Pop-up goes the weasel

Image via getreading.co.uk

Another exclusive brought to you by your super, soar away Expired and Stupid; voted Britain`s laziest regional newspaper for three years running.

Delighted residents of a run down, crime ridden slum area of Walsall are celebrating the council`s bold decision to offer a “more flexible service” for young people by closing their youth club. By cutting and pasting a council press release, your super, soar away Expired and Stupid has discovered that the unnecessary youth facility is surplus to requirements and will be replaced by a much needed training base for the borough arsonist. Instead the council will be providing pop-up anti-social behaviour units in derelict shops and a van. In line with the wise and prudent council budget policy, the 1974 transit van will be outsourced to a private partner and will be fully equipped with a mattress in the back, a glove box full of sweets and a tape recording of an out of tune bugle.

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An open letter to Gavin Drake

Littlejohn

Dear Gavin,
Possibly the best piece of good old fashioned home-spun advice is that one should never corner a rat as rats are far more dangerous when threatened than when happily scurrying about in sewers and cess pits.

Your interesting open letter the Lord Chancellor confirms that rabid ignorance and parasitic sensationalism will continue to be defended to the death by vermin press pack mentality. You question the ability of Her Majesty`s Coroner for Blackburn and Hyndburn to act in a judicial manner because his findings were critical of the gutter press hounding and vilifying a member of the public who, subsequently, became distressed enough to take their own life. As a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists specialising in religion and law you have, at least, offered some accurate reporting by stating that you did not attend the inquest into the death of Lucy Meadows. Well done. Instead, you have criticised the Coroner based on press coverage provided by the news platform that the Coroner has criticised. I wonder how many freelance journalists believe everything they read or, indeed, write in the press. Do you remember Hillsborough?

Kill the wabbit

Image via Warner Brothers

Regular readers of this influential, widely-read and award winning blog will no doubt remember the arrival of a rabbit into the domestic bliss of family life.

I must make clear that the rabbit entered our lives without any consultation or any agreement from me. For further clarification, this blog can be defined as widely read because at least one person in Romania and possibly three people in Bulgaria clicked on a recent opinion regarding the moral bankruptcy of UKIP. The award is based on a survey of about a dozen 14-year-olds undertaken by UKTV Gold who were asked the following question:
“Which anonymous blog written by someone pretending to be a polypropylene river horse from Botswana is least likely to have any influence on Michael Gove`s vision for a return to medieval education?” I would like to thank all the little people and, above all, God for this marvellous honour.

The rabbit, after about three days of looking cute, went through a rampant and deranged adolescence and emerged from the cocoon of fluffy bunnydom as a violent sexual predator.

In Godwin we trust

Who do you think you are kidding Mr Farage?

Put at its simplest, Godwin`s Law postulates that whenever any protagonist in a discussion, debate or argument offers a comparison juxtaposing current events with the German Third Reich, Nazi oppression or fascism in general then all credibility disappears and any argument is automatically lost. The law was formulated in 1990 by a bloke, unsurprisingly, called Mike Godwin who was, and is, a lawyer and an author. His intention was entirely laudable in that his “law” allows for an elegant disengagement of drunken keyboard warriors who inevitably compare anything they disagree with to fascism. More importantly, Godwin`s Law is there to counter internet bores who seem happy to compare, say, traffic wardens to storm troopers and in doing so trivialise the full horror of the holocaust.

Interestingly, this bit of social media fun has been enthusiastically embraced and modified by the political classes for their own purposes. At any sly reference to marching on Poland, bierkellers, bunkers, blitzkrieg or Nuremberg rallies, Godwin`s Law is evoked to silence any awkward criticism. A recent disturbing example of this failsafe escape clause was beautifully demonstrated by the Department of Work and Pensions in their reaction to the so-called Spartacus Report. The People`s Review of the Work Capability Assessment, to give its formal title, is an independent analysis of the impact that “Welfare Reforms” will have on people with disabilities and severe illness. The DWP are scared stiff of the report because it contains impeccable research, actual data, hard facts and conclusions so damning that ministers have refused to engage with the authors or discuss the ongoing carnage with the Spartacus campaign.

Instead, Iain Duncan Smith continues to make up stories to justify his blind ideology and continues with expenses claims of £39 for a single breakfast. The DWP will not discuss individual cases such as the grandmother who took her own life for the sake of £20 per week bedroom tax yet happily leak the names and addresses of those found guilty of benefit fraud. Clearly a minister of the crown who charges the tax payer £39 for his breakfast does not want to hear that benefit fraud totals £1.2billion, his departments` errors cost £2.2billion and unclaimed benefit amounts to £16billion. Let`s not talk about tax evasion and let`s not allow the shirkers and the scroungers to spoil a hearty breakfast.

Hanging on in quiet desperation

There was a time, long ago, when civic pride was measured by fine public buildings, the health and wellbeing of residents and the prosperity of a town. In present day Walsall, ambition and aspiration begins and ends with the opening of a shop selling cheap clothes and yet another bloody supermarket.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and the decision to “invest” £8million of public money in order to attract an exploitative bunch of bandits like Primark to Walsall is a sign of a clueless and desperate council. Given the less than heroic history of Walsall council`s financial management skills and slash and burn approach to urban regeneration, what could possibly go wrong?