Sunday 28 August 2022

The Sunday Ishmael 28/08/2022: The legal edition.

 
 Some Ishmaelites will remember that on the 5th October 1974  the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated two 6-pound (2.7-kilogram) gelignite bombs at two pubs in Guildford, Surrey, England. The pubs were targeted because they were popular with British Army personnel stationed at Pirbright barracks. Four soldiers and one civilian were killed. Sixty-five people were wounded.
The bomb in the Horse and Groom detonated at 8:30 pm, killing a civilian, two members of the Scots Guards and two members of the Women's Royal Army Corps. 
 
A near-by pub,The Seven Stars, was evacuated after the first blast, and a second bomb exploded at 9:00 pm while the pub landlord and his wife searched the pub. The landlord sustained a fractured skull and his wife a broken leg, whilst five members of staff and one customer who had just stepped outside received less serious injuries.
At that time, the Provisional IRA had separated from the Official IRA and were engaged in a campaign they called the Long War. Beginning in 1970, they considered bombings, assassinations and ambushes to be legitimate means to achieve their war aims, which were the establishment of a republic, the end of British rule in Northern Ireland, and the reunification of Ireland. In 1973 they expanded their terrorist attacks to mainland Britain and eventually even to Europe. It was estimated that, between 1969 and 1994, the IRA killed about 1,800 people, including approximately 600 civilians. The IRA was funded, in part, by the United States of America.
The Guildford pub bombings were perpetrated by an IRA active service unit which became known as the Balcombe Street Gang –  arrested in December 1975 after the Balcombe Street siege,  leading to their trial and conviction for other murders and offences. Although they admitted responsibility for the Guildford bombings, they were never charged. This is because the police had already fitted up four other people, and, as Lord Denning commented in respect of the similarly wrongly convicted Birmingham Six:
"If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.” Despite Denning's appalling vista, the convictions of the Birmingham Six were quashed in 1991. In 2001, the men received approximately £1 million in compensation each.
Back to the Guildford Four, arrested in December 1974. One of them, Gerry Conlon, had been in London at the time of the bombings, and had visited his aunt, Annie Maguire. A few days later, Annie and her family were arrested, becoming known as the Maguire Seven. The Guildford Four were wrongfully convicted of the bombings in October 1975 and sentenced to life imprisonment. They were imprisoned for 15 years. The convictions were eventually overturned years later in the appeals court after it was proved that their confessions had been obtained by torture and evidence that specifically cleared them had been suppressed by the police. They were released in 1989, having served a combined sentence of 60 years. The case is now a staple in the discussions of miscarriages of justice. Despite this, the infamous Lord Denning said that the Guildford Four were "probably guilty".The Maguire Seven were wrongfully convicted in March 1976 of providing bomb-making material and other support and were sentenced to terms varying between four and fourteen years. Their confessions had also been obtained by torture.
 
Why am I reprising this now? Because it was 48 years ago, and memories fade - and Mongosling 3 didn't know about the Dog Shooter's Party, so I can't assume that the events are remembered nor why I assert that the police detect nothing, just wait for folk to be dobbed in or fit up if they have an Irish accent. Mainly, though, we are revisiting this because Her Majesty's Senior Coroner for Surrey, Mr Richard Travers, has just concluded his resumed inquests into the deaths of the five young people who were killed in the Horse and Groom pub: 
Paul Craig, plasterer to trade, 
Guardsman William Forsyth
Private Ann Hamilton
Guardsman John Hunter
Private Caroline Slater
And with the inquest's conclusion has gone the last opportunity to lift the veil of secrecy which has shrouded the deaths of five people and injuries to 65 people. The families of the five dead young people were refused Legal Aid so were not legally represented at the inquest. They could not afford transport and accommodation, so could not even attend. The establishment, however, was thoroughly legally represented by Queen's Council, their Juniors and Solicitors - attending, at taxpayers' expense, to represent the Surrey Police, the Ministry of Defence and the Metropolitan Police. The inquest ignored two documents recently come to light: one showed that finger print evidence gathered at the time proved that the Balcombe Street Gang had carried out similar attacks throughout 1974, both before and after Guildford. The second revealed that Hampshire CID and Special Branch had alerted the military to evidence that the terrorists responsible for the March 1974 Ripon Army barracks bombing were planning an assault on the barracks near Guildford - yet no action was taken and the threat alert level was not elevated.
Coroner Travers also had the opportunity to review the over 700 confidential files on the IRA's English campaign, due for release in 2020, which had been reclassified for another 75 years. He handed them over to the Surrey Police and asked them to decide which were relevant. They identified only 2 documents.
Coroner Travers also  decided it was not in the public interest to hold an Article 2 inquest under human rights legislation. Article 2 would have allowed him to poke around in the events leading up to the bombings, whether the security services held information about who the bombers were and how they were able to plot, prepare and perpetrate  the bombings. Whether they could have been prevented. Instead, he confined himself to looking at the facts that were already known. 
Anyway, the Government's Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, introduced for its Second Reading in March this year, when enacted, will close down all these troublesome inquiries, civil claims, judge-ordered inquests and police investigations and victims and survivors can just shut the fuck up, in the interests of reconciliation, avoiding blame and protecting the guilty.
Ishmaelites new to this topic may note with some amusement the euphemistic appellation of Troubles to what was a bloody civil war, at the same time as the establishment deploring the Russian habit of referring to the Ukrainian upset as a Special Military Operation. Since the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, open hostilities by the IRA against the United Kingdom have ceased, with republicans agreeing that Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of the population so desire. It is not going well, though - Stormont is not functioning, with the Democratic Unionist Party still blocking a restoration of power-sharing in protest over Brexit's Northern Ireland Protocol. As recently as 2015 an investigation into the murder of a former IRA leader revealed that the organisational structure of the Provisional IRA is still in place and the IRA has resisted decommissioning its entire armoury.
mr ismael would have been raging at both Coroner Travers' conclusions and the forthcoming Legacy and Reconciliation Bill. Here's his thinking from 2014.

 

MURDER, HOW TO GET AWAY WITH IT. AND HOW NOT TO. 
ishmael smith 26/10/2014
 







Martin McGuinness, Provisional IRA leader & Deputy First Minister, died 21/3/2017 
 
The deputy first minister of Northern Ireland is handsomely paid, resourced, pensioned and protected by the British taxpayer. As is the case with Tony'n'Imelda Blair, the security costs in relation to  McGuinness will be unlimited and will be paid until his death. Millions and millions of pounds, to protect an acknowledged mass murderer, the most successful criminal of our time.
Serial killer, Marty Kneecaps, has never worked, is a career revolutionary sadist and, at my expense, leads a life of luxury, fawned upon, even though his psychopathy is ill-disguised and although cruelty, menace and  viciousness crackle around him, like electricity. McGuinness is a freak.  Although, by any evaluation, he should be held in a secure institution for the criminally insane,  this psychokiller is welcomed and entertained by the British monarch 
 
and by our motley crew of first and prime ministers. 
 
First ministers 4 Justice.
Och, aye, intimidate our electorate and tell them lies, well, that's just what you have to do for their own good and anybody says otherwise is scaremongering; Project Fear.
Aye, yer no' wrong there, so yer not, Alec.

Marty is also feted abroad, by a community of fellow monsters, anxious to acquire from him what he impudently describes as his conflict resolution skills, his knack for peace-processing,  by intimidation, by torture and by murder.
During the Ulster war, largely instigated and waged by the now deputy first minister, then commander of the Provisional IRA,  nearly fifty thousand civilians were injured and of the three and a half thousand killed, eleven hundred were members of the official security forces, approximately three hundred police officers and eight hundred members of HM armed forces.

 Challenged about his astonishing  criminal record, Marty, the repulsive shit, counters that he deplores the  killings on all sides, so he does; many bad things happened on both sides, so they did,  as he bombed and shot  his way to power, but since he wasn't responsible for all of them, he's not responsible for any of them, sure, how could he be?  British Govament, it was all their fault. When it comes to effrontery, even Gerry'n'Cilla could take lessons from this monstrous piece of filth.

Nearly fifty thousand civilians were injured during what is euphemistically termed The Troubles. Many of those responsible for this orgy of largely nationalist slaughter were either not prosecuted or were released early from prison sentences, prime minister Blair's and president Spunky Bill Clinton's view being  that the only way to burnish their piss-thin,  tinny legacy was to stop the IRA killing, torturing and maiming people.  And the only way to accomplish this   rudimentary compliance with Decency's rules was to pardon their previous crimes in the hope that they wouldn't commit any more; it is a stratagem unique in British jurisprudence, the pardoning of mass murderers, torturers, arsonists, bombers and vigilante kneecappers  in order to ensure their future good behaviour. Oh, yes, and then permitting them to frighten and persecute their way into elected office. Bit of a mixed message, that, to put it mildly, from an establishment which never does deals with terrorists.

Harry Roberts, on the other hand, a London criminal,  during the commission of a 1966  armed robbery,  participated in the murders of three police officers, sounds a lot but it wouldn't even be a practice run for Ulster's deputy first minister;  he'd manage three before breakfast. Since his conviction, Mr Roberts  has been in prison for forty-eight years, and at the age of seventy-eight has been granted conditional release on parole. One would think that the Devil, himself,  after an Eternity of murder, mayhem and noncing, was being granted a Royal pardon, a seat among the beasts in the House of Lords and a country estate.

Marty Kneecaps is immune from prosecution for  hundreds of times as many police murders as Harry Roberts committed.  He enjoys similar immunity  in the matter of tens of thousands of people maimed, burned, blinded and seriously injured, as well as in the matter of billions of pounds worth of security costs, of damage and compensation claims  - more than enough to fund a five-star health service - being borne by we, the taxpayers. This startling state of affairs is hailed as a triumph of statespersonship. And while it  is second-nature-easy  for Spermface Osborne to blame poorly-paid dinner ladies and cleaners for their greed, blame the weakest for NHS decline, you'll never hear the pasty little crook say, Actually, D'YouKnowWhat,  it's partly Martin McGuinness's fault that we are short of money, even though, obviously, it is.

 It is hard to find official figures on the costs of the Troubles, troubles which, incidentally,  could and should have been avoided, could easily have been short-circuited in 1969 by the arseholes then in  MediaMinster, had they simply extended universal franchise to Ulster - one man, one vote - none of this McGuinness shit would have happened.  I was there, in Belfast,   when it started, a perfectly legitimate civil rights protest by nice, mainly young, non-sectarian people; met by government intransigence, it was allowed to be  escalated and hijacked by the then marginal Provos.  Maybe it is government's collusion in stupidity which makes it reluctant to provide proper accounts.  But fuck them, the bent politicians and crooked mandarins, we can make a guess.

Academics' estimates  of the military bill range between half a billion and a billion  pounds but, as we know,  courtesy of prime minister Snot, War Money is Magic Money, comes from contingency funds, doesn't therefore, really exist, doesn't actually cost anything;  half a million pounds missiles, they are not paid for with real, schools'n'ospitals money, but with contingency funds which never run-out, never need replacing,  don't actually exist;   but, look, lessbeclear,  you  can't expect ordinary stupid people to understand that, they must just be told.  And on top of that, Brigadier General Rupert Golightly-Jockstrap often says that wars like this provide valuable training for his chaps, or is it his people, these days,  - in passing, I think the Army was fucked from the moment its members started talking of one another as colleagues not comrades,  but that's another story - one linked to the army widows' TeeVee careers, the exhibitionist Amputees 4 Harry and the Royal Cheshire Torturers Regiment, aka The Queen's Own Beasters -  giving them an opportunity to get in there and do a real, magnificent, professional  job of work and anyway, we already pay for the forces,  may as well get some service  out of the bounders;  doesn't really cost anything, y'see, because  we have the soldiers anyway, so what's the point of a standing army if it's sitting down on its arse, may as well get their balls blown off in Ulster as anywhere else.  Actually, therefore,  according to Whitehall, the thirty-year war in Ulster and on the Mainland didn't cost a penny in military terms; we could just as easily have sent eight hundred Tommies off to their deaths practically anywhere and as for all the guns, armoured vehicles, helicopters, body armour, we would have needed all that anyway;  Golightly-Jockstrap, in fact, was actually, at the end of the day, when all's said and done, the bottom line is, that he was only sort-of spending his own pocket money;  the Devil, as we MenOfTheWorld say, is in the detail, detail which, on the grounds of national security, we never release. But take our word for it, we wouldn't lie to you. And as for looking after the hitherto healthy but now limbless, eyeless and bowel-less squaddie, well,  that's what the Poppies are all about, isn't it?  Ulster, then, probably  a net profit, miltarily speaking, we should, as a matter of fact,  shake McGuiness's gravedigger hand, old man;  wossat, we often do? Yes, yes, I suppose we do.  Yes, even her Majesty.

But what about the decades-long blitzes, 
 
on Belfast, Enniskillen, Lisburn, 
 
Omagh, Warrington, Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, Guildford, 



Now youse  had better just pay attention.
Them two wee lads in Warringtom, they just had to be blown to fuckin' bits, so they did.
For Ireland's Freedom.
And let me tell youse, there's nobody in Sinn Fein regrets them deaths less than me.
Mr Gerry Adams, responsible for thousands of murders.
Years spent in custody for same - none.
Commander of the IRA, Martin McGuinness.
Fought a war of terror against the British state, its security forces and civilians, men, women and children,  their lives, limbs and properties. Fifty thousand assaulted and wounded, four thousand murdered.
Years spent in custody - none.
 One of the McGuinness expenses  is the still-ongoing search for Ulster's Disappeared, IRA victims snatched, tortured and buried in the bogs, on his orders.
And what about Canary Wharf, 

Hyde Park?  
We have already established that murdered troops and civilians don't matter but lots of these locations have been completely rebuilt, must've cost billions. Billions of pounds of schools'n'ospitals money. No? Oh, right, city centres need rebuilding anyway, so Marty and the Monsters did us all a favour, hurrying us along, towards a shiny, glass-fronted Cathedral of Consumption in every town. The construction industry and the citizens of these places, they  should shake Marty's widowmaker hand?  Yes, of course they should. And it is of course tragic that children were blown to smithereens, of course it is,  but we mustn't get involved in the blame game, must we, gets us nowhere, quite frankly.
Mr Tony Blair.
Instrumental in the deaths of tens of thousands, instrumental in creating millions of refugees and in inflaming, prolonging and spreading multiple conflicts in, so far,  the Middle East and Southern Asia.
Years spent in custody in respect of same - none.

But back to the question of what it all cost us and we are making progress, now, on the matter  -  the military costs were non-existent, soldiers' resettlement costs are a matter for charity and the reconstruction costs are, in fact, a blessing; Angels in disguise, actually, saved us some of the demolition costs, Marty Kneecaps and his Torture Brigade, the HardMen of West Bulfaaaast. Well, nancy boys, really, if you ask me, cruel, cruel arse bandits, 
 
taking BDSM to stunning, exotic new heights;  
burying people alive, what a rush that is, slapping women around in front of their children, and there's just nothing, nu-thing com-pares2 drilling though a young man's knees with a Black and Decker. But no, it was a dirty job, murdering and torturing and somebody had to do it, even though they didn't, not really, not in the sense of being held responsible, and that's the thing that counts, no, if they haven't been charged and convicted and done time they're not criminals,   and in fact they did us all a great favour, actually. And we should be proud to shake their hand, yes,  that's good, that is, proud to shake the hand that held the drill.  Pure poetry, so it is.

And all the health and social security costs attendant on fifty-thousand casualties and four thousand deaths? Yes, but they woulda had to be paid sooner or later, everybody gets sick, everybody dies, right?  So no cost there, to the taxpayer, either. And actually,  members of this house should know that,  challenged by the results of the unimaginable cruelties perpetrated by the deputy first minister and his bumchums, surgeons in Northern Ireland were able to develop a whole raft of treatments for extracting bags  of broken nails from the bodies of teenagers and children and old people, for repairing and rebuilding joints and tendons patriotically ruined by a power tool's intrusion and  expert  twisting about. Aye, conflict resolution, 'swhat we call it. 

President Hillary Trousers courts the American-Irish vote. 
I am sure she's kissed worse things.
But probably not for a long time.

And surgeons, surgeons es-pecially, them's the ones, so th'are, as should be proud to shake the mutilator's hand, for if it wasn't fer us, me an' yon brave boys, there, sure they'da had hardly any work to do. Patron Saint of Surgery?  Saint Marty? Aye, well I wooden mind, so I wooodent.  Only be the right thing, after all, so it wood. Fair's fair.

Our national debt of honour, therefore, is owed not just to Tony'n'Imelda  but also to the saintly Marty McKneecaps, a man who has demonstrated, time and again,  that Yes, you can  torture and kill hundreds  of police officers and hundreds of soldiers, year after year after year;  yes, you can kill thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children, injure tens of thousands, year after year after year;  yes, you can destroy city centres like you were Hermann fucking Goering;  there need be no limit to your own personal and political depravity, clad in Nobility's balaclava, you can bomb the nursery's comfort and the sickbed's sanctuary;  young, old or ill, combatant and civilian alike, shoot them in the back, bomb them in the dark, bury them alive. And not only will it not cost anything but you will never, ever, ever go to jail, so you won't.

Mr Harry Roberts, however,  
 
Harry Roberts.
Committed two murders, convicted of three.
Time spent in custody - forty eight years.

 and his partial release at the end of his life  and for a year or two at best, is damned as an outrage to Decency and has led some lardy, embarrassingly ignorant and fearfully  stupid  Poundland bint 
to call for the reintroduction of the death penalty, although if it wasn't this that  prompted her immoral indignation it'd be something else; for Sergeant Filth and his union to insist, again, that his life and his members' are more valuable than that of any other murder victim's; best of all, this tiny act of tiny mercy has chorussed together all the rotten, wormy, inebriate, poxed-up, crooked and rotten tub-thumping, rabble rousing  voices  of skymadeupnewsandfilth - what ToryTurd Ian Hislop describes as the free and independent press -  as they  scream and howl for the devising of Infinite Punishment.

Briefly, on the box, I saw some silly old cunt, a child in the vicinity at the time of Mr Roberts's offences, still, fifty years on, engaging in recreational mourning for the cameras, I never got over it, he wailed, why should he be allowed out? I don't know what that fucking numbskull would do if   he'd lived through the Blitz or been born in Belfast at the time I was.

I knew a young social worker in Selly Oak, in the mid-'eighties, she and all of her young, female - and male - colleagues would, almost daily, in the line of duty as officers of the court,  go to places to visit or supervise those whom Old Bill would only visit tooled-up and mob-handed;  Francis and  the perpetrator's wife were murdered, by a man who had been in my office a week previously,  I did tell his caseworker that I thought him highly dangerous but she and the victim had many such on their swollen case-loads, many such but potentially worse;  the Police Federation, never too keen on equal opportunities,  had nothing to say about the murders but then even  the trauma of having his helmet knocked-off generally leads constable Filth to six months' sick leave, his being caught in criminality to early retirement on health grounds.  I don't deplore and regret the killing of a police officer any less than I do that of any other victim but I certainly don't deplore it any more and there is, indeed,  a perfectly  reasonable argument which  says  Better Him Than Me - he voluntarily joined-up to protect me, he is trained, equipped, he is paid and pensioned to protect me, he retires early as a result of having protected me, his wife or partner and his dependents will be well provided-for should he die in the line of duty;  nurses die in the line of duty, are killed by their patients, social workers, teachers, too, risks of the job to which, clearly, there is no absolute deterrent;  if you don't want to be killed as a police officer then simply don't be a police officer, job done, evenin' all.

The random apportioning and non-apportioning of guilt has become a commonplace of Ruin, successive home seckatries hating the petty benefits cheat, pursuing the impoverished non-BBC-taxpayer to the ends of the Earth, whilst endlessly and guilefully deflecting any scrutiny of My Noble and Learned Friend, the Lord  KiddyFucker, QC, PC and so on;  the disabled are paraded naked across the pages of the Daily Filth, nonces and war criminals spirited away to Brussels or the Middle East, their dodgy personal relationships, like their expenses, accidentally - Oh, Whoops! - shredded.  Or closed to public scrutiny until after all concerned are dead.

McGuinness, though and Adams and all their ghastly fraternity,  their pardoning is the most cynical reversal of Decency and Common Sense that  I  have ever witnessed - torturers, proud of their scourges, cigarette ends and power tools, waltzing and fucking each other around the legislative palaces, rebuking us for even knowing of their Devilment, threatening us, should we complain, with more of the same. Yet a one-time conventional criminal with but three deaths to his account - nothing, compared with McGuinness's  rapsheet - has leapt over Mayhem's Premier League to colonise our attention, our outrage.

For the Parole Board to have reached this decision about Mr Roberts' final years - that he must be deemed as not presenting a risk, that he understands the seriousness of his offences and is remorseful. One would imagine that Mr Roberts' forty-eight years in jail would  satisfy even the most vengeful among our punishment-fixated society, that in a country which, though largely faithless,  now, more than  ever, boasts implicitly  of its white Christianity,  a simple, end-of-life mercy such as this would not be controversial;  shame on Poundland, shame on the coppers, shame on skymadeupnewsandfilth, shame on Joe fucking Bloggs, drunk, wife-beater, bigot and ignoramus, shame on them that they would piss on even a moment's Mercy.  

What they want, these insatiable punishment arseholes, what they really, really want is Sharia, dressed in a Union Jack; as mr tdg said, were they not too stupid to recognise it, what they will see is the face of their own slavery, leering back at them from Poundland's dark mirror.

They are not all Poundlanders, of course;   Colonel von Fawkes, this year's model Kelvin Mckenzie, for all his Newsman of the People schtick, is Bigotry's Fool, the Brute in Liberty's stolen clothes; vast swathes of the Redneck Forest on the Tory benches would wet themselves at the thought of a good hanging, a flogging or a thousand -year jail sentence,  the Daily Mail panders to I'd Pull The Lever Myselfers, Life Should Mean Lifers, Spare The Rod And Spoil The Child-ers, people who daily, credulously fork-up and  swallow-down  the Peace Process Can of Worms whilst working themselves into apoplectic stupor at the thought of one old man enjoying a few months of tightly-regulated freedom outside Custody's walls.

Fuck UKIP, fuck the gutter press. When they pursue well-connected criminals I will join their hue and cry. In the meantime, I hope Harry Roberts scents  a Spring or two's blossoms,  knows, once more,  the feel of the wind on his face and sniffs a  fragrance more wholesome  than those of other men's piss and sperm. Forty eight years of that is enough.
......................................................................
mrs. ishmael again -  "when I was a child,  I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things." 1 Corinthians 13:11
I used to think that we British - we were the good guys. But now I have put away childish things, I know that we never were the good guys, that the Kingdom is DisUnited, that war is embedded in our footprints. The Irish Question is not resolved. The Scottish Question annoys the fuck out of me, and the last time I paid attention to Wales, the nationalists were burning English property.
Here is a Song for Summer:  a lullaby for a white baby being raised by enslaved black people on behalf of its parents who can't be bothered.
 

 

 Now Available

If the above essay has whetted your appetite for more from the originator of Call Me Ishmael,  look no further than  Ishmael’s Blues - which is now published, in both paperback and hardback editions; both editions are immediately available from lulu.com.  The paperback is also listed on amazon. Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack, the first two books in the sequence are also 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 :

 Unless you’ve done this already, 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. 

The book’s full title is "Ishmael’s Blues – further Chronicles of Ruin", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of blogdog Buster retiring from the fray, cat gloating from a safe distance. The cover is the same for both editions.

Link for Hardcover :  https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

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.

 

15 comments:

ultrapox said...

thank you mrs ishmael for your, and your late husband's, excoriating exposition of ira-ideology and its inherent subtleties.

with the help of their ira-informers - one of whom was probably a member of the birmingham active service unit itself - british and american intelligence-services insidiously ensured that the 1974 birmingham pub-bombs exploded without the bomb-planters being able to issue their conventional coded warning - and of course the resultant nationwide outrage at the birmingham-bomb-carnage not only scuppered prime minister harold wilson's plan for peace in a united ireland, but also ultimately undermined britain's, then socialist, government.

in hindsight, it is now apparent that ultra-right-wing factions of the british and american intelligence-services actually colluded with key-members of the provisional ira in order to derail prime minister harold wilson's programme for the unification of ireland - and thereby fatally undermine his left-wing labour administration.

meanwhile, back in the present troubled times, uk premier boris jiffsnort, predictably, wants all of us to pay for his war...

however, despite his cheery-chappy exhortations for us to go over-the-top of our fragile financial fence, opinion-polls suggest that folks aren't too chuffed about shelling out for the big fat nazi-bastard's nasty neo-imperialist war, and so in order to reverse the self-inflicted death-spiral into which britain's economy now finds itself inexorably being drawn, the new prime minister will have either to end support for nato's futile war-of-convenience in ukraine, or else - along with the rest of her nasty nazi-arming neo-imperialist government - get the sack.

ukrainian damsel-in-distress said...

to be quite honest, i'm becoming rather sick-and-tired of boris junksperm 'saving' me: he commands all the grace and charm of randy rooting pig

mrs ishmael said...

Thank you, mr ultrapox - it wasn't an easy piece to write, as my mind prefers to celebrate the creative and artistic achievements of the human race, and squirms protestingly away from the reality that we are a rather unpleasant species. I hadn't connected the dots re the IRA, the right-wing intelligence services of the UK/US and the plot to undermine Wilson's government - but, of course, it makes perfect sense. The working class are entirely expendable to the ruling establishment - they just do enough to ensure that folk keep on voting rather than rioting.
I also hope that you are right that Truss will back away from support for Ukraine and encourage Zelensky to sue for peace:it is the pragmatic thing to do, but all her war-posturing will make it a tricky U-turn to accomplish.
Not long now, and we will see what sort of a Cabinet and policy direction she will form.

inmate said...

“Not long now, and we will see what sort of a Cabinet and policy direction she will form.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And we won’t get fooled again. Oh how we laughed.

All murderers are equally evil, however, some are elected and become more equal and more evil.

Thank you for this mrs I and thank you mr ultrapox, this I was unaware of.

mongoose said...

It is all bollocks, I am afraid. The notion that the intelligence services - including their propagaanda arm, the media - are either for or against governments depending on the colour of their rosettes is childlike in its innocence. The spooks are on the side of spookiness. They have their own agenda, their own interests. Where these agencies intersect you will find an endless, swirling, maelstrom of deceit and cant.

If you doubt me, look across the Pond to the USA. The current incumbent President is a doddery old man who cannot read a sentence, let alone frame one. David Aaronovitch - winner of the Orwell Prize for journalism ("How we laughed, Poppy and I, over the canapes, darling! How we laughed!") will tell you without even a hint of a smile that it is completely clear that the old boy was properly elected, that he won a record vote although he hardly campaigned at all. The CIA, the FBI, the DOJ - all of thwm will line and lie to your face, demand of you that you buckle under to the lie. Brexit and Donald and similar are what they are aginst because they threaten control. Wokery - trannies madness, pronouns, carbon, shopping bags, lower speed limits at the dead of night are all just extra demomstrtions that they can do what they like. Most of public discourse is a huge exercise in Room 101 compliance to all of this.

Mongosling3 - a reader of Law at one of the finest universities in the land, had never heard of the Guildford 4 or the Birmingham 6, God help us. All 10, of course, were one veneer deep credible fall guys. Oops, I mean suspects. The 4, innocent had relatives and connections. Fuck I've got those! The 6 were hoisted off a train on their way to an IRA funeral. (Footnote1: The chap blew himself up bombing a telephone exchange in Coventry. As the decades pass, the number of us who profess that we heard the blast increases so tht it now outnumbers the then population of the city.) So they were all connectable as long as you didn't ask too many questions. Sensible candidates for a fit-up, I guess. And the 6 were up against the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad which was probably the most corrupt police force to ever stalk the land. (Don't ask me how I know.) And so we have educated Number 3, and added the necessary subclauses: One, all coppers are bastards, and two, never speak to a policeman!

The Ukrainian unpleasantness is maintained to provide a credible villain who can be blamed for the coming energy disaster across Europe. It is a lie as thin as the lies that doomed the 4 or the 6 but the media will parrot it, that Dogshooter lad will parrot it, and poor people will die in their thousands this winter while Naga Manchetty and David Aaronovitch whisper their lies into unsuspecting ears before splitting another case. "The good stuff, please. Cheerio!"

ultrapox said...

i had overlooked the fact that until the early seventies there existed no equitable electoral, housing, or employment rights in northern ireland, and therefore thank you, mrs ishmael, not only for highlighting this once constricting tentacle of systemic uk oppression, but also thereby revealing the labour party for the corrupt bunch of fascist establishment-cunts it has always truly comprised; of course, the labour party has come a long way since its imperialist manifestation in the 1960s - via biafra, afghanistan, and iraq - and in blind pursuit of nato-nurtured neo-imperialist ambitions, is now unashamedly applauding the arming of ukrainian nazis.

was the labour-movement by-any-chance one of adolf's early social projects...?

i apologize, mr mongoose: in order to make clear their significance in a politico-historical context, i should, more correctly, have referred to the 'anti-communist elements' of the british and american intelligence services, rather than to the 'ultra-right-wing factions' of these state-sanctioned facilitators-of-genocide - and in this respect, i should add that, despite harold wilson being an avowed anti-communist, his ideological adherence to socialism somehow always triggered, within britain and america's rabidly communophobic intelligence-services, the enduring suspicion that he was actually a crypto-pinko agent-of-the-kremlin, who seditiously slumbered in bright red pyjamas beneath decent folk's beds.

finally, may i also thank the damsel-in-distress for her most intriguing and insightful 'letter from ukraine'? unfortunately, the 'ukrainian letters' received by our promiscuous prime minister were - like a lot of stuff in present-day ukraine - full-of-holes, and as a conjugal consequence, he has been morally obliged to found a chain of boris-nurseries - which, reports indicate, are subsidized by hundreds-of-millions of uk-tax-payers' dosh, and largely populated by little blond-haired goose-stepping johnsons.

Mike said...

This is very difficult and disturbing reading Mrs I. To paraphrase Herman Goering: "the next time someone talks about their democracy I will reach for my Luger".

I lived in London during the prime time IRA bombing campaign, but I recall most people paid it no attention. The slaughter of the horses at Hyde Park seemed to touch a raw nerve and change that. BTW I was around the corner in Green Park that afternoon.

The role of the US in all this has not yet been fully revealed in my opinion - particularly when Reagan issued a veto to Maggie about a UK military night of the long knives to wipe out the IRA - there were not that many and all were known.

mongoose said...

I am sure that you are right, mr ultrapox, about factions. Twas ever thus, I reckon. The Brits have always been masters at factions. The IRA, the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA. Divide and rule. Sinn Fein can be translated as "We ourselves". If only the daft buggers had understood that and been happy.

The Yanks are having a time of it. The Republicans having had a presidential election stolen from them in plain sight had but two options - climb out of the mire or sink deeper into it and be more skullduggerous than the other bloke. Sadly they have chosen the latter. So now we have three Republican parties: Trump's MAGA, the De Santis MAGA-Lite, and the RINOs. They are doomed if they don't work this out in about 6 weeks because the mid-terms are the last chance to save what remains of democracy in that benighted mad land.

I think that there is something about federations. The Federal Government in the US, the EU, maybe even the old USSR. Whatever they have is never enough, the machine grows, the tentacles get longer, and they end up breaking themselves. And then comes despotism. There is that lad in the US - the name will come to me - who openly says that "Yes, we did, we enrolled all of the media and the net and we stole the election but it was necessary to stop Trump". Completely void of self-awareness. Was it for this that the clay grew tall?

OTOH it is almost as if someone somewhere doesn't want democracy to work. These green shoots of it - even if you don't agree with the policies - the green shoots that we get from time to time have to be ground underfoot. Perhaps that is the true role of the Deep State, the moiling sack of puppies that is the Establishment. To stop things until once every three hundred years we have a clear out. We're overdue, aren't we?

Anonymous said...

A collector's item from the Peeb for you, mr mongoose - having turned over from Radio 5 (happens more & more these days) when Carpet Munchetty was being even more annoying than usual, I heard a World Service interview with a Pakistan govt minister. Not a peep of perplexed dismay, nor a modest request for clarification, when the minister assured the Peeb's listeners that whereas previous floods were caused by overflowing rivers, the present horrorshow is down to excessive rainfall caused by manmade global warming.

We lived about a mile away when the IRA tried to blow up Nigel Havers' dad, who was away on holiday and whose house sustained structural damage but stayed standing - months later there were builders outside on scaffolding when my English teacher, who rented part of the Havers gaff and might have perished if he hadn't been up late marking our essays (so the legend went) was tutoring me. Tutoring is not a squalid euphemism in this instance, before anyone asks. The bombers had strolled across school playing fields to get to the back wall, apparently. Even a mile away, and down a hill, the noise and vibration were alarming.

mr ultrapox reminded me of the murky ambiguity surrounding Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995. There's a good synopsis here, from 2001 :

https://www.salon.com/2001/06/09/john_doe/

Though it doesn't mention McVeigh's own claims (in a letter predating the bombing) to have been recruited for black ops government work. (Then again, would you put something like that in a letter if it were true?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing_conspiracy_theories

Millwall fans used to have a Harry Roberts song - to the tune of London Bridge Is Falling Down - "Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, is our friend. Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers. Let him out to kill some more, kill some more" etc. Maybe it's still sung, or maybe it died with Harry the Dog. Tempus fugit.

cheers

v./




Anonymous said...

NB Harry the Dog was not Harry Roberts.

v./

mrs ishmael said...

Having started this thread, I'd like to be able to say something philosophical and profound in response to our regular commentators. Something comforting even. But there is no comfort and the only conclusion to be drawn is that homo sapiens is a shit species; stupid, emotional, violent and indifferent to the suffering and death of others. I am surprised by how quickly we forget the most appalling atrocities - but I suppose it is a manifestation of the brain's ability to ignore the certainty of its own ending - we live our lives as though, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we are going to live forever.
Thank you, mr verge, I hadn't known about the conflicting theories surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing. The speedy execution of Timothy McVeigh reminds me of another of Lord Denning's obiter dicta in respect of the Birmingham Six: “We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get them released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied."

mongoose said...

I don't think that that is true at all, mrs i. The human species is the only species that we know of in the whole universe that strives to regulate the conduct of its members against their selfish instincts - however imperfectly - by a framework of shared rules and values. We alone have the written word, the musical notation to record our achievements and to pass them on. We alone have the wheel, the right angle, the pencil. We alone put a vase of flowers on the table because it's beautiful.

Life expectancy today is twice what it was a hundred years ago. Go to gapminder and click the link to update your view of this world. We are magnificent.

Alas, one of us is Gerry Adams. One of us was Black'n'Decker McGuinness. But one of us was Isaac Newton. One of us was Nina Simone. One of us was Marie Curie. One of us was John Clare. One of us might be something even better tomorrow. Chin up! We'll get there despite the buggers.

mrs ishmael said...

Thank you, mr mongoose, encouraging and uplifting words. I think music, literature, medicine, technology, art and architecture should be up there in our appreciation of human abilities.
On the human exceptionalism angle, though, let me remind you that the black seabird, the shag, decorates its nests with flowers and shiny things to make them pretty, crows and rooks live in communities regulated by shared rules and values, and when a member of the community transgresses, its fellow-citizens debate its guilt and then impose justice - which can be exclusion or being pulled apart. Bees communicate by complex dances that describe flight paths, distances and obstacles - I know, not the written word. All the apes are tool-users. Rats are great problem-solvers and heroically self-sacrificing parents.
Après nous les mouches.

mongoose said...

Those crow buggers are vigilantes, mrs i. In their way, just as bad as myopic old Tom Denning but I take your point.

mongoose said...

Dark, dark days about to happen in the USA.