Farage Latest Sob Story BUSTED

After his bid to become Britain’s Ambassador to Washington, backed by a nod from Combover Crybaby Donald Trump, turned out not necessarily to his advantage, UKIP’s still “interim” leader Nigel “Thirsty” Farage has turned to his next wizard wheeze to generate More And Bigger Media Coverage Opportunities For Himself Personally Now, which has involved taking out a king-sized onion and playing the victim.

Squeaky rumbled finger up the bum time

And once again, the press is all too ready to indulge this preposterous windbag, as they have on so many previous occasions. That the increasingly piss-poor Express would come running to his aid was not in question, given its hysterical pro-UKIP and anti-EU stance. But the rest of the press pack, headed by the Murdoch Sun, have also carried the story, which is that Farage claims to have been the victim of death threats.

So what’s the schtick? “NIGEL Farage says he cannot leave his house without security after Brexit and Donald Trump’s US presidential election victory … The interim Ukip leader has received death threats and just last week was confronted during a night out … he had been threatened with a glass on Thursday night”. So just like the experience for many EU migrants on a trip down the local Wetherspoons, then. Big sodding deal.

But there’s more: Farage then bleats “I’ve got no life - I can’t do anything, I can’t go anywhere … Certainly I would not go out in London of an evening on my own without security - couldn’t even think about it … I can’t even walk down the street without it. I have to go to private places, private venues”. Like lording it at the Ritz Hotel and then telling everyone how he’s challenging those so-called elites.

Fear for your declining public profile, more like

And on he drones: “The thought of doing a Friday night pub crawl around Westminster – I just can’t do it any more”. Got barred from the Westminster Arms, did he? In any case, what’s the difference between what he describes and what other party leaders experience, especially in London? He wants to claim he’s the leader of a major party - well, there you go Nige, that’s what being the leader of a major party entails.

In any case, what the press are managing not to ask is those inconvenient questions, like taking Farage - a proven fantasist and liar - on trust. Remember the claim that he had been the subject of an “assassination attempt” after his car’s wheel nuts came loose? There was no second source, no informed opinion, just Farage taken on trust once more. And it was a totally invented pack of lies. He just dreamed it up.

On top of that, had there been a string of death threats, one might expect him to have informed the Police, who would then, at the very least, have advised him about what additional security arrangements he should put in place. You know Nige, like Gina Miller, the woman who got piled on by all the Kippers and their hangers-on after telling you where you got off on The Andy Marr Show (tm). But there is no Police statement this time.

And until there is, this story should be treated with as much scepticism as all the other Farage fantasies. Stop playing his game, press people. He’s an irrelevance. End of story.

Top Six - November 27

So what’s hot, and what’s not, in the past week’s blogging? Here are the six most popular posts on Zelo Street for the past seven days, counting down in reverse order, because, well, I have kitchen clear-up to do later. So there.

6 Don’t Menshn Jo Cox Killing (fortunately) former Tory MP Louise Mensch appointed herself as supreme legal expert to tell anyone who was listening that Jo Cox’s killer Thomas Mair did not receive a fair trial. Yeah, right.

5 Nigel Farage Is A Fraud The bloke is nothing more than a self-promoting irrelevance, and only enjoys any status because the media continue to play his game and give him airtime. So how about the same media just ignore the SOB? Just saying.

4 Farage Backlash Begins The campaign to have the UK’s Ambassador to Washington thrown out of his post in favour of Nigel “Thirsty” Farage faltered as the Daily Mail, whose support will be critical to continuing this frankly ridiculous farce, decided to hedge its bets.

3 Milo Yiannopoulos - NOT Banned The blubbering man-baby of Breitbart protested that his free speech was being constrained. But all that was happening was that he would have to debate his repellant opinions with someone else, rather than spout unchallenged.

2 Jaguar Brexit Boost? Er, No The Mail’s pretence unravelled as their own story revealed Jaguar Land Rover is actually building its next new model in Austria - a country not wanting to leave the EU - and that it’s trying to blackmail the Government into bunging it £450 million to persuade it to think about building in the UK instead.

1 Jo Cox Killing - THE REALITY After Thomas Mair was given a whole life sentence for the murder of the Labour MP, the idea that he was some kind of loner with mental health problems was blown apart. The press, as so often, had been whipping up hatred and division, and now they would not be owning their problem.

And that’s the end of another blogtastic week, blog pickers. Not ‘arf!

Castro Tribute Hypocrisy

Another chapter in the still evolving history of the Cold War closed overnight as the death of Cuban leader Fidel Castro was announced. Castro, who was 90, had fought and overthrown the corrupt Batista dictatorship in the 1950s, emerging as the one who conquered the resulting power vacuum. He later declared the Cuban revolution to be Marxist-Leninist in nature. Some have paid tribute on the occasion of his passing.

Those tributes included this dignified response from Barack Obama: “At this time of Fidel Castro’s passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people … We know that this moment fills Cubans - in Cuba and in the United States - with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation … History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him”.

But for some, that level of non-judgmental restraint went out the window, and there was no more unsubtle example than that provided by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, who have ridiculed anyone and everyone saying anything not totally hostile about the former Cuban leader.

Jeremy Corbyn, George Galloway, Ken Livingstone and Peter Hain are all duly ridiculed as The Great Guido revisits his favourite smear - mental health - and talks of “Nuttiest Tributes”. The Fawkes folks are also particularly severe on the hated BBC - Staines’ appearances on the Beeb do seem to have tailed off of late - whining about their coverage by telling “No mention of the thousands summarily executed after the revolution”.

There’s more: “No mention of the decades of impoverishment and human rights abuse. No mention of his secret police rounding up homosexuals and putting them in concentration camps. Castro gets a free pass on democratic norms – ‘his critics accused him of being a dictator’. Does the BBC think that is only an allegation?”

So dictators are A Very Bad Thing, then, and summary executions are also right out of order. In that case, perhaps Staines would care to explain his slavish support for the tyrant and dictator Augusto Pinochet, who murdered his way to power in Chile in a military coup in 1973, deposing the democratically elected Government of Salvador Allende, had thousands summarily executed, and for whom human rights abuses were a way of life.

Democracy, for Pinochet and other régimes favoured by The Great Guido, such as the Contras in Nicaragua, was the kind of inconvenient detail they ignored. And for Staines there is not even a mention of the USA’s - or more specifically Richard Nixon’s - role in making sure Castro formed an alliance with the Soviet Union, after Tricky Dicky met Castro in Washington DC and declared that he was a Communist. He duly became one.

The Fawkes rabble are, as so often, full value for their hypocrisy when it comes to kicking the dictators they don’t like, while either ignoring the ones they do, or sucking up to them, as Staines did with the memory of Pinochet. Another fine mess, once again.

Boris Joke Amnesty DECLINED

A strange argument has been made today by James Forsyth, political editor of the highly overrated Spectator magazine, in a column for the Murdoch Sun, where he asserts that taking the piss out of London’s formerly very occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson should now be made streng verboten, on the grounds that Beano Boris has inexplicably been made Foreign Secretary and should therefore be taken seriously.

A complete muppet. And Elmo from Sesame Street

I kid you not: the headline “Constantly bashing Boris Johnson will just hurt Britain - so let’s stop it right now … The Foreign Secretary’s circle is becoming increasingly fed up with him being the butt of the  Government’s jokes” tells you all you need to know, including that, as Bozza doesn’t have much of a “circle” to speak of, the most likely source for Forsyth’s dubiously argued copy is Himself Personally Now.

But do go on. “The Foreign Secretary’s circle is becoming increasingly fed up with him being the butt of the  Government’s jokes”. So Bozza doesn’t like folks taking the piss. Fine. So he should do the right homework, and thus avoid stories like “A source said the Foreign Secretary sparked groans of disapproval at a meeting of the Cabinet’s Brexit committee on Thursday because he had read the wrong briefing notes ahead of the discussion … The news fuelled suggestions that the Prime Minister was ‘coming to the end of her tether’ over a series of gaffes by Mr Johnson”.

There is more in this apologia: “Taking the mickey out of Boris is hardly new, every Tory leader since Michael Howard has done it”. Howard had good reason - Bozza not only got caught shagging Petronella Wyatt, he lied to his then party leader about it. “But taking the mick when Boris is Foreign Secretary is very different to doing it when he’s just an MP or Mayor of London”. Yeah, it makes him an even bigger embarrassment.

Still the excuses come: “When Boris was Mayor, the Tory party could get away with treating him as the party jester - after all, the most important negotiations he had every year was with the Treasury”. Yeah, trying to keep Britain’s capital city from running out of the means to keep it going is just kids’ stuff, innit? This is truly lame.

But there is yet more: “When the Prime Minister and the Chancellor suggest that they regard the Foreign Secretary as a bit of a joke, they invite the rest of the world to follow suit. Why should other governments take him seriously if his own Cabinet colleagues don’t?” Who appointed Bozza to the FO? Theresa May. So it’s glaringly bloody obvious that she takes him seriously, otherwise she wouldn’t have promoted him.

Carry On Excusing: “‘It doesn’t create the right impression in Europe,’ warns one friend of Boris”. You mean “warns Boris”. Have another go. “Boris hasn’t responded in kind to these jokes”. He sodding well has - he briefed you. “But don’t think he doesn’t mind them”. See, he has briefed you. “I am told he has made clear to Downing Street how unhappy he is about this briefing against him”. I was right - he definitely has briefed you.

Forsyth then stretches his credibility beyond the bounds of elasticity: “He has thought seriously about the Russian threat and what Britain’s role in the world should be once we have left the EU. Next week he is making a major speech setting out his foreign policy vision”. F*** off. Just f*** right off and then f*** off some more. Bozza doesn’t do serious thought, unless it’s about enhancing his bank balance.

Still he soldiers on: “But if he is to be listened to,  his Cabinet colleagues must stop treating him as a figure of fun”. Fine. And to accomplish that, Bozza has to stop behaving like a clown, opening mouth and inserting boot, offending half of Europe and much of the rest of the world, and thinking that a little stream of consciousness rambling plus a few words of broken Latin will be enough to make him a serious politician.

And as for Forsyth’s parting shot, “If the Government wants Boris to bat for Britain, his team-mates can’t break his bat before he gets to the wicket”, it’s Bozza who is breaking his own bat. Let me put this directly, so Forsyth can be in no doubt.

Boris Johnson never has been, is not, and never will be a credible proposition as a serious politician. His only specialist subject is the promotion of Himself. The only reason foreign diplomats see him as a figure of fun is because that is what he is. He might as well go the full Ken Dodd and complement the ruffled hair with a tickling stick, declaim the phrase “What a day Missus” to introduce his routine, and sign off with a suitably lewd double entendre about the vicar and his Brussels sprouts.

On the subject of Bozza, I commend to James Forsyth the wise words of Cloughie: “He’s a clown, young man”. And he does a lousily concealed briefing.

Jaguar Brexit Boost? Er, No

In the run-up to last June’s referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, the paper that most frequently departed from reality in its demonisation of all those ghastly foreigners was the Daily Express, aka the Daily UKIP, and indeed, the flagship title of Richard “Dirty” Desmond’s joke media empire has continued since the vote in the same vein. But it is now being out-fantasised by the Daily Mail, as today’s front page confirms.

What the f***'s wrong with telling my readers some good news, c***?!? Er, with the greatest of respect, Mr Jay

If yesterday’s effort, where the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre and his obedient hackery heaped as much of the brown smelly stuff as they could get into their bucket on to the IFS for making forecasts that had displeased the Vagina Monologue, was routine, today’s headline “Investment, exports and retail figures ALL up, and car giant plans 10,000 new jobs … JAGUAR’S BREXIT BOOST” was the stuff of fantasy.

What do readers get in support? “The car giant threw its weight behind the UK by indicating it could expand its workforce by 10,000 and make a million vehicles a year by 2020 … A flurry of other positive news showed investment, exports and retail sales were rising … The figures confounded gloomy official forecasts this week that suggested leaving the EU would cost billions of pounds and worsen a squeeze on living standards”.

And how, exactly, will these new jobs come about? “Jaguar Land Rover boss Ralf Speth … vowed to use the UK as a base to take on the powerful German motor industry and make Britain the global leader in electric cars … The firm is planning to build a new generation of the vehicles along with the batteries that will power them … The chief executive challenged the Government to invest £450million in Midlands infrastructure to help secure the investment, saying this could create jobs … He warned Britain would lose investment to other countries - such as Germany - if ministers did not act”.

Would anyone like a plain English translation of that? Here goes. The number of actual new jobs that Jaguar Land Rover will definitely be creating is Zero. Zilch. Nil. Nada. Not A Sausage. Bugger All. But if the Government will bung them £450 million, they might create some. Yet that’s only at the planning stage. It’s a particularly crude piece of blackmail.

What Speth is doing is not unlike the doorstep salesman who tells his potential customers that they can benefit from a great deal, but they have to hand over the money there and then, because otherwise that great deal will be lost and someone else will benefit from it.

The reality is, as so often with the Mail, buried further down the article, as it is conceded “In Los Angeles last week Jaguar Land Rover unveiled its first electric car, the I-Pace, which will be manufactured in Austria … But … Speth said the firm plans to make electric cars in Britain”. And at the very end comes “A spokesman for Jaguar Land Rover said: ‘We cannot comment on quoted job numbers or a timeframe’”.

What the Mail is not telling its readers is that they face a wage freeze unprecedented in modern times. And the strong possibility that the huge extra debt due to Brexit will weaken Sterling yet further. The usual thundering editorial in support of the Mail’s further departure from reality just recycles the clichés, and abuse of those dissenting.

There are no new Jaguar jobs. There is therefore no Jaguar Brexit boost. There has been no “vow” by Jaguar’s boss. And Paul Dacre is away with the fairies.

Daily Mail IFS Hypocrisy

The obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre was incandescent this morning as the Daily Mail’s front page lead thundered “Top economists accused of Brexit doom-mongering after claiming living standards squeeze is worst since 1920s … WHO ARE THEY TRYING TO KID?” The 1920s, of course, is another decade the Mail would prefer its readers didn’t look at too closely (the Zinoviev Letter, for instance).

Why the f*** shouldn't I face both ways on the same subject, c***?!? Er, with the greatest of respect, Mr Jay

The supporting article frothed “Britain’s most prominent economic think tank was accused of scaremongering last night for claiming that families face the biggest squeeze on living standards since the 1920s … The Institute for Fiscal Studies said workers faced a ‘dreadful’ ten-year squeeze on pay, with wage growth in real terms at its worst for a century … It claimed workers would still be earning less in real terms in 2021 than they were in 2008, before the financial crash”. And then came the smears.

“Director Paul Johnson, who spoke out in favour of the Remain campaign before the EU referendum … the IFS - which receives 11 per cent of its funding from the EU”. They cited notorious Tory liar Iain Duncan Cough in support. And then came a further broadside from Daily Mail Comment, the authentic voice of the Vagina Monologue.

“At the height of the referendum campaign, when every economic expert was predicting the end of the world if Britain left the EU, Michael Gove declared: ‘People in this country have had enough of experts … His quote comes to mind again now after the absurdly gloomy forecasts about the cost of Brexit by the Office for Budget Responsibility - the Government’s leading quango of economic ‘experts’ - were roundly dismissed, including by the Chancellor himself”. And there was more.

“Yesterday we had the offensive claim from the Institute for Fiscal Studies - described as Britain’s top economic think tank - that this decade would probably be the worst for living standards since the 1920s … Its director, Paul Johnson, may say the comparison is merely statistical but he must have known it was deeply inflammatory … It has already generated headlines in the liberal media suggesting we are being dragged back to a bygone age of hardship and poverty”. Yeah, that IFS, eh? Who cares what they think?

Well, a paper called the Daily Mail does, actually, or rather it did. As recently as May this year, it was approvingly called “The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think-tank”. In June, readers were told of “trusted public spending watchdog the IFS”. Ahead of last March’s Budget, the IFS was described by the Mail as “respected”. It was also described as “influential”, which is the real reason the paper is up in arms today.

The Daily Mail respects the IFS, like all other think tanks, when its findings are convenient to Dacre and his doggies. When they do not comply with the paper’s agenda, they are spat on and smeared. That’s the kind and caring world of Paul Dacre for you.

Don’t Menshn Jo Cox Killing

After Thomas Mair was given a whole life sentence for the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, even the most anti-Labour and anti-EU pundits had to admit that this was an open and shut case: a far-right activist, a white supremacist, had killed his local MP in the belief that he was a patriot. He had stabbed and shot her. He intended to kill her, and in this he succeeded. There were no redeeming features to the case.

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

As a result, whatever spin has been put on Mair’s state of mind, and the press’ desire to absolve themselves from any responsibility for the murder, it has been admitted that he did the deed, he was appropriately nicked, he was given the benefit of due process, there was no problem with Mair’s ability to plea, he was given the benefit of a trail before a jury of his peers, and after due deliberation they decided that He Done It.

This statement of the totally obvious, unfortunately, has for some reason not reached the reassuringly upmarket part of Manhattan inhabited by (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch, who has been given a platform by the piss-poor Murdoch bankrolled website Heat Street to claim that Mair did not receive a fair trial.

At first, Ms Mensch is quite rational: “Jo Cox’s murderer, Thomas Mair, has been convicted in a court of law”. But then she comes off the rails, claiming “But some people and journalists who support Remain have used the result of the trial to tell me that I should disavow tweets I made about Mair and Cox during the Referendum”. Wrong. She is being told that she got it wrong. The referendum choice of her accusers is irrelevant.

But do go on. “My arguments about Thomas Mair and his trial still stand today … How can that be? Mair was convicted after being found to be fit to stand trial; he was evaluated psychologically first … The evaluation did not find Mr. Mair’s mental illness as being so advanced that he could evade criminal responsibility. That is literally all we know about it”.

There’s more: “I would argue that parts of Thomas Mair’s trial seem, at least on the surface, to be unfair, based on his mental health issues, and others, I would argue, raise the question of a miscarriage of justice - at least in so far as it would seem the accused did not receive a fair trial”. And then she pulls her masterstroke.

“There is, however, an absolute gulf between sanity for the purposes of criminal responsibility and mental illness. You can be both sane, and suffer from extreme mental illness. Only at a certain level of mental illness do you lose responsibility … It was the judge in the trial, then, and not the court-appointed lawyer, who had the job of guarding Mr. Mair’s rights. And he appears not to have done so”. Ready for the payoff?

“Thomas Mair was mentally ill but competent and the judge, I believe, played to the gallery by making the trial what it never ought to have been - a comparator of the characters of heroic Jo Cox and racist Thomas Mair”. Yeah, right.

Thomas Mair was rightly found guilty of a brutal murder and has been sent down for the rest of his life. And just how much credibility Louise Mensch’s opinions rate can be seen from one of those Tweets she declines to disavow. Replying to Mair’s statement at his preliminary hearing, she trilled “Wibble Wibble I’m A Hatstand”. Louise Mensch is plain flat wrong once again. And to think they allowed her to become an MP.

Nigel Farage Is A Fraud

There is one thing that is certain about UKIP Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage, and that is when he denies the latest rumour about his next political move, it’s all a bit rich, because the rumour will have also been started by him. So when he let it be known that he was considering moving to the USA, only to then deny it, it was yet another example of Farage conning the media into letting him have his cake and eat it too.

Squeaky irrelevance finger up the bum time

Hence the Independent telling “According to a report in The Times, friends claimed he was worried about life in Britain and had refrained from appearing in public with his family since Anti-Ukip protesters forced him to flee his local pub where he was eating with his family over a year and a half ago … They also said the Ukip MEP, who proudly announced Britain had gained its ‘country back’ after the Brexit result, would feel ‘freer’ in America where he is less well-known” is Farage putting the rumour about so he can deny it later.

Why the Murdoch goons at the Times did not see that one coming is mystifying. The idea that Farage has some kind of constraint upon his freedom in the UK is bunk. And it’s not as if he’s some kind of shrinking violet - he loves the attention he gets from the public. The only part he dislikes is that some of that public has rumbled him as a fraud.

That fraud covers not only his politics - which have zero constructive value, and are based on little more than xenophobia and some notion of bringing back an age that never existed - but his press leaks, with the Indy concluding “There has been no public confirmation of Mr Farage’s plan to travel to the US and a spokesperson for Ukip did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment. A representative for Mr Farage did not respond to request for comment on reports he was moving to the US”.

He rubbishes reports he’s moving to the US, but was a full participant in the Trump and Bannon stunt designed to unsettle the UK Government and con them into installing Mr Thirsty as our Ambassador in Washington. He bleats about wanting to feel free, but his millions give him the freedom to go and live wherever he wants - not an available option for all those poor saps who have been conned into voting UKIP.

He rails at “career politicians”, but having spent seventeen years as an MEP - on the Brussels gravy train he claims to despise - and having stood for the Commons seven times, losing on each occasion, he is a career politician himself. Equally, he whines about “elites”, but this is coming from a privately educated City trader.

Farage protests that he does not have far-right sympathies, but admitted he backed Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, which talked of repatriation and suggested migrants should not be given the benefit of equal rights or anti-discrimination laws. He span the press a pack of lies about having had his car tampered with, which they conveniently reinvented as an “assassination attempt”.

And now we have another leak, this time that he’s off to the USA, only for him to say it’s not true. This stream of self-promotion could, of course, be stopped in its tracks - by the same press that keeps lapping up Mr Thirsty’s self-publicity. All they have to do is to ignore the SOB and his hangers-on. Until and unless they pony up something newsworthy.

Nigel Farage is just a gobby fraud. The press could, and should, leave him well alone.

Jo Cox Killing - Look Over There

As I suggested yesterday, the morning after Labour MP Jo Cox’s murderer was handed a whole life sentence and shown to be neither the loner painted by so many in the press, nor someone with mental health problems, the tabloid and right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate has decided that, whatever coverage they give to the killing, they will not have done anything wrong. It was just a one-off, something that could not have been predicted.

So while the Murdoch Times, to its credit, runs the front page headline “Warning over far right after MP’s killer jailed”, and the Guardian tells readers “Racist terrorist who killed Jo Cox in ‘act of supreme cowardice’ will never be freed”, the Mail, Sun and Express, those great proponents of migrant and Muslim bashing, have all instructed their readers to “look over there” at how wonderful the post-Brexit world is going to be.

Never mind that even that story is substantially untrue - the National Debt, for instance, is set to reach eye-watering levels, which may not be such good news for Sterling, and therefore inflation down the line - it’s all about diverting attention. Thomas Mair gets the obligatory mental health smearing from the Sun - which dismisses him as a “Nazi Nut” - but what he did, he did of his own volition. No-one else made him do it.

And the Sun’s take is typical: “Jo Cox’s killer nicknamed Marigold by neighbours amused by his love of coloured gloves and unaware of Nazi double life … Families on Thomas Mair's Birstall Estate had no idea the quiet loner who volunteered and looked after disabled children was harbouring an evil plan behind closed doors”. No mention of Britain First. And no mention of the Springbok Club, either.

The Mail tries to blame the MP: “Did Neo-Nazi murder Jo over fear he'd lose council house he grew up in? Terrorist thought property could end up being occupied by an immigrant family - and the MP wouldn't help him … Thomas Mair had been asked to consider leaving his three-bedroom home … He’d lived in the council house for 40 years and was considered a recluse … He had been in house by himself for 20 years after his grandmother died … Murderer suspected foreign family were going to be given his house”.

Proper Daily Mail mealy-mouthed nudge-and-wink headline construction there: Thomas Mair may have suspected his MP would not help him, but in the Mail’s retelling, readers are given the impression Jo Cox did something unhelpful, although no request was made to her. It is once again left to the Guardian to spell it out.

“25 years before he killed the MP, Mair told a far-right magazine that the ‘white race’ faced a long and very bloody struggle … The seeds of the hatred that drove him to murder his appear to have been sown years earlier, when he began to acquire the means to kill. They germinated during the febrile countdown to the EU referendum … Brexit campaigners were claiming that a remain vote would result in ‘swarms’ of immigrants entering the UK”.

An editorial tells  that Mair “was a committed lifelong member of the extreme, white racist right … He had direct connections with hard-right white racist groups in the United States and South Africa”. Yet for the worst of the rabble-rousers, nobody could have foreseen it. He was a one-off. A “nut”. He filled his own head with all that hate. Look over there.

The tabloid press are incapable of manning up and owning their problem. End of story.

Jo Cox Killing - THE REALITY

Today, Thomas Mair was found guilty of murdering Labour MP Jo Cox. He failed to enter a plea, was refused permission to address the court by the trial judge, and was given a whole life term, a very rare occurrence, meaning only a Secretary of State can sanction his release. What that means will make uncomfortable reading for many of those whose pushing of borderline incitement, hatred and rabble rousing contributed to her death.

As the judge put it, “Mair's inspiration was not love of country but admiration for Nazism”. He told Mair “You affect to be a patriot. The words you uttered repeatedly when you killed her, give lip service to that concept … Those sentiments can be legitimate and can have resonance but in your mouth, allied to your actions, they are tainted and made toxic”. Mair “had maintained his silence throughout the trial and during every police interview”.

That much will not be disputed. Some of what follows certainly will. But it has to be said, and some of those being referred to need to listen - and learn.

Thomas Mair was not a “loner”. He was a member of the far-right, an extremist, a radical, a zealot for his particular cause.

Thomas Mair did not have mental health issues. One of the first excuses deployed by the ranters and bigots in the right-leaning press was that Mair had some kind of mental health problem. This was bullshit. Had he been so afflicted, he would have been able to have a plea of manslaughter entered, probably on the grounds of diminished responsibility. No such plea was entered, as there was no problem. He knew what he was doing. The whole life term handed down underscores that.

Radicalisation is not just about Muslims. Right-wing indoctrination and radicalisation is out there, it is at least as poisonous as any other brand of extremism, and it needs to be tackled before someone else gets murdered. And the press needs to wake up to its role in deflecting attention elsewhere, taking ownership of its very considerable problem.

Had Mair been a follower of the Prophet, the press would have behaved very differently. There would have been no “look over there at the loner with the mental health problem”. There would have been no “it’s got nothing to do with the referendum”. Every contact he had made in the past year, and perhaps going back longer, would have been pored over and splashed all over the papers. Unlike what actually happened.

The press will now try and divert attention elsewhere. Mair’s actions will be justified with that nudge-and-wink “well, he was right to be worried about all those migrants”, “it’s not racist to be worried about someone else taking your job”, and of course it will all be someone else’s fault. That is not good enough. The right-wing press knows that its constant barrage of migrant and EU bashing contributed to this tragic event. They have a problem and it’s about time they agreed to man up and own it.

Right-wing extremism is being legitimised. It’s not just groups like the BNP, NF, Britain First and the rest of the neo-Nazi pond life. There is also, more worryingly, the rise of what is politely called the “Alt-Right”, which is in reality just far right unpleasantness masquerading under an ostensibly legitimate name. This includes the likes of Breitbart and others pretending that males, and especially young white males who can’t get laid, are being oppressed by some mythical tide of political correctness, rather than their own inadequacy. This, too, is radicalisation, and it too is potentially dangerous.

All of this combined to help poison Thomas Mair’s views, and no doubt many others. But I have news for all those hoping that there will be a more tolerant and civil approach to the EU, migration, other religions, other languages and nationalities, and opposing political views - the press and their legions of attack dogs will not take ownership of their problem. Indeed, they will protest that any toning down of their rhetoric is an attack on free speech.

So the Sun, Mail, Express and the rest will continue to insist that they be allowed leeway to shout “Fire” in the crowded theatre of life. The incitement will continue, the hate speech will go on, the hate crimes will continue to mount up, and ultimately someone else will get killed. But it will be someone else’s fault.

Thus the sad state of political discourse in Britain today. The words of Stanley Baldwin were never more apposite: the newspapers “are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal vices, personal likes and dislikes … What are their methods? Their methods are direct falsehoods, misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of the speaker's meaning by publishing a sentence apart from the context … What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.

Jo Cox need not have died. Think about that, editors and proprietors, next time you bleat about your freedom of speech. I’ll just leave that one there.

Farage Backlash Begins

The idea that Britain’s ambassador in Washington should be summarily sacked and replaced by Nigel “Thirsty” Farage might have looked like a good idea to some out there on the right, and the more impressionable among the tabloid press, but when the Mail makes to hedge its bets and leave the door open to turning downright hostile about the whole thing, you know that this is not going to be a runner.

Squeaky failure finger up the bum time

Promoting the affair to front page lead, the Dacre doggies tell their readers this morning of the “Extraordinary bid by Trump and UKIP chief to oust Brtiain’s ambassador to the US … FARAGE FARCE IN WASHINGTON”. The supporting article lays bare Farage’s dishonesty and duplicity - as well as the sheer amateurishness of it all.

“Mr Farage yesterday insisted he had been ‘astonished’ by Mr Trump’s intervention, adding: ‘It was like a bolt from the blue’ … But sources close to the Ukip leader say Mr Trump’s explosive tweet was pre-planned, with Mr Farage standing ready to answer his phone in the early hours when contacted by the BBC for comment”.

Well, well. As if we needed to guess - Mr Thirsty knew what was going on, and then pretended to be surprised when what he knew would happen did indeed happen. Exactly how that fits him for a diplomatic posting I will leave to others, especially as the Mail also notes “The key link man is understood to be is Steve Bannon, the publisher of the Right-wing Breitbart news website who is now the president-elect’s chief strategist”.

Anything coming out of Breitbart should be treated with immediate suspicion, if not contempt. Bannon, a white supremacist of no discernible principles, “has been close to Mr Farage for more than two years. The Ukip MEP’s ex-chief of staff and friend Raheem Kassam runs Breitbart in the UK”. Likewise anything to do with Raheem “Call me Ray” Kassam, another individual who cannot be trusted any further than he can be chucked.

The Mail also makes sure to tell readers “Downing Street insisted Britain would not be pushed around by Mr Trump. A spokesman for the Prime Minister said that ‘as a basic principle, we appoint our ambassadors’, adding that there is ‘no vacancy’ in Washington.

He said Mrs May regards Sir Kim, who spent years as Britain’s representative in Brussels, as ‘an excellent ambassador who is doing a fantastic job’”.

And while Farage carries on whining about “career politicians”, no-one should forget that he is, er, a career politician. It should also be remembered that, when Barack Obama suggested Britain should remain in the EU, Farage accused him of meddling in our internal affairs. Now that someone who is more to his liking - and who is white - meddles in our internal affairs, all that is forgotten and it’s fine and dandy.

The Mail’s equivocation suggests that the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker sense this may well blow over. Add to that Donald Trump’s ability to change his mind on a whim, and you can see why. Theresa May should stand firm and tell Mr Thirsty to shove off.

Theresa May And Workers Reps - NOT

If one example were needed of the ever-flexible nature of the policy proposals put forward by Theresa May, our Prime Minister who is not unelected, honestly, it is the idea that there should be workers’ representatives on company boards. Only recently, this was touted as being A Very Good Thing. But now it has been unceremoniously binned, with her most ardent backers in the right-leaning press cheering her on.

Back in July, Nils Pratley at the Guardian told “Theresa May’s plan to reform boardroom governance in the UK is extraordinary. The next prime minister didn’t merely attack grotesque levels of pay in FTSE 100 boardrooms, a refrain heard in vague terms from most of the runners in the Tory leadership race. She also wants employees to be represented on company boards, a specific proposal that reopens a debate that hasn’t been aired seriously in mainstream British politics since the mid-70s”.

Pretty radical stuff, it seems. And there was more: “For good measure, May plans to abolish advisory shareholder votes on pay and make all votes binding. And she wants to make it impossible for the likes of asset-stripping, tax-minimising Pfizer to mount a takeover bid for a pharmaceutical titan such as AstraZeneca … Those subsidiary pledges would themselves be remarkable in a Conservative leader”.

She was parking her tanks on Labour’s lawn. This was another way in which the Tories would rebrand themselves as the true workers’ party, taking advantage of the worries of some natural Labour supporters over Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But Ms May is the ever flexible Tory leader, and so it came to pass that she ditched the whole idea.

The Guardian again: “Theresa May has told business leaders that her government will not force companies to directly appoint workers or consumers on to their boards, watering down an earlier pledge on the issue … She used a keynote speech at the CBI conference to say she had no plans to mandate such changes, despite suggesting that would be the case during the leadership contest and at the Conservative party conference”.

And that translated into sighs of relief at the Murdoch press, where the Baby Shard bunker is a union-free zone, and the idea of workers having a say, other than to ask “how high” when Creepy Uncle Rupe and his inner circle tell them to jump, is inconceivable. So it was no surprise at all that the Murdoch Sun was in full support of the PM.

“THE Prime Minister is right to back down from the most hasty and aggressive of her measures to bring big business to heel … Forcing firms to have workers’ representatives on boards would have been a godsend only to the unions … If you doubt that, listen to their howls of outrage yesterday when she binned the idea … It would have slammed a brake on companies’ innovation and profits. And it is profit that creates more jobs, feeds families and pays mortgages and rents”. And enables Murdoch to dictate policy.

f ever you needed to see how this unelected foreigner meddles in this country’s politics, look at how Theresa May has turned tail and run away over worker representation on company boards. It’s done across Europe, to the benefit of many large firms, but one meddling foreigner can screw things up for the UK. No change there, then.

It’s Ambassador Farage - NOT

We may not elect our diplomatic corps, those who are posted abroad to serve our country. But we leave the decisions as to who thus serves in the hands of the democratically elected Government of the day. This may on occasion spark claims of cronyism, as when Jim Callaghan’s son in law Peter Jay, who was not a diplomat, was made Ambassador to Washington when Sunny Jim was Prime Minister. But the decision is for those elected.

Squeaky non-diplomatic finger up the bum time

This inconvenient fact has, for some out there on the right, become forgotten as the President-Elect of the United States, Combover Crybaby Donald Trump, had decided to interfere in the UK’s internal affairs over who should be our next Ambassador to his country. Taking to Twitter overnight, he proclaimed “Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job!” No they wouldn’t. Not in the real world, anyway.

What many people who have by now rumbled The Donald’s modus operandi did know was that the most likely reason for this hokum was that Trump wanted to divert attention from something significantly more embarrassing - like his decision not to go after Hillary Clinton, demonstrating that he just sounded off about that to garner a few more votes.

Sadly, though, nobody told Nigel “Thirsty” Farage, who, despite having failed in seven attempts to get himself elected to the Commons and being held in a mixture of ridicule and contempt by most of his fellow politicians, decided that he was the man, despite the BBC reminding him “The role is currently held by Sir Kim Darroch and a spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May added that he was ‘an excellent ambassador who only took up post in January and traditionally they serve four years or even longer’”.

Nige, whinged that it was all terribly unfair: “At every stage I am greeted by negative comments coming out of Downing Street … The dislike of me, UKIP, and the referendum result is more important to them than what could be good for our country … It is career politics at its worst and it is now getting in the way of the national interest”. So spoke a career politician who has always put his interest ahead of any other.

Then he took out a king-size onion: “I have said since the now famous photograph with Donald Trump 10 days ago that I would do anything to help our national interest and to help cement ties with the incoming Anglophile administration … I have known several of the Trump team for years and I am in a good position with the president-elect's support to help. The world has changed and it's time that Downing Street did too”.

Exactly what that interest might be was highlighted by Political Scrapbook when it was revealed that Trump wants Farage a little closer to the centre of decision making so Mr Thirsty can help The Donald lobby against wind farms being visible from his golf courses in Scotland. As Scrapbook pointed out, this underscores the kind of blatant corruption that the incoming administration in Washington is likely to indulge in.

And it shows why Nigel Farage’s dreams of becoming UK Ambassador to Washington must remain just that. Mr Thirsty has sponged off taxpayers across Europe for far too long - we don’t want to be paying his bar tab after we leave the EU as well. End of story.

Milo Yiannopoulos - NOT Banned

The repellant man-baby that is Milo Yiannopoulos, failed entrepreneur, failed website guru, failed tech guru, failed campaigner, and ultimately failed human being, has returned to the UK, despite his having flounced out recently and run off to the USA. Here, he has for some inexplicable reason featured on Channel 4 News, being frankly abusive to host Cathy Newman - well, abuse is the one thing he hasn’t failed at yet - and was intending to also feature at his old school, in what was billed as a “talk”.

Behold an empty creep

Yiannopoulos, who has recently been banned from Twitter, to the great relief of those who wished the ban had happened rather earlier, was scheduled “to speak at his former school, Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury, on Tuesday”. It’s not going to happen. Apparently, “The decision was taken after the school spoke to the Department for Education Counter Extremism Unit”. Were they ordered to pull the event?

Well, it seems no, they weren’t. That was not enough for Yiannopoulos, who whined “My old high school has been bullied into canceling [sic] my talk on Tuesday by the ‘counter-extremism’ unit at the U.K. Department of Education … Who even knew the DoE had a counter-extremism unit? And that it wasn't set up to combat terrorism but rather to punish gays with the wrong opinions? Perhaps if I'd called the speech ‘MUSLIMS ARE AWESOME!’ they'd have left us alone. Disgusted”. Yeah, right.

Quite apart from Yiannopoulos being banned from Twitter after his vicious campaigns which culminated in the one against Leslie Jones, he is being highly selective in his claims, as well as playing the victim by equating  his own far-right extremism with terrorism. We know this as the people at BuzzFeed have painted a rather fuller picture.

This is what his old school said “This decision was taken following contact from the DFE Counter Extremism Unit, the threat of demonstrations at the school by organised groups and members of the public, and our overall concerns for the security of the school site and the safety of our community”. The report also told “objecting to the invitation, two former pupils who are now university academics, Kit Caless and Gary Budden, wrote: ‘Milo Yiannopoulos is not the “alt-right”; he is a twisted new incarnation of the far-right’”.

And then came the real reason for the cancellation: “The Langton is intending to have Milo return at some point for a proper debate the format of which will be acceptable to all parties concerned”. In other words, what Yiannopoulos nearly got away with was to spout his propaganda without someone from the real world challenging him on it.

That is the real problem for Milo Yiannopoulos, and indeed all of the goons at Breitbart: they love the idea of sounding off unchallenged. The DfE suggested it was a good idea to not only hear what he had to say - no problem with free speech, then - but that there should be someone there to not only practice free speech, but free dissenting speech. And that is what Yiannopoulos, and the rest of the Breitbart goons, cannot stomach.

The reason that Yiannopoulos is so sore is not that his free speech has been constrained, but that those he dislikes get to enjoy free speech too. What a hypocrite.What a sore loser. What a closet fascist. And what a splendid example of a washed-up has been.

Kavanagh Blair Hypocrisy

Faithful Murdoch retainer Trevor Kavanagh has given Sun readers the questionable benefit of his wisdom today as he lays into yet another Labour leader, this time from the past. “Former PM Tony Blair wants to poke his sticky fingers back into British politics, but hasn’t he done enough damage? The man who single-handedly fuelled the anti-EU rage which triggered Britain’s stunning OUT vote in June now wants to have his say on Brexit”.

That’s most interesting, the idea that the vote to leave the EU in this year’s referendum was due to some factor other than Young Dave and his jolly good chaps imposing six years of needless austerity on the electorate while the likes of the Murdoch press - that would be the one for whom Kavanagh spews his tenth rate rantings - tell their readers that the stagnating wages and worsening living conditions are all down to Johnny Foreigner.

Indeed, when Tone secured his third victory as Labour leader in 2005, EU membership was not in question, and Kavanagh knows full well that not even the Sun would have secured a No vote if there had been a referendum then. But on he ploughs. “It was Blair as Prime Minister, remember, who flung open the doors to mass immigration - the key factor in people’s minds, especially betrayed Labour voters, when they chose Brexit. It was Blair as PM who gave away a sizable chunk of our EU rebate in return for sweet FA”.

Immigration is only a key factor in the minds of the inmates of the Baby Shard bunker. Moreover, when Blair was winning, they not only kept quiet about a referendum - they backed Blair to the hilt. But let’s see his reasoning, however tedious.

“When PM, he gave away our EU rebate worth billions in return for a fantasy promise on farm subsidies which France still runs like a private gravy train. He plunged Britain into the Iraq war at huge cost in soldiers’ blood and taxpayers’ money without negotiating a single favour from America in return”. We still have a rebate, thanks. And the Iraq war was something cheered on by … well, the Sun. Trevor Kavanagh’s paper.

Let me put this directly: the Sun backed Blair in 1997. It backed him in 2001 - no complaints about immigration then - shouting “IT’S IN THE BAG, TONY … You might as well call election now”. It backed Blair in 2005 - AFTER the Iraq war, and after it became clear that the mythical WMD did not exist. AFTER even more immigration. It was no problem for Kavanagh and his pals then. They were all for him.

Now, because Murdoch is desperately trying to stop his readership seeing just how bad a Prime Minister Theresa May is, and that she and her jolly Brexiteers have no idea how they’re going to accomplish Britain’s departure from the EU, Kavanagh - ever the obedient lapdog - does as he is ordered and lays into Blair. Just to let him know that Don Rupioni still disapproves of him not really shagging his former wife, you understand.

Hell’s teeth, the Murdoch goons even backed Blair as recently as last year, with its “The Blairdryer” editorial. The Sun is hypocrisy on stilts. No change there, then.

Is Piers Morgan Leaving GMB?

There has been no British pundit more keen to extol the virtues of Combover Crybaby Donald Trump than Good Morning Britain and former CNN host Piers Morgan. He was on good terms with The Donald, he had access to him, and didn’t GMB viewers and his co-hosts know it. And when Trump won the Presidential election earlier this month, Morgan was even granted the privilege of an extended phone chat with the winner.

We know this because, with his customary lack of modesty, Morgan took to Twitter to tell anyone prepared to listen that The Donald had chosen to speak only to him: “Just had a 15-minute conversation with President-elect Donald Trump … He was on great form & very excited about the challenges ahead”. One has to wonder what they spoke about for quarter of an hour. It probably wasn’t the weather.

Someone else who was asking the same question was the current occupant of the Spectator’s Mr Steerpike chair, vacated last year by the odious flannelled fool Master Harry Cole, formerly chief gofer to the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines at the Guido Fawkes blog. The resulting post observed “During the US presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s UK supporters were few and far between. In fact, aside from Nigel Farage, it fell on his old friend Piers Morgan to be his main cheerleader”. Do go on.

“It seems his show of loyalty has now paid off. Morgan has taken to Twitter to announce that he has just shared a 15 minute phone conversation with the president-elect … With Morgan telling friends over the summer that he would be keen for a job as a spinner should Trump be elected POTUS, watch this space”. So what did Piers say to that?

My information is that when the Steerpike account put the question “Is Piers Morgan angling for a job in Donald Trump’s press team?” the one-word answer was “No”. But that Tweet can no longer be found. Moreover, Steerpike was asking the wrong question for two reasons. One, it might not be Trump’s press team. And two, if Morgan had already been offered a job, he wouldn’t be angling for one, would he?

The missing Tweet, together with Piers Morgan’s two areas of wriggle room, mean that the question as to whether or not he might be going to work for his pal Trump still very much stands. And it’s not going to be just this blog, and Steerpike, asking it. The folks who run Good Morning Britain, where Morgan’s co-hosts have made a special effort to accommodate his, shall we say, unconventional approach, will also want to know.

ITV bosses have seen GMB’s ratings improve over the past year, partly on the back of the current presenting line-up. They may also want Piers Morgan to state conclusively and unequivocally that he is not going to be upping sticks and going to work for the Combover Crybaby, whether in the USA or here in Britain. So let’s have the definitive answer to that question: is Piers Morgan going to go and work for Donald Trump?

Perhaps one of his co-hosts on GMB could quiz him, live on air. Just a thought.