Private Eye, 11th September 1970: Nothing Changes, Except for the Worse!

 Note: I am presently trying to sell my semi-complete run of Private Eye between 1979 and 2005. I’m having little success. But I have been nudged into looking again at some of the very early issues that I found in a cupboard when I was at school.

They make for a depressing read. With a few exceptions, none of the villains named in the old issues ever came to a bad end. Instead, he continued lying and defrauding his way to the grave. Everything identified back then as a problem has got steadily worse.

Here is a set of pieces by Auberon Waugh, just as he was coming into his prime. At the time, I recall his vicious contempt for the Heath Government was not thought entirely reputable journalism. Looking back, with the hindsight of 40-odd years, at the multiple catastophe that Government was, his attacks seem almost gentle. I don’t think anyone believes nowadays that politicians do other than lie or prevaricate all the time.

I have included a few notes in square brackets for those who might not know or recall some of the nicknames or references. SIG

I wonder if they did it on purpose

David Davis

[Subsequent edit by author] Further to receiving one-star ( = very poor) I should just rectify my omission, which was clearly observed by the respondent. I forgot to mention the requirement, that will encumber any incoming Libertarian or Revolutionary-Liberalist administration, whether in England, or the UK, or elsewhere, to criminalize and proscribe the existence of any bodies calling themselves “Trade Unions”, which behave in ways shown by the 19th- , 20th-  and 21st-Century British models of same. These outfits have proved themselves, through the deliberate policies and actions of their “officers”, to be far far more insidiously dangerous to life and liberty than any “terrorist” organisation, even the IRA and “Al-Quaeda” (whatever that might be), both of whom might be thought responsible for the deaths of up to 10,000 people each. The deaths probably attributable to the prevalence of “Trade” “Union” and “Workers’ Council” actions within the past 120-odd years probably run into the millions, aside from the planned and avoidable destruction of the UK’s heavy industries, docks, mining industries, railways and shipyards. (None of this needed to happen: the ability to fire all redundant labour upon the advent of better technology, thus keeping wage rates and hours to JapoChindoBraMexican levels, was prevented.)

Roll on the custard pies and rotting tomatoes….but Libertarians ought to begin speaking for real people, not just metropolitan political intellectuals like ourselves.

The coagulation-government is getting stick and rotting-cabbages from various quarters, for seeming to allow Francis Maude (who is, I admit, a bit of a slimy toad at times) to suggest that people should stock up on motor fuels before any putative strike by tanker drivers.

But I wonder…there could be a subtext here. Perhaps some clever Tory strategist thought that by artificially creating a fuel shortage at the pumps before any strike took place, the mass of inchoate but not negligible public opinion could be turned angrily against “UNITE”, whatever sort of GramscoStaliNazi front-organization that might be. I mean to say, it describes itself as a “Trade Union”, although it’s f**k-all to do with trade, and isn’t a union in any meaningful sense with regard to its members’ welfare – only its “officers’ ” wefare, power and prosperity.

Some of this unfocussed but very public mob ire might then rub off against the “Labour Party”, which predictably has failed to come out condemning the “union” – only mouthed platitudes about “the way to solve the crisis is by the negotiations”, as if there was anything meaningful for the drivers’ employers to talk about.

I just wonder if it’s a “cunning plan”. Of course, the predictable mainstream-media-response has been to toast the coagulation for its incompetence and “dangerous advice” (I mean to say! We used to keep old Duckhams 1-gallon oil cans and keep petrol in them for year after year – I always had 6 gallons in the house at any time, when in London years ago – about two-thirds of a tankful). But them the MSM is not on the side of any administration that is not overtly and aggressively GramscoStaliNazi. Perhaps because it thinks that most people viscerally are that, inand to their very bones….and they may sadly be right. Hitler got in, after all, by not misreading the mood of the German general public.

A Christmas Appeal from Private Eye

Is it illegal yet to link to this?

Hate Crime in the Plain Light of Day

by Sean Gabb

I’ve just been told a very un-pc joke. It’s about a drug for depressed lesbians called Tricocagen. Of course, I felt physically sick, and am about to go in search of a police officer so I can do my civic cuty of informing on the sicko-nazi who told it. There are laws in modern England against this kind of hate crime. I only pretended to laugh….

Diverse Pigesses

Rense

Can We Thank the Riots for a Great Deal?

by Sean Gabb

I bumped into one of the main local estate agents this morning in Deal. We were in the same queue for postage stamps, and our conversation turned to the inevitable matter of house prices.

For the past ten days or so, his agency has been flooded with enquiries from South London. Last weekend was his busiest for viewings since Gordon Brown did his Sampson in the Temple of Dagon act. Because it’s about the nicest place on the Fast Link to London, he expects prices to rise ten per cent relative to the South East average – and by Christmas. We agreed that there would eventually be more riots in the inner cities, and that crime levels would rise to levels comparable to low-intensity civil war. Crime would be up, and insurance premiums, and there would be the general inconvenience of living on something like the slopes of Vesuvius. The only thing to fall, we further agreed, would be prices for those unable to see the writing on the wall.

Deal is already filling up with refugees from the Hell that used to be London, and I’ve been moaning for a year about how crowded the roads are getting. Well, the shock of the riots may turn a trickle into a flood.

So, thank you, friends of Mark Duggan. Because of you and, of course, the useless plod sent in to calm you down, my late Stuart former brothel and place where Nelson slept with Emma Hamilton may finally outstrip the value of somewhere three times bigger – with land – in what Mrs Gabb thinks an even nicer part of England.

And, for those of you who have been sneering at me all these years from what you thought the much more desirable Notting Hill or St John’s Wood, the main Deal estate agents are Messrs Bright and Bright. You can find them on the Internet, though they currently have nothing left to sell.

It’s an ill wind….

Dear me, the BBC at the anti-capitalist-sauce, again….

David Davis

I couldn’t just let this one go: the subliminal message just chimes in so well with today’s British-State GCSE/A-level “Geography” “syllabuses”. Everyone probably believed it wholeheartedly – it was said on the “Telly”… After all, the “educationists” who produce the syllabus-twaddle just love maundering on about TNCs based in MEDCs exploiting the Pull-Factor among MDPs in LEDCs.

You couldn’t make it up: the use of so many acronyms guarantees the unemployability of any British-State-geography student in any capacity other than a Soviet Metropolitan Council planning department.

A re-arrangement of the deckchairs

David Davis

Estonia, strangely, is going to join a sinking currency.

Tail-chasing

David Davis

UPDATE: I note now. 16.12.10, that Iain Dale has handed in his cyberpress and has ceased blogging. It’s a pity: although nobody in his right mind would call Iain a libertarian, he writes well and knows which targets to assault.

The trouble with being retired is that you have so many things you have to do. So, writing has been a bit light, held up here sporadically by Michael and Sean Gabb mostly: they also have family duties and stuff like that.

I wonder if serious blogging is really, in the end, only for people who nobody much likes, such as those fellows at Labourlist or whatever it’s called? Or, else it is for those so powerful and prominent that they can make time to think (it’s not the writing, it’s the thinking that costs time) or have people to do stuff for them while they think/blog, like Guido and Iain Dale and that lot. I have worked out that the “half-life of a blogposting” is somewhere between 20 and 36 hours, depending on the prominence of the writer. This half-life is the time in which the “hit rate” (absolute new page views per unit time) declines to half the value it was at the moment when the first regular stopper-in noticed it. Guido is on about 36 hours. We manage around 20.

Or it’s for people like Brian Micklethwait, who don’t much mind how few or many read their thoughts, but have interesting things to say about cats, cricket, photography, buildings and finer points of liberal philosophy.

Sometimes too, I wonder at the state of the Political Domain of human endeavour, and consider what more it’s worth saying that we have not already said. There are only so may thousand ways you can justify your ire at the scumbags and fascist time-servers that blight our lives in return for taking all our money and using it to oppress us more….

….well, that was exciting…The LA tab I was on, just…well…disappeared right out of the browser, throwing me back to the Waily (“coalition” ) Torygraph. Lucky that WordPress had pre-saved a draft with most of the text on.

I’ll trail the Christmas message though: it’s becoming a LA-Blog tradition, and I’ll be starting soon to try to find time to think of something interesting and relevant to say about this year’s Enemy-Class-machinations. If any of you disgusting and dysfunctional reprobates would like me to talk about something in particular, please state so in the comments!

Carry a Samurai Sword and become invisible to police

Michael Winning

You can see it here.

NOW…that’s what I call an idea

Bioluminescent trees.

David Davis

Bet you 50p you’ll see this at David Thompson soon, on Friday Ephemera….

FLC199, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Humour: No Laughing Matter, Sean Gabb, 11th November 2010

when someone is arrested for making jokes about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, we can see that the line has been crossed that separates a state with police from a police state.

via FLC199, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Humour: No Laughing Matter, Sean Gabb, 11th November 2010.

Trevor Philips has been reading Mein Kampf again

Michael Winning

188 pigs all OK for the night, but Ive got a bad cold and came in and saw this.

Hes still doing the long march through the institutions. Guess he thinks he’s winning still. Does he have a child at private school? Anyone know? He badmouths them something deep.

Conservatives ought to know better by now

David Davis

Over at Guido’s place, someone called Tim Yeo, described as a “Conservative”, writes in the Guardian about increasing spending on “green” projects, such as windfarms and the like.

There is nothhing intrinsically bad about writing pieces for the Guardian, if that gets your rocks off for you. However, most liberals in the classical sense are more like classical conservatives than Guardian readers and contributors tend to be: they are also more skeptical than not, about the next neopastoralist-fad-religion such as GreeNazism.

Yeo of course, as you shall see, takes  one position where the placing of wind-farms is concerned if it benefits his pocket, and quite another where it will affect him personally regarding a particular one. This is standard GramscoStaliNazi behaviour and has been seen on countless occasions to date, in others.

I do not view these people while wearing quite the same charity-tinted glasses through which dear Sean Gabb looks, when he talks of the Enemy-Class. The extent of his magnanimity towards them astonishes me. To my mind, there can be no really useful place for many of the “top people” in this group, once an approximately libertarian civilisation emerges and becomes self-sustaining.

A caption competition from me

Michael Winning

I haven’t done one of these, but how about this which I found over at Old Holborn?

Apologies, OldH, I now see it was for yours too. Oh we,ll

Extremely funny pic

David Davis

This came by just now over at Legiron’s place. Perhaps it deserves a caption competition: we don’t seem to have done one in a while.

I just came up with this on bookface

David Davis

“The greens know they will have to break us on this planet, or lose the war”….

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=662052517&v=wall&story_fbid=118640131506476#!/profile.php?id=662052517&v=wall&story_fbid=149201721787089&ref=mf

One day, art will take its proper place

David Davis

I never usually read movie reviews, not knowing or caring about movies apart from “The Dam Busters” and perhaps “The Lord Of The Rings”. But I just had to click on “Pay, Sit, Barf” – partly because I didn’t know what “barf” means and still I don’t.

But what this “movie critic” appears to be writing about – amusingly – is one example of the self-indulgent narcissism exhibited by some of the things called “movie stars”. I don’t know whether it’s the “stars” themselves who’d like to be thought of as thinking like what she describes a-propos of Julia Roberts: or whether it’s the generalised studio-corporate-direction, being as it is a projecting-part of the Western Political Enemy-Class, that causes films to be made that sound like the ones I would pay to _/not/_ watch.

However, Lindy West’s article is amusing and I wanted to share it.

Perhaps the British State wants pubs to close

David Davis

h/t VelvetGloveIronFist

I’m not a conspiracy-theorist – really, honest, guv! But you wonder about the juxtaposition of the increasing rate of pub closures, coupled with a nationwide smoking ban in buildings used by the public and also with the feeling that “they” don’t want you to be able to plot gainst them and whinge about them to your friends, in places where “they” can’t bug you easily.

The pub closure stats make astonishing reading.

Here’s even more statistics from the same place.