Public Interest.co.uk

Bring on the All-Blacks. Polly won't be pleased.

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It's just like reading the Guardian.

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I think the Hills Have Eyes one is the best.

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Hard to keep up with blogging these days. Okay, I've been in semi-retirement for the last five years or so, but I like to think I still read them on occasion. But there are just so many. For example, Call me Ishmael. No, I'd never heard of him either. But I came across him just now, and for invective and bile he knocks Devil's Kitchen into a cocked hat. I mean, this is one hell of a first post.

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The noted political philosopher and former deputy leader of the people's party Roy "Lardbutt" Hattersley thinks all is not lost for our current overlords:

"The party is facing a crisis of personal courage, confidence and conviction — not of social democratic policy. If the worst were to happen in May, some of us would make sure that the blame was laid on the politicians, not the winning idea that they have ignored".

I think this is the "socialism hasn't failed, it just hasn't been tried" gambit.

"It is not too late to escape from the Government’s failure to assert a belief in a different and better society. But time is running out. Mr Brown can redeem two years of missed opportunities by speaking at last about freedom and equality. If his nerve fails, it will be up to the rank and file to prove that the Labour Party still stands for something".

I think, in common parlance, Mr. Hattersley is guilty of that most contemporary sin: not getting it. It's the things it stands for that is the problem. I don't want to listen to Gordon Yellow Belly lecture me about freedom and equality any more than I want to hear the lardbutt do so. The idea of the rank and file bellyaching about their core values doesn't fill me with too much rapture, either.

There is a reason that the Labour party has failed, and it isn't the personal courage, confidence and conviction - or lack thereof - that is the problem. It's the ideology, stupid.

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Michael Blowhard has quit. Damn. My favourite culture blogger, gone.

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Mrs. Self is now writing for the Guardian! This is just the beginning. As the Independent starts to jettison its star writers, getting ready for that much-looked-forward-to closure, it's inevitable that the rest of us are going to have to suffer for our sins. I notice the Yazzmonster crops up with alarming frequency in the Daily Mail. We can expect more of that when the plug is finally pulled.
Who else? Robert Fisk in the Sun? Johann Hari in the Telegraph?
In an ideal world they'd surely all be banned for life. Or at least given a six month sabbatical, and sent off to The Writing School to fine tune their talent. The paper fails and their writers get rewarded by being picked off by their former competitors. You'd have thought these papers' proprietors would put two and two together. There is a reason these papers fail, you know.

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Last week I got an email from a group blogging at Nothing British, whose mission in life is to expose the lack of patriotism among the British National Party. On the one hand, one, I'm rather touched that anybody still asks me to link to anyone. Flattery will still get you somewhere, I suspect. And, two, I'd have thought patriotism, albeit a pretty eccentric - that's putting it mildly - is about the only thing the BNP have got going for them.

However, looking closer at the blog, they do seem happy enough to lambast the left for its role in promoting the rise of the BNP, and that's a view I'm delighted to support. The nerve some of the hardcore left has had in pretending that the BNP is right-wing is always slightly irritating. Collectivism, identity politics, separate but equal, capitalism is the same as fascism - these preoccupations are hardly libertarian/conservative ones. Let's face it, the BNP is basically the Labour party as it was in the fifties. What's the difference?

So more power to Nothing British's elbow. I'll stick'em on the blogroll soon, too.

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We have a solution! I found it here. Thought I'd share it with you, because I sure in hell aren't the only person to have this problem. How it was caused was still a mystery, but at least it's done, and I can now listen to Subo covering the Rolling Stones in all her majestic glory.



I believe this will be her next single, too.

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And while I'm here, just on the off chance that 1. There are any readers left here.

and 2. One of them understands this here internet thing.

Could someone possibly explain why I can't hear stuff on youtube now? Or the BBC I player? I can hear music on Windows Media and Itunes and the like, but the rest just goes dead.

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Mrs. Marr:

"Let me take you by the hand and lead you to a very different Britain, one that's perhaps not more than half a year away. It's a country convulsed over its future in the European Union, one in which welfare is being slashed and new prisons are the only public investment still growing. Bodies set up to make life fairer and safer are disappearing in a "bonfire of the quangos".

The BBC is being dismantled and a Fox News-style Murdoch broadcasting agenda is ripping ahead".

Here's hoping.

Nice to be back.

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Peter Preston:

"Why on earth do we splutter on about foreign menaces in editorial lines dictated from New York by an ­Australian OAP?"

Peter Preston is 71.

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