Sunday 26 November 2023

The Sunday Ishmael: 26/11/2023

It's been a great to see the parsing of Jeremy Cunt's Autumn Statement this week, both here and in the press - shows that the Great British Public are not as easily fooled as the Conservatives think we are. They sent out the new totty, Laura Trott, this morning, to tell us lies. This is her, pleading with Laura Kuenssberg to believe her, in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary:
Laura: Please, please, please believe all this made up nonsense and don't be nasty to me. 

Laura: No, Laura, that's all bollocks, isn't it? 2.2 million more workers now pay the 20% basic rate of income tax than three years ago, and 1.6 million more workers are in the 40% tax bracket.

Laura: That’s actually not true. For people on average wages, their taxes would have been cut by about £1,000 on average since 2010. 

Laura: Oh, come on, dear, I know you are new here, but you can't get away with this crap. You know, and our viewers will have seen and heard on many occasions, taxes are going to reach a post-war high.

Laura: (giggles prettily) Yes, I am new, Laura, and this is my dream job. I'm such a lucky girl. Spreadsheets and everything. I'm Chief Secretary to the Treasury, you know. 

Laura: The overall tax burden is going up. Shouldn’t you just be straight with people? For every additional £4.00 people are paying, you are giving £1.00 back.

Laura: (trying to pout charmingly) Yes, and isn't that good, Laura? It is targeted. Wealthier people are being asked to shoulder more of the tax burden.

Thirty-nine year old Laura Trott, an Oxford graduate (of course), was appointed a Member of the British Empire in 2016, in David Cameron's Resignation Honours for her political and public service. She is currently the Conservative MP for Sevenoaks in Kent, a lushly wealthy constituency, which has had a Conservative MP since 1924. They must like her as she has a majority of 40.9%, which is pretty good. Her claim to legislative fame was her bill to restrict access to Botulinum Toxin and filler cosmetic procedures for under 18 year olds, which was passed into law in October 2021.
Bit ironic, that. I was transfixed by Trott's curiously static mouth as she attempted to pout prettily for Kuenssberg and the cameras. You see a lot of that, these days. TV women with curiously smooth and buttery upper lips - not a smoker's wrinkle amongst the lot of them.


The other fun thing on the Laura Kuenssberg Show this morning was the fight between Unison General Secretary Christina McAnea and Reform UK leader Richard Tice about immigration figures and British culture. It got quite nasty, with Chrissy claiming there isn't one, calling in aid her Oirishness and Dicky using the my dad's bigger than your dad defence: "When he gets out of the Celebrity Jungle, Nigel Farage will be "absolutely furious" when he sees the migration figures. And he will be President Farage. Just you wait."
Honest, you couldn't make this stuff up.

What else in this week's news? Oh, yes, heart-rending  photographs of Israeli children hugging their dads after being released from Hamas detention. Here's a photo to redress the balance:
This is Israa Jaabis, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2015 when her car burst into flames a mile from a checkpoint in the West Bank. Israa's family said the fire started because of an engine fault. She suffered severe facial burns in the fire, but her requests for surgery were turned down by prison authorities. Here she is hugging her 15 year old son, Mua'tassim, who was eight years old at the time of her arrest. 

And old Politicians don't die, fade away or depart with dignity to polish their money. We had Baron Munchausen of Chipping Norton last week roaring back as Foreign Secretary - and, just see what happened! Cease Fire and  Hostage Release the same week! No, no, mrs ishmael. That was a Coincidence. Actually, Baron Wrongway went to Ukraine, not Israel. And no, he hasn't sorted that one out yet.
And this week it is wee Alex shouldering his way into the spotlight again. Such sport. I'm getting quite fond of the fat little bastard, what with his chippiness in the face of adversity and the disgraced Nicola Sturgeon. Anyway, he's equipped himself with a shiny new lawyer - well, the last one didn't like him. Remember? Gordon Jackson QC, was overheard (and recorded) saying of his client:  "He [Salmond] certainly was... I don't know much about senior politicians but he was quite an objectionable bully to work with....I think he was a nasty person to work for...a nightmare to work for." 
Anyway, wee fat Alex is now suing Nicola Sturgeon and her former civil servants for ‘misfeasance’. In court documents today he accuses her and her officials of having ‘conducted themselves improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond’......  ‘criminal leaking of confidential documents, the concealment of documents in defiance of court orders and a criminal warrant, the misleading of the court during judicial review proceedings, the soliciting of false criminal complaints, and ultimately the commission of perjury at a parliamentary inquiry’. Wow.
It is a civil action (lower standard of proof) and Salmond is seeking £3million in damages.
The suggestion is that because Sturgeon, her husband, Peter Morrell, and John Swinney have all been cleared out of the way having been interviewed by the police under arrest over the matter of large sums missing from Party funds and the mysterious appearance of an expensive motor home on the driveway of Sturgeon's mother-in-law (no charges have been laid against the three), the way is now clear for Salmond to return to power by merging his prospering Alba party with the failing SNP and picking up the cause of Scottish nationalism - to which end this civil action is a feint. We'll see. Just a few words on the wee fat bastard's sartorial presentation from mr ishmael: 

Sir Alex Lard, of Donald Trunp, plc, Chief of the Jock Tribesmen, also part-time prime minister of Scotland, part-time MP and part-time MSP and full-time cross-dressing, obese, inebriate, gluttonous monster, poses in a neat, wee, below-the-knee, Jock S&M outfit, designed for the shorter man with the fuller figure and revealing a tempting glimpse of fetching white calf. The sporran, swinging gently against the genital area, adds a frisson of exhibitionisme-lite for those jaded with beating their wives, interfering with their nieces and nephews or brutally attacking their opponents in the sectarian divide which so characterises Salmond's Smart, Successful Scotland. Asked about this strange apparel one of the Tribesmen's spokespersons said it was a means by which Jock men could announce their manliness to the world, by dressing like big girlies.
D'ye have any cake in yer bag, mammy?

Fat Alec in his First Ministerial costume of bumfreezer and trews poses with his mother on her annual day out of the atticwhere she is normally kept, awa' frae human ken, d'ye ken? Alec only draws his three salaries not because, like all politicians he's an unprincipled greedy fuckpig but because of Scotland's long history of suffering under the English, in the Union, see, which they themselves requested, because their bankers, then, as now, had fucked everybody up the arse with a broken bottle. If it wisnae fer they English bastards and centuries of oppression Alec wouldnae be raking in three salaries, expenses and pensions and four hunnerd poond a month fer food, - Aye, food, in Westminster, when parliament wisnae sittin' and he wisnae even in the fucking country, the fat cunt.
 It's just like NewLabour - pious, egalitarian horseshit from the mouths of gangsters, only up here, when the SNP shit in your face the faeces are tartan. Och, aye.
...........................................................................................
Contest Answers and Results

Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland. 
Alnwick Station was built in 1887 of huge size and grandeur which  reflected North Eastern Railway's ambition to impress royal visitors to Alnwick Castle. It was closed in 1968 under the Beeching cuts. In 1991 Mary Manley opened a second hand bookshop called Barter books in the old Alnwick station. I've been visiting it since very soon after its inception, and it has now grown to take over the whole station. It was described by Chris Mullin as a "national institution" and by the New Statesman as "the British Library of second-hand bookshops".
Dunstanburgh Castle, Northumberland
The castle is a 14th-century fortification on the coast of Northumberland in northern England, built by Earl Thomas of Lancaster between 1313 and 1322, taking advantage of the site's natural defences and the existing earthworks of an Iron Age fort. By the 1920s its owner could no longer afford to maintain it and placed it under the guardianship of the state. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, measures were taken to defend the Northumberland coastline from a potential German invasion. The castle was used as an observation post and the site was refortified with trenches, barbed wire, pill boxes and a minefield. It is now owned by the National Trust and run by English Heritage.

Craster, a small fishing village in Northumberland.
Home of the legendary Craster kippers. The smokehouse is owned by L. Robson and sons. First, the herring are split on a machine capable of splitting 500kg per hour, this replaces the numerous “herring girls” that used to split the herring by hand. Then the herring are placed in a brine solution of plain salt and water for a predetermined length of time depending on their size and, lastly, they are hung on tenter hooks and placed in the cavernous smokehouses. Fires are placed under the rows of herring made of whitewood shavings and oak sawdust and these smoulder away for up to 16 hours before the kippers are ready. The firm will post their Kippers to all parts of the U.K.
Alnwick Castle Gardens
A complex of formal gardens in the grounds of Alnwick Castle, Northumberland. Redevelopment of the garden was instigated by Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland in 1997, and has been led by Belgian landscape designers Jacques and Peter Wirtz. It is the most ambitious new garden created in the United Kingdom since the Second World War, with a reported total development cost of £42 million.
Wallington Hall, Northumberland
Wallington is a country house and gardens located about 12 miles west of Morpeth. It has been owned by the National Trust since 1942, after it was donated complete with the estate and farms by Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan, the first donation of its kind. It is a Grade I listed building. Wallington has a large collection of antique dollshouses, and eight murals in the central hall depicting the history of Northumberland, painted by William Bell Scott. Wallington visitors included members of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, who painted the pillars.

The Winner?
mr bungalow bill, who came closest with his answers.
Thanks to all who participated or had a bit of a think about it.
.........................................
More japes, jollity and political satire  can be found in the  four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre,  the work of editor mr verge.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.
Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4
 
At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

8 comments:

Mike said...

You hit the nail square on the head, Mrs I.

Promotion to minister all all about how you look on the telly, and remember the soundbites.

And let's not forget, who you are fucking.

BTW I'm hoping fatty Salmond twists the knife.

mrs ishmael said...

Thanks, mr mike, I watch these politics shows so that you don't have to - and I tell you, I may play with the dialogue a bit, but the key points are as spoken on live TV by these clowns. Laura Totty Trott really did say it was her dream job, loving the spreadsheets, and Dicky Tice really did say President Farage would be a good idea.
"Who you are fucking" - yes indeed - if only his pretty young Spad hadn't recoiled in horror from Peter Bone's Bonio, he might be holding very high office by now, as well as the Bonio. 'Twas Willy Hague came to prominence for sharing a bedroom with his Spad "to save costs" and now it seems that they are all at it.
Talking of which, David I'd-like-to-push-you-in-the-bushes-and-give-you-one Cameron rewarded the 32 year old (at the time) Laura Totty Trott in his Resignation Honours list for political and personal, whoops, sorry, public services. She was 32, FFS. What extraordinary services did she render to get an MBE? Just asking.
And yeay - lets hear it for the fat salmon. He's going to bankrupt the SNP and Scottish Government if he wins - and I don't see why he wouldn't. AS I said at the time, he may be a loathsome sleazeball, but the ruthlessly ambitious Gnasher and her minions do seem to have singled him out for a pretty thorough monstering.

mongoose said...

As they say across the Pond, the process is the punishment. If even somebody with the financial resources of Our Great Orange Leader cannot withstand the ire, what chance has any ordinary person. (NB I see that Tommy Robinson was peppered and dragged off the street again at the weekend. "Have I done something wrong, Officer? I am just attending this protest marcch like the other 99,999 people here today." "Fuck that and get in the van!")

It is a rum do all of these shennanigans - caravangate and ferrygate and the like. It's a proper banana republic you've got yourself, mrs i.

Bungalow Bill said...

Oh dear, Mrs I, a horrid misfire on Northumberland basics from this contestant. Never mind, it won't be troubled.

mrs ishmael said...

You got pretty close with some of your answers, mr b.b. Just sit back and enjoy your triumph. By the way, I was watching one of those comparison shows with a panel blind-testing products from Fortnum and Mason's and Lidl - which came out streets ahead? Lidl, of course. The £60 quid Christmas pud from F&M was rejected in favour of the £10 quid Lidl pud. But an interesting bit of aristo gossip was that the abdicated and exiled Nazi-follower, briefly Edward VIII and latterly the Duke of Windsor, used to have Fortnum and Mason fly out to him daily a pair of Craster kippers for his breakfast. You think he might occasionally fancy a boiled egg and soldiers, or the fragrant e.and b. like Bertie Wooster. But no. Kippers. Mind you, he wasn't much of a man for his grub, at least from the skinny, moody photos.

mrs ishmael said...

Indeed, mr mongoose - Scottish politics are all about emotion, bombast and anti-English venom, in order to disguise the fact that the Scottish "Government" not only couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, but, allegedly, are as corrupt as the Westminster Conservative Government - allegedly.
And they really don't want to bother with the Highlands and Islands. Maybe its historic antipathy as the clans came out for the Catholic Jacobite cause on multiple occasions, to the general embarrassment of the Presbyterian Central Belters.

Will you be gracing us with a Christmas crossword this year? 'Twould be much appreciated.

mongoose said...

I have nothing prepped, mrs i, but I will have a go or you. There is to be air much material.

mrs ishmael said...

Thank you, mr mongoose, that is very kind of you. And, really, you are spoiled for choice by the events of 2023.