What a tangled web Uppal weaves

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for my awful MP, Paul Uppal. He's a Tory MP with a majority of 619 in a working-class city, whose majority exists because the Labour vote slumped. He relies on the votes of the elderly, white, middle-class people on the western edge of the city, and he thinks they're going to vote UKIP.

What's the magic Tory solution? Well, the city has a large Sikh community which has traditionally voted Labour. The (slightly racist in my opinion) Tory thinking appears to be that Sikhs will set aside their political beliefs in favour of identity politics and vote en bloc for a fellow Sikh. Bingo: Tory majority, hence Paul's recent focus on Sikh affairs.

Distasteful and patronising, but it's a strategy. Sadly though, the worst thing in politics that can possible happen is, as Harold MacMillan never actually said, 'events, dear boy, events'. Operation Sikh Vote was going rather nicely last year, when Paul managed to cling on to David Cameron's coat-tails and get himself on the trip to Amritsar, the spiritual home of Sikhism.

Here's Mr Cameron at the Golden Temple:

So far, so good. Great photos, support no doubt rising. And then! Calamity! It turns out that Paul's political hero, one Margaret Thatcher, supported the Indian government's full-scale attack on the separatists occupying the temple, leading to 3000 deaths. Not only did she offer political support, she sent an SAS officer over to help plan it. All very unfortunate: Paul was pressing the government for 'the truth' about Amritsar for political advantage, and it turns out to be very unhelpful indeed.

So poor Paul's in a bit of a bind. As an ultra-loyalist, does he break with his party's view that this is all a fuss about nothing and pursue the truth and re-election, or does he shut his mouth and continue to enjoy the torrent of dodgy money pouring in from various funds to help marginal constituencies? I imagine that if anything will encourage Sikh voters to work together, it's throwing out the party which connived in the deaths of 3000 of their young men.

Paul's solution? Hush it up. It turns out that he organised a meeting with the Cabinet Secretary this week, and decided that concerned MPs from other parties didn't need to be there. He wanted a quiet little chat so they could organise a cosy little deal that would save his political bacon and would have got away with it too if he hadn't let it slip during a TV appearance.

"I want to take the politics out of this. I want to go and see Sir Jeremy Heywood. He is going to have some other representatives of the Sikh community there. If he wants to have a meeting with Tom Watson I am sure he will be happy to do that.”

Uppal, who eventually met the cabinet secretary with the former Labour business minister Pat McFadden, said: “As the only Sikh MP it was only reasonable and sensible that I should go and see the cabinet secretary,” he told the Guardian. “I got an invite. I had been pushing for it. I made it clear I wanted to see the cabinet secretary.”

Let's hope poor Paul's manoeuvrings don't rebound against him on election day as he stands for the party that gave a big thumbs up to murdering his own people. And in case you think I'm being cold and cynical, the Sikh 24 Channel knows exactly where the Tory Party's interest lies:

Cameron, who is said to be deeply concerned about the impact of the revelations from 1984 among Sikh voters, recorded a message for the Sikh Channel in which he spoke of the “dreadful incident” at the Golden Temple which “remains a source of deep pain to Sikhs everywhere”.

Update: the fix is in. 
William Hague made a risible statement yesterday, with a report attached which carefully doesn't include the key document, a letter from Margaret Thatcher to Indira Ghandi, and there will be internal reviews. The Guardian is not impressed:

Yes, it is the case that an exhaustive review of paperwork took place. That is Sir Jeremy's way; he is our top civil servant. But it wasn't quite everything, because in 2009 the Ministry of Defence came across one of the relevant files and destroyed it. That was regrettable, said Hague, but not catastrophic. Sufficient was unearthed for Sir Jeremy to conclude everyone had behaved properly. 

There will be a review, said Hague, led by Sir Alex Allan – the PM's adviser on ministerial standards – to ensure no more files are destroyed in circumstances that later become difficult to explain. Thus there will be an internal review by Sir Alex, prompted by the internal review by Sir Jeremy. But no, there will be no apology or public inquiry, for there is nothing new under this sun. Unsurprisingly, Labour members were disinclined to accept Hague's assurances at face value.

But Paul is:

British involvement was not in any shape or form malicious

Really? Sending military advisers to help storm the home of Sikhism, leading to 3000 deaths?

But then Paul gets clever:

If documents cannot be released to the general public, will my right hon. Friend take the unusual step of making sure that they are released to the widest possible audience, but within a proper environment?

One of the reviews going on is into how the documents got released at all: apparently they were meant to be suppressed, which would have been very convenient all round. The magic words here are 'within a proper environment'. Without them, it sounds like Brave Paul is calling for openness and facing up to the truth. But hey presto! 'A proper environment' means 'never' or 'selectively' or 'amidst a massive spin-doctoring operation' to ensure that political discomfort is avoided. That's certainly how the Foreign Secretary sees it:

questions arise over when documents should be withheld and how the 30-year rule, which is to become the 20-year rule, is implemented. Those are fair questions that can be looked at in Sir Alex Allan’s review.

What Paul really means is 'bollocks: I've a 619 majority in a constituency with a significant Sikh population and now I'm in trouble you bastards'.

Speaking ill of the dead

Over the past few weeks, right-wing newspapers have made it clear that anyone who so much as murmurs objections to St Margaret Thatcher's biography (kitten-lover, washed the feet of the poor every evening, sent every miner a postal order on their birthdays, always the last to leave St. Patrick's Day ceilidhs) is a damned traitor who should be hung in Trafalgar Square and is bloody rude too.

In my ongoing attempt to point out that political discourse in modern Britain is politer than in any previous period, here's an obituary:

The subject is King George IV, spendthrift, hypocrite and bigot. He was ridiculed in life and damned in death by all and sundry. I find it hard to imagine a mainstream newspaper being quite so pungent about any royal or politician these days… even Prince Andrew or Tony Blair. 

Despite building the magnificent Royal Pavilion in Brighton (which the racist English Defence League recently mistook for a Mosque.

the only way George is at all remembered is as a foppish moron in his years as Prince Regent, memorialised so gloriously by Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third. 

It's the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine

So, the Thatcher funeral. A 7 hour tribute in the Commons compared with the 45 minutes afforded Winston Churchill. A David Cameron interview this morning which claimed that 'We are all Thatcherites now', and that a funeral indistinguishable from a State one is necessary because 'foreigners' would think it odd if we didn't. £10 million for a funeral for a woman who made sure that striking miners' families were refused funeral grants for their men's families. Peter Mandelson telling us this morning that she told him 'The Irish are liars. Liars. You cannot forget that'. The desolation of Northern Ireland, the dead hunger strikers, the SAS murder squads. The crumbling schools and fragmented HE system in which education is considered a private good rather than a public benefit – and the same goes for the NHS. The friendships with the most gruesome, grotesque characters on earth: Saudi dictators. Saddam Hussein. Pinochet. Kissinger. Murdoch. Archer. Aitken. Savile. Apartheid South Africa. Saying nothing when the US invaded a Commonwealth country (Grenada) for electing a socialist government. A host of industrialists who made their fortunes from making the poor fat and sick, cramming them into rabbit hutch houses and low-paid work if any. TV and radio cheapened and weakened. A supine media which hacks its way across the land in search of stories about footballers' sex lives. National xenophobia and hostility towards the poor, the black and now the disabled. A North laid waste, a South in thrall to debt and house prices beyond the reach of all but the richest. Former national utilities channelling billions to shareholders while the infrastructure decays. A country bankrupted by her City friends while industry is a fading ghost at the feast. Tax evasion as a legitimate profit centre (don't forget: Thatcher was a tax lawyer). Open contempt for the poor and for any notion of public service. Claims that the working classes are 'the enemy within'. The naked, bigoted hatred for homosexuals made concrete in Section 28, which forbade any teachers from mentioning homosexuality. Race riots. The cult of the motor car and the aeroplane. Privatised hospitals, social services and even prisons.

In fact, there's a piece of poetry which sums up how I feel about this seedy, polluted, socially-divided, vicious Thatcherite country. It's Hell, as seen by Satan in Paradise Lost, having been thrown out of Heaven:

The dismal Situation waste and wilde, [ 60 ]
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace [ 65 ]
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd [ 70 ]
For those rebellious, here thir Prison ordain'd
In utter darkness, and thir portion set
As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n
As from the Center thrice to th' utmost Pole.
O how unlike the place from whence they fell! 

Here instead, the voice of a man whose politics came, quite literally, from the coalface rather than PPE, a think-tank or a lobbyist's office.



Perhaps it's tasteless to say these things on a person's funeral – but she wanted a public funeral and the Tories have used taxpayers' money to make it a political affair. And nothing's more tasteless than what she did to this country.

History Corner: a satire special for the Daily Mail.

For what seems like (but can't be) the fifth week running, the Mail is criticising the breasts and/or employment of people who celebrated Margaret Thatcher's demise. Some of these headlines are hard to make up.






It's also running a campaign to force the BBC to censor the Pop Charts because some people are marking the event by purchasing Judy Garland's 'Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead'. I don't want to add to their mental stress, but it was written by a lefty!

Personally, I prefer the Klaus Nomi version:

Now, there's a certain irony in the Mail (and the Telegraph, amongst others) calling for censorship. Why? Because these are the newspapers leading the charge against any kind of statutory regulation of the press. The Mail also got very, very angry when the BBC edited out a couple of racial epithets from a (1970s) Fawlty Towers episode and from an old Elvis Costello song: "If we let the BBC wield censor’s scissors whenever they like they will get away with being as imperious, bossy & bullying as Sybil Fawlty" it said. 'Censorship that shames the BBC', it said. 'A grim day for all those who value freedom', it said. What else? 'For centuries men and women fought and died for freedom of expression. Who are Miliband and Clegg to throw it away?' It also gave space to Peter Hitchens to announce that 'David Cameron ... will be remembered mainly as the man who brought censorship back to Britain'. Melanie Phillips rounded on Hacked Off and its influence: 'unelected campaigners' trying to hijack the public sphere in piece titled, with absolutely no irony at all, 'The Press is the last bastion of free thinking that the Left has not managed to conquer. Until now'.

And now for a little perspective. Firstly, the British have a long tradition of apparently tasteless public celebrations of deaths. I'm not sure if you know, but every year on November 5th, British people burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, who was tortured and murdered by the state after his failed attempt to blow up Parliament. Similar street parties were held when Mary Queen of Scots died, and usually followed the demise of unpopular rulers and regimes. A large number of traitors celebrated the American victory in the War of Independence in 1783, which they saw as a blow against imperialism and oppression shortly to be imported to Britain: imagine the Mail's reaction if it had existed then. Also, when George VI toured the Blitzed East End during WW2, it was presented as a triumphant bonding moment: in actuality, large numbers of ungrateful Cockneys roundly booed the monarch. A generation or two before, Queen Victoria was so unpopular that her advisors genuinely feared revolution.

And that's just the common herd. If the Mail is so upset by a song from a musical, imagine their shock if they'd ever seen any eighteenth-century satirical cartoons, or read poetry, from Byron to Pope. Here, for example, is Hogarth's Sir Francis Dashwood At His Devotions: Dashwood was a notorious sexual libertine, member of the Hellfire Club, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. You may notice that his Bible has been replaced with a naked woman and an erotic volume:



Here's another Hogarth, from the Times of 7th September 1763, in which he attacks the recently fired prime minister William Pitt, the man on stilts trying to 'fan the flames' of war. The heroic fireman is meant to be either his successor Bute, or the King, desperately trying to prevent war from spreading throughout Europe, while those firing on him are Pitt's political and media supporters:



Here's Gillray's attack on the Prince Regent, whom he considered a greedy, dissolute scoundrel (later immortalised in Blackadder the Third. This one is A Voluptuary Under The Horrors of Digestion:



Here's another one of the Prince Regent, by arch-conservative George Cruikshank:




And then we move on to literary satire. How about Byron's lines on the hated and arch-reactionary PM Viscount Castlereagh, who killed himself?

Epigram

So Castlereagh has cut his throat! - the worst
of this is, that his own was not the first.
So he has cut his throat at last! He? Who?
The man who cut his country's long ago.

Dedication to 'Don Juan'.

Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferred to gorge upon a sister shore
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fixed,
And offer poison long already mixed.


Posterity will ne'er survey
a Nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss!

And of course Shelley's lines on Castlereagh in 'The Mask of Anarchy', about the Peterloo Massacre:

I met Murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew…

There was also an outpouring of joy at the assassination of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham - lots more here.

'A Satire on the D of B'

For all thy quondam power, thy name shall bee
For ever hateful to posteritie.
Yet I could wish one thing for thee, belowe,
In those infernall shades where thou do'st goe,
Thou might'st a purgatorie finde, wherein
A thousand yeares mighte expiate thy sinne,
By purging those deepe staines, and vices fowle,
Which in thy life-time did infect thy soule,
That soe, at last, thou might'st enjoy that blisse,
Where our Creator and Redeemer is.

'Prosopopeia':

I that my countrey did betray,
Undid that king that let mee sway
His sceptre as I pleas'd; brought downe
The glorie of the English crowne
The courtiers' bane, the countries' hate,
An agent for the Spanish state;
The Romists' frend, the gospells' foe,
The Church and kingdomes overthrowe;
Heere a damned carcase dwell,
'Till my soule returne from hell.
With Judas then I shall inherit,
Such portion as all traytors meritt.
If heaven admitt of treason, pride, and lust,
Expect my spotted soule among the iust.

Here's a poem in praise of Mr Felton, the assassin:

Awake, sad Brittaine, and advance at last
Thy drooping head: let all thy sorrowes past
Bee drown'd, and sunke with their owne teares; and now
O're-looke thy foes with a triumphant brow.
Thy foe, Spaine's agent, Holland's bane, Rome's freind,
By one victorious hand receiv'd his end.
Live ever, Felton: thou hast turn'd to dust,
Treason, ambition, murther, pride and lust.

I could also point you in the direction of Alexander Pope, but I think instead I'll drop the nuclear bomb of satire: the Earl of Rochester's 1673 'Satyre on Charles II', which he supposedly accidentally handed to the king himself… before fleeing the country.

Warning: this contains words not normally seen in the Daily Mail.

I' th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best-bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get renown
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
---Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.
'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
---To Carwell, the most dear of all his dears,
The best relief of his declining years,
Oft he bewails his fortune, and her fate:
To love so well, and be beloved so late.
For though in her he settles well his tarse,
Yet his dull, graceless ballocks hang an arse.
This you'd believe, had I but time to tell ye
The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly,
Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs,
Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.
---All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
---From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.

So on balance, I think the right is rather over-reacting to some people spending 79p on a song from a musical.

From the vinyl vaults

There are a lot of Thatcher Death Party soundtracks floating around at the moment. One of my favourite collections in this one, because it includes some tracks that aren't just angry punk screaming.

Like this classic bit of rave-era revenge: sampling Thatcher ranting about acid parties to provide a self-referential soundtrack:



And now I'm going to go home and slump into oblivion. I've seen several dissertation students, counselled more by email, and been to 3 long meetings. No marking, no preparation and certainly no chance to sneak off for a swim. Feeling very fat and unhealthy at the moment.

There's plenty of other work to do too. I've agreed to review two new collections of R S Thomas's poems for Poetry Wales (Uncollected Poems and Poems to Elsi) which might add to the legend of RST, and a piece for the Literary Encyclopaedia on JG Farrell's Troubles. Plus several papers to start thinking about… But for tonight: the waters of Lethe. Once I've got the ironing done. It's a rock and roll life I lead, I tell you. At least I have the new Kurt Vile and Gesualdo LPs to soothe me, and the meta-genre stylings of my new literary discovery, Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn and Child.

Until tomorrow, I bid you adieu. Or rather, I'll let Jahn Teigen and Anita Skorgan do it for me, with the song of that name which formed Norway's entry to Eurovision 1982. A classic, I think we can all agree. And quite a contrast to the Thatcher track.

Can you be an honest Conservative?

It is, isn't it? Despite not dying on a trolley in an underfunded or privatised hospital, Thatcher's death at least happened. I was beginning to think she was immortal. But no, it's just like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: with the death of the evil queen, the snow melts away and the downtrodden populace cautiously emerges blinking into the political and literal sunlight.

Of course the analogy breaks down somewhat: Thatcher's evil progeny are in charge and going full steam ahead in their drive to make this country poorer, meaner and more divided than ever before. But I'm hoping that the liberation of knowing Maggie's gone will embolden the resistance.

I was wondering last night why I'm feeling so relieved that she's gone. After all, she was in the end a powerless, confused old lady, and the evils she did now have lives of their own, independent of her corporeal existence. I decided that it's symbolic. We lost, over and over again. We didn't even overthrow her: the Conservative Party ruthlessly defenestrated her without a moment's gratitude or sentiment (remember that when you see them on TV weeping crocodile tears). Her death was out of our control too, so we can't claim any kind of victory, but there's a satisfaction in knowing that it comes to the evil as much as too the good.

Why am I using the evocative word 'evil', with all its Manichean overtones? It's like this. Think of all the other Tory/Conservative Prime Ministers before Thatcher. John Stuart. Lord North. Pitt the Younger. Addington. Spencer Perceval (the only one to be assassinated). The Earl of Liverpool. Canning, Goderich and Wellington. Peel, Derby, Disraeli, Salisbury. Balfour, Bonar Law, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill. Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Hume and Heath. Some of them were bad. Some were sad. Some were even mad. But most of them thought that they knew what was best for the country. All of it. They were (in my view) almost always wrong, but they largely took the attitude that they had a responsibility towards friends and foes alike: political opponents and those from other walks of life.

For me, Thatcher was the first Conservative who abandoned this patrician attitude. She famously would ask whether her party members and people from other spheres were 'one of us', by which she meant fellow free-market Tories. If not, they were dead to her. Rather than applying Conservative policies for the good of the country, she and her supporters applied Conservative polices to the country for the good of her business friends, her political allies and her overseas backers: the Murdochs, the Pinochets, the House of Saud, ATOS, Capita, the weapons dealers, fossil-fuel burners, speculators and wide boys of the City.

It's a fundamental breach, encapsulated by the Kenyan politician who on election announced 'Now it is our turn to eat'. Under Thatcherism, success is due only to those who grab what they can: government should get out of the way, shouldn't referee competing interests or take long-term decisions. Pre-Thatcher, Conservatives could be wrong and principled. Since Thatcher, I have come to believe that they (and the higher echelons of the Labour Party under Blair and Brown) have abandoned the notion of the 'public good' entirely. Government becomes the vehicle of vested interests who occasionally tussle for control, but it's no longer seen as the expression of the public desire for a shared and equitable destiny.

Thatcher did this. Monetarism and raw capitalism requires a majority of losers to generate an elite of winners. Since then, government is little more than a fat cash cow ripe for exploitation by tax-evaders intent on asset-stripping the MoD, the Department for Education, the NHS and all the rest. The difference is that – as we've seen with Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt, Gove and many more – the Vandals are in office rather than battering down the door.

So in answer to my question: yes, it's easy to be an honest Conservative. It's just unfashionable, and increasingly rare.

Self-defence

The surely-not-long-now death of Thatcher is going to be a horrible time for those of us with a conscience: the right is going to behave as though she were a combination of Boudicca, Mother Teresa and Marie Curie. Carpers (i.e. anyone who points out that her legacy is global despression, inequality and war) will be as welcome as republicans at the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

So here's a cheery and tuneful (no, really) song by Mogwai called 'George Square Thatcher Death Party'. I've a playlist of Thatcher death songs which I'll work my way through.

It's what she would have wanted…

Thatcher's death is (hopefully) nigh, though I've been saying that for years. For some reason, the government wants to give her a state funeral - the last non-royal to get one was Winston Churchill, and I don't think grabbing the Falklands back from the people you stole it from in the first place is quite up there with liberating Europe.

So there's a petition to the government:

Thatcher state funeral to be privatised
Responsible department: Cabinet Office
In keeping with the great lady's legacy, Margaret Thatcher's state funeral should be funded and managed by the private sector to offer the best value and choice for end users and other stakeholders. The undersigned believe that the legacy of the former PM deserves nothing less and that offering this unique opportunity is an ideal way to cut government expense and further prove the merits of liberalised economics Baroness Thatcher spearheaded.

I would suggest that the lowest bidder wins the gig, in keeping with school food provision and other formerly-public services. I volunteer to do it for free. All I'd need is a wheelbarrow and directions to the nearest closed coal pit.

Sign it now.

You want more GRUEL?

Heading down to the canteen, I dine on some miserable salad and a bowl of Red Lentil and Vegetable Soup. It seems familiar. I wonder idly if it's related to the Red Lentil soup served on Tuesday and the Vegetable soup served yesterday. I decide that it probably is.

No matter though - at least someone's eating well. According to the kitchen staff, the Vice-Chancellor's leaving bash is scoffing the best of everything. Through the low partitions, we can admire the acres of gleaming crystal, and listen to the jazz band noodling while the guests nosh.

Does this sound bitter? Well, perhaps I am. After all, 150 of my colleagues lost their jobs during this VC's stint, and we've all taken a large pay cuts while her income reached £240,000. No wonder that these items - received today from Left on the Shelf, my favourite bookshop - will be prominently displayed in my office.

Poster

Postcard of a Philip Berkin cartoon in Private Eye

I Piss On Your Grave?

There's a bit of a fuss about Eduardo Labarca using a photo of himself urinating on Jorge Borge's grave as the cover of one of his books. Actually, it's a concealed water bottle, but it looks quite realistic.

Are you bothered? Is this desecration? Labarca's defence is that Borges visited and spoke in support of General Pinochet, Chile's brutal, murderous fascist dictator, which seems fair enough to me.

I've only seen a few notable graves. Ibsen's. Sylvia Plath's (from which her fans had tried to scratch out her husband's surname, again reasonably, I thought). One of the Brontës. I had a little lie down on that one. 'Reader, I boffed her'. Arf.

Whose graves are OK for desecration? Admittedly, it wouldn't make much difference to the occupant, but it would offend his or her supporters. I am planning to run coach trips to Margaret Thatcher's last resting place. I'll provide a massive music system, and to the strains of 'Ghost Town' by The Specials, Hefner's 'The Day That Thatcher Dies', I'll organise mass grave-dancing.

Joke of the week

This is from Phil, who writes one of the best blogs around:

'I just saw loads of miners and Scousers on the TV, celebrating wildly. Is Thatcher dead?'

And while I think about it, congratulations to Tipton Town FC ('the Tipton Terrorists') who managed to overturn the mighty Radcliffe Olympic in a replay of the FA Cup 3rd Qualifying Round, with an emphatic 2-0 win. Next match: Sheffield FC, apparently the oldest team in the world, and the only team in Sheffield which isn't Wednesday or United.

Nuts to you

Much hilarity ensues in my departmental meeting as I open the parcel. Was it my new Mac? No, damn it.

It was this: the Margaret Thatcher Nutcracker. Misogynistic, yes. Funny? Definitely. Many thanks to The Well of Lost Blogs.

Meanwhile, on the theme of hated people:

from Awful Library Books

Punt

What do you call an Argentinian narrowboat enthusiast?

Argy-bargee.

Argentinian-Indian fusion cooking?

Argy-bhaji.

Meanwhile, the anagram generator keeps on giving: William Shakespeare comes out most accurately as 'I Am A Weakish Speller' (he spelled his name in several ways), and Margaret Thatcher ironically provides 'That Great Charmer'.

Don't forget: Tories = scum

Amongst the other books I've got on the go at the moment, I'm reading Iain Sinclair's Downriver, a sprawling exposé of the full Thatcherite horror that was London in the 1980s. Now it looks like that pink-cheeked proletariat-rapist Cameron looks like being the next Prime Minister, here's a passage about the Tories from Sinclair's book - the Minister reminds me of Cameron:

Closer inspection… revealed no youth, but a shrink-wrapped young man - who had forgotten to climb out of his lightweight suit before sending it to the cleaners. Or some kind of quantum leap in the field of headshrinking. The Minister looked like a ventriloquist's dummy - which, in a sense, he was: the latex exception that proves the rule. The rest of the Widow's gang split neatly into the Uglies (shifty, weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven-week embryos) and the Bunters: smooth, fleshy, near-identical, bum-faced nonentities in Savile Row suits and bulletproof glasses. Apocalypse-resistant unflappables. The Uglies had lost ground recently, the time for cracking skulls was past. They were ennobled, sent to the city like feral cats. No longer the nights of broken glass, lycanthropes and zoo-rejects with burning brands: it was the mid-term era of soft sell, Brylcreem-condomed, safe-handed boys, and public men of conscience (and private fortune).

This boy, the Minister, had been picked because he smelt like a political virgin: he was fresh, oven-ready, blatant with coal tar and Old Spice; bubbling enthusiastic, popping up everywhere with endorsements that kept him spinning him dizzily around the outer circle, never quite 'one of us', but very useful as a fag and disposable messenger… he remained, basically, a whipping boy, buoyant enough, and stupid enough, to deflect heat-seeking missiles from such entrenched citadels of the left as the Church of England, the Royal Opera House, and the Sunday Telegraph.

Rejoice, rejoice

I believe that anyone who doesn't hold a grudge is simply lazy. So welcome to IsThatcherDeadYet.com - I've got music, beer and food ready for the street parties which will spontaneously break out all over the country.

The Book Vole

Even going to a wedding allowed me to acquire more books: my mother gave me a 1930s edition of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, and my brother and his wife Bethan presented my with Mark Thomas's exposé of Coca-Cola Belching Out The Devil, some fine Moleskine notebooks, and a Warhol-esque Margaret Thatcher postcard.

Then I get to work and find deliveries of more fine books: Nick Turse's The Complex: How The Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Reeve's Fever Crumb, le Carré's A Most Wanted Man and finally Diana Wynne Jones's The Game. I must do some work this week, so will try to ignore them…

Just a little longer

I'm not a vindictive man. Well, I'm not usually a vindictive man. OK, sometimes I can be non-vindictive. Now is not one of those times. I just noticed that Margaret Thatcher has broken an arm. That's what happens when a woman in her eighties greets the BNP's victory with the traditional stiff-armed salute.

Before you all start whinging about how cruel it is to take pleasure in the pain of an old woman, I should point out that she is the most damaging, actually evil individual every to take control of this country. I have mixed views on Oliver Cromwell even though he massacred thousands of Irishmen in cold blood. I don't have the slightest tinge of sympathy for Thatcher. Brought up to despise anyone poor, foreign, or who saw the world differently, she allowed her personal prejudices to develop into an ideology which simultaneously yearned for the past while encouraging her friends to make money by making the world worse - culturally, educationally, enviromentally, politically. She supported Apartheid South Africa, despised the working classes, took tea with Pinochet and never met a fascist or hereditary despot she didn't like. She literally denied the existence of community ('there are individual men and women, and there are families') and did her best to destroy the organic communities which grew out of stable employment.

Her lessons that greed, selfishness, wealth, consumption and individualism are the only standards by which success should be judged is at the root of our atrophied education system, our stunted NHS, our poor public services, our low-tax, low-pay economy, our awful railways and clogged roads: Blair and Brown are her spawn, the reason why there's no space in the current political system to discuss collective effort for collective gain.

I haven't the space and time to cover her crimes against humanity - but I do think that any minor bit of pain and suffering is nothing compared with what she's done to us. When she dies, I'm holding a massive party. Every year, I'll visit her grave to make sure she's still dead, and water the wreaths with poison.

Mo: a quick recap

Mo - it would be sexist (creepy, in fact) if I'd decided to list powerful women for the hell of it. I did so because a previous commenter decided that an attack on Margaret Thatcher was symptomatic of fear of women as a sex. You have inspired me though - I'd forgotten about Mo Tucker.

On closer inspection of the stat-porn, 'Mo' turns out to be one of my darling siblings!

Albrecht, you poor deluded man

Albrecht objects (see comments) to my inclusion of Lauren Laverne in my list of strong women who aren't Margaret Thatcher.

Well, little Albrecht, you must be quite young if you don't remember the glorious splash made by Kenickie, which consisted of aforesaid Lauren, Marie du Santiago, Emmy-Kate and Johnny X (the runt of the litter). I think young Lauren has made the best of her talents - she's clearly the future of Radio 4 (I hope) and all other thoughtful outlets. If we have to have under-informed celebrities fronting anything vaguely cultural (so as not to scare off ver kids), at least Lauren's genuinely curious and eager to learn.

Damn. I forgot Charlotte Green. And Jessica Stevenson.

Late entrants

Late additions to the list of powerful women who aren't Margaret Thatcher: Caryl Churchill, Anne of Green Gables (with some reservations), Helen Suzman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, Angela Carter, Ada Babbage, Ruth First, Lauren Laverne, Franny Armstrong (thanks Neal for the latter, and Emma for the Buffy suggestion).