Hyperbolix

Sickening as it is to see people celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher, I was not one of those calling for a ban on the playing of Ding Dong The Witch is Dead. I'm pleased to see no ban was introduced. I say that, but it seems it depends on your definition if the word "ban".

The BBC had taken an editorial decision to play a short clip of the track today, with an explanation, rather than the whole thing. This decision was a compromise, allowing the chart placing of the track to be marked but recognising that the track is only there due to a campaign directing personal hatred at someone who has only just died, and is therefore distasteful by any normal person's standards.



It has not been banned. The government has not told anyone they can't play it. In a free country media organisations have the right to choose whether content they carry is suitable for their audience or not. As a public funded organisation, the BBC has to take a particularly sensitive view on the content of prime time programmes such as the top 40 chart show.

Arguably, the BBC's decision is the worst of all worlds. On the one hand they are not playing in full a track that is legitimately in the Top 40 (albeit it only as a result of social media driven manipulation of the charts). On the other hand they are drawing attention to the pathetic hate driven rationale behind the track charting when, if they'd just played it with no explanation, many listeners would just be bemused as to why it was there at all. I understand that, in the event, the DJ chose not to mention the title of the alternative, Thatcher fans backed "I'm In Love With Margaret Thatcher" when she played it. So, all in all not that balanced a decision after all.

But still, this is a free country and the BBC has every right to take whatever editorial decision they want. And people are free to criticise it. But some interpret the Beeb's editorial decision as an outright ban. The most ridiculous commentary I've read comes from, unsurprisingly, The Guardian and Nick Cohen. Where he equates the situation to censorship in Communist China.


It's a surprise as the left is not known for exaggerated and offensive comparisons is it?

The Really Nasty Party

As they continue to lose the main political arguments facing the country today, the leftists' bitterness grows and grows.

You have to feel for them. They are desperately trying to deny their complete and utter irrelevance to the needs of a country their statist ideology has brought to its knees. So, instead of engaging in a sensible debate about the way forward for Britain, which would require some degree of honest reflection on their role in creating the mess, they are reduced to pathetic name calling and offensive caricaturisation of government policy.

First the delusional Polly Toynbee calls the coalition's housing benefit cap proposal the "final solution for the poor" as if restricting those receiving the benefit to the average level of income for a working person is comparable to the attempted systematic murder of a whole race of people.

Then, as if to show that Labour aren't just highly offensive in their delusional state but utterly pathetic as well, Harriet Harman (ex political correctness ultra Equalities Minister who was dedicated to helping minority groups) describes red headed Danny Alexander as a "Ginger rodent". Nice. In doing so insults all red heads.

God knows the poor copper headed sun dodgers* have enough on their plate without this kind of prejudiced insult.

* I am allowed to insult red heads as I married one, one of my children is one and a significant proportion of my facial hair (when allowed to grow) is that hue.

Great response from Danny Alexander:

@dannyalexander: I am proud to be ginger and rodents do valuable work cleaning up mess others leave behind. Red squirrel deserves to survive, unlike Labour.

He shows himself to be a more gracious and humorous person than sad old Hattie.

Nasty Hypocrisy

I've got a lot of time for the Labour MP Tom Harris. I don't agree with him politically, obviously, but he seems to be one of a dimishing number of Labour politicians that doesn't come across as totally deluded and, even more rarely, he honestly expresses his opinions which are usually reasonable.

I say usually because of this blog post. It attempts to provide evidence of the tired old anti-Tory charge that they are the "nasty party". I've no reason to think that what Labour's top blogger claims about the behaviour of a couple of Tory backbenchers is untrue (although he's hardly an inpatial witness), but the final paragraph raises my eye brows.

"(Now, I’m going to take bets on this one: a prize for the first Tory (or LibDem – same difference) commenter who brings up Damien McBride. And a special prize for the first Tory (or LibDem – same difference) commenter who actually condemns this behaviour rather than seeks to defend it. Come on – who’s first…?)"

I suspect what happened here was Mr Harris MP finished writing his post, realised that anyone with even the shortest political memory would know what utter hypocrisy it is for a member of the Labour party to call any other party "nasty" and realised he needed pre-empt people pointing this out.

So, he picks on one possible (and in the bloggersphere, probably the most renowned) example of New Labour's endemic nastiness - Damian Mcbride's Smeargate and attempts to discredit what he knows to be the inevitable charge of hypocrisy by casting the subject as some kind of cliché.

The problem for Tom is that Smeargate was just one of many examples of Labour nastiness he could have mentioned.

• There's the contempt with which Labour hold the electorate (and even their own supporters) as illustrated by Bigot-gate;
• The appalling treatment of Dr David Kelly (leaking his identity, his humiliation by a Labour MP at a select committee hearing);
• The systematic undermining of anyone they consider to be critical of them by briefing against them. For example, members of the public (i.e. bullygate) all the way up to Generals, the BBC (Kelly again) and even their own senior people (Alistair Darling's "forces of hell" and the constant negative briefings between Blair and Brown etc);
• Alastair Campbell (no more needs to be said about this nasty piece of work).

That's just a few off the top of my head, I could go on, but I think the list, says it all.  It is Labour, not the Tories or Liberal Democrats that are "nasty". To extrapolate the behaviour of a couple of new backbench MPs to represent the approach of a whole party isn't very believable. 

Personally, I think the whole use of the word "nasty" is childish. I know it was Theresa May that started the whole thing off years ago in a clumsy attempt to illustrate the image problem the Tory party suffered from that was causing them to keep losing elections, but Labour jumped on it and have thrashed it to death over the years. For Labour, I'd prefer the words: dishonest, vindictive, bullying, controlling and poisonous. Hmmm, perhaps nasty does actually sum that lot up quite well.

I'd like to say that Tom Harris has never been part of that nastiness. The hypocrisy in his piece arises from his support for the real nasty party and its leadership (including all the likely winning candidates in the current Labour leadership election), not from his own personal behaviour.