Ghosts of Cable Street

Well, thank God that this years summer coincided with our weekend away. We are now hoping and praying that summer returns in September when we attend the End of The Road festival, which, for a Blues fan, must be the best named festival in the world.

Ah, the Blues. As I predicted from the moment we went down, we have gone back up and a strange an unfamiliar harmony has settled about the place. People are even beginning to warm to the board. Quite right too. They have already started spending money and more of it than we are accustomed to and everyone seems delighted with the players that have been mooted to join us. I will hang fire a bit before expressing delight as they are either lower league journeymen (who may, nevertheless, cut the mustard) or exotic foreigners of whom I have never previously heard. The signs are good though.

The world has managed over the weeks without me commenting on the current political pickle and I am sure it could last a few more weeks without input from me, but it won’t have to, because I have an opinion or three.

There is something that is really beginning to bug me, and that is the easy ride that David Cameron is enjoying. Somehow, he has managed to place himself on the moral high ground and I can’t understand it. Poor old Michael Martin got hounded out of his job because many MP’s turned out to be immoral freeloaders, and many Tory MP’s turned out to be extraordinarily extravagant immoral freeloaders. Apparently, it was all Michael Martins fault.

Right from the start, Cameron managed to hitch himself to a populist bandwagon and has managed to keep himself firmly hitched to it, despite milking the cash cows udder to within an inch of its life. All his expense claims manage to fall into just within the maximum. I read somewhere that he is independently wealthy (inherited, not earned) to the tune of 30 million quid, yet he will take as much as he possibly can out of the public purse to subsidise a second home. Fair enough if he needs a floor to sleep on when he is away from the family home, but how palatial does the floor need to be?

Johan Hari wrote a good article on Cameron the other week, wondering how he gets away with it, and it is a very good question.

Then we have had the unedifying sight of a bunch of Labour MP’s who no one has ever heard of resigning, some of them with nasty little smirks on their faces. Have they resigned because they helped themselves to the nations petty cash? No they have resigned because they don’t much like Gordon Brown. Pathetic. I don’t much like Gordon Brown myself; he has been a sorry disappointment, but he is preferable to the political pygmies who currently oppose him.

The little leadership crisis appears to be over, the plotters having displayed their lack of nous and their inability to organize a piss up in a brewery to magnificent effect. I hope now that Labour comes out swinging and goes for the Tories and also demands that the news media, particularly the BBC subjects Tory policies and personalities to the same forensic analysis and questioning that Labour is subject to. I am no fan of new labour, but if anyone thinks that the fucking Bullingdon Club and the party of the duck island owning classes will be an improvement, they need their bumps felt.

I keep hearing that the election of 2 BNP oafs to the European parliament is a bad thing, but I think that it is a good thing, Nick Griffin getting egged and scurrying away from his scrawny assailants is the best laugh I have had in months. Did you know that neither Griffin or his mate would be allowed to stand in local elections, because of their criminal pasts?

A superb video of the utterly brilliant Two Gallants performing in a Houston car park