The Ministry Of Truth

Yet more tragically easy satire

BigBrother — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:36:13 +0000

Do you have one idea to win the next election? The Fabian Fringe at Labour 2011

Labour Party Conference is fast approaching and as with every year we’ll be running one of the largest fringe programmes on offer. Come and join us and our partners in Liverpool Town Hall, just five minutes walk from the Secure Zone. No conference pass is needed to secure attendance.

Do you have one idea to win the next election? If so please submit your ideas to Me and the winner will get to pitch their ideas to our Dragons in this year’s ‘Fabian Dragons’ Den entitled‘One Idea to Win the Next Election’(Sunday at 1pm).

Hazel Blears MP and Mehdi Hasan (Senior Editor New Statesmen, co-author ‘Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader’) will be joined by a special guest to pass judgement on your ideas.

To take part all you need to do is submit your pitch via e-mail and be ready and available to speak at The Fringe event itself. The pitch should be no more than 500 words and a few runners up will have their ideas posted on our prestigious and influential Fabian blog ‘Next Left’.

Posted by Olly Parker – Events Director at the Fabian Society

Er, “ditch Chauncey Gardiner and replace him with someone more credible with the electorate, like Iain Duncan-Smith”?

“I said to [Gideon] jokingly that when you’re Prime Minister one day I’ll have all the dirty goods on you. And he laughed and took a big fat line of cocaine.”

BigBrother — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:46:28 +0000

Now, watch this drive…

BigBrother — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 07:49:52 +0000

…he’s gone off on his fifth holiday in as many months.

First there was Cornwall back in spring.

Then there was a mini-break to Granada.

Then there was Ibiza.

Then there was Tuscany, where the millionaire eventually remembered to tip the waitress.

And this week he’s gone back to Cornwall.

From whence he has returned to London, briefly, to discuss the end-game in Libya before going back to his beach.

I’d love to say all this gallivanting is doing the nation a disservice, but I’ve racked my brains and can’t think of anything much that would be improved by this man giving it his close attention.

I can’t say I’m completely relaxed about having a Prime Minister paid £142,500 a year to do very little of any worth. I can’t help thinking he’s an Earth version of Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Douglas Adams character who was made President of the Universe purely to distract attention from the people who were really in charge.

But I suppose him being utterly disengaged – from the electorate, the nation’s wants and needs, the nuclear button – can only be better than having someone so dim he can’t open a bottle of wine without an embolism actually making decisions on our behalf.

Fleet Street Fox

“Don’t go mistaking paradise for a pair of long legs.”

BigBrother — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 19:00:44 +0000

“I trust that this serious lesson will operate as a warning to all future ministers, and that they will henceforth do the thing that is right, for if the upper ranks of society are permitted to act wrong with impunity, the inferior ramifications will soon become wholly corrupted.”

BigBrother — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 19:56:52 +0000

Always remember to never forget

BigBrother — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:00:18 +0000

“Fair play is one traditional British value we have always admired. And one we fear is increasingly at risk.”

BigBrother — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:56:32 +0000

A slowly growing sense of hopelessness and impending doom

BigBrother — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:16:59 +0000

Story #1: London’s burning. Again.

Story #2: The markets are in freefall and various economies are failing. Again.

Story #3: There’s been a massive increase in crime in rural areas since the recession started.

I don’t know what story #4 was on the BBC’s early evening news yesterday because I switched off at that point.

Each of the stories was presented in isolation, with fuck all by way of analysis or thought apart from a flash of Stephanie Flanders’ revolting green skirt.

It’s all linked, of course, and none of it is remotely surprising for those with half-an-inch of long-term memory. It happened in the 80s during a recession. It happened during the 90s in a recession. Just because we didn’t have a recession for 15 years doesn’t mean we should raise an eyebrow that the slash and burn approach to economics adopted by PBD and Gideon have resulted in exactly the same social upheaval that occurred when That Bloody Woman did the same thing three decades ago.

There are only two differences now.

First, rolling news channels have been invented. They’ve got to fill all that airtime somehow. The riots of the 80s just got ten minutes at the start of the evening news bulletin. Now it’s all riots, all the time. Breaking news is the new light entertainment.

Second, our leaders – the people in whom apparently sane and rational individuals were inexplicably prepared to place their trust just over a year ago – were absent. Whatever other flaws she had (and I think she had a couple), you can’t imagine a complete vacuum in Downing Street when That Bloody Woman was in charge. Even Bliar and Arrivederci Gordon realised some bugger had to hold the fort.

Everybody deserves a holiday. Even PBD and Gideon. (Or, more accurately, their families.) But, in real life, everybody in my department is not allowed to go on holiday at the same time. It is shameful beyond comprehension that the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London were all on holiday at the same time.

And I notice Chauncey Gardiner was on his hols, too, only deigning to come back from Devon’s Adenoid Extraction Recovery Unit AFTER PBD had announced he was getting on a plane to fly back from Tuscany. That tells you everything you need to know about our Leader (sic) of the Opposition.

What was our Coalition administration’s stunning Plan B while everyone topped up their tans? William Hague and Vince Cable. The former, a man whose leadership credentials have already been roundly rejected by the British electorate in a plebiscite; the latter, a man whose sole achievement over the past 15 months has been to demonstrate his lack of temperamental suitability for ministerial office. It shows how well the Don’t Panic Double Act went that first Nick Clegg, then Theresa May and then finally PBD dragged their sorry arses back to work like a half-hearted zombie invasion.

Gideon remains absent, soaking up the Californian sun. Rome burns but it’s nothing to do with him, guv.

Of course, the real salt is yet to be rubbed into the wound. Wait for it – it’s coming: the emergency police powers. We’re inches away from a police state. But then maybe that’s what our politicians have wanted all along.

And one final thing. What the fuck has this got to do with the Olympics? How many people were murdered in Los Angeles in 1983? Or Beijing in 2007? Grow a fucking pair. If you want to try to shift attention away from the fact that you have wrought this on yourselves by pursuing exclusionary policies, fine. But some of us would have preferred all along if the £9.3 billion or more of public money being spent on the Olympics had been spent pursuing inclusionary policies.

Not for the first time, the Minister quotes with approval Tom McRae:

Rioters of London, remember to leave some real estate standing so mortgage companies have a product to deny you.

I wish the poor shopkeepers luck in claiming on their insurance or getting small business loans. The wrong buildings are on fire.

(Thanks to Radio Nixon for the post title.)

You decide if you think he has a point…

BigBrother — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 06:22:48 +0000

“Your great, great uncle Ernie died at 25. He lost his mind because he was going bald. He was a very vain man.”

BigBrother — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 19:33:07 +0000