Surely it's Andy Murray who's the oddity here, given British athlete's past inability to break through to the finals? The Polish do lend themselves to puns, but, as near as I can tell, Thomas has decided that he wont go there with a barge-them*. Is it that Romanians are intrinsically funny? Is it that there's a newspaper billboard propped up where there are no newspapers for sale? Regardless I've spent more time thinking about this one cartoon than I have last years Booker Prize Winner, which must surely indicate some sort of depth.

2)

Part of the reason that people have become so disillusioned with the political process is our leader's constant equivocating and simple refusal to call a spade a spade. Everything is so couched in spin and between the lines dog whistling that it's hard to tell what any of them think on a specific issue. Cue Thomas, who cuts through all the bullshit and tells it to us straight. If someone disagrees with your point of view, well, you straight up murder their bitch ass and parade their decapitated head in front of a crowd of gawking onlookers. That's what those ISIS chaps do, and say what you like about them, they get shit done. 

1)

Who says satire's dead? Paul Thomas, that's who. Because sometimes things are so obviously good, that to question them or to draw attention to their flaws in any way is not just churlish, but actively harmful to the good of the nation, stepping over the mark from simple quibbling to actual Quisling. Why the hell should a political cartoonist attempt to speak truth to power, when those in power are so evidently the very bestest thing for the country?  "Tory" rhymes with "Glory" and that's all you need to know. What does Labour rhyme with? "Gay, duh!" that's what. Kudos for looking past David Cameron's occasional resemblance to a pair of freshly paddled buttocks and instead depicting him as the square jawed, rakish go-getter that we all think of when we picture the PM. And for anyone who feels this portrait of Mr Cameron is unduly flattering and uncritical, you are invited to get a damn grip. It's not like he drew him walking on water.

Well. Except for that time that he did.

Honourable Mentions:

It's funny because he's disabled 

It's funny because Australia

It's funny because domestic violence during the World Cup is totally a thing.

It's funny because... the... the sea dried up?

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Please note, if you feel I have been somehow disrespectful to Mr Thomas, a man who has known vastly more personal and financial success than I will ever know, but has also, at the end of the day, just lost his job, please be aware that he has his own website where you buy cards and prints, enquire about commissions or whatever. Alternately, if you feel I haven't been disrespectful enough, there's an absolutely epic thread on the Mailwatch forum about him that was responsible for my introduction to the man and his work and can be more than a little unkind at points.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*I'm fully aware how awful that was. I apologise.

Busting Makes Me Feel Good

It transpires that we are under attack. I refer not to any terrorist group or  or nation state, but the army of black eyed ghost children that have apparently apparated around the world, at least according to The Daily Star. The Star is hardly a paper of record. It is a paper for those who get thinky pains when trying to read The Sun. It long ago abandoned any pretence at actual journalism in preference of regurgitating reality TV press releases, creatively interpreting human interest stories from local newspapers (Elvis impersonator skateboards down Snowdonia, that kind of thing) and, when all that's been tried, straight out fucking lying. Therefore National Enquirer-esque stories about the undead are hardly new ground and barelyworth commenting on. What is noteworthy is the way they've been hammering away at it. Over the past fortnight it's been on the front cover at least half a dozen times, probably more.

Although, to be fair, fuck all else was going on during this time

A Parcel of Rogues

You can't go, Scotland. David Bowie will cry!

I admit, I don't spend a huge amount of time writing about things outside the realm of pop culture ephemera or my own mundane goings on. This is not because I don't have an opinion, but because those opinions are basically the equivalent of a fart in a hurricane, nobody notices them and nobody cares. Still there are big things afoot in the grown up world of current events insomuch as the state that I was born and raised in - the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - may - depending on how the people of Scotland vote on the 18th - soon cease to exist. In its place will be an independent Scotland and whatever we decide to call the rest of the country (Rump UK / Betty and Phil's place / The Anglo-Celt Experience feat. Cornwall). Given that this is potentially the biggest constitutional shake-up this country will go through in my lifetime, I though I may at least comment on it.