George Galloway wins Bradford West: Labour should learn lesson

Whatever you think of George Galloway, the main parties should take heed. This is the public putting a rocket up your bum. It's no use dismissing this arrogantly as the victory of "communalism", "oh it was just the Muslim vote", and all the other whining I've seen and heard since he won his astonishing 36 per cent swing in last night's Bradford West by-election for the Respect party. The voters have noted that the Tories are emboldened in their attacks on every aspect of life for anybody who isn't a top earner while the creepy Lib Dems facilitate their pillage and Labour flails pathetically.

Yes, he has a monstrous ego. Yes, he sues at the drop of a mention of his affiliations or parts of his past. Yes, he wore a cock-hugging leotard, aired his sinister submissive side when he role-played a cat with Rula Lenska on Big Brother and was a beastly bully to the two young contestants on the show. All that is true.

But he defends the Palestinians articulately and with gusto — his performances in the US and against the awful Sky newsreader were impressive. And he is now saying what most of us are saying. While Labour can barely muster the energy to pretend they care about the damage being done to British society, Galloway provides a voice, an analysis and a willingness to fight this corner where no others will.

If Labour doesn't like Galloway then the solution is easy. Start doing your job so Galloway doesn't have to.

UPDATE: In one predominantly white middle-class ward, 900 votes went to Respect while only 40 went to Labour.

Sunday 8th April 2012 — Patrick Coburn in the Independent:

The Economist, after recording that Mr Galloway is "a hate figure for the British establishment", claims he won his seat "mostly by touting his opposition to the war in Afghanistan." (Note the use of the loaded word "touting".) But what should be more relevant to current British politics than the Afghan war where 407 British soldiers have been killed and a small British army of 9,500 is still fighting? It is a conflict in which men and women have died and are dying in vain: their intervention has achieved nothing; the Taliban are not being defeated and this should long have been self-evident.

Pastygate: George Osborne get your hands off our pasties!

A 20 per cent tax on hot food for poor people from the millionaire cabinet that just awarded their friends a five per cent cut in their taxes.

Here's a poem from the other year which features a pasty.

Ode To A Detox On Returning From St Ives

I'd hoped to grow old like Lauren Bacall,
Elegant, willowy, tall,
Tight arse, tons of class,
An enigma on a pedestal

Once slender and considered quite tasty
In a thin thong and pasties,
The pasties are now Cornish pasties
And I can't thing the thame thong without crying.
My legendary six-pack is now a six-pack of cider,
My inner Size Zero grows a whole lot wider
finds the hacksaw hidden in the hogroast
and hacks her way free,
pausing only for a swift one with pork scratchings on the side.
Deep fried.
If only I ate apples instead of being shaped like one.
I am a woman of many appetites but fruit salad ain't fun.
My overactive mandibles leave love handles the size of trees,
I love my food but my food hates me.
Treacherous, it deposits clues
In my jelly belly
it's a jelly belly, it's a jelly belly, it's a jelly belly, it's a jelly belly
I tried sleeping with the fishes,
Even they didn't fancy me.
They flashed their fins and went upscale
And threw me out of the sea

A whale washed up,
A chubby cherub after the Fall,
I roll across the land, a shapeless fog,
Devouring all in an epic trawl.
I wish the fog was a pea-souper
Cause I could scoff that an' all
Scarf the lot like a hog.
Nom, nom, nom.
No! This lardy bard must recall
Lauren Bacall was no butterball.

Fat threatens to settle in folds,
In rolls of old cholesterol.
The make-up thickens
Like clotting cream,
Like two inches of plasticene,
Like fossil strata from the palioscene.
My bags are now luggage
My breasts are baggage
In body angst overdrive
My reflection is savage.
I will rivet closed my gaping maws
My beak snaps shut,
My greedy paws gathering greenery,
My jaws chewing up the scenery,
Filling the hole inside me
Coz I recognise the metaphors.
Grimly I scan the vision before me
And understand why no-one adores me.
I do not enthrall like Lauren Bacall
Tons of flaws, open pores,
I'm growing old like Diana Dors

Anna Chen September 2010

Madam Miaow makes the Orwell Prize longlist for blogging 2012

Informed witty commentary on China matters available here

The Orwell Prize has just announced its 2012 longlist for blogging and I'm delighted to find that Madam Miaow has made the grade.

My submitted entries here.

Blog longlist here.

Alex Massie Alex Massie
Anna Chen Madam Miaow Says
Bagehot Bagehot’s Notebook
Ms Baroque Baroque in Hackney
BendyGirl Benefit Scrounging Scum
David Allen Green Jack of Kent
Gavin Kelly Economics and the reality of the ‘squeezed middle’
John Rentoul Independent Blogs
Lisa Ansell Lisa Ansell
Pavel Konnolsky The Konnolsky Files
Polly Curtis Reality Check with Polly Curtis
Mick Fealty Slugger O’Toole
Raph Shirley Another stupid human
Rangers Tax-Case Rangers Tax-Case
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi
Tim Marshall Foreign Matters
Toby Young Telegraph Blogs
Wiggy Beneath the Wig

Reading art: Li Tianbing exhibition

I quite fancy going to see the exhibition of Li Tianbing's paitings being shown at the Stephen Friedman Gallery.

I know nothing about Li's art except for what I've been reading today, including an intriguing piece at Art Lyst.

Li is quite young, born in 1974, the year I visited China with my parents. Still a schoolkid who wanted to be an artist, I was shown around Shanghai University's art department and, with my mother in tow, allowed into their gallery to view the work of their students. It was an impressive display with superb technical ability on show in a range of styles from traditional watercolours to Western oils.

We soon noticed a common trait in the landscapes that amused us. Every one featured a tractor. You didn't need to be a student of Kremlinology to see who'd go far. We guessed that the artists with the in-yer-face bright red tractors taking up the biggest area of canvas would climb the greasy career pole faster than the painters who appeared to have used the finest sable brush with about two hairs to make the most parsimonious stroke of red possible denoting the presence of the people's farm vehicle in the furthest reaches of the landscape, several miles distant. We thought they may very well have a had a future kneeling on glass and would have been lucky getting a job painting white lines down roads in the middle of traffic. Which, consisting mostly of bicycles in those days wouldn't have been as bad as it sounds.

Anyhow, a look at Li's paintings places him in the latter category and on the naughty step.

Take the painting above — Recruitment — of four children holding up official information pamphlets. At first glance it's a rural portrait of poor kids. Art Lyst says:

Like many of Li Tianbing's paintings, the work is pock-marked with black ink-like stains - a reference to photos the artist once saw of the Khmer Rouge, whose deteriorating surfaces convey a haunting connection to an obliterated past. This stain motif is used time and time again as a reminder of the corrosive power of political dictates and is a haunting yet powerful motif.

What struck me is what he's saying in the picture. Where are the official pamphlets being held? Think of the Three Wise Monkeys and see how the paper is held, left to right, over the mouth, the ears, almost over the eyes which are almost obscured, and then, adding a new figure, the boy who is standing holds his pamphlet over his head: think no evil. Or just: don't think.

Not only that but, behind them, emerging from the group, are leafless trees: dormant, wintry. Two of the trees go nowhere, hitting the dead end of the top edge of the picture. But the fourth one we see in it's entirety (a third one is in view but stunted): what's it doing? It is not heading towards the light but is bent. And what is it bending towards? The left (the past in western terms as we read left to right — Li did study in Paris, after all), and towards the old traditional building. It also forms a circle and an anti-clockwise (backward) cycle from which nothing breaks out. Far from being an innocent flat snapshot of a historical moment, this is a bitter caustic comment on what Li believes the system is doing.

It is sad that the system that once promised to break the masses out of their spiritual and intellectual poverty, having raised hundreds of millions out of physical poverty and doubled life expectancy, is now seen by some as trapping them in a deadening cycle. Agree or not with what he's saying, this picture is powerful because it is so loaded with meaning. And he's a bloody good draftsman.

Tory lords, LibDem peers and MPs with interests in health companies

In the wake of today's shameful vote for the Health and Social Care (NHS) Bill 2011 in the House of Lords, here is a brilliant comprehensive list of politicians where there may very well be a conflict of interest due to their financial involvement with the private health industry.

Another must-read is Professor Allyson Pollock's papers laying out the arguments against the bill: ‘Commercial confidentiality’ trumps public right to know in England’s new health market'; 'a legal basis for charging and providing fewer health services to people in England'; 'services, charges, and exclusions'; 'A flawed bill with a hidden purpose'; 'How the Health and Social Care Bill 2011 would end entitlement to comprehensive health care in England'; 'changing data requirements of the market: implications for public health'; 'conflicts of interest'; ' abolition of the secretary of state's duty'; 'The final frontier: The UK’s new coalition government turns the English National Health Service over to the global health care market'.

UPDATE Tuesday 20th March: Harpy Marx writes to me:

When services become privatised one of the first things to go is accountability replaced with "‘commercial confidentiality’. This is happening with welfare reform, private companies becoming covered by "commercial confidentiality" and many of these greedy companies try and sue....and pressure blog providers, for example, to take a blog down if it criticising them. Bookbinder judgement in '93 stated (when local authority tried to sue a newspaper). "It was contrary to the public interest that organs of government, whether central or local, should have the right to sue for libel because any governmental body should be open to uninhibited public criticism and to allow such actions would place an undesirable fetter on freedom of speech." Freedom of speech is part of a functioning democracy privatisation erodes it democracy. Excellent book by Dexter Whitfield on "New Labour’s Attack on Public Services: Modernisation by Marketisation (2006)" Just replace New Labour with ConDems in the title...same process happening but at an accelerated force.

Looting at the top: Marie Antoinette meet George Orwell

The two million dollar bra

The looting at the top carries on apace. While we wait for the results of the next vote on the break-up of the NHS, here's a delightful Rogues' Gallery of Tory peers and their connections to private health companies.

Essentially, they are privatising our public services, removing the wealth via tax havens, making the majority capitalise their banks, finding more mad luxury items to waste our money on at a time when corporate profits are at a 50-year high and the Sunday Times Rich List is breaking records.

Luxury items include the £100 million yacht recently built for former Miss UK Kirsty Bertarelli and her Swiss pharma tycoon husband, multi-million dollar bras, spider silk fabric because they reckon they're worth it and Beckham and Ecclestone owning Birkin handbags worth between £500K - £1.5 million. Ever suspect we are being run by a bunch of degenerates?


The Tories were not elected to power and have no mandate for any of this. Their Lib Dems human shields are helping to usher in major healthcare companies in a feeding frenzy as they use tax havens to suck out public money. Lib Dems who talk about "bloated public services" being the problem are ill-informed at best. A friend tells me that, according to a World Service report, over 30% of local authority expenditures are private 'Special Services' run by ex civil servents who avoid income tax on their fees by being paid directly by the private company.

Meanwhile, the cop with the machine gun in Trafalgar Square on Saturday's NHS protest goes unreported in the mainstream press.Welcome to Britain, George Orwell stylee.

Don't tell me there's no money: great facts and figures from Mark Wright