Don’t you have it?

Coming just weeks after Express Newspapers were handed a £550,000 fine and ordered to make prominent front page apologies to Kate and Gerry McCann in the Express and Daily Star, for publishing over 100 “seriously defamatory” articles concerning the disappearance of their daugher, the Star excelled itself with this story last week:

MUSLIM SICKOS’ MADDIE KIDNAP SHOCK

As Five Chinese Crackers writes “the article isn’t actually about Muslims kidnapping anyone, although you won’t find it on the Star’s website. It’s about some Muslims suggesting on the internet that the McCanns were responsible for their daughter’s kidnapping.”

Considering that most of the population of Europe has been morbidly fascinated with the case of Madeleine McCann for the past year and that terabytes have been expended on endless speculation suggesting the parents are guilty, it seems extraordinary that another in a very long line of tasteless theories expounded online is considered newsworthy at all.

And of course it isn’t. What it does allow, however, is an opportunity to give the most wretched element of our society another fucking good kicking. Coming on the back of a set of decent results for the BNP I’m not much in the mood for restraint right now, so let’s just get to the rub shall we?

If you buy the Daily Star you’re a fucking idiot. This includes those who would claim they only buy it for the football, or the TV pages. If you blithely repeat the lies it prints down the pub or at the bus stop or on your favourite messageboard, and in doing so contribute towards the kind of success the BNP enjoyed last week, then I’ll assume you’re a racist prick. If you attempt to go beyond the very real dismay and anger we feel at the realisation that some are so made that they commit vile atrocities against children and instead rant and rage and jerk spittle down the line to whichever racist magnet you prefer – TalkSport or Five Live, take your pick – and then proceed to take a newspaper which once published a topless photograph of a fifteen year old child, arms across her chest and then promised its readers it intended to publish her naked breasts as soon as she reached 16, you’re a hypocrite and are very possibly aching to penetrate a child yourself.

The decents love to tell us that we’re wrong and in turn we try to make them understand that we’re as appalled as they are, but seek to understand the context behind recent terrorist atrocities. Personally, I try to square my politics with my atheism, which is a harder process than I like to admit when many of those I admire for their stance on the latter dismay me when they turn to the former.

So allow me to adumbrate a question. There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to ask, when one considers the juxtaposition of this vile headline next to the image of poor vacuous Lucy, her pendulous breasts cupped, her arse proffered towards us, her ambition apparently nothing more than appearing in a tawdry rag, acting as an avatar for a particular type of empty male fantasy in which her crimson flue becomes a repository for bollock fulls of gelatinous gloop, a product of grasping capitalism and a willingness to sell ourselves for the right price; there’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to ask, considering all that, considering the hateful words alongside, themselves a just a tiny part of an ocean of hatred, state sanctioned and tacitly approved of by an indifferent electorate; there’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to ask, when one is told that some Muslim women are mentally ill and that opinion is then endorsed by an otherwise apparently kind and venerable and rational man; there’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to ask, is there the merest possibility, of the slightest lacuna, of the slimmest chance, that someone may, for the scantest of moments, feel a flicker of anger and maybe begin to consider the possibility of embarking on a process of which may eventually lead to this? Don’t you have it?

It’s all the in the database or: People who don’t pay their TV licence against the Nazis!

If anything could turn me into a free-marketeer, fists pounding at the keyboard as my bloviated carcus undulates with rage at the latest offence against common or garden decency, this astonishing piece of intimidation from the BBC could well be the catalyst.

First the Kermodian twaddle. Panning across a cityscape, the camera swoops between high rises and under bridges but something serreptitious and sinister is being imparted. All is not as it would appear, for we are the victims of a visual sleight of hand. This landscape is actually a printed circuit board, where electronic components represent the familiar density of a city centre and regimented rows of microchips are substitued for the spread of suburbia. In this distopian mise en scene (a 2:2 in Film Studies is surely mine for the taking) the metaphor is as stark as the insult to our intelligence is clumsy. Our towns, our streets and our homes are under the aegis of the “database,” from which nobody should attempt to escape, lest they wish to hear the dreaded knock at the door, of which we are reminded at the end of the film.

If I were to awake from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into the insect I described above, I may well issue that moth-eaten cri de coeur so beloved of my fellow travellers, and as no other metaphor will suffice, I must employ here. This is rather nannyish, is it not? Hitching itself onto the current zeitgeist for hectoring us for that we which haven’t done and had no intention of doing in the first place, we are assumed to be guilty and admonished accordingly. Such blandishments are nothing new on the BBC, which these days rarely passes on an opportunity for self-aggrandisement and cross-promotion and never ceases to hotly tell us what “the BBC has learned” when they’re parroting the same line as every other news outlet.

You must not assume that I would wish to see the BBC privatised, nor do I propose here to enjoin with those laptop libertarians who never cease to inform us how we’re in the grip of a liberal conspiracy. Despite all of my misgivings enough fondness for Auntie remains for me to still hope, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it will recover and thrive in the face of increasing competition.

Whenever I am asked if I caught a particular programme the night previously, for the sake of brevity I often respond that I do not own a television. This is untrue. A portable resides under the bed and occasionally, should the desire take me, it is given temporary berth whereupon it almost never fails to raise the blood pressure, as it did last Thursday evening when it delivered to me the juvenile witterings of Jeremy Vine and the terrifying blank-eyed stare of a second generation Miliband unit. For this I am reconciled to paying the licence fee and pathetically, to be bullied whilst doing so, having no option other than metamorphing into a bug.

A short sketch, entirely unrelated to recent news

“Ok Miley, remember what we rehearsed. Research tells us that when the pictures come out we’ll need to win back the Christian demographic. The corporation has cells within every media node, so we can let them counter any negative publicity. Anyway, they’ve threatened to withdraw the advertising accounts so they’re not gonna be trouble!”

“Uh-huh?”

“So, what do you say? We’ve been over this a thousand times.”

“I say that I’m sorry and that my family and faith will guide me through the journey.”

“That’s good, honey. Real good. Family and faith. They’re the key to this whole thing. It don’t matter how greedy, how shameless, how venal you are. If ya’ got God on your side, you can’t get away with anything in this great land of ours. Hell, even poppa got away with that terrible song! Daddy will feign outrage and claim he’d left the shoot when the picture was taken.”

“Uh-huh?”

“And remember. Put your palm to your chest when you say faith. It’ll look more convincing.”

“Whatever. I wanna gold-plated Lexus.”

Transformed

If Doncaster Rovers win at Cheltenham on Saturday they’ll be promoted to the second tier of English football, ten years after losing their league place in 1998. Chairman John Ryan will have delivered everything he promised when he bought the wretched remains of the club that summer, with the team playing in a new stadium and at a height not seen since Alick Jeffrey’s first spell in the side fifty years ago.

Although I attended games sporadically during those first two seasons in the Conference, relegation was essentially the end of my time as a supporter. My heart was no longer in it. I simply couldn’t summon the renewed commitment, having gone through the protracted death rattle at the end of the arsonist and fraudster Ken Richardson’s tenure as the soi-disant benefactor of the club. Later on, promotion would’ve been difficult to take in its own way, had I been there to witness it. Actually winning something seemed precisely anathema to the whole reason for supporting Doncaster Rovers in the first place. There are three constants in my life: Philip Larkin, Depeche Mode and socialism. A declaration of love for any of them is unlikely to get one laid. “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” said Larkin, who, when he wasn’t humping Betty Mackereth behind the accessions desk occasionally wrote some astonishingly good poems. I don’t listen to Depeche Mode because I think life is a joyous celebration. No, I listen to Depeche Mode because they offer pain and misery in various tempos. When asked what goes through his mind onstage, guitarist Martin Gore responded that he thinks about death and how curious it would be if he expired in front of 50,000 people. Nor do I need to explain here why identifying as a socialist, as I do now, as I did at the last election and as I have done for as long as I knew the world was hugely unjust, does not cheer the soul. If I had wanted success I could have turned to Manchester United. I grew up in Stretford and, unlike the majority of United fans, I’ve actually been to a game. No, keep it miserable and I’m happy.

So, a return to the league in 2003 via a golden goal in the inaugral Conference play-off final was followed by the Division 3 title the next year. Victories over Manchester City, Aston Villa and so nearly against Arsenal in the Carling Cup were an adequate substitute for promotion the season after* and when the subsequent campaign again stalled short of the play-offs, victory in the Johnstones Paint Trophy in front of 60,000 at the Millennium Stadium sufficed. It made me sick.

Ultimately though, it isn’t the success, astonishing and unexpected as it has been which repels me. I may even have returned after a hiatus. No, it’s the fans. More precisely, the new fans, who have emerged in their thousands over the past five years. Families. Children with painted faces. Those for whom football is a leisure choice enjoyed à la carte in the sterilised environment only a £32m all-seater stadium provides. And it’s arse-clenchingly awful.

I still watch from afar. No doubt capricious fortune will likely conspire to deliver a victory for Sean O’Driscoll’s side, but then snatch it away from them, when Leeds United are given just enough points back via arbitration to send Donny tumbling into the play-offs. That would almost be enough to call me back, just so long as it precipitated an immediate relegation and the start of another generation in the doldrums. When those painted faces are being ground in the Doncaster dirt by a group of Chelsea fans at school my heart will sing and when that club-affiliated visa card is being hacked across despairing wrists will I truly belong again. Until that day I remain an exile.

Still, the possibility of Doncaster winning promotion and leaving Leeds United behind them remains. Even I can see that is remarkable. If one could go back in time and tell both clubs their respective fates on this cup night just over seven years ago who would have laughed hardest in sheer incomprehension?

*As Nick points out here, I’ve omitted a season. Apologies for this oversight.

Your retarded

Is there a more objectionable constituency on the internet than that to be found chucking shit at one another in the comments beneath a YouTube video?

In between the debate about the provenance of this clip of an unfortunate television presenter dissolving into laughter, an interrogatory finesse which essentially consists of little more than adopting a contrary position in favour of either Belgium or the Netherlands and then screaming about it in an increasingly vitriolic manner, is an equally unpleasant shit-storm debating the authenticity of the video.

The reality? The clip is taken from the Belgian comedy In de Gloria, which satirises the worst excesses of daytime television. I know this because despite the voices of lucidity and sanity appearing only rarely, they are there and can be found if one is prepared to pick through the YouTube slurry with a pair of tweezers.

A quick reference to IMDB via Google should be enough to suffice, and yet the cacophony of shit-flinging continues unabated. Some claim it to be an extract from a genuine factual programme. Some are horrified. Some are amused. Some are both. Some go so far as to assert that the host was dismissed for offending decency. Some claim he now works in radio. For the other side, some claim it to be a comedy. Some claim it to be fake. Some claim it to be a comedy and to be a fake, which is to open up a whole meta-layer of philosophical introspection I had hitherto not attributed to the average YouTube commentator.

John Gabriel is wrong. Far from hiding behind anonymity, it is a sobering thought to confront what we are reduced to when we’re granted mere pseudonymity and a keyboard. Will Web 3.0 allow us to evacuate our bowels directly down the nearest ISDN line and into the face of someone who dares to claim a video posted on YouTube is actually from Belgium, not Holland? Why, despite lofty claims of interactive, user-generated content breaking down barriers is the internet invariably little more than a saloon bar brawl featuring emoticons, pixels and poor spelling?

If you leave me, can I come too?

This article in today’s Guardian is especially pertinent at the moment. My manager – a relaxed, music-loving, left-wing, genuinely nice guy I’m delighted to have got to know these past months since my return to work – announced last week he is leaving for a post at another agency. He’s been measurably good for me; understanding my mental health problems, always supportive, never remotely placing any pressure on any of us and always on our side. And in a few weeks he’ll be gone, driven up the wall by the myriad failings of our ‘new’ – only eight years old, folks – IT system. in all probability to be replaced by some cocking vapid fuckshard.

He isn’t the only one leaving. I spent many a cigarette break outside with my closest friend at work. A like-minded thirty-something Adidas-wearing socialist relic from the 1990s, unlike me he’s a graduate with cause for genuine complaint that he’s wasting himself here. In a week he’ll be gone and there’ll be no more Friday lunchtimes laughing at New Labour, or the ziggurat-climbing coporate schillings in our place, with their healthy lives and their gym memberships. their Audi TTs and their lunches at All Bar One, their ‘time management’, their euphemisms, their pleonasms and their wholesale support for the ‘journey’ we’re expected to enjoin.

Last night I went for a drink with a colleague on my section (despite liking many of them personally I refuse to use the word team, connoting as it does images of high-fives, paintballing, daily huddles and Key Performance Indicators) and he’s in the same frame of mind. Everyone else I merely tolerate, with their haircuts and their “did you watch Dancing on Ice?” and their “I won’t mind global warming if it means I don’t have to wear a jumper” and their tedious fucking conversations redolent with implicit racism.

My dull, steady little world is untethered from its moorings again and I’m really not good at dealing with the change about to wash ashore. I sure picked a good time to quit smoking. For what it’s worth, I’ll miss them.

Third degree burns

The staff at the Ministry of Defence army recruitment office in Liverpool have a delicious sense of irony; their telephones play When Will I See You Again? when one is placed on hold.

Up the Arse!

Reproduced below is the text of Craig Murray’s now infamous article on Alisher Usmanov, who has recently purchased a 21% stake in Arsenal. Murray’s webhosts have unfortunately capitulated under pressure from Usmanov’s legal goons and have not only taken down his entire site but also Tim Ireland’s Bloggerheads and bizarrely, Boris Johnson’s too. Chicken Yoghurt has a list of sites supporting Murray and I’m happy to join the choir.

Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist

I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you. You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media becuase he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:

“Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged. He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record.”

Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal. He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke “Gorbachev”, a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue.

Usmanov’s pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socilist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan. Karimov ordered the “Pardon” because of his alliance with Usmanov’s mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev’s side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.

Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the World’s most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into the “privatisation” process at a time when gangster muscle was used to secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian Mafia and Russian security services was being formed.

Usmanov has two key alliances. He is very close indeed to President Karimov, and especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the 2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country’s natural gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this. This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.

Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through Putin’s long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski. Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college. Gazprominvestholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests outside Russia, Usmanov’s role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom’s bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.

Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has bought out – with the owners having no choice – the only independent national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish this through Gazprom. The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window.

All this, both on Gazprom and the journalist’s death, is set out in great detail here:
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/russian_journal.html

Usmanov is also dogged by the widespread belief in Uzbekistan that he was guilty of a particularly atrocious rape, which was covered up and the victim and others in the know disappeared. The sad thing is that this is not particularly remarkable. Rape by the powerful is an everyday hazard in Uzbekistan, again as outlined in Murder in Samarkand page 120. If anyone has more detail on the specific case involving Usmanov please add a comment.

I reported back in 2002 or 2003 in an Ambassadorial top secret telegram to the Foreign Office that Usmanov was the most likely favoured successor of President Karimov as totalitarian leader of Uzbekistan. I also outlined the Gazprom deal (before it happened) and the present by Usmanov to Putin (though in Jastrzebski’s name) of half of Mapobank, a Russian commercial bank owned by Usmanov. I will never forget the priceless reply from our Embassy in Moscow. They said that they had never even heard of Alisher Usmanov, and that Jastrzebski was a jolly nice friend of the Ambassador who would never do anything crooked.

Sadly, I expect the football authorities will be as purblind. Football now is about nothing but money, and even Arsenal supporters – as tight-knit and homespun a football community as any – can be heard saying they don’t care where the money comes from as long as they can compete with Chelsea.

I fear that is very wrong. Letting as diseased a figure as Alisher Usmanov into your club can only do harm in the long term.

Mission Statement

Error Gorilla is commited to delivering the very best standard of care to his readers during their stay here. At all times he will endeavour to ensure his valued customers have an enjoyable experience and leave without suffering increased levels of stress, raised blood pressure and sheer unadulterated bitter frustration. Therefore, with immediate effect, he has taken the precaution of banning David Duff from commenting on this blog. Although the chances of an outbreak of Duff are slim, readers are assured that should this breathtakingly ignorant, malicious and reactionary old cretin wheel out his wheezing attempts at humourous persiflage and precise social commentary, they will be deleted on sight.

Thought for the day

Let me begin with a brief precis, by no means intended as an apologia. My father died suddenly in 1982 and although I remember little about him, I can recall a few memories. Sundays are mostly a forgotten boredom but I can picture him in his armchair watching Brian Walden on the television. As it happens, I can also bring to mind the hot tears of frustration when I overheard him discussing the forthcoming Labour Party conference at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. Sensing an opportunity for cakes and balloons, I began petitioning him to take me along, uncomprehending his subsequent gentle refusal and explanation. I was six years old when Labour first let me down. There were to be no cakes and no celebrations, not then as a little boy and not now either, now we are told the socialist tradition has been consigned to the last century, and is apparently never to come again.

He died in April outside the social security office he was due to sign on at, having been made redundant at the age of 62. In the years that followed I saw my mother struggle to keep us afloat, navigating the notoriously fickle seasonal employment market of a faded coastal town in the 1980s. One of her many jobs was as a cleaner at the Pleasure Beach and she recalls the time she was barked at for not clearing tables fast enough. Occupied with the task of attempting to prise loose a soiled nappy fermenting behind a hot radiator, where it had been stuffed by a considerate patron, she was humilated further for a job that offered just £1.42 an hour. When he demised suddenly and uselessly on the floor of his boardroom in 2004, Geoffrey Thompson, who had inherited the resort in 1976, was worth an esitmated £25m.

In 1987 my mother remarried and we moved to Thorne, a forlorn mining village near Doncaster. This once proud little town had been licked to a splinter by economic fate and the closure of the colliery that provided the majority of employment. Today the bright lights of Doncaster offer a career in any number of call centres and if that doesn’t appeal there’s always God to keep the local children well behaved.

I now want to write about the BBC and it is because of this that I offer the above in the interests of full disclosure. Lately the BBC has found itself the unwelcome subject of a succession of negative headlines. Never guilty of missing an opportunity to stick the boot in further, the usual outriders from the right-wing media have dusted off the same old accusations of an inherent left-wing bias. And yet I can’t square that particular circle which asks us to believe the BBC is little more than an extension of the Socialist Workers Party. I am left-wing and I am working-class. I do not own my own home and, earning slightly over £13000 a year cannot afford to buy much more than a flat in a converted former council house in one of Sheffield’s poorest areas. Alack, even that option is barred at present, as the Department of Work & Pensions do not currently offer permament contracts to new employees; as it currently stands, I could find myself turfed out of work by next January at the latest, should my contract not be renewed. If the BBC is left-wing I can’t say I’ve noticed lately.

A cursory and by no means extensive glance at a random day’s viewing explodes this myth so often peddled by the right-wing. Every morning Breakfast – one presumes it is no longer called Breakfast News so as not to incur prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act – regularly distils us the latest from the City courtesy of Declan Curry, the only presenter from that programme to cross the picket line during the 2005 strike. The same channel then helpfully explains how we can make a killing at a property auction – Homes Under the Hammer – shovels more misery on those of us who cannot afford a home at even the low end of the housing market – To Buy Or Not To Buy – and advises how to pawn Granny’s Wedgwood collection for a quick buck – Cash in the Attic. Elsewhere in the schedules The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den sell the message that happiness lies at the conclusion of the next killer deal and there’s even a version for kids where the winners get a limousine ride while the losers take the bus home.

Is this really the output of a conduit for liberal propaganda? Who are these people trying to kid? Imagine, if you would, regular dispatches from the frontline of the anti-globalisation movement during the risible and ridiculously named Breakfast, or a radio phone-in programme by a left-wing equivalent to Jon Gaunt – although perhaps without the violent prediliction that led him to abuse a critical listener as a “moron” and threaten to “come around… with a baseball bat” – or the equally shrill and visceral Stephen Nolan. Countenance the possibility of John Pilger or Noam Chomsky or Tariq Ali being allowed a seat at the Question Time table. It would not happen. It does not happen.

The estimable Johann Hari nails it here:

This is stated so often that nobody stops to ask: is this true? Where’s the evidence? In fact, the BBC’s most famous and high-profile presenters today are figures of the right, and make increasingly little effort to hide it. Andrew Neil – union-buster, former Murdoch lackey and cheerleader for Thatcher at her most foaming – presents all the BBC’s live Westminster coverage, with six programmes. On ‘This Week’, he jeers at anybody who expresses left-liberal ideas as unwordly imbeciles, and is immediately reinforced by another Thatcherite, Michael Portillo. Only the poorly-prepared Diane Abbot is there to pout alternatives.

I must consider my blood pressure but from memory I can recall one particular incident in which Radio Five’s hateful Peter Allen – a man who regarded chinless Otis Ferry’s incursion into the House of Commons as little more than the harmless jeu d’esprit of a pithy rascal – responding to critical emails accusing the channel of affording Gordon Brown too much coverage with the bizarre response “imagine how sick we’d all be if John McDonnell was Prime Minister?” Although this presumably did not go unchallenged somewhere, I cannot recall any left-winger being allowed recourse on air.

On a December morning in 2005 the BBC descended on Sheffield’s leafy Ecclesall Road, an extensive avenue connecting some of the most sought-after areas in England’s fourth city, to broadcast what was little more than a puff-piece derived entirely from a report by Barclays Bank. Whilst one half of Sheffield can still expect to die some eight years earlier than their affluent neighbours from the other side of the city, they can at least take comfort from the fact that they share the same geography with some of the most relatively wealthiest outside London. What goes without mention should only do so if it doesn’t warrant it, yet this rather stark statistic was not deemed relevent to the report, which instead juxtaposed footage of the city’s poorest areas with the words of an estate agent delivering a glowing encomium to the must-have postcodes. And that was it, the assumption of popular affluence encapsulated in one report.

From Radio 4’s Thought for the Day to BBC 1’s Songs of Praise; from Radio 2’s awful Jeremy Vine Show to BBCi’s Have Your Say (both of which invariably couch debate in terms designed to get right-wingers frothing about the liberal conspiracy reducing the country to its knees); from the genuflection before the Windsors to the courting of Alastair Campbell; from former Young Conservative Nick Robinson to Spectator Chief Executive Andrew Neil; from Dragon’s Den to the Apprentice; from Jeremy Clarkson (who last night spent an hour soiling the Arctic in a Toyota and concluded that the “inconvenient truth is [that the damage alleged to have been done by the car to the environment] doesn’t even appear to have scratched the surface”) to Jon Gaunt. Hardly Marxism is it?

And yet the myth goes on.

Originally published 27th July. Reposted after being deleted in error.