Out of this world

It’s not you, it’s me. No; that’s the wrong way round. It is you, I’m pretty sure.

Me = out of kilter with you.

You = politicians, the media, the world, the universe and everything.  

I used to think it was just me, but oddly enough I keep coming across people who suspect the News is being beamed in from a parallel, extra terrestrial BBC, possibly staffed by shape shifting lizards. Sky News is coming at us from beyond the actual sky. It follows that the mysterious, abstract concept formerly known as cyber space is really outer space and the print media is collated by evil men from Mars.  

We can tell that evil, shape-shifting forces have taken charge, and we are wondering why hardly anybody has noticed up till now. In fact it’s almost official; we’re being fed iffy stuff by aliens.

 I’m writing this from a padded cell in David Icke’s personal dungeon.

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Brexit V Remain.

I heard this programme on BBC World service. “The Inquiry. Is Brexit inevitable?” The title suggests we were in for an objective analysis. An ‘inquiry’ sounds objective, no?

This episode was about the legal and constitutional implications of Brexit. Of course it had a palpable pro EU agenda.  “Brexiteers are regretting it”  “People are changing their minds” and so on. That’s par for the course with the lizards, but I’m citing it here specifically to illustrate how the BBC perceives Brexit voters.

“Our next expert witness is John Harris. He’s been travelling round the country for ‘Anywhere but Westminster’, a project run by the Guardian Newspaper” 

announced the presenter, Maria Margaronis, in a quavery voice.

“He’s found deeply wounded communities”  

You’ll guess what’s coming. 

Although full of nostalgia for the days when south Wales was a working-class area with a thriving mining industry and a sense of community, John Harris portrays the present day inhabitants as an unemployed, drug-addled underclass with racist tendencies and no hope. Through no fault of their own, it must be stressed. He’s not blaming them at all. He’s blaming the establishment for ignoring them for too long, and he warns that if the establishment  continues to ignore them it will result in the rise of UKIP “or something worse”. 

The have-nots railing against the ‘haves’. The disenfranchised expressing their anger at the political establishment. According to John Harris, these are the Brexiteers, while the Remainers are university lecturers -  pro-immigration, open minded and well-healed, but selfish.  

Melanie Phillips, on the other hand, has the definition I much prefer. (£)  

“Remainers swallowed their dislike of the EU because they didn’t think Britain could overturn the status quo and survive.”

See? That is a much more nuanced characterisation of the Remainers. Yes, indeed they probably were frightened by the scaremongering and did not wish to risk upsetting the applecart, despite the potential instability of the EU ‘going forward’ and a small matter of sacrificing our sovereignty.

  “Those who voted Brexit did so because the continued loss of national self-government was so intolerable it made the undoubted risks of leaving the EU worth taking.”

See what I mean? She gives both groups credit for their ambivalence and their nuanced appraisal of what was at stake. We’re not all selfish thickos.

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Aliens are in charge. Part two. Back-stabbing.

The BBC has attached a meme to Michael Gove. The “Backstabber” meme.

Jo Coburn said: 

“ Michael Gove is a backstabber, as you know”. 

According to the media Michael Gove is officially a backstabber.  The well-known backstabber.

Did you hear  Sarah Montague and guests discussing unsurprising things that (surprisingly) surprise people? For example, the referendum. A yes or no affair; yet neither David Cameron nor Boris Johnson were prepared for the outcome. They were taken by surprise. 

Let’s face it, neither Boris nor David Cameron really needed to chicken out, did they?

Hadn’t it crossed their minds that one of just two outcomes would automatically follow a ‘binary’ choice?  Heads or tails. One or t’other. In or out -  no mister in between.

What is going on? Alien forces are at it again.

Even if that mischief-making knife-related meme wasn’t wholly responsible for Theresa May’s decision to sack Michael Gove, it has served to justify it.

Michael Gove was regarded by many of his colleagues as the kind of reformer that Theresa May should have promoted rather than ditched, and her inability to recognise that looks short-sighted and vindictive, like cutting off one’s nose to spite the whole country’s face.

 Melanie McDonagh said: 

“There was neither sense nor generosity in the PM’s brutality to Michael Gove. He had patently acted like a lunatic over the leadership campaign, behaving neither rationally nor honourably, but all that is over now. But it is still quite extraordinary that Mrs May has not taken on board that Mr Gove was pretty well the one reformer in government.”

Still, does Melanie McDonagh actually know how Michael Gove, or for that matter Boris Johnson, ‘behaved’ over the leadership campaign, or is she just going with the flow?  Was she there at the time?

Describing Mr. Backstabber’s Gove’s behaviour as “neither rational nor honourable” suggests she’s taking the easy route and accepting a meme that is so entrenched that no-one has the strength to argue with it. 

  She says:

“He was shaping up to be a genuinely reformist Justice Secretary, having identified right at the start that prison was for people who had been failed by, among other things, the education system; it was in a way where his previous department left off. His Christian feel for rehabilitating the sinner was patently the driving force behind his programme of reforms. Rehabilitation is one of those things everyone talks about but he, remarkably and in a way his predecessors had not, started to engage with, though God knows, cuts fell disproportionately on prisons. 

His programme for giving governors greater autonomy was an interesting take on the same principle in schools; ‘academy prisons’, you might say, though the title was ‘reform prisons’. If you want to know why Mrs May should have left him well alone, read the account of Michael Gove’s address to the Howard League for Penal Reform.”

Libby Purves writes:(£) “Our squalid prisons needed the zeal of Gove

” My awareness of Liz Truss, the Norfolk MP and former Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) minister, has been pretty much confined to her eerily intense conference speeches about “opening up new pork markets in Beijing” and cheese imports being a disgrace. Now, as she takes over as justice minister, I hunger for reassurance that in her new job she will recognise a real disgrace when she sees one: our overcrowded, drug-poisoned, often squalid and educationally under-resourced prisons. She has a tough act to follow: when her predecessor Michael Gove was removed from education for undue abrasiveness, he…”

That’s the free part of the online Times. I have the hard copy, but I haven’t time to type it in here.

Theresa May has decided to appoint Liz Truss and we are left wondering ...why and what for? 

Here’s another piece, this time by Charles Falconer, even.  (£)

“The new prime minister’s reshuffle could not have revealed more clearly her indifference to the rule of law. In any government the lord chancellor has a duty to ensure that judges are properly protected from political attack and are able to act independently — and that the government itself always acts in accordance with the law. 

The lord chancellor has to be someone with the weight and stature to stand up to the prime minister or the home secretary when, for instance, they want to compromise on complying with the law in an attempt to placate the public. Or when…”

That’s the free bit, but you get the gist. Our prisons are in crisis. Violence, drugs and radical Islam rule the roost. Swapping Liz Truss for Michael Gove seems truly senseless and irresponsible.  It’s nearly as mad as appointing an accountant to head Culture, Media and Sport. 

I see I’m contradicting my theory here, as Melanie McDonagh, Libby Purves and Charlie Falconer are part of the media rather than men from Mars. There must be blips in the system.

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Aliens part 3.

Stabbing and car-ramming.

Wasn’t it odd that Jon Donnison happened to be in Nice at the time of the “Lorry Attack”? As the BBC reporter with the biggest obsession about Israel and the Palestinians, he was uniquely placed to inform viewers that car-ramming is not a new phenomenon. The difference is that when they occur in Europe, they’re called ‘terrorism’, but of course when the victims are Israelis car-rammings and stabbings are seen as militancy and acts of resistance. 

I know I’m not the first to point that out and I probably won’t be the last. 

As soon as we heard that 84 people had been killed in Nice, we were swiftly reminded that Muslims were victims too. 

We were told that the perpetrator (the driver, not the lorry itself) had mental health issues. 

The security services are looking into any possible connection between this man and Islamic State. 

It’s immaterial to me whether they find links or not. If Islamic State claimed him as their soldier, that’s enough for me. Soldiers of Allah, “structured in a quasi-military fashion” rather like the Salvation Army.

While they’re at it, Islamic State may as well claim ownership of every violent crime that takes place anywhere; then all murderers get to claim an ideological motive, Islamic State continues wreaking terror without lifting a finger, and the alien commentators get more blame to share out. Everyone’s a winner.

Panels of extra-terrestrial experts could appear on Sunday Morning Live and explain that what happened in Nice is our own fault because we make Muslims feel alienated and disaffected.  They even looked as though they’d just landed from Mars and they didn’t fool anyone.

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Talking of stabbings and vehicular rammings, I read a transcript of a recent question session in parliament (Foreign and Commonwealth office) which took place on or around the previous government’s final day. 

As a kind of tribute to Jo Cox, who apparently had a passion for Palestinians, Tobias Ellwood MP asked  a question about the continued demolition of Palestinian property by Israeli authorities. Aliens were evidently controlling this session, because the speakers gave little indication of why seemingly random demolitions might take place.  For sheer devilment perhaps. File it under “What Israel is doing to the Palestinians.”

Then Eric Pickles said : 

“There is, however, the other side of the coin, with 36 Israelis, along with four foreign nationals, murdered this year. Instead of condemning the murders, the Palestinian Authority glorified them.” 

Which was duly acknowledged by Mr Ellwood: 

“My right hon. Friend makes the important point that the actions of the Palestinians do not go unnoticed, and we require the leadership of President Abbas to make it clear that those actions must be condemned.”

But Sarah Champion (Rotherham) piped up with her concerns about Palestinian children being detained in Israeli prisons. I’m tempted to ask whether she showed as much concern for the children in her constituency who suffered sexual abuse under her watch, but I won’t in case it sounds bitter and twisted.

Beam me up.

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I saw Jan Ravens (off Dead Ringers) on TV the other day. They were perched under an awning on College Green chatting during a brief lull in the political revelations. She was asked how her Theresa May voice was coming along.

She demonstrated how, in order to produce the Theresa May voice, the muscles in the lower part of the face must be clenched rigid. Theresa May’s voice has a jangly timbre to it and her enunciation is stiff and posh. 

Have you noticed, Theresa May often does that Gordon Brown ‘jaw’ thing - a kind of grimace. You’d almost forgotten about that, hadn’t you? 

Daniel Finkelstein mentioned something recently that I swear I’d been thinking as well.

The BBC has a whole department dedicated to proper pronunciation, and it should  issue instructions on the correct pronunciation of Theresa.  Not Teraysa, not Tereessssa, but plain “Te - ree - za”.

Jon Culshaw hasn’t yet mastered his Jeremy Corbyn. Wind players have to control their breathing when playing, to keep phrases intact. Most of us do so naturally when speaking. 

Not Jeremy Corbyn. He takes tiny breaths, mid-flow,  like a small child whose vocabulary can’t keep pace with his thoughts.  Jon Culshaw needs to incorporate his mid-flow intakes of breath into his monotonous drone or he won’t get very far with his Corbyn impression.  

In order to get into character properly, he should cock his head slightly to the left, and the script should include repetitive socialist wish-lists that all start with the same few words, and he must finish every statement with a slight smirk (and he should never leave the stage)

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This is the one I wanted to write about yesterday, but I didn’t have time. It’s Mark Mardell introducing Naz Shah and that pesky "anti-semetic" incident. 

Naz Shah might well have made amends, apologised and genuinely built up a good relationship with the local Jewish  community. I’m not criticising that at all. But how could someone who’s bright enough to get herself elected as an M.P. not know that antisemitism was ‘racist’. 

The mind truly boggles. She now needs to question the racism that emanates from her constituents as well as her own racism, otherwise it’s all a bit hollow. She sounds fairly intelligent one minute and laughably, mind-blowingly stupid the next.  Is she .......from a parallel universe?

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I also watched the Home Affairs Committee enquiry into antisemitism. Unfortunately it took place on a day when other matters were occupying the most perky members of the committee, so hardly anyone was present. 

Poor old David Winnick seems to think Israel should be grateful for his half-baked support and he assumes his criticism will be regarded as that of a friend. Some friend. 

John Mann was a witness. He is a strong character and his high profile campaign against antisemitism is of immense value, especially as he is not a Jew.  However, he is much more positive about Shami Chakrabarti’s review than anyone else seems to be, which seems a bit strange. ‘To boldly go where no Mann has gone before’ comes to mind, I don’t quite know why.