Tuesday 8 July 2014

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL.



There is much comment, on the information super highway, much of it thoughtful and well-informed, about the conviction of Rolf Harris.  Some complain that the evidence is all hearsay, others that it is too old, or historic, as we must now say, aping our arse-watching masters in MediaMinster.  One strand in this unpopular campaign is the fact that one of his victims took thirty grand or so, in advance of the trial, from a tabloid; another is that Harris's daughter's friend, upon turning 18, voluntarily remained in a sexual relationship with the old creep for thirteen years, only raising Hell when he refused her demand for money and there are yet others who insist that even if he did do that groping and all the rest it, it isn't really that bad. Strengthening their hand, paradoxically, some might think, is the intervention of Ms Vanessa Feltz, complaining very late in the day of events she alleges took place decades ago.  Like so many in showbusiness, Feltz, indefatigably talentless, is a Cantabrian, amongst the finest brains in the country, yet she breaks, it seems, just like a little girl.  I don't know the extent of the Harriskrieg on Feltz's underwear but whatever it involved it is a long way from child abuse and I guess, par for the showbusiness course, these people are uniformly repulsive and amoral and Feltz's belated cant unreasonably fuels the unreasonable assault on feminism which underpins, I think, much of the disquiet around Harris's conviction. 

I do not know if he was guilty as charged, if the charges were lawful but I must presume that the judge and the jury decided rightly, on my behalf, on both.  Judges, however,  are neither infallible nor always entirely honest; look at the trial, ancient now, historic, of Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, in which the judge directed the jury that it could not convict an Old Etonian; look at the trials and imprisonments of so many supposed IRA bombers, who were all innocent; at the outrageous framing of Barry George for the murder of Jill Dando and the unanswered questions about her investigations into establishment paedophilia; we could fill the streets of cyberspace with the rotten, scandalous behaviour of judges high and low. Overwhelmingly white,  privately educated and Oxbridge, who could doubt that these vermin will, first and foremost, protect their own, I would believe anything of Mr Justice Slag.

I am also perfectly willing to believe that Hall and Harris and Clifford have been chosen  as scapegoats; indeed, watching, a few minutes ago, a sinister, former Tory children's minister, smarming and soothing, advising caution in the face of hysterical conspiracy theories and blaming all but parliament for all this shit, I would almost bet my life on it.  Thrown to the wolves or not, though,  I have little doubt that Hall and Harris and Clifford behaved reprehensibly for significant periods and towards those who were vulnerable to them as a result of their celebrity.  This does, of course, open an argument about the nature of celebrity but I have been having it here for years, already.  I wish more would engage, would see the true meaning of the phrase, There is no business like showbusiness.

But the danger I came to talk about is that old one, divide and rule, which Mediaminster so readily deploys against us.  Cameron’s spivs and gangsters would, at a stroke, repeal equal pay legislation – Look, it hampers the wealth creators, simply gets in the way of long term economic reform; would repeal anti-discrimination legislation -  Lessbeclear, it costs the taxpayer a fortune; would, as it so successfully does, even further set worker against worker, black against white and man against woman.  The women’s rights struggle was and remains everybody’s struggle; it is a piquancy of our ruinous times that so many blame it - and not himself - for the apprehension and conviction of a wretched old nonce.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

'…I must presume that the Judge and the Jury acted rightly on my behalf…'

No, Mr Ishmael, you must never presume such dangerous things as that.

Vincent

Woman on a Raft said...

Does equal pay matter if the tendency is to push the bulk of wages down to the legal minimum of £6.31 per hour, with the minimum becoming the de facto maximum?

Now, zero hours - there's an obscenity. I know of only one example where such a contract is justified. All the other cases are globacorp trying to make people reserve an option on their time for no stand-by fee at all.

mongoose said...

Indeed it is an obscenity, mrs woar, but it is also the inevitable market answer to a maximum wage. It is the minimisation of poor people's wages by another means. Did anyone think that it would not be so? Horrible but just as the night follows the day.

As for nonce-hunts, Mr I, I am astonished at you. Are you well? All that gardening is doing your head in, Sir. That after Rolf's abuse of a child she "voluntarily" stayed in a relationship - she grew into it, I'll bet; it fucking matured and blossomed, of course, it did, like a wee spring flower in a blissful meadow; there may even have been violins a-twitterin' away upon the breeze... Aww, bollocks! And if she has turned into a money-grabber of poor judgment, whose fault is that likely to largely be? Here's a few bob. Buy yourself soemthing nice. Yeck! A subsequent so-called consensual adult relationship is reason for more years in the jug for the bastard not fewer.

But notwithstanding that Lord Justice Slag and his merry band of bent coppers can stitch up the innocent, this is no reason to deny justice to even this bunch of showbusiness fuckers. And it's just so that we don't look too closely at our Parliamentary Paedos. Rolf? God rot the reptile but it has been one of a dozen distraction mechanisms from the start IMO. And am I sure that a jury can be found to weigh the evidence rather than the racket on the telly? Well, I am afraid that I am not at all sure but what do I know?

The sooner we separate the issues the better: noncing v sexual error; a sensible time limit for the prosecution of necessarily evidence-free accusations; and a lifting of the lid on a full-blown fucking conspiracy to groom, abuse, traumatise, and then to murder victims and witnesses when they become inconvenient. As we have pondered in the past, if you only had one bullet?

callmeishmael said...

Shouldn't take me so literally. mr vincent, implicit in that phrase is that we all must, like it or not, are supposed to, required to respect the verdict of the court, this is our system of jurisprudence; unless we are present in court we can do little else but accept the verdict; that's the system. I would prefer a French, investigating magistracy to this adversarial nonsense but the jury is what we have; that many are misled and misdirected by bent judges is rathet if not completely comprehensively outlined by those few examples and by many other posts.

You, too, mr mongoose, shooting the messenger, I merely report what is being said, do I not? And I conclude as you would expect. Would you have me break step, depart from my convention of not using he saids, she saids, he cheerily rejoinereds? Would you have me litter the landscape with speech marks?

I have been a-gardening, and so should you, you will find the evening air and the birdsong levels your head and eases your mind, might divert you from calumnising your friend,

Your own comment, anyway, as it must be in this matter is as ambivalent, considered and hedged as is my own, so spun are we that the wonder is we do not fall down, dizzy, in a swound.

But you are not alone in rebuking me, mr mongoose and mr vincent, for mrs woar finds me guilty of omission, we have and continue to damn the long-term economic reform which so exalts slavery. I was, in this instance, chiding those who use the Harris case to damn, on the back of thr behaviour of people like Harman and Greer, what they call the Sisterhood, as though equal pay for women damned a poor old man to the torments of the jailhouse.

callmeishmael said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
mongoose said...

Well it is possible, Mr I, that the balance of mind has become disturbed having had recent dealings with my so-called betters in the clergy - and a nameless one of whom does sorely need his arse kicking - but, fuck me, do we have to put up with this panto too? I cannot bear, truly, listening to the disgusting Hodge and the inconceivably horrible Clegg lecturing me on accountability and openness. It does indeed make yer 'ead spin.

callmeishmael said...

Thinking about it, Hodge, Clegg, Vaz, all of them, does make the head spin - where do we start with defrocking them, the task is monstrous.Increasingly, I think that parliamentary democracy is an engine of Satan.

Anonymous said...

You're right there. Anyone who ever votes again - there is a policeman who invedtigsted these dhits who's saying he was forced to sign a non-disclosure on pain of losing his pension - needs their head examined.
-richard

Anonymous said...

dhits of course should be "shits"
-richard

Anonymous said...

I was just pulling your leg, Mr Ishmael.

I've always thought it daft to be forced to conclude that so and so is guilty, just because a court says so, and vice versa. The judge, waffling his usal shite about how terrible the blah blah, reprehensible blah, lack of remorse, aggravating features, blah, blah. He could just as easily be spouting the other schtick, the leaving this court with no stain on your character, blah, head held high, blah, blah. Must have to prepare both speeches, then pretend to genuinely believe whichever verdict the Jury decide.

DLT, Bill Roache, Freddy Starr and others could quite easily be sharing a cell with Rolf, given a different jury, given a different day. And Rolf could be sipping champagne from the stilletto of a buxom blonde now, for the same reasons.

It's the randomness of it all that concerns me. The apparently haphazard manner in which a person is either imprisoned, villified, bankrupted and otherwise generally ruined. Or freed.

Might as well toss a coin, it seems to me. Be about as accurate, I think, in these cases at least.

The minimum wage is a frigging joke. I heard that Farage git suggesting that MPs should get 100 grand a year. Pay the feckers minimum wage, then watch it miraculously rise.

Vincent

call me ishmael said...

Yet, mr vincent, it is writ large, in mystical, golden lettering, that ours is the best judicial system in all Creation. Were there to be a million-year civilisation out there, somewhere, they would fall down in awe and envy on encountering Mr Justice Slag, m'learned friends and twelve good men and womenpersons true. And then, after a moment's consideration, they'd obliterate us.

mongoose said...

Ruminating on this, Mr I, leaning on me windowsill, there must be something more to it all. Even this morning, the Cameron Bastard has used the Paedo Menace as a partial justification for email/web tapping of everyone and everything in creation - "with cross party support". No shit, Sherlock! There is that line from somewhere that these things we shouldn't worry about overly are terrors for children. The bogeyman in the night, like the Muslim bomber or the BBC nonce. I think that they are circling their wagons and preparing us for a pre-election event of some kind. Stay on your island up there and the fuck away form the McCommonwealth Games.

callmeishmael said...

Yes, I watched as much as I could stomach of the unelected pm and his deputy, doing his version of MyFellowMotherFuckers, in front of two limp and shabby Union Jacks, and that's just what I thought, as well as wondering why none asked him about the paedo using the Downing Street computer. No danger of my visiting the Glasgow games, any number of bad things might happen, from any number of sources, might be a bit worse than Man Falls Off Bike.

Anonymous said...

Mr I, I notice that you refer, from time to time, to the fact that the Prime Minister, is 'unelected'. Is this directed at the current occupant of the post or at Prime Ministers generally? I suspect you can see where I am going with this so I shall not insult your intellect and knowledge by stating the point but what is yours? Perhaps I am just being pedantic? SG

call me ishmael said...

No big deal, mr sg, just that like his predecessor, Gordon Snot, Cameron was not actually elected to the position of PM as were, say, most of them, by a decisive majoriy vote in a general election. Instead, he insists, and the commentariat has confirmed, that the electorate voted for a coalition with him at its head, which, obviously it didn't; the coalition was a coup d'etat, a grubby deal, no-one elected Cameron prime minister, no matter what he says; if he had the tiniest balls he would have, as did Salmond, in a similar situation, run a minority government.

I have heard him say things like The Coalition was elected to do so-aand-so, even though it wasn't. I am tempted to say that he probably actually believes it, himself, that the Coalition was elected, except that he obviously, Godless heathen bastard, doesn't believe in anything. Least of all the NHS. But that's another story.

Anonymous said...

Sorry Mr I but I am going to be pedantic and picky here (and probably a bit of a wanker too). To the best of my knowledge no-one has ever been elected, as such, to the post of PM in this country. The PM is simply someone who is able to form a government whether by means of obtaining a majority in the House of Commons, forming a coalition, as now, or some other arrangement enabling government (e.g. 'confidence and supply'). I suppose Cameron could have tried to form a minority administration and gone for another election in six months or so but would the outcome have been any more decisive, especially given the in-built advantage to Labour with the current electoral boundaries? At the time I thought that the ability to form a government with the so-called 'Liberal Democrats' was a 'poison chalice' for the Tories (couldn't have happened to 'nicer people' I am sure you would say). I have no great love for the Tories or Cameron, but I think it would have been more just if Labour had been put in the position of having to clean up their mess (which is not to say that the Tories would have done any better had they been in power over the same period). The treachery, lies and hypocrisy of Labour politicians sickens me more than the rest of them put together (which is saying something). I dread their return to power next May. I have long thought that general elections are about choosing the lesser of the evils. By God these are evil times Mr I! SG

callmeishmael said...

However we approach it, mr sg, neither Cameron, his party, nor his coalition were elected in the sense that he uses the term and its underlying assumptions. The fact that this opportunism enables both parties to ditch their manifestos makes it all the more nonsensical, claiming facetiously, as they do, that it is the fault of our psephological indecisiveness that they must break all their promises; such a thing simply should not be permitted unless all those standing set down, in their manifestos, what they would do in the event of them joining a coalition, to which they would say, we simply cannot say, you must just trust us to work in your interests with some other bunch of cunts. Although, actually, it is you who work for us, obviously.

Heavy-heartedly, I agree with you; the differences between all on the green benches are merely cosmetic and the Blair Brown Campbell Mandelstein Junta of Filth was a crime family par excellence. The midwife to Ruin, however, was the Thatcher spiv government; crooks, vandals, beasts, slags, pimps and trollops; they set the tone, lowered the bar and bricked-up the goalposts.

Anonymous said...

I can't disagree with you about that Mr I but I think we can go back further than that to look for the origins of ruin. The Thatcher government is sometimes characterised as having been 'revolutionary' but it was, in fact, reactionary. A reaction, amongst other things, to the excessive power of the unions in the 70's, itself fuelled by poor management practices, weak government and, perhaps, bigger things - 'the aftermath of 'Nam, the oil crises and onset of a new wave of what we now call 'globalisation'. I think that the Thatcher led governments did some things that had to be done but much baby went out with the bathwater (including, possibly, its heart...). Most serious of all, perhaps, the consolidation of power at central government level in the name of dealing with the 'loony left'. A Pyrrhic Victory for democracy if there ever was one. Also Maude is probably right about the Civil Service - though perhaps for the wrong reasons - your point about who 'they' should work for refers. SG

callmeishmael said...

The desired solution to the perceived problems caused by trade unions is, logically, their abolition. together with the dismantling of the welfare state, which was their creature. Cameron odiously plays the card of his dead child to insist Who? Me? I love the NHS, while trashing the NHS so he can sell it off to his chums

There have been many arguments here, with mr jgm2, especially, over the role of unions in the motor industry, his view, briefly, is that they were a bunch of idle, self-destructive, Marxist wreckers; my view is that it was the management team, not the unions, which invented the Allegro, the Marina and the Princess.

There is much to go into the analytical pot, the UK motor industry was working with outdated plant, whereas Japan and Germany were retooled, at our expense, after the war; the Empire was lost, along with its markets and resources and as you say management was unsble to manage, much less motivate; British working practices, compared to, say, Volvo's were in the stone age, alienating production line worker from manager, alienation and division being government's preferred strategies; by government, I mean greedy, disreputable, hypocrite clowns like Farmer Jim Callaghan and the repulsive, malevolent, chortling cottager, Grocer Heath.

These positions can be argued until the cows come home, and mine are no more exclusively right than are mr jgm2's. What is indisputable, though, mr sg, is that Thatcher and her gangsters exalted greed, selfishness, stupidity, larceny, police brutality, frame-ups, racism and the cancer that is Rupett Murdoch, exalted them so highly that the national discourse is now as coarse, stupid and selfish as she; just look, for verification of her own personal qualities, at her imbecile son, Mark, and as if that wasn't enough, she was Beasting's handmaiden. What's not to like?

Anonymous said...

Thanks Mr I. Yes I see you've been round this track before. Regarding the state of UK Industry and industrial relations back in the 70s I suppose I kind of find myself in agreement with both you and Mr jmg2 as both conditions can and, indeed, may be true although the cause and effect relationships are not neatly drawn. Lack of innovation or recognition and willingness to change - adapt or die - on part of management and unions. Adversarial 'us and them' relationships - a perhaps unintended collective suicide pact for much of our industry. But more fundamentally a lack of insight and vision across industry and government. Some rust belt stuff probably had to go but also much opportunity lost. Strange how folks like the Finns have been able to carve out a niche building BFO cruise ships etc. Hardly a low wage economy...

I take your point about Cameron and the NHS. However, and whilst I think essential medical treatment provided free at the point of use should be the mark of any civilised society, the NHS has become a sacred cow and polarised positions cloud judgements about the way forward for this behemoth (as they did with industry back in the 70s as discussed above and I worry that we may end up in much the same place). SG