This edition looks at just three of the many different motives behind the under-reporting and otherwise covering-up of child sex exploitation. Sometimes it’s money – big money. Sometimes it’s Establishment fear of where the trail might lead. And  at other times, it may be nothing more than callous idleness. The Slog investigates.

Every year, many thousands of children are taken into care. In the vast majority of cases, this happens because their home life is hopelessly dysfunctional. But in some cases – a disturbing number of cases – it happens as part of a monied process of trafficking vulnerable children into a care system that has been compromised by paedophile penetration. If you drill into the numbers here, apply that to the money involved – and then relate it all in turn to the dozens of recorded cases of organised systemic child molestation – it’s not hard to deduce what’s going on. Conspiracy invention has nothing to do with it.

The Secret Family Courts and the Court of Protection are in camera areas of the law from which serious media coverage is barred. On five separate occasions since 2004, government Ministers and agents of the judiciary have promised to reverse that situation, and reform the system. None of it has come to pass. No sane observer of the system can any longer deny that it has and still is being used as a supply source for sadistic perverts. To my mind it is the biggest unrevealed scandal in Britain. But the bubbles in Westminster and the national media continue to throw ageing minor-league celeb gropers and cadavers to the wolves.

Slough Council recently installed a new Fostering Allowance Scheme. It gives foster parents £400 a week to do the job. Every year, 10,000 children disappear from the care system. That latter figure comes from the June 2012 All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Runaway and Missing Children and Adults and the APPG for Looked-after Children and Care Leavers report of their joint inquiry into children who go missing from care.

Yet the previous year, the official figure for 2011 was 930 children missing. That’s a 90% understatement of the problem. It’s a cover-up, isn’t it? No? Administrative error? What, like all the administrative errors to do with forty years of quietly closed police enquiries, shredded council reports in Wrexham of Welsh care home abuse, and four false starts in the Richmond/Elm House scandal you mean? The banishment of a senior Cabinet Minister to Brussels in the 1980s was a coincidence, was it? Thatcher’s close aide being a known paedophile? Cyril Smith’s fun and games being widely known but ignored? This is all being blown out of proportion by paranoid sex-crime obsessives is it?

OK, let’s continue. In March 2011, the Department of Education said that just 0ver 27,000 children had been taken into care that year – and it was a slight fall. But the BBC’s Katherin Sellgren discovered six months later that the total figure was 65,520 – and on the increase. So each year – if that intake was average, as it seems to have been – there’s a 45% turnover of kids going in and then coming out. That seems like a remarkable success story.

Well, bear this in mind. The majority (48,530) of children looked after in 2011 were in a foster placement: only 7,910 were cared for in residential accommodation such as secure units, children’s homes, hostels and residential schools. But 10,000 kids disappear every year. That is 35% of all kids going in. There is obviously something odd going on here, is there not?

Let me write it out again. 27,000 kids go in, 10,000 disappear, there’s a 45% turnover – and 84% wind up in foster care. Now take that thought, and hold it in the context of government under-reporting the disappearances by 90%. Then add all that to the context below.

As we saw earlier, foster carers get £400 per week per child. But in another piece, Sellgren reports that, based on figures submitted by Family Information Services, average weekly costs of private care for children of all ages rose from £85.93 per child in 2011 to £90.97 in 2012. I recognise that the two costs – £400 and £90 – aren’t directly comparable.  But £400 a week for a foster parent is £57 a day. That’s a lot. Is there money in this for other people too? There certainly is.

The National Fostering Agency may sound like a quango, but it is an entirely private company. The second biggest UK fostering company, it has 13 offices monitoring the foster-carers of 178 local authorities. It has 200 staff. The Chief Executive is a man called Iain Anderson. Since his arrival in 2008, profits have risen by 35% every year. That’s some track record. So good, in fact, that it attracted a takeover by Graphite Capital in January 2012. For just over £130m.

And now, back to the numbers. 200 staff monitoring the foster carers of 178 local authorities….from just 13 offices. Slightly over 1 staff member per Council. 50,000 fostering homes in the UK. 10,000 kids a year in care go missing. Right then. This is beginning to look more like a very good motive indeed for lying about how many kids went missing. If you follow.

I’m still investigating this case, in which it is perfectly possible that there is nothing amiss. Either way, if you have any substantive information to offer, the usual email applies, jawslog@gmail.com

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Things seem to be settling into a familiar pattern between Plod and powerful paedophiles. It goes like this: Plod reluctantly reopens the last cover-up they quietly stuck away in a files 20 years ago. They f**k about for a bit half-heartedly, and after a short time (when the media have gone back to sleep) stop doing anything active. Then the Exaro team accuse the police of closing the investigation, and the Bluebottles issue a denial and do something new to take the heat off their backs.

At last in Rochdale, some results are emerging. But we are living in a State where the media wind the police up, and the Establishment wind them down as soon as they start accusing anyone powerful. It is not the most healthy state of affairs for a Parliamentary democracy to tolerate. This feeling is only made more intense by the filth that does emerge, as it’s clear that Plod obviously knew about it all along.

In just the week since the Rochdale Rozzers were hoofed up the rear by Exaro et al, new abuse suspects have emerged, many of whom seem to have been known to Cyril, the LibDem who has turned out to have been anything but a Nice One. The Manchester Evening News reports today that three sexually abused boys formerly at Knowl View school have given police the names of ten alleged perpetrators, and remarkably not all of them are dead.

Only eight days ago, Detective Chief Superintendent Mary Doyle of the GMP issued a statement saying “Since last year, we have only had a very small number of people come forward to report any abuse by Sir Cyril Smith”. The assumption being, presumably, that Big Cyril was the only paedophile in the Manchester approved school and care home system.

On 14th May, The Slog was emailed by an anonymous abuse victim claiming that higher authorities has told the civilian police to “call off their dogs” in relation to Smith.

Knowl View was shut down in 1994 after a dossier detailing abuse was handed to police. Smith was a major name in the dossier, but no action was ever taken against him. At the time, the Liberal leadership dismissed it as “harmless bottom-smacking”. However, those now getting their hopes up should note this rather significant wording in the MEN piece: ‘Officers are actively investigating the whereabouts of the others, although no arrests have been made.’ Alors, plus ça change et plus reste la même chose.

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Yesterday, Labour MP Madeleine Moon and others were described as ‘stunned’ by the Exaro team as the MoD admitted it had forced some children of services personnel to stay at schools despite well-documented complaints of sexual abuse. Although Exaro says this raises ‘further questions’ as to how the authorities treat accusations of child sex exploitation, my only question remains, “What on earth would the motive be for someone in authority to do that?” The options available are:

1. The MoD are the worst examples in Whitehall of self-serving bastards who would rather see Britain defenceless than reduce their staff headcount. In short, they can’t be arsed.

2. They ignored the complaints because that might cause the media to get involved and then a cover-up might be discovered.

If that seems simplistic, then either I or you are disconnected from reality. While I realise that seeing the media as The Real Enemy  is endemic in British government today, that attitude surely cannot be blamed for a secret report being ignored. Can it? To use ‘framing’ in the modern American sense, the British Establishment has done a remarkable job of persuading the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ people that rumour, innuendo, and anti-social elements are being used to pin guilt upon entirely innocent people in authority. In which case, what is this shadowy terrorist group doing the using? Answer comes there none. Yet almost everyone believed McAlpine was just a harmless old bloke in a flat cap with no intention of spinning anything in a desired direction.

I tried to argue in my previous Paedofile post that a huge factor in all this is the unwillingness of Mr and Mrs Ordinary to face up to the depravity in our midst. We don’t like talking about child-buggery. Thus, child-buggery flourishes. I have said from the outset that the hooking of just one big fish beyond show business would start to make a difference. I still think that. I’m sure that a great many dedicated Plods want that. The trouble is, not many security agencies and politicians want it.

Last night at The Slog: Britain gripped by terrorist terror as two nutters terrorise Woolwich

I’m referring of course to the incident in Woolwich today, wherein a soldier was hacked to death by two Islamists, who were then shot and severely wounded by the police. Some footage on the Al Jazheera news channel showed a young, tall black man, his hands red with blood, talking to a person who was filming the incident. The clip was nowhere to be seen on the BBCNews channel….although they did show a photo of another black man talking to somebody else. Did anyone know what this was about? No, they didn’t.

For the next two hours, we had Boris Johnson giving the “London can take it” speech, the Prime Minister saying he would return early from his hideout in Brussels, and Theresa May urging us all to be reassured by that early return. Keith Vaz (inevitably) made an appearance and was asked whether he could confirm it was a soldier who’d been murdered. No, he said, he couldn’t. An ex-cop terror consultant said he was “amazed” by what had happened, but when asked what had happened, he replied that no, he didn’t know. Various on-the-spot reporters added nothing beyond saying that it was all shocking, and a massive police operation was under way. A lecturer in safety & terror came on to say she thought it was a terrorist act, but it was too early to be sure. She did however think that security would have to be upped, but it was too late to say.

The voice of a local man in Woolwich took up several minutes of airtime making a series of bizarre statements, including one – “I mean, this bloke was wavin’ a gun at the police, I mean – even I wouldn’t do that” – which made you wonder what his profession might be. Others said they had heard both men yelling “Allahu-aqbar!” which means God is great – the standard emittance from lunatics who think they are about to claim 77 virgins in Heaven.

This is the story. There is a barracks in Woolwich. A soldier walked out of the barracks wearing a ‘Support Veterans’ teeshirt, and two black guys pounced on him with sharp weapons. At some point as the victim fled, a car hit him. He was then beheaded. Plod arrived, the two headcases invited them to speed them on their way to sex in Heaven, and the cops shot them – but not dead. The killers are now in hospital. That’s it.

“It has all the hallmarks of a terrorist incident,” said the Prime Minister. “We have had a meeting of Cobra and we will have another one tomorrow,” said the Home Secretary.

So called ‘breaking news’ is at its most silly when nobody knows what’s going on, and people who obviously have no idea what’s going on are asked by concerned-looking news anchors if they know what’s going on, only to answer that no, they do not know what’s going on. Like this or not, it is funny to hear this idiotic series of exchanges taking place. We have far too much news in the world today, and far too little analysis or critique. I watched forty minutes of the coverage, open-mouthed at the blindingly obvious and knee-jerk muddle of responses offered to stupid hack questions. Then I went away to shake my head, and write this.

Less will always be more. 24/7 news disobeys this golden rule. It is yet another curse that comes as part of the 21st century’s territory.

Earlier at The Slog: No, perhaps Carney and Meyer aren’t mad after all

You read it here first: Mad Mark Carney, the incoming Bank of England Governor, is already fuelling speculation that he will try to relaunch quantitative easing (QE) and slash the Pound’s value when he arrives in the UK. Yesterday, he once more applauded Japan’s bonkers drive for growth. Carney has already said, bewilderingly, that Japan’s “bold policy experiment” to boost its QE programme and drive down the Yen is “not devaluation”. It looks like my tipster of last February was on the money, so if your money is in Sterling, it might be a good idea to get it out.

Quite why Mr Carney (or Tokyo) think that spending more money we haven’t got, making our imports more expensive, and driving up the national debt still further are the answers to a global systemic crisis may well elude most of you. All it does is kind of confirm the desert of policy creativity I was posting about last night.

Even Carney, however, doesn’t appear quite as deranged as Yahoo’s fragrant Melissa Mayer, who has just forked out a billion bucks for Tumblr, a company whose 2012 revenue was just $13m, and has never made a profit. It has earned the owner David Karp $250m.

Just to put that lunacy into perspective, the gearing ratio on price to earnings is infinity, the gearing ratio on Karp’s take alone is four, the price to turnover stands at 80-1, and Mr K has trousered almost twenty times more than Tumblr’s entire cash volume. Yahoo loons are rushing about saying how the business they can put through it will “dramatically increase turnover in 2014 alone” which is fine, so why didn’t they just set up a better competitor and save the shareholder’s billion?

The deal gave me a tremendous sense of ABNAmro deja-vu, and we all know what happened after that.

So, Carney and Mayer have completely lost their minds, and will soon have mislaid their shirts as well, right? Well, not so fast. I am absolutely sure neither of their ventures can pay for themselves, let alone deliver a viable return. But with every day, it’s becoming clear to me that these two are really only doing what I’m doing – just on an unimaginably huge scale. Let me explain my reasoning.

It’s now very clear indeed that the G7′s central bankers intend to flood the world with fiat money. Hence Carney’s approval of blatant Japanese currency wars, and last week’s G7 in turn giving their approval to it. Ben Bernanke is banging in $85bn a month – over a trillion per annum – despite the glaringly obvious fact that it’s not working. Everyone in authority wants assets at the other end of this disaster: hence the continuing upside-down Gulliver’s Travels formerly known as the gold market. Let’s look a little more closely at the shiny stuff.

It was in late 2008 that I first pointed out to the chairman of a UK wealth management consultancy how the Asians kept buying gold overnight, and then as London and in turn New York opened, the price would go down again. There are lots of reasons why this might happen (seasonality, Chinese obsession with the stuff, religious festivals and so on) but not day in day out for months on end. I’ve become m0re convinced over time that – despite gold’s useful flurry upwards during 2011 – this has settled into the East buying it to stop the West devaluing it, the West in turn devaluing it for reasons to do with the stock market confidence and debt.

As of a few months ago, the G7 has been both manipulating the gold price and carrying on with reasonably daft QE. Now – as in so many other areas – they have abandoned all pretence, and opted for veritably pumping out money and slashing the gold price. Once they have enough gold, they’ll leave the price alone. We the People, meanwhile, won’t be buying much of it on account of hyperinflation having made our Pounds, Dollars and euros worthless.

I’m now waiting to see how and when Draghi will turn the cash-tap full-on. So are the Germans, in case you hadn’t noticed: like China, they’re in a rather different position to everyone else, in that they’re flogging every car they can make regardless of the price. For much of last year, SuperMario insisted that printing money wasn’t the answer, but after Cyprus and the ECB’s further interest rate cut, he’s been rather more quiet on the subject….and the Bundesbank’s Lens Weidmann has been more eagle-eyed than ever in watching his every subterfuge.

We are, of course, still waiting for any data about European capital flight to appear, but all the bits and bobs of info out there suggest that EU investment is disappearing fast. Draghi will have to print to replace it – as he also must in order to refinance the banks of Greece, Spain and Ireland. Once the French fiscal mess begins to make a larger blip on the radar, his main problem is going to be the water supply required to keep the printers cool. And something to stop the top of Herr Weidmann’s head from blowing off.

So to sum up, currency devaluation will hyperinflate every penny you have in cash away….at some point. After that, they’ll come after whatever assets you have. Hopefully, before that happens they’ll have been dissuaded from this path by the citizenry. But don’t bank on it. Speaking for myself, I’m going to go out and buy things that are too heavy for thieves to carry.

Earlier at The Slog: More ideas go here, please.

So anyway, here we are in 2013 – and still the only descriptive dimension being applied to politics is the Left to Right spectrum.

I’ve no idea when or how the term ‘Left-wing’ originated, but I can’t believe it was earlier than, say, 1910. In more recent decades, it has become a noun in the collective (hoho) sense, The Left. Increasingly, it puts me in mind of the past tense of ‘to leave’: “I left many years ago, because there was nothing left for me, and there was no real working class left by then anyway”.

I suspect the baggage of the Left would be better referred to as The Left Luggage Office. Around 1981, somebody left the Case for the Left there – but in the 32 years since, nobody has turned up with the correct credentials to reclaim it. Except for Ed Balls, a man who really was born forty years too late. He does strike me as oddly archaic, and – like Tom Watson – is brazen to the point of bigotry in his tribalist unwillingness to accept that anyone beyond the confines of The Left has anything valid to contribute.

Being Right-wing, by contrast, is the big thing now among the Young Lions. It is very funny to observe their worship of the Dead: the idolatry of past heroes coupled with a conviction that they represent the Future represents a form of mule-like naivety they never seem to recognise. Dan Hannan quotes endlessly from 17th and 18th century icons, Ed West abominates Ted Heath with a venom totally oblivious to the old Boy’s irrelevance these days, and James Delingpole rejoices in membership of a narrowly nationalist organisation whose ideas owe more to 1930s Empire Loyalism than anything likely to address our profound cultural and economic problems going forward.

A great deal of parroting emanates from both sides. For the Left, there is much emphasis on unthinking acceptance of political correctness, feminism, and multiculturalism – along with an inability to complete any declaration of ‘progressive’ politics without using the words ‘smash’ or ‘scum’. From the Right, we get endless references to Friedman, Adam Smith, Ronald Reagan, deregulation and a dozen other failed crackpot theories. The Left is too frightened to use the word socialism and too dim to think of anything better; the Right boffs on endlessly about free markets and then rigs every last one of them.

I doubt if, in the entire modern history of Man, so much certainty of success has been based on hypocrisy about the present, and inflexible reverence for the past.

In the West, we have lost the Voyager gene. It was undermined by cotton-wool Nannyism and pc education from the Left, alongside a persistent insistence on TINA (There is No Alternative) from the Right. It has fallen into disuse after years of watching formulaic media content driven by process rather than ideas. It is being destroyed once and for all by our escape into and dependence on technology: we daren’t go anywhere without a phone, make a car journey without satnav, or sort anything out without an app. And it is being discouraged by a banking system that favours big business, multinational gargoyles out to destroy all serious competition, and crooked politicians with little or no experience of adventurous commerce. The central risk-idea of the last thousand years – capitalism – has been nobbled by either socialism or monopolism. In the UK, we have alternately used both to devastating ill-effect.

The dominant human emotion today is fear. Fear of what citizens might decide, given half a chance. Fear among banks of lending risk. Fear of leaving the EU or the euro. Fear of actually letting the markets decide. Fear of everyone else’s currency value. Fear of ratings agencies and Troikas. Fear of terrorism. Fear of radical creativity. And perhaps most pernicious of all, fear of reality.

Some of this is generated by control-freak government propaganda that lurches from odious pessimism about loss of jobs through to ludicrous optimism about non-existent recovery. But even more of it, I suspect, is the unconscious realisation by many people that those supposed to be in charge have no idea what to do apart from save themselves. This generates a widespread feeling of having nobody to look up to, nothing to look forward to, and nobody to look after us. Given the conviction by many over the last sixty years that we need the State to look after us, there is a diabolical irony to it all. Worse still – given the expectations generated among the mass of the population by vote-hungry politicians – the potential for serious violence in the medium term is very real indeed.

This is all, of course, the wrong interpretation for the innocent citizen to make. The far more positive way of looking at the mess we’re in – while accepting that we’ve gone along with it, and must be complicit to some extent – is to remember that it hasn’t been created by any of us: Politicians, Government bureaucrats, investment bankers, media moguls and multinational business senior management did it. The overwhelming majority of us don’t occupy any of those positions. Far from being dependent on such people, we need more independence from them.

Without the acceptance of risk and responsibility as part of life, all cultures decline in the end. Risk-averse monopolism would rather artistic expression offered immediate investment payback. Nanny State would rather we became children, rather than be adult in how we look after our children. The entire construct is built on fear. Fearful packs retreat inside themselves, stick to their comfort zones, fail to bring home any bacon, and thus eventually tear each other apart by squabbling about whose fault it is.

This is what we are doing in the West. Our politics – indeed, our debates generally – have never been so adversarial, so negative, so devoid of reason, or so divisive. Warmists yell at deniers. Occupiers yell at bankers. The 1922 Committee yells at Camerlot. Tea-Partiers yell at Democrats. Republican Congressmen yell at Obama. Golden Dawn swears at Syriza. The French press vilifies Hollande. UKippers yell at Europhiles. Rome yells at Brussels. Berlin yells at ClubMed. Everyone today would rather be right about something than actually do something.

Even the maths of contemporary politics shows near-exact division: none of the US, Britain, France, Greece and the Netherlands has been able to show decisive results in recent years: nobody gets a mandate because nobody has a fresh idea to which the clear majority can sign up. We are not living in the present in 2013, we are looking for certainty from the past. We do this because we fear the future. We fear the future because there are no ideas to inspire and unite us.

I’ve written many times before about my solution. I believe the legislatures of the West have less and less power: they are selling out to minority money, and anyone who tries to challenge that through the electoral system will simply be sucked into it. As sure as eggs are eggs, that is what will happen to America’s Tea Party, Farage’s UKip, and Greece’s Tsipras. The solution isn’t political, it lies with the citizenry.

I have no doubt there will be serious violence in the end, but there is no need for it. Radical Realism as I keep advancing it is about a starting point that asserts, “They think they have the power, but only we have the power”. We have the power not to cooperate, not to buy, not to pay tax, not to work, not to accept. We have the power to boycott policies, to empty banks, to threaten MPs, Deputies and Congressmen with unemployment. In the end, we have the power to starve the beast.

The beast feeds on money, cooperation and prisons. Above all, it feeds on apathy. Take all those things away, and the beast dies. We are all understandably apathetic about the legislative process, because it is no longer for our benefit. Just one large demonstration of online power will show people that there is something they can do. Already throughout the West, communities are waking up to the fact that most of the State’s central apparatus – and most of the globalist companies – are expensive, dysfunctional, and in the way. They are ‘bridging’ – showing the State how community action by decent individuals can deliver pretty much everything we need to be more content.

Just one large demonstration of online power. Just one Live Aid for liberty. We keep on waiting for the Leader to emerge. Well, the hour has been here since 2008 and no leader has come to the fore. Nobody else is going to do this for us. Only concerted and constructive demonstrations of citizen power will deliver us from serfdom. Comment threads calling this naive, poppycock, impractical and juvenile won’t do it: the beast snacks on cynicism every day. This is the time to do, not the chance to have another moan and then feel better.

Carpe Diem. Or verily, bestiam nos habebit.

Yesterday at The Slog: Surreality reigns supreme in Greece

“We may be drowning, but the water’s lovely and warm”

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is now so deluded on the subject of a Greek recovery, there is a kind of developing sangfroid humour in the media coverage of his descent into what is either madness or carefully choreographed, slow-motion can-kicking. In this sort of atmosphere, it is truly astonishing just how much awful news can look good as things go from bad to worse than even the biggest Job expected. Greece has reached the stage in May 2013 where even Job has no comfort to offer: but somehow, the EC and its allies in the Athens government can spot a Phoenix rising from the coldest cinder.

Good news, the recovery will begin in 2014, and by 2016 unemployment will be only 21%.

Good news, inflation has been conquered: the March official figures show that deflation has arrived.

Good news – in the same month taxes fell….by a shortfall in government income of 25%.

Good news, Samaras is attracting new investment….by selling the family silver to China.

Good news, the Alpha Bank is Greece’s safest, it only lost 12% in value last Friday.

Good news, Greece’s borrowing costs have fallen – because nobody noticed a 5.3% gdp contraction in Q1.

Good news, investors are betting that Greece is on-track for recovery….its gdp is now back where it was in 2005.

A combination of surreal spin, lazy analysts and market braindeath hyper-optimism is conspiring to make it look as if the Hellenic Republic is back from the brink. Well I’m sorry, the country’s fingers may be back up to the cliff-edge, but a large truck is about to drive right over them. 1.3 million Greeks are out of work, 400,000 families have no income, 300,000 workers haven’t been paid for months, and hundreds of
thousands more have work, but can’t make ends meet on the salaries they’re getting. If those numbers don’t sound that big, try to remember that the total population of Greece is only 11 million.

Later this year, the government must deliver a 2014 budget. The EC says it is on track for this year (I don’t see how it can be with tax income down by a quarter) but it will probably need to raise an additional 8 billion euros to achieve the for 2015. If the Troika sticks to its insane insistence on the Greek government implementing more austerity to fill the gap, the relatively stable political situation will, assuming my sources are right, go very badly downhill.

The thing about Greece is that the bollocks is so ubiquitous now, it’s more ducks in a barrel than deconstruction shooting it down. But what far too many Northern and Western Europeans don’t get is that – just as there is no such thing as a gradual panic in the markets – as the Soviet Union discovered, there is no such thing as a successful rebellion on one country. Once somebody in ClubMed – and my money’s still on Italy – holds up their hands and says “Go forth and multiply” to the Troika, the fire-wave will travel faster than that following a large nuclear detonation.

Earlier at The Slog: Why a very British putsch is about to do for Cameron

“Put that light out”

Ben Brogan has a somewhat telling column in the Daily Telegraph this morning. The headline – ‘Cameron shouldn’t blame our rowdy press for his own failings’ – is probably the best example I’ve seen for some time of guilty protesting by the media. Ben can defend the actions of the hacks and moguls until the Normandy cows decide they want to leave the EU: the truth is that – as I have maintained from the start of this nonsense – a loosely affiliated media/business clique has produced something out of nothing here, purely with the intention of overpowering a democratically elected government.

What’s happened here isn’t ‘rowdiness’. It is a plot, pure and simple: and the plotters are, to say the least of it, an unprepossessing bunch of, um, if not swivel-eyed loons, then certainly very right wing goggle-eyed sociopaths. Wander down the guest list at this Hellfire party: Lord Ashcroft, the Barclay Brothers, Tim Loughton, Paul Goodman, Nigel Farage, James Forsyth et al. If you want to know why Red Ed chose to help the Conservatives last night, think about it for a few seconds: if the plotters get their way, the Labour Party will be swamped at the next election….drowned under a giant wave of bellicose anti-EU Ukippers in league with Borishunt Fallongove and their psycho chums in the City. Having done some back-of-envelope sums earlier this morning, I would say that a UKip/Tory non-compete pact in 2015 (or whenever) would deliver a solid neocon-nutter majority in the Commons of at least 80 seats.

Now let’s summarise the events that led the Guardian’s Nicholas Watt this morning to describe Cameron’s position as in serious jeopardy thanks to ‘a sea change in the parliamentary party as growing numbers of MPs decide that the prime minister is becoming a liability’. I’ll drop all the ‘alleged’ legal bollocks, because I doubt very much if anyone could go into a libel Court on this matter now and be credible. Lord Feldman held an off the record dinner, and in one way or another was disparaging about grassroots Tories. James Kirkup then broke a fundamental journalistic code of conduct by reporting these off-the-record comments – even though the other hacks didn’t, and the BOSELs remark has been around for ages. Either he or another informant then told Farage what had happened, and being by nature nothing more than a gobby opportunist, Farage machinated with the likes of Forsyth and Goodman to get the identity of the Top Tory leaked into the blogosphere. Feldman then denied the remarks, as did Number Ten. The Newscorp and Sarkist press piled in with endless follow-ups….just in time for the Gay Marriage Bill (which, by the way, I don’t support and never have) to become a humiliating shambles for the Prime Minister.

When Cameron returned from the US last week, I said this time he was in serious trouble, because the Tory Right had reached its carpe diem moment. I wrote last night about why – far from being ‘a bit of a yawn’ – my forensic analysis of this extra-Parliamentary takeover was of serious constitutional significance. The significance is very clear indeed: a clique of unlected wealthy media barons have conspired with unprincipled hacks to unseat an elected Prime Minister. If you can explain why that is any different to the nasty combo of Union block votes and flying pickets against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, then I’d love to hear about it.

Out of the frying pan into the fire? I think a more appropriate phrase would be ‘killing the Bourbons and getting Napoleon’. I’m now going to drop the subject and report some other stuff. But even if, as some think, this ‘demeans’ me, I cannot resist the opportunity to say “I told you so”.

Yesterday in the Paedofile: Parental rubbish and Royal connections

What I’m less keen on is Cameron coming down hard on tax avoidance. Surely that’s down to the incompetent pillocks who draft the tax legislation – and quite knowingly leave loopholes everywhere – to sort out, is it not? Is it not also down to the Chancellor and his Rottweilers at the HMRC to put tax accountants out of business by simply saying ‘no’ to every scheme, whether it might involve pork scratchings futures or losses made on Ghanaian car wash ventures?

There is, every week, less and less clarity – and more and more anarchy – about the Coalition.

And yet, here in one place is the fundamental problem for all decent, intelligent people in Britain. We – and I use that pronoun proudly – would reluctantly rather see Cameronian muddle in power than the two alleged alternatives on offer: Borishunt Fallongove plus UKip support, or the Ed Miller Band. The rub for us, however, is that we would far, far rather see a Government not led by an Old Etonian berk whose combination of gobsmacking naivety and sly complicity leads one every day to wonder how he can possibly be the best 58 million souls can come up with.

I’ve felt like this about British Governments since 1964. I didn’t want Labour then, or Heath in 1970, Callaghan after the 3-day week, Thatcher in 1979, or Nude Labour under Blair in 1997. I was either way about Cameron’s Coalition in 2010, and would’ve preferred a more overtly anti-EU victory of One Nation Toryism. Now I’m forced to fall back on the least ghastly of three insincere offers. Like so many Brits today, I feel almost entirely disenfranchised.

If, by the way, you think my contention that Dave is in trouble to be alarmism, harken unto this: the 1922 Committee sees UKIP as “our party of choice”. They loathe Cameron with a passion so visceral, it is rarely seen in politics these days…..except among Mandelson’s knitting circle in relation to Miliband the Younger. Throughout Westminster, backbench MPs of all Parties are gossiping about everything from an imminent Tory leadership collapse to a forced General Election after the summer. As I posted some days ago, while the MSM doubts it, I don’t: this time, King David may well see his brethren slain with the jawbone of many assholes.

One only has to look at the merry dance of duplicity being choreographed by the Right in relation to the Gay Marriage Bill. For example, Tory swivel-eyed former minister Tim Loughton tabled an at first sight trendy amendment to allow heterosexual couples who don’t want to get married to opt for a civil partnership instead. But in reality, it was a subterfuge designed to defeat the bill by inviting Labour’s inclusive fluffies to vote with the Rightist rebels. Anyone with an ounce of political nous is left asking “Where TF are the Tory whips while this is all going on?”

Rather than whipping Tory backbenchers into shape, Number Ten has been forced to do a deal with Labour to ensure the Bill’s passage – which now looks certain – but the outcome is that the Ed Miller Band of Hope will surely claim that the Bill’s passage was really down to them….and that they had to rescue the Conservative Party from its own nutters. Whichever way you cut it, it’s going to look like a humiliation for Camerlot.

Not too long ago, Conservative rebels would’ve backed away from landing their own leadership in such mire. Not now: six days ago, 116 Conservative MPs voted against the Queen’s Speech, the size of the Tory revolt surprising even leading dissidents. Tonight, former Party Treasurer and Cameron-hater Lord Ashcroft said the rows over Europe, gay marriage and swivel-eyed loons had to come to an end. But somewhat predictably, he was enigmatic on the subject of how. Privately, of course – like Farage, Johnson, Gove and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh – he wants Cameron to be ousted in time for a new leader to establish himself (I’m assuming neither Theresa May nor Nadine Dorries would get it) before 2015. And we should not, of course, leave out the other part of this dastardly plan: to smooth the way for an electoral deal with UKIP that will, between the two right wing Parties, give them easily enough constituencies to leave Labour miles behind at the next Election.

Support for the strategy came later today in the shape of a Survation poll giving UKip a 22% share of voting intentions. Worryingly for Camerlot, the Faragist gains were almost entirely direct switches from former Conservative voters.

Yesterday, I had something of an explosive exchange with several threaders here at The Slog. My beef was very simple: I was trying to evidence how a plan to get Cameron out of 10 Downing Street via ‘Swivelgate’ was being orchestrated by a phalanx of interested parties consisting, by and large, of unelected media barons, Nigel Farage, and a group of hard Tory Right journalists. These folks continue to pursue their objective by using anything to hand – be that the EU referendum issue or the Gay Marriage Bill. They’ve been at this game since a week into the Coalition, when Telegraph journalists brought down a Gay LibDem Minister, and then tried hard through equally nefarious means to nobble Vince Cable. Later still, the Murdoch press – after their own illegality had dropped Camerlot in it bigtime – went out in search of Scottish Nationalists to try and destabilise the Coalition. Along the way, Lord Ashcroft – a shadowy billionaire also unable to garner any votes for himself – has used every weapon at his disposal to undermine Her Majesty’s Government. Now we find Sarkist hacks – in league with Nigel Farage (a man who scuttled round to pay homage to the Digger Murdoch at the first opportunity) trying to do the same thing.

The issue in all this is not which Party one supports or doesn’t support. The issue is, quite simply, the pernicious influence of unelected money in the public life of the country of my birth. I do not give a monkey’s chuff whether a threat to the sovereignty of an elected Commons comes from the TUC, Brussels, Newscorp, multinational managers, mad investment bankers, Ed Balls, Jack Dromey, the Barclay brothers, Washington, Buckingham Palace, or Lizards from the Planet Gung. The principle remains unchanged. I have no respect for David Cameron, and even less for his squeaky Chancellor. But thanks to the vagaries of our electoral system and largely unwritten constitutional conventions, they and the useless Nick Clegg represent the winners (and let’s get real here, for better or worse they were) of the May 2010 General Election.

People who find analyses of how this is being done yawn-inducing should stop coming to The Slog, because they are being incredibly short-sighted. They may well want a Government in which Nigel Farage plays a major part, Newscorp fans have all the High Offices, a fascist Sark-bankrolled buffoon is the real power behind things, and the Opposition is reduced to a rump. If so, they’re welcome to it: but such a thing would be a disaster for civilised culture, democracy and personal liberty. Holding up a Labour victory as “the only alternative” is, to be honest, a risible argument. The real alternative is devolved, communitarian government and national self-sufficiency. The idea of a financially-controlled, globalist-supporting bunch of sociopaths running things would be the sort of nightmare guaranteed to keep me out of Britain permanently.

We are not going to put right our way if life by handing power to fanatics who don’t care a fig about it. That is true whether the victors be Harmanite multiculturalists or Friedmanite monetarists. But we most certainly aren’t going to do it by adopting and endorsing the foul means in play at the moment.

The task for real Britons at the moment is to propagate the idea of a return to ethical, commonsense principles being applied to everything from sexuality and sovereignty to capitalist commerce and taxation. That must be achieved solely by the actions of legally elected legislators, not plots and schemes hatched by hare-brained chancers.

Earlier at The Slog: Is sex-crime justice being royally shafted?

New danger from technology, old case of It’s a Royal Knockout

The Daily Express ‘reveals’ today that – “shockingly” -  a large proportion of parents think pupils as young as five or six should be given lessons on the subject of pornography. They need this, 90% of parents think, to help them cope with what they’re likely to see online. These parents also think the lessons should be at school, and all porno sites should face an automatic block for kids.

It’s an odd little item is this one. The research was wrong to ask about something as broad as ‘pornography’ – a meaningless word at the best of times. The Express is shocked that kids might need to know about such unmentionable things, but not at all shocked by the continuing cover-up of child molestation and porno films of guilty ex Cabinet Ministers buggering care system kids. The parents in turn don’t seem to make any link between lessons about porn in schools, and how the tiny but aggressive minority of paedophiles employed in that profession might use the situation to put, shall we say, their own spin on things. But worst of all, I think, is the news that 9 out of 10 parents want someone else to do the dirty work: somebody else to tell their kids about it, and somebody else to have the near-impossible task of blocking out kids without their assistance.

While that makes quite a statement about contemporary ideas of what constitutes responsibility, we see here again how paedophiles manage, usually, to evade detection and capture with relative ease: not only is Plod demonstrably unwilling to take an active role in the process of tackling such a heinous (and often well-connected) form of crime, the parents don’t want to hear things their kids might say, because such things aren’t naice.

Well, here’s something all parents need to think about. Since the mid 1990s – and up until about two years ago – an obscure field of maths called Markov random field modelling has gradually been proving its use as an application in real-time detection of children’s skin on social networking sites. The last reference I have for this idea is late 2012, when there were papers knocking about talking confidently about ‘probability regions to be segmented and estimated’ using the Markov random field to model the size, age, and so forth of the person using a keyboard remote from the site. The possibilities for protection of children by site-owners are obvious. But I have three questions:

1. Why is there no record of it being adopted to help screen kids out from where they shouldn’t be?

2. As Markov fields can also accurately measure the presence of adult bodies in child spaces, surely this is a major breakthrough in detection of a common means by which paedophiles start grooming kids: has it been applied yet…and if not, why not?

3. Would it be possible for tech-savvy paedophiles to use the technology for their own ends?

I would be willing to bet that Plod is nowhere in this field; but let’s see if any Sloggers know one way or the other. In the meantime, I think more than kids needing to learn about porn at five years old, parents need a rude awakening plus a lecture about what it means to be a parent in this sick culture of ours. We may have passed idiot legislation about smacking kids, but I don’t see anything on the Statute about that form of wake-up call being applied to squeamish mums and dads. They do not need to become obsessed with scaring our children: but there is surely a proper space somewhere between that and the denial we have at the moment.

On now to the Highest Family in the Land, and time for me to remove any slim chance I had left of getting a knighthood. They cost so much these days anyway, one simply can’t afford it….but after this next bit, I severely doubt whether the offer would ever be forthcoming. There follows a direct quote from a Telegraph article of two days ago:

‘Prince Charles takes a close interest in the work of the Secret Services. He presented what will become annual awards for espionage excellence, officially known as the Prince of Wales’s Intelligence Community Awards.’

So if you’ve ever speculated that the heir to the Throne knows something we don’t, you have a degree of confirmation there that Chuck knows one helluva lot more than probably most politicians. You may also wonder if, in a Parliamentary democracy where the Head of State enjoys a largely dignitary role, the future Charles III should be dishing out gongs to spooks right left and centre. For every pro quo, as they say, there may well by at least a quid in it for someone.

“Twas ever thus,” I hear you mutter. But in this instance, you would be quite wrong: last year, Charles Windsor became the royal patron of all three main intelligence agencies. And that is the first time in history it’s happened.

Travel with me now a short distance from Buckingham Palace to Richmond and Barnes, places beloved of previous princes when it came to a bit of droit de seigneur. In those once glittering boroughs, yet another police investigation into systemic child buggery and trafficking is moving along at the sort of lick to put any half-fit snail way out in front. Last week, there was yet another flurry of “a former Minister’s collar will be felt”, but as usual it came to nought. This time, however, vibes I picked up suggested – not for the first time – that trails leading down the Mall were involved. And that, in the light of this, the Secret Service had moved in swiftly with a road-block.

I’ve posted about odd Royal connections to this sort of thing before – notably in relation to the close relationship that existed at one time between Charles’s brother Prince Andrew, and the convicted American paedophile pimp Jeffrey Epstein. I can also confirm that via his marketing trips to the Middle East, keen munitions student Andrew has also in turn cemented long-lasting relationships with British spooks. And that one-time Randy Andy dislikes hacks who “poke about in things that are none of their business”.

Without being melodramatic, what we have here is the two senior sons of Queen Elizabeth II very well in thank you with the country’s intelligence  agencies. Perhaps that’s why keen Royalist David Cameron told the hapless Philip Schofield last year that “if people know anything, they should go to the police”. Then they could be sure it’d go straight to the Palace, and action would be taken.

For many older or more traditional Brits, this developing slot in today’s Paedofile will go down as “disgusting republican rumour and innuendo”. That would be unfair because first, I am not a republican; and second, the Royal Family is far from free of rumour when it comes to secrecy both past and present. I am a supporter of the Monarchy, but not of a monarchy above the law: we tried that up until 1660, but it didn’t work. Further, the third Charles to follow those last two control freaks has shown himself in several ways to have an interest in pushing the boundaries of Royal involvement in affairs of State. It is therefore perfectly proper for commentators to question the wisdom of his actions.

Lest we forget, the alleged ‘list’ at Elm House contained the names of two members of Royal staff, and eclectic forms of buggery within the walls of the Royal Palace have been alleged on several occasions. The short-lived reign of Edward VIII (whose interfering was on a par with that of the current heir) gave Churchill terrible problems during 1940, when it became perfectly obvious that the Simpson-shagger was feeding secrets to the Nazis. The lid has been kept ruthlessly on the details of that caper these 70 years or more, after which the relevant Cabinet papers are still withheld. To paraphrase Disraeli, when it comes to secrecy and the Royal family, they lay it on with a trowel.

Of course, I accept that there is no inbuilt correlation between rank and paedophilia. The Left would like to suggest there is, because that suits their hopelessly archaic agenda. The link I continue to hypothesise is that of the psychographic congruence between bullying control freaks and child molesters: but at present, that’s all it is. To be frank, the link between having been abused in childhood – and then abusing kids in adulthood – is far more empirically sound.

But there is a blindingly obvious link between rank and prosecution for paedophiliac behaviour. It seems that to the list of MPs, Peers, cops, senior officials, judges, and politically affiliated local government pols immune from Plod’s interest, we must now add Windsors. In 21st century Britain, you have to be dead, stupid, over 75, a former BBC groper, or somebody in PR the security services don’t like to be charged with sex offences. As of last year, Catholic clergy have been grudgingly allowed membership to this ridiculously eccentric, unrepresentative, and frequently innocent club. Serious authority figures remain, as ever, in the dark corners of which our children are blissfully (but dangerously) innocent.

This entire pavanne of depraved corruption has been and still is a shameful stain on our standing as the motherland of modern Parliamentary democracy. But apart from machinating political tribalists, there exist none in positions of power who will stand up and take the heat from those busily cooking the facts and immolating the evidence. The only option is for people far braver than I, at the sharp end, to keep on searching, sleuthing and stabbing this cultural hobgoblin in the heart.

Yesterday at The Slog: Why media moguls in 2013 are more dangerous than Scargill was in 1974

In existentialism, the individual’s starting point is characterised by what has been called “the existential attitude”, or ‘a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world’. (That’s a crib from one of the classic definitions)

One of my closest friends has a shorter version, which goes “It’s all bollocks and that’s official”.

His observation (and to this day I suspect he doesn’t realise this) inspired the brand ‘The Slog’….short for bollockslog. But the existentialist approach was what topped off the name for me: life is a bloody hard slog, but in the end it is meaningless and absurd. Hence, The Slog. Except that I don’t accept the basics of existentialism. Go figure.

There was much disagreement among the existentialists about, well, pretty much everything really – including how many principles of it there are – five? six? – whether to call themselves existentialists at all, and even about whether the e should be E. Most versions of it today list five principles. The first one – ‘Existence exists‘ – strikes many people as a thinking stage that could’ve been skipped, but it’s actually an antidote to the Buddhist assertion, ‘nothing is real’. So it is very important indeed. But I disagree with it, while liking much of what existentialism posits.

There was, for example, very little discord among the exi’s about what to do in the light of life’s existence, and its meaningless absurdity: potential is infinite, so all beings must try to realise their potential. There was lots of argey-bargey about whether we should do it on our own or look for collective help, but no deviation at all from the central rule: finding the world mad and doing nothing about it is not an option. Thus, the most celebrated exponent of this – Jean-Paul Sartre – believed that ‘In order to ground itself, the self needs projects, which can be viewed as aspects of an individual’s fundamental project and motivated by a desire for “being” lying within the individual’s consciousness. The source of this project is a spontaneous original choice that depends on the individual’s freedom.’

This may all sound like angels gyrating on a pinhead to you now, but remember that Sartre lived in a world where people were in three minds re what to do about fascism: support it, fight it, or do nothing.

Much of that (I’ve always thought) is about the individual exerting a free will upon a physical world. Change something in the world, and you prove you exist. Ergo, ‘Existentialism’. I have to say that reading Sartre, at Uni I often found the bugger seemed to contradict himself, move goalposts and shift sand at regular intervals; but ultimately, I suppose you could say that the bottom line here is “You exist, so don’t just stand there – do something”.

My problem is, I agree with the sentiment of that….up to but not including the ‘exist’ thing. My argument with Sartre is that the self is not real, there is no chance of feeling grounded, so wassa point, eh? I am that person eternally stuck between existentialism and Buddhism: I do think we should strive for a better world, but I don’t think the world is real – because if it was, then it wouldn’t be so f**king absurdly pointless. QED, or something.

Some eight years ago, I found a German philosopher (still very much alive as it happens) called Eckhart Tolle. He has written many books, but for me the definitive one is The Power of Now. I wouldn’t call myself a disciple – I dislike all cults – but there are truths in Tolle’s thinking that are both existential and Buddist at the same time. Above all, where Tolle cracks it is by saying that almost all human misery derives from guilt about the past and fear of the future…..so stay in The Now as much as you can. To my mind, putting his finger on Time as the Big Illusionist is what moves Tolle beyond being just another fortune cookie self-help-book clichéiste.

The concept of ‘Now’ is Buddhist, but it is also existentialist: that is, we exist in the Now, and the rest (ie Time) is bullsh*t. Follow that reasoning and you can plug directly into quantum physics, Einstein’s relativity theory – and much of the theory about sub-atomic physics….which in turn leads into a quite startling vindication of homaeopathy, revolving around the reversal of normal principles in the sub-atomic zone.

A sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world is what I feel most days on reading the spread of information available to all those of us who feel motivated to comment on it. What keeps me going are the absolute certainties that none of it is real, that we are all being tested to see what we make of it, that escape to what is real may well be the point of the entire exercise, and that all facile cynicism will do is ensure we never escape…because it only strengthens the bars that imprison us.

This is what makes me a hopelessly Buddhist Existentialist. I believe that Time is bunk, but Now is real – and all the true prophets were trying to tell us this in their own way. Allow yourself to be ruled by a right cortex ego obsessing about past and future, and you have no existence, no reality. But strive to make a difference in Now – in the true reality perceived by senses – and you become indestructibly immortal.

Take it or leave it: it is nevertheless my conclusion. Cue lots of smart-arsed threads about me being Out of my Depth etc etc. ; – )

Earlier at The Slog: Swivel-eyed loons reacting to thoughts on the nature of swivel-eyed loons

Not a swivel-eyed loon, as such

The Tory Party Co-Chairman Andrew Feldman is vehemently denying that he was the person who made the “bunch of swivel-eyed loons” (BOSEL) crack about Conservative grassroots workers. He is, I’m told, considering legal action if anyone repeats the rumour. Analysis by The Slog suggests that four key players may well have been behind the alleged insult becoming infamous now…despite having been first uttered by Cameron himself some time ago.

Somebody – or more accurately, body of men – have worked very hard to inflate the swivel-eyed loons row. For starters, there are those who think Boris Johnson’s younger brother Jo is far more of a cuckoo in the Camerlot nest than the Prime Minister realises. Boris has said on several occasions in private that he and his brother Johnson “are indivisible on policy”. Within days of being appointed, Johnson the younger urged Cameron to seriously reconsider building a new hub airport in the Thames Estuary. This is, of course, his Mayoral brother’s pet project. Previous pamphlets from Jo also suggest he is at odds with his new boss.

However Downing Street tries to spin the appointment, it was a serious U-turn by David Cameron. Previously he’d employed civil servants in the role, but this time he chose a former Whip with a degree of clout within the Party. And although some see JoJo as pro-Europe, he certainly isn’t pro-Brussels: if anything, he is something of a Commonwealth loyalist with a passionate belief in the UK trading more with Asia in general – and India in particular. This is a view he shares with Nigel Farage, as well as his brother.

Before we go further by the way – because there seems to me to be deliberate obfuscation going on here – the Top Tory said local associations were swivel-eyed loons, not Backbench MPs. But some MSM on the Borishunt Fallongove wing of the Conservative Party have been blurring that distinction…with obviously mischievous intent.

The story about the BOSEL remark – while known to several hacks – was broken by one man and one man alone: James Kirkup, the deputy political editor of the Daily Telegraph. But of far greater interest to me is who started the Andrew Feldman rumour. Finger someone like Ollie Letwin (as I did yesterday) and Camerlot can just write it off as sour grapes. Finger Cameron’s co-Chairman, and you get Cameron’s biggest fund-raiser sacked….and a major row on your hands. We now have a major row on our hands. The Sundays are all over the story – including the Newscorpers – and Lord Feldman is not being helped by Grant Shapps defending him. I wouldn’t believe Shapps if he said “Good morning” to me: his business career is a trail of proven misrepresentation.

The Sun leads with ‘only 20 backbenchers loyal to Cameron’, something of a canard in that it means only twenty MPs have voted with him on every issue since May 2010. But it does make for a dramatic headline…and blurs the line I mentioned above. Camerlot’s Spin-Horse has issued a careful denial saying that “no member of the Prime Minister’s key Downing Street staff made such a remark”.

For once, however, the Mail on Sunday may be on to something. It notes, shrewdly (and accurately) that Cameron has himself made the remark before – using those exact words. I would go further: I know for a fact that he has used it about Nigel Farage – who in private gets quite excitable on the subject. Also, the respected FT hack George Parker recorded last year that the Prime Minister refers to his backbenchers in this vein at regular intervals anyway. So somehow here, a non-story has been turned into a story – why?

And how? James Kirkup posted the now infamous column at three minutes before 10 pm Friday last. He did not reveal the ‘Top Tory’ name. But Matthew Parrish alleges that the remark was made at an off-the-record dinner. If so, that tars Kirkup with unpleasant intent to make trouble – especially if he knew Cameron himself had made the remark previously.

Friday evening later on has the Guardian hack Nicholas Watt claiming that the Senior Tory made the remark ‘in earshot of journalists’ – note plural. He also wrote two further interesting comments: ‘Farage, who knows the identity of the Tory…’ and ‘…The Times, Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror, who all reported the remarks and who know the identity of the Tory, declined to name the senior member of the prime minister’s circle’ – again, note plural.

So Kirkup doesn’t have an exclusive. But it’s his story that breaks through. And if Farage knows the Top Tory’s identity…as he wasn’t at the dinner, who told him?

The first column I can find saying “I suspect the Top Tory’s identity will be revealed today” was posted at The Spectator’s site at 6am Saturday morning by James Forsyth. It’s hard to miss the sense in his piece that Mr Forsyth already knew the name from somewhere. He’s also relishing what’s about to follow.

At some point after this, the alleged identity of Feldman as the author of BOSEL breaks in the media. However, if you go to what I think is the best site to trace this sort of thing - NewsNow – you will see that no other MSM newspaper said anything about Feldman being the culprit until the denials began. This seems to be confirmed the Independent’s post at 1.09 pm to say ‘the party’s co-chairman Lord Feldman has rebuffed internet rumours that it was him that made the comment’. Did these internet rumours emanate from Tory Home?

 By 5 pm Saturday, Kirkup was tweeting, “I have read Lord Feldman’s statement. I stand by my story. I have nothing to add”.

At 5.52 pm, Top Spectator Tory Fraser Nelson posted a column covering the Feldman and Kirkup statements.

At some indeterminate time – probably late Saturday – Tory Home published a piece by Paul Goodman which stirred the brew bigtime:

‘The key problem with the loons claim, as I point out in the Mail on Sunday today, is that many Tories think it’s what Downing Street thinks.  Three very senior Ministers made it clear to me yesterday that they believe Number 10 has a very low view of Party activists.  James Forsyth suggests in the same paper today that David Cameron should write to each Association Chairman to say what a good job he or she is doing – and how much their work is valued. Lord Feldman should certainly ring each one over the next few days to make it clear that this is his view.’

Let’s examine some of the key players involved in what, I am increasingly convinced, is merely another stage in the continuing determination by genuine BOSELs on the Tory Right to destabilise Camerlot. I think we can safely take Borishunt Fallongove as being sympathisers for granted, and focus on those guilty of propagation here…..if not out and out propaganda.

James Kirkup ran the story without reference to the name. He may have been involved as an initial catalyst with others. Certainly he at least sprained journalistic etiquette by running it.

James Forsyth was egging the pudding as long ago as June 2012 when he wrote in The Spectator that ‘Inside Ten Downing Street, it seems that it is becoming a question of when to announce a referendum not whether to call one’. He is close to Farage, and very much a pro-UKIP Daily Mail Tory. He is also close to BoJo.

Fraser Nelson makes no bones about seeing Cameron as ‘infected’ by pro-EU sentiments. In January, he accused Cameron in the media of lying about Britain’s national debt, describing Cameron’s broadcast about it as “so astonishingly dishonest that it really would have disgraced Gordon Brown”. He always gets a good press at Tory Home, where Paul Goodman makes many an appearance….when he’s not writing for the Daily Mail. But he’s a relatively peripheral player in this one: mainly, it seems to me, he’s doing his job.

But when it comes to Cameron, only Nigel Farage is nastier than Paul Goodman. On April 23rd, Goodman wrote a piece saying that ‘senior advisors to David Cameron are leaving in droves’. Five days ago he told readers that ‘David Cameron is heading for the exit. Enter Gove’. Last December he wrote that ‘the 2015 election is already lost’ with Cameron at the helm. Only yesterday he is reported to have said, “David Cameron has so many problems with his party because he and his entourage don’t like it very much”.

But Mr Nasty becomes Mr Nice when on the subject of UKip’s leader. ‘Many Conservative Party members have a soft spot for Nigel Farage, Ukip’s rumbustious leader’ he wrote in the Telegraph last September. ‘One in ten who voted Tory in 2010 has switched to Nigel Farage’s Ukip’ he gushed last January.

However, this excerpt from a Goodman piece two weeks ago at Tory Home might be highly significant: ‘UKIP activists in essence are, overwhelmingly, Conservatives, and many of them are former party activists.  And the UKIP programme for which they campaign is in large part a Conservative one, too.  Very simply, UKIP is a party of the right, and Mr Cameron ought to be crafting a tent big enough to contain voters from both the right and centre’. This reads like not so much a Freudian slip as Sigmund’s entire underwear drawer on display.

So in the classic Perry Mason manner, let us establish timing, means, and motive….in no particular order. Nigel Farage knows that the only way he can do a deal with the Tories is if its leader goes. He also knows that many Tory activists have strong Conservative sympathies. He dislikes Cameron intensely and is very bitter about the original Dave BOSEL remark which he knows was aimed at him. Nigel was stirring the pot within minutes of Kirkup’s story on Friday night, and claims to know the identity of the BOSELer on this occasion. He has mates throughout the right wing press, and is regarded by many as an insidious leaker against all opponents. So he ticks all the boxes.

Paul Goodman is a confidante of Cameron rival David Davis. He quit Parliament soon after Cameron became leader. He makes a good living as a freelance right-wing journalist for Tory Home, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph – all normally anti-Camerlot publications. He’s been upping the ante on BOSEL since yesterday afternoon, and again this morning. He supports many of UKip’s ideas, and likes its leader. Privately he thinks a Tory-UKip deal is the only way the Right can win in 2015. He has written in the past about the relationship between Tory and UKip grassroots workers. He too ticks all the boxes.

James Kirkup writes an influential column for the Daily Telegraph. He broke the story when others declined to do so…probably because the remark was made at a private dinner alleged to have been off-the-record. He hasn’t confirmed Feldman as the source, but he hasn’t denied it either. Many in both journalism and the Conservative Party would regard him as being a bit of a rotter for running the story at all. Others wonder why recycled old new at this particular time. Just look at some of his tweets and retweets since Friday on Twitter - (He’s made none since):

RT @MirrorJames: Tory activists are “mad, swivel-eyed loons”, declares crony of David Cameron http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/conservative-party-activists-mad-swivel-eyed-1895672 … #spitemonkeywin

Paul Goodman ‏@PaulGoodmanCH 17 May Morning, all. How are your eyes today? Steady in their sockets?

Last night at The Slog: The case for not making financial crooks a special case

So tonight I want to put a simple proposition to all Sloggers: why should financial services as a sector of commerce be the unique exception?

As I have written several times previously, the mere word ‘regulation’ is spat forth by the City of London and Wall Street chaps as if it might be a highly contagious form of Socialist leprosy. But the commitment of these idiots to The Golden Calf makes them oblivious to the many other equally vital areas of life where regulation is, um, equally vital. It might well be instructive to look at a broader professional world to which total deregulation had been applied.

Take medicine, for example. Imagine applying the ‘expertise’ level of the clowns running HBOS at the time of its implosion to the issue of surgical procedures. Triple heart bypass operations being performed by lobbyists, and complex intravenous brain investigations being undertaken by former market researchers…..my goodness me yes, what a splendid case history of deregulation that would’ve provided. Very much in line, really, with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, wherein peasants became doctors and doctors worked in the paddy fields.

Or the legal profession. How about a no-limits Court procedure under which every form of hearsay is admissable, and anyone can pitch up to a Grand Jury hearing with nothing beyond GCSE Geography with which to defend his or her client? You may think this parallel extreme, but if so you should think again: the four most senior directors of HBOS – during the period of its descent into obscene debt and taxpayer rescue – had not one single banking qualification between them.

Let’s have a deregulated architectural profession. Never mind all this tedious red tape about load-bearing calculations and proper foundations: this kind of crap is getting in the way of growth. Get the bloody project built, like they do in India….then we can praise the bravery of the rescue services as one small child is rescued, and the diligence of the police in arresting nine developers. What we won’t be able to do, however, is bring back the 79 people killed.

My own former profession of advertising was heavily regulated. Do I think it would’ve been a good idea to deregulate it? I do not: the business was full of reptiles who would’ve declared open war on the consumer the minute regulations were removed.

We’ve seen the way things are among ‘professional’ (but totally unregulated) politicians, have we not? Broadscale corruption, cash for questions, cash for access to Ministers, fiddled expenses….and then yet more fiddled expenses. Should politicians face exams and regulations? Yes – actually, I think they should. They should face serious examination on their knowledge of social anthropology, commercial experience, and Right from Wrong. And then they should be warned before standing that any dishonesty involving taxpayers’ money will be rewarded with serious prison sentences…not poncey open prison flower-arranging jollies à la Chris Huhne.

Does anyone remember deregulated Murdoch at work? Illegal phone hacking was Murdoch’s work. I don’t want press regulation: but I do want gargoyles owner like Murdoch out of the UK’s media offering for good.

If you want to know what a completely deregulated world would be like, then just go on the internet for half an hour. There you will find that free = expensive, unique = commodity, guaranteed = zero warranty, and hand-made = slave-laboured.

Not only should financial services not be the exception, it should be the main industry to be gone over with a fine tooth comb.

My message tonight for all those who would deregulate commerce in all media is this: first, re-engineer the culture so that people know how to behave. Then come and talk to me about deregulation.

Earlier at The Slog: The swivelling eyes on offer in 2015

A close ally of David Cameron meanwhile has called Conservative grassroots supporters “mad swivel-eyed loons” who are forcing Tory MPs to take extremist positions opposing gay marriage and Europe. The Minister – “a close confidante” of Mr Cameron who didn’t want to be named – is very probably Mr Oliver Letwin, well-known habitué of London litter bins for the use of Top Secret document disposal, and the brains behind elected police chiefs. I personally find that cv far more extreme than being against gay marriage and the EU, but each to his own. David Cameron is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Across the corridor in the House of Common Criminals, a close ally of Ed Miliband has urged the Labour Leader to pave the way for a coalition with Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats. The man (happy to be named, as he is rapidly becoming the forgotten man of British politics) is Peter Hain, the man who built his career on being carried away by policemen and digging up cricket pitches. “We need back channels on this issue,” Mr Hain added – not a wise choice of phrase in the current Parliamentary environment. The former South African said that he would be “fighting tooth and nail for an overall majority” but thought it was unlikely to be achieved, possibly because there won’t be any job-hitting or growth-jabbing, which he admitted he found “disappointing”.

Five days ago Ed Miliband said that Britain “must stay in the European Union”, and three days ago David Cameron said that both Miliband and Clegg were “sticking their heads in the sand” about the need for a referendum: they should, he insisted, be prepared, like him, to extract their heads from the sand some time in 2017. In the light of these and many other bits of evidence, former Labour donor Lord Sainsbury called Miliband “average” as a politician, and earlier this week Mary Riddell called him “the Doctor Who of British politics” without satisfactorily explaining in the article what she meant. His speech of earlier in the week was found “disappointing” by those present, “although he was good when taking questions” said one lady. A middleweight Labour MP confided that he “cannot believe that Ed wants to lead us into an Election where everyone wants out of the EU, and we are the only serious Party ruling out a referendum”. Ed Miliband is the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in Parliament.

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Just sort of let the aggregate of those facts sink in a bit, and then carry on reading.

After the 2015 General Election, we could very easily find that we have somehow – probably inadvertantly – voted in a Coalition between one man who believes olive oil pourers to be a real and present health hazard, and thinks referendums hit things; and another man who may have ambitions to be a Time traveller, but won’t even contemplate leaving a madhouse where olive oil pourers are banned. Whichever way you cut that combo, it doesn’t look good for reality, or indeed Italian restaurants.

On the other hand, we could wind up (as the lesser of two bubonic plagues) with another term of Dave the man, who thinks only swivel-eyed loons are against gay marriages in the EU…and who could very soon afterwards find himself ousted by people who look to me for all the world like half a dozen loons whose eyes never close, on account of swivelling 24 hours a day.

The other runner in the 2015 contest will be a Party led by Nigel Farage, a man infamous this week for his ability to shoot off both feet at once in Scotland….by putting the phone down on a BBC Scotland interviewer, and calling SNP supporters fascist scum. He too might become part of a Tory administration, but if he did Dave would have to go. Thus we’d be left with Government by Seven Swivel-Eyed Loons.

One vaguely comforting thing about this prospect is the, to my mind anyway, very strong likelihood that these coalitions will cancel each other out in terms of electoral support. But when it comes to the choice before the electorate, it’s going to be between one team led by those who have a morbid fear of olive oil bottles, and another crowd dead keen to hand Rupert Murdoch the job of BBC Director General. I wonder what the turnout will be.

It’s hard to see how anyone could construct a Nazi-Soviet pact between those two opposing barmy armies, and that’s why I have a terrible fear that something else might emerge. There are, after all, three people in this Eton-Wall-Game-Meets-Underwater-Rugby unpleasantness who have one thing in common: they would much prefer to stay in the European Union rather than leave it. And they are, of course, Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg.

Yes, I’m afraid the Grand Coalition is a real possibility. United by their common ground on the Olive Oil Pourer issue, this Unholy Trinity would easily command a majority, leaving only Monday Clubbers, Ukippers and Stalinists to pass the time in Opposition with daily eyeball-workouts. It would break the mould of British politics. And every olive pourer in Europe.

Earlier at The Slog: More food for thought on market manipulation