Biased Against Everyone and Everything, Everywhere

"Nigel Farage has said he hung up on an interview with BBC Scotland because the line of questioning "was insulting and unpleasant"... He told the BBC he did not regret the interview's abrupt ending, adding "I wasn't very impressed with it..." - BBC, 17 May 2013

"Asked about how many elected representatives he has in Scotland, Mr Farage said: "Absolutely none, but rather more than the BBC. We could have had this interview in England a couple of years ago, although I wouldn't have met with such hatred as I'm getting from your questions.  Frankly, I've had enough of this interview, goodbye." - Telegraph, 17 May 2013

 "Newsnight Scotland has been accused of being biased towards the SNP.  Labour MP Ian Davidson called it "News-Nat" throughout an interview...  Record, 9 August 2012

"Labour have hit out at BBC Scotland for refusing to broadcast their conference this weekend... Labour MSP David Whitton said "This is a remarkable decision and demonstrates a serious lack of balance from the BBC..." - Record, 17 March 2011

"SNP anger at "enemies" in the BBC boils over...  Stewart Stevenson, a former minister and close friend of Alex Salmond, tweeted: "Once is happenstance. twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action – Ian Fleming." - Telegraph, 7 March 2013  

"SNP go on attack against BBC Scotland over EU interview...  The SNP unleashed an extraordinary offensive on the BBC yesterday as ministers scrambled to salvage their claims a separate Scotland would enjoy an easy entry to the European Union. - Telegraph, 28 January 2013

I could go on and on here, since these boo-hoo-woe-is-us assaults on BBC Scotland are more or less endless - but I'm sure you get my drift. 

Rather than seriously entertaining the notion that BBC interviewers are viciously biased against Nigel Farage, UKIP and the Union, we should ask ourselves why, exactly, a man who can't hear a few incontestible facts without a hilarious meltdown can somehow keep his shit together on UK-wide media.  

Because it should be obvious that any politician who responds to being asked how many representatives UKIP has in Scotland with "None, which is more than the BBC" then hanging up, is not exactly an arch-media manipulator. 

My Girls Are The Creme De La Creme

If you believed the Meryl Streep film, she died like she lived - in comfort, delivering rambling, fantastical homilies on personal responsibility to the uncomprehending and the indifferent.

I was a toddler when she was elected, but she must've hit Scotland like a thunderbolt.  The nation never wanted any part of her lunatic revolution - we rejected it at the ballot box again and again, in fact - but by God, we got it good and hard anyway.  Such was the wonder of free choice that we had that of others thrust down our throats by the fistful for a decade.

If you could've called forth Middle England's rampant id in all its virtuous pomposity and self-regard, it would don one of those fruity little dresses and wander around quietly lecturing the less fortunate on the value of thrift.  She came from a sub-species of affluent, frustrated bores who thrill to imagine themselves menaced by the phantasm of some terrible, probably Bolshevik menace, from the safety of their own inviolate Hobbit-holes.

She was the perfect product of a system warped by a righteous belief in its own entitlement and a suspiciously convenient terror that somebody, somewhere, might be nibbling on a hunk of government cheese at its expense.

All of which is ironic really, since she resembled nobody more than that stock figure of Scottish letters -  Miss Jean Brodie, resplendent in her Prime, sermonising to the class like Providence, like the God of Calvin.

She sold the UK on her little home-spun homilies about the path to prosperity but force-fed vast tracts of it grinding misery.  That was the eighties for many of us: endless harangues on hard work and self-sufficiency, delivered by those who were striving daily to make the possibility of either ever more remote.

If she ever suffered a moment of doubt while entire towns were shuttered, she never showed it, certain that God was on her side whatever her course.  So she experienced no difficulty or sense of hyprocrisy in stomping like a stormtrooper on those who resisted her, sending legions of militarised police to spread her message of personal freedom by force.

If our skyrocketing unemployment rate ever gave her a moment's pause, we never saw a flash of it.  In all the broken marriages and deprived upbringings and jobless poor, she saw only more proof of the powerful correctness of her opinions, and redoubled her efforts to kick us all into a shape she found more pleasing.

All of our lives and livelihoods were secondary concerns in the great psychodrama of her personal battles.  The atmosphere she created was like sitting in a classroom copying out lines from the Bible, with no toilet breaks, and the penalty for asking questions is caning.

Most of Scotland didn't hate her because it disagreed with her politics or her style.  It didn't loathe her or the clique of privileged, over-educated sexual deviants around her simply because they might as well have been aliens with flourescent genitals, for all that they understood us or our lives.

We despised her because she made war on us gladly, with a song of joy in her heart, for our own good.  She was certain she knew better what we needed than we did ourselves, and she never missed an opportunity to let us know that she could make us see it her way, any time she liked.

She loomed over our childhoods like a gorgon and bequeathed to us as adults possibly the most offensively cretinous politics ever to stain the tattered ideal of British democracy.  In a more just world, her political legacy would be fit only for slapstick comedy and allegorical children's TV dramas.

She was a fantasist and a mentalist.  She sent us all to fight for General Franco. Her passing comes far too late to offer any comfort to those upon whom she wreaked the worst of her harm, like the death of Stalin.

I'm not glad she's dead.  

I'm sorry she entered politics, and I'm sorry we did such a shitty job of repudiating her that we became a nation that richly deserves to be ruled by her idiot offspring.

That Marriage Argument, In a Nutshell

Lover One:  My darling, I love you.  I want to share my life with you, declare my devotion to you before our loved ones and as an incidental result, entitle you to a significant share of my estate if I die unexpectedly.

Lover Two:  Dearest, I love you too.  I want to share my life with you, declare my devotion to you before our loved ones and as an incidental result, entitle you to a significant share of my estate if I die unexpectedly.

Weirdo Humanist MC:  I now declare you -

(Bang, Crash!) 

Lunatic interloper:  Stop!  You two autonomous individuals cannot order your personal lives and legacies in whichever way you see fit!

Lover One: What?

Lover Two:  What?

Lunatic interloper:  Moral/Religious/Civil law says that you can't do what you're about to do.  You must stop.

Lover One:  Eh?

Lover Two:  (Who's a bit more streetwise about these things)  Keith, gonnae chuck this mentalist out, eh?  He's talking pish.

(Scuffle, Scuffle, Shout!, Scuffle, return to relative peace) 

Lover Two:  Now, where were we?

Lover One: My darling, I love you...

Oh Yeah? Well, Regulate This!

Oh no, the liberal-left has gone berserk again!

We're talking about Nick, of course, so it's worth recalling that for him, "the liberal-left" is "going berserk" roughly 99% of their waking lives, and that when he says "berserk" he usually means something like Saying rude things about Sarah Palin or Thinking that having massive wars with everyone is a silly idea.

To go berserk then is basically to disagree with Nick about something.  Quite how being rude about Sarah Palin is some kind of 28 Days Later rampage is anyone's guess, but there it is, in black and white.

Today, we're "berserk" because some percentage of us agree with proposals for press regulation, a stance which strikes Nick as a kind of parade of suburban Mussolinis crushing human freedom.  This represents a form of progress for Nick, given he's usually more fond of dressing people up in SS uniforms and making them march about for his amusement, as opposed to comparisons with Hitler's more slapstick Italian accomplice.

You'd be forgiven for missing the freedom aspect of course, since a skim-reading would leave you with the impression that the topic is "My God those liberals are bastards and I hate them all, the verminous wankers that they are", as opposed to a Tom Paine-esque defence of liberty.

Sharp-eyed readers will spot that the bodycount from all of these berserkers is zero, while many of Nick's own pet projects are now buried under a sky-scraping pile of skulls.  We might question whether somebody who has a long record of hemming-and-hawing and reluctantly-concluding on the issue of  torture might have a bit of a cheek to accuse anyone else of enabling oppression, but likely to no avail.

Well, I'm agnostic on Leveson.  I think it's entirely right and just that the press should be held accountable for their behaviour, but I'm not convinced that these proposals are the right way to go about achieving that.  These proposals may in fact be terrible idiocy, and Nick may well be correct to oppose them.

But let's just observe how odd it is that most of the hacks I've seen really shitting their legs off with rage over press regulation are the type who are prone to making sweeping generalisations about the inherent villainy of entire demographics.

I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible that Nick is particularly offended by encroachments on human freedom.  It's not the kind of thing that usually bugs him, since he's been entirely on-board with just about every major bit of loony Star Chamber legislation aimed at "protecting the public from terrorism" of the last decade, and an enthusiastic booster of pretty much unlimited, omni-directional war whenever the option has presented itself.

Maybe Nick is trying to alert us to our voluntary adoption of our own disenfranchisement.  I'd say it's also at least possible that Nick is chewing the cushions because press regulation might make it more difficult to call people pro-genocide dictator-fellaters and so on without then getting publicly reamed by the regulator for disseminating bullshit.

And you can probably imagine why somebody like Nick would find that an alarming prospect.

Plus Ca Change, Plus Ca Le Meme Bullshit Chose

Oh, those whiny war protestors!  So narcissistic, thinking their opinion should trump that of parliament!  So self-indulgent, to ignore the fact that many had different opinions!

I mean, I understand these whacks at anti-war hacks.  I found all those Boo-hoo how come nobody listened to us? opinion pieces trite and annoying too.  Who wouldn't?  I agreed with the authors' sentiments and I felt like launching the laptop out of the window.  Me!

What's noticeable though is that the last week's pre-war nostalgia parties came in only two flavours - either the We-Were-Right variety from the anti-war folks themselves, or the You-Were-Kind-Of-Right-But-You're-Dicks species from their detractors.

And indeed, the But-You're-Dicks guys have a point, at least about democracy.  Loads of people really did think Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth with nuclear and chemical weapons and that somewhere beneath the smoking remnant of his fucked airforce or the charred ruin of his 70's-era army, lay the Destruction Of The West.

I imagine quite a few even believed he could fly over London in one of those model planes the Americans pretended to be afraid of, then drop an ebola-stuffed atom bomb on Great Ormond Street Hospital out of his arse.

People believed these kinds of inane fictions because largely, they were naive enough to think that the government wouldn't lie through their teeth with the charm of conmen slipping a sly finger into Granny's purse, but they believed it nonetheless.

And so it's noteworthy that we've seen so many pieces reminding us of how many people believed all the bullshit propaganda, and so very few pieces explaining why people actually believed this facile, transparently fantastical nonsense.

I mean, this is surely the big story here.  When nearly half the population base their opinion on a war - a war with a bodycount big enough for a respectable mid-20th century conflict, mind - on tall tales and oogah-boogah, you'd think that would be an issue.  And yet, from what we've seen this week, it barely rates a mention.

The reason is plain, I imagine.  It's fun to club writers like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny for being angsty and strident.  It's fun to concuss these people with the club of political reality, and fun to call them wankers for dismissing so many suckers.  Let's laugh at the weepy idealists is a grand lark.  Point with me, people!

We fucked up and got tens of thousands of people killed, on the other hand, is not fun.  Explaining why you fell for one of the most hilariously obvious con-jobs since those American women got serially-groped by the door-to-door Breast Inspector isn't fun at all.

Nope, correspondents can't don Kevlar, stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier and shout over swooshing infographics, which demonstrate that unmitigated lies and bullshit came out of this mouth here, entered journalistic ears at this strategic point, and were then distributed verbatim to the populace over a wide area, here and here.   

Can't do that, no sir.  We were slack-jawed, credulous idiots doesn't sell papers, unless maybe you can think of a way to get a credulous but photogenic idiot to get his or her arse out during the confession.

Nobody can explain their grand theory of humanitarian derring-do while perched upon the carcass of a nation.  You can't take the moral high-ground when you've carpet-bombed the middle-ground and napalm-nuked the low-ground, and then strafed the rubble.

Nobody looks good when they're gabbling justifications for credulously accepting Iraq as some kind of sudden, pressing threat to world civilisation.  It sounded ludicrous back when there was doubt over the issue but now, long after the matter has been settled, even the masters of the art just sound like they've been caught whacking-off to bestiality-porn on the office computer.  Again.

And that's what all of this is, in the end-up - a choice between publishing self-effacing articles openly declaring the authors' incredible levels of gullibility, or just forgetting the nation's credulity and giving the hippies one more richly-deserved slipper-thrashing.

This country's no different to any others, I imagine.  Lay out a choice like that, and the hippies are always going to wind up with smarting arsecheeks, especially if they've had the temerity to be both correct and smug about it.

If it also has the effect of drawing a discreet veil over one of the most crass and nonsensical episodes in recent British history well, that's just one of those little added benefits that life sometimes throws you.

TFMAVAWMETAPMN, Redux

(Since I spent most of my time on this blog arsing on about our myriad wars, and since we're coming up for the ten-year anniversary of The Fabled, Most Awesome Virtuous Anti-War March Ever To Achieve Pretty Much Nothing, I thought I'd revisit TFMAVAWMETAPMN.  After all, every other lazy bugger is). 

I remember it was very cold, and I was very hungover.  It took a long time to get to Glasgow - either lots of people were driving through for the protest, or there was a football match on.

I remember it was damn loud and some jokers had brought drums, but I recall being fine with that.  It was all kind of exciting.

I remember we joined in right behind a bunch of Commies with shouty placards, since it seemed as good a place as any.  "Who are these guys?", Mrs R. asked me.

"A bunch of Commies, by the looks of things", I told her.  I seem to recall that the crowd behind us were crusties, Greenie types, although my memory is vague by now.

I remember that when we turned south and made for the Clyde, a workman in a hardhat shouted down from some scaffolding at us.  "Don't you have anything better to do?  Get a job!"

Get a job?  I had two, for Christ's sake.  "It's Saturday, dickhead" I shouted back, and added the finger for good measure.  I was a youngster, you know how it is.

I remember Mrs R's friend phoning her right then.  "Youse are pure fannies", Mrs R's friend told her. "Do you want Saddam to bomb us?"

Mrs R told me her friend thought we were pure fannies and wanted to know whether we wanted to get bombed by Saddam.  I told her I thought brainless, credulous horseshit like that was one of the main reasons for being there in the first place.

I remember when we got to the Armadillo, where the Labour Party conference was being held, we had to wait for about an hour and a half for everyone else to arrive.

I remember the Prime Minister had showed up earlier than expected for his big troop-rallying, let's-bomb-fuck-out-of-Iraq-for-reasons-that-make-no-damn-sense speech and then buggered off long before we got there, to avoid any unpleasantness with the huge crowd of pissed-off people.

I remember the snipers on the cranes overlooking the Clyde, and how big their rifles looked even at long distance.  I remember the police cars parked at the Armadillo all had one copper driving, and another with a sub-machine gun in his lap.  MP5s, I'd learn later from playing Call of Duty.  Deadly effective up close, but not so much at range.

My mate thought they were there to protect us from terrorist attack; I thought they were there to protect the Labour Party delegates from popular attack.

I remember thinking there must have been about sixty thousand people there.  I'd been to enough football games to know what a big crowd looks like, and this was a big crowd.  I remember the cops thought it was half that size.

I remember that the protesters were about evenly-split between Barber-jacketed middle class folk, studenty/crusty types, and ordinary Glaswegian punters.

It was the Glaswegians who actually made an effort to speak to you.  They were nice and many were clearly from rough parts of the city, and although some of them had some fairly wacky ideas, all of them appeared to be basically aware that wars involve killing fuck out of people in vast numbers.  That put them far ahead of the lawyers at my work, who mostly thought this war was an awesome idea.

I remember that many of the speakers were boring as hell.  I remember Tommy Sheridan blared slogans at us like an angry foghorn, exuding little of the personal charisma that he's apparently famous for.  I remember John Swinney gave us a hedging, if-this-then-that speech of the genus you'd expect from a professional politician with higher ambitions.   Mind you, I remember that Jimmy Reid - I think it was Jimmy Reid, anyway - was witty and acerbic, which I liked, although I had no idea who he was back then.

It may be because I like her so much that I remember Margo MacDonald making most of the points I agreed with: the ones about how the whole affair was a stupendously retarded and dangerous idea, certain to end in a godawful bloodbath; about how the Vietnam War must've struck people as sane at some point, even though it was plainly deranged, but mostly about the jaw-dropping levels of political bullshit citizens were being forced to wade through, to get at anything that looked like a semblance of truth.

Somebody pointed out that the previous Gulf War had been sold as a virtuous police action, but later turned into an insane death-rampage, although I don't recall who.  Somebody else noted the many and various porkies that had been told about the new war, and how you couldn't trust anyone who you caught telling you porkies.  You couldn't trust them at all, and you were a sucker if you did.

And then, we walked back to Mrs R's car and went home.

I remember it was still very cold, even though it was a beautiful sunny day, but I remember there was a widespread feeling of satisfaction, like something good and worthwhile had been done...  Like maybe, some kind of contribution had been made to the debate, a statement that couldn't just be ignored or slyly shoved aside.  The crowd was plainly a mish-mash of political cranks and ordinary citizens, but getting this many people to take time out to agree on one basic message - This war is total bullshit - felt like an achievement.

I don't remember whether it was that night or the next day that we got the Prime Minister's response, but I do remember that I was out of the front room, and that Mrs R shouted me through to the TV.

"Tony Blair was just on talking about the marches", she said with a confused look on her face.  I asked her what he'd said.

"He said he was glad that we could protest, because people in Iraq can't do that", she said.

"Uh, okay.  What else did he say?"

Mrs R shrugged.  "That was it.  He said it's great that we can march, because Iraqis can't".

"That was it?"  I looked at the TV.  The newsreader was talking about something else.  I clearly remember rubbing my temples like I had a bad headache coming on.

"The man's a fucking lunatic", I said eventually.

"Yes", Mrs R said.  "He is".

Then, we watched the football reports.

The Fuckyousaurus Rex

"There is no viable alternative...".  

Quick quiz - who said this today?

A clue - the speaker was defending his strong desire to ignore wrongdoing by organisations and individuals, on the basis that applying the letter of the law would inevitably lead to large losses in revenue.

Was it Chancellor George Osborne, defending criminal bankers from judicial inquiry?  Maybe it was Rupert Murdoch, in defence of phone-hacking and bribery...  Or could it be Barack Obama, explaining the necessity of promiscuous drone strikes?

Hell, maybe it sounds like Margaret Thatcher, once more addressing the Conservative Party conference from her armchair while her carer prepares her some egg soldiers and a nice pot of tea.

The answer: It was, of course, Stewart Regan, chief executive of the Scottish Football Association, exhorting the nation to accept the readmission of Rangers Football Club - or at least, its revenant, zombified corpse - into the second flight of the senior game.

If you've found your jaw dropping in amazement at the tabloids' defence strategies at the Leveson Inquiry or your knuckles whitening as the rigging of financial rates has been explained away as a minor error, you haven't seen anything yet.


Regan's problem is that Rangers FC are dead, and that's a real threat to the money men in Scottish football.  It's simply the greatest crisis they've faced since the dawn of the professional game, and Stewart Regan is the rock at the centre of their defence.  Rangers must live - There Is No Alternative.


(Brief summary, for those not familiar with the situation)


An executive precis of how this situation came about is this - Rangers FC didn't die because they over-reached, as have so many other clubs, nor because they "dared to dream" in pursuit of European glory, or because they made foolish property deals.  

They're dead because, for most of the last twenty years, they were perhaps the first example of a criminal enterprise impersonating a football club.

The rest of Scottish football swam in the vast pool of money this activity created and, with their city rivals Celtic, Rangers were happy to splash and duck the other clubs as they liked.  When the financial crisis sucked up that big pool of money, clubs across Scotland were able to cover themselves by retrenching and refinancing as best they could while Rangers were left naked, cupping their balls in shame.  


Or, let's try another strained metaphor...  It's like there was a power cut during the evening soiree at Lady Hampden's country mansion and, when the lights suddenly came back on, there stood Reverend Rangers with Miss Motherwell's diamond necklace in his teeth and Colonel Caley's silver hip-flask in his left hand, while his right wiggled a wallet halfway out of Doctor Dundee's jacket.

(Summary ends)

While it remains to be seen how many of the highly credible allegations made against the club can be proven beyond doubt, the known facts have already shown it up as the worst corruption scandal in the history of British sport, by some distance.  Rangers were already the country's most successful club, yet they still felt the need to cheat...  And the Football Association are staking their own credibility, that of the Scottish game itself and even their own positions, on propping Rangers up.



So the SFA has a major problem on its hands.  Rangers FC are about to be liquidated and will return as an entirely new club with a similar-but-new name, playing in the same ground, yet still as an entirely new entity.  That new club has had its application to take Rangers' former position in the Scottish Premier League turned down, and the vacant slot will now be filled by a First Division outfit. 

Under the rules, the only remaining option for New Rangers - or for any non-league club trying to enter senior football - is to ask the other clubs for permission to join the Third Division, which is the fourth tier of the game.  After months of ignominy, even the club's own supporters appear to favour this option, if only to dissipate the rank stench of criminality wafting from Ibrox. 

Here's the solution that the SFA have devised - and get ready, because it's a humdinger...


1) Rip up the rulebook.


2) Offer struggling clubs a bribe to accept Rangers into the First Division, while also threatening them with the one-carelessly-dropped-match routine, and then 


3) Reorder the entire league structure...


...And all of it just to help just one club avoid its just desserts, so that the tills keep ringing.  

In customer service terms, the SFA's solution to the Rangers situation is a colossal, roaring Fuckyousaurus Rex of an affront.  The highest officials in the game and their press creatures have been pimping this proposal in the most brazen fashion as if it were the essence of reasonable compromise, rather than a very public gang-pishing upon the concept of fair competition. 


It tells fans loud and clear that all of those wet Saturdays watching their clubs slog away, hoping to win promotion on merit, were a sham.  It reduces the entire sport to the level of WWF Wrestling, without the enjoyment of seeing somebody rattle Lee McCulloch round the chops with a fold-up chair. 


As commenter Justin has noted, there's a name for this willingness to overlook wrongdoing for financial gain.  That word is corruption, and this corrupt scheme is the self-declared policy of the Scottish football authorities.


And did I mention that both the presidents of the SFA and the SFL own shares in Rangers FC, and that the former has been heavily implicated in the multi-million pound tax evasion case that was partly responsible for the club's demise?  

Much as I'd like to say that this corruption starts and ends with the SFA, it doesn't.  The top sides voted against allowing New Rangers to rejoin the top flight only under duress, on the threat of mass fan boycotts.  If you were to offer Celtic or Kilmarnock a chance to readmit New Rangers with impunity, you'd require microsurgery to reattach your bitten-off digits.

The chief executive of the SFA threatens clubs with the spectre of "social unrest" that could be caused if Rangers cease to exist entirely, invoking memories of recent incidents involving bullets and bombs being sent to footballers and political figures by disgruntled RFC supporters.  This is no light claim to raise - Raith Rovers FC, who are yet to vote on the proposals, have recently had to increase policing at their games because of firebomb threats that were likely made by Rangers fans.

The stain spreads.  Most of Scotland's media organisations are Glasgow-based, and the tabloids in particular survive on their football coverage.  A dead or drastically diminished Rangers will likely result in staff clearouts on sports desks all over the city.  Coincidentally, many of those journalists have spent the last week prophesying Armageddon - literally, Armageddon - if New Rangers are dealt with under the rules.

Rumours of collapsing sponsorship deals abound; a league without Rangers is even less attractive than it currently is, and the possibility of fleeing broadcasters threaten clubs with loss of vital TV income.  Political intervention is too little, and far too late to do any good.  Pressure is ratcheting up ahead of the vote.  

And here's where it gets interesting, if you've been exasperated by corruption in finance and the media - it looks like the clubs are going to vote against the proposals.


That is, the clubs in question are going to disregard the wishes of the money men and accept straitened circumstances, in the interests of "sporting integrity".  It'd be naive to imagine that the lower-league clubs don't have the bottom line in mind when they vote in accordance with their supporters' wishes, but a large proportion have already signaled their intentions.

And so Scottish football is in a position to do the entire nation a favour, here.  At Westminster, there are hundreds of ostentatious demands for high earners to pay their damn taxes, the same as the rest of us do.  There are a thousand pledges to run a river through the Augean stables of tabloid media and a million promises to end bonus culture and stop the banks rigging capitalism in their own favour.  


Here's the difference though - having declared their intent to uphold morality in the face of severe intimidation from proportionately similar entrenched interests, the SFL clubs may actually do it. 

Even if it sends some clubs to the wall, it's heartening to know that somebody, somewhere, finally drew a line in the sand and said No further.  You may wait a lifetime to see a repeat.