The Sunday Ishmael:23/04/2023

Babyman resigns to save Humza Useless the job

He may look like a sweet old grandad (always the most sus), but that cut no ice with Polis Scotland, who interrogated him under arrest last Tuesday. Jowly, pouty, pinkly offended, with a face like an unhappy foetus,  Colin Beatty, aged 71, has taken it on the chin for the party and resigned from his post as SNP Treasurer. Ishmaelites will recall that between 2017 and 2020 the SNP raised a large sum, now revealed to be £666,953.00, for the purposes of funding an independence referendum. Things looked a bit dodgy when the 2019  accounts showed that there was just under £97,000 in the bank and that the assets were around £272,000. The SNP accountants, Johnston Carmichael, promptly resigned, as did the former Chief Executive, Peter Murrell. 

The Police investigation, Operation Branchform, having towed away the expensive mobile home parked on Nicola Sturgeon's mother-in-law's drive, is now looking for  sim cards used in unregistered mobile phones. You know, like Drug Dealers and Gangsters use. The Polis want to know the numbers connected with these cards which could contain numbers called and text messages. They are also interested in expensive pens, pots and pans, jewellery, and a fridge freezer in the party's HQ in Edinburgh. 

What? Really? Taking the fridge into custody? What was being kept in there? The few remaining SNP senior ministers are looking pious and refusing to comment as it is an ongoing police investigation. Beattie's resignation came mere hours before First Minister Humza Patsy Useless set out his government's priorities for the next three years. Ever the optimist, eh?

The other piece of political theatre this week was provided by Official Black Woman, Diane Lard, formerly Labour MP, but now suspended in deep shit.

Surely that's a wig?

The Labour Party will be mounting an investigation into Diane Abbott having written a letter to the Observer, espousing unfashionable views about racism. Only Proper Black People, really Black People, can experience racism, she said. Any negative experiences by white people who aren't Proper White People, Really White People, like Jews, or redheads, are experiencing prejudice, not racism. Labour, anxious to shake off the whiff of anti-Semitism that has hung about it since the Corbyn regime, rushed to comment that Diane Lard's views, words, thoughts, indeed, very being, were "deeply offensive and wrong".

Here's the letter:

"Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated”, Comment). They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.
It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships."
Diane Abbott
House of Commons, London SW1

Having seen the National Theatre production of C.P. Taylor's GOOD this week, for which Sir Keith Starmer should buy Diane tickets, I have to disagree with her reflections on the philosophical and semantic differences between racism and prejudice. Nothing trumps the Holocaust. GOOD was originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1981. It has been described as the definitive piece written about the Holocaust in the English-speaking theatre. Set in pre-war Germany, it shows how John Halder, a liberal-minded professor whose best friend is the Jewish Maurice, could not only be seduced into joining the Nazis, but step-by-rationalised-step ends in embracing the Final Solution, justifying to his conscience the terrible actions involved. The depiction of Kristallnacht was chilling in the extreme. The N.T. production is directed by Dominic Cooke and Halder is portrayed, brilliantly, by David Tennant. You can subscribe to National Theatre at Home for £9.99 per month.

Diane Abbott's letter prompted a backlash, including from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which described it as "disgraceful" and her apology "entirely unconvincing". Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge, who is Jewish, called the letter "deeply offensive and deeply distressing".  The Jewish Labour Movement - an organisation of Labour-supporting Jewish members - said:

"We should be unified in our struggle against racism, not divided against one another.  A hierarchy of racism only divides communities and assists the racists."

mr ishmael, as you may remember, had a lot worse to say about the younger Diane Abbott, Official Labour Black Person. Here she is in an imagined conversation with Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo, all squashed up on a couch in the This Week studio to look ridiculous:  

Now, the moral of this story, the moral of this song, is simply that one should never be where one does not belong.......

Not for nothing are journalists rightly despised, scribbling rubbish in the London papers and spouting drivel on telly; Diane Lard has made a comfortable, private school living, pretending to be one of them; in addition to her handsomely-paid public servant role Abbott has boosted her income, not due to her talent or merit - there is much better commentary in these cyber-pages than would ever spring from her leaden opinionising - but due to her position; last night, she found that journalism is a little more brutal than she had imagined.

Bumptious, hypocritical gabshite beasted on mainstream Tee-Vee

If you missed this week's This Week, among the usual frothy rubbish, pantomime journalists in boats and numbskull, nobody celebrities, there was a dark moment or two of political reality as Andrew Neil effortlessly exposed the hypocrisy and self-interest, the utter poverty of intellect or principle at the heart of Ms Abbott. She really is as stupid as she sounds, as venal, as precious, as astonishingly maladroit and incompetent as one has always suspected, unable to explain, refute or even divert Neil's questions about her expenses, her own, stagey racism, her contradictory, greedy, self-centred parental decisions, she floundered, Oh-Andrewing, as though these straightforward - and long, long overdue - questions were beneath her. So utterly banal and worthless was her performance, so embarrassing, that one wondered, not for the first time, why it was that Neil has for so long pretended to value her opinion.

"Diane, you know some poor black people, don't you, do they smell frightfully bad? I mean, aren't poor people dreadful ? What's your take (1960s slang = opinion) on this?"

DIANE LARD, pretend MP (from inside a billowing black tent.) "Well, Andrew (waving arms around) I blame the parents; as you know, I was so conscientious a parent that I sent my precious little baby to an expensive, fee-paying, radical socialist school, in order, purely, you understand, to keep him from harm's way, out of reach of my constituents' grubby children and not to give him any advantage in later life, like when he inherits my seat. So my conscience on this matter, as in all others, is clear. As for the trash and riff-raff in my constituency, well if they can't be bothered to get the very best for their children well, why should I care, not as though I'm paid to represent them or anything. It's not as though I don't set them a good example.

(turning, smiling acidly) Michael, you should know, does Barack Obama have a big one?"

DAME MICHAEL PUNCTILLIO, MURDOCH EMPLOYEE AND FAMOUS COWARD: 

"Indeed, and you make my point, Diane, some of these black chaps have whoppers, as Ron Davies often remarked, when he was Badgers Secretary; it beats me why we can't find jobs for some of them, lots of them, down at the House; why, even some of the female members might find use for a well-developed young ree-surch assistant, although my instinct tells me that they'd be gobbled up, so to speak, by the gentlemen members. You might try one yourself, Andrew, if you ever tire of totty young enough to be your granddaughter. Are we going to be singing Gimme, Gimme, Gimme a Man After Midnight again this week, Andrew, I do hope so."

...................................................................................

You couldn't accuse me of liking children - certainly not in packs, but I wouldn't actively wish any of them harm. I wouldn't subscribe to perpetuating the school conditions depicted in Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, although wearing tidier uniforms and plaiting their hair wouldn't come amiss, and keeping them boxed up at lunchtime in the school canteen  instead of allowing them to maraud through the streets of Kirkwall in a grease-crazed search for  chips would be an improvement. So I suppose I accept that some sort of school-inspection regime is necessary. We wouldn't want State Schools to go the way of the private sector, with beatings, buggery, bog-washing and faggery the order of the day.

However, the implacable conviction of being right, getting it right, being helpful, even, was writ large in the features, demeanour and pronouncements of the Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, in her interview with Laura Kuenssberg today.

I mean, just look at her:

This is what she used to look like before she started getting it right all the time:

Shows what a career of I know Bestism will do to a girl.

There is something deeply wrong in an inspection regime that takes a little kiddies' school from Outstanding to Inadequate over two inspections, and causes the headmistress to kill herself. The very idea of rating schools is deeply wrong - resulting in pushy parents with the means to do so moving into the catchment areas of Outstanding Schools. Ofsted has overstepped itself, in creating a competitive league table of schools, instead of just satisfying itself that schools are not actively harming kids, are teaching the curriculum, and are providing extra help for those kiddies who are not a joy to teach. And providing healthy lunches. Breakfasts if necessary. And making the gels wear knee-length skirts and the boys tuck their shirts in.

To remind ourselves of just how terrible privileged schools were in the Sixties, how far we have come as a society in being averse to the active harming and sexual abuse of children, and how unlikely it actually is that poor dead  Ruth Perry's  school was Inadequate, let us turn to mr ishmael's reminiscences about the King Edward Grammar School that he attended - a school considered to be outstanding, no doubt, at the time, by the parents paying for their offspring to be abused:

"My first day at grammar school, in the 'sixties, is memorable not for its welcome from staff and older boys, for there was none such but for a long rebuke, alternately hissing and thundering, during Assembly, from the Headmaster, a fatuous prick called Cholmondeley.  Cholmondeley was an over-dressed, over-confident caning freak who promoted fellow travellers. Dennis Marsden, my French teacher, was a loathsome, over-dressed, over-cologned, overweight bullyboy;  Jack Watson (Oxon,) physics and maths, was a skeletal, SS-alike Christian sadist who crafted cats-of-several-tails from Bunsen burner tubing and who would, today, be arrested on sight and  spend his sentence falling down stairs and having shaving accidents;  Shifty Watson took rugger and physics and was a groper of arses and scrota, all good clean dirty fun;  Dave Buttress was my form teacher, an uptight hysteric who, in an instant would lose it and fling a blackboard ruler at a twelve-year old, wonder he didn't blind anyone;  he needed profound and lasting psychiatric care, Dave;    they were fucking awful people, most of them, and even the decent ones, then as now, conspired by their silence in the humiliation and brutalising of pupils. Dave Hill taught me English and together  with Miss Boulter and Mr Coe at primary school, inspired me for life, I hear their voices, the latter two,  every time I sit down here - you may not start a sentence with and or but or so; you may not follow and with a comma and so on; people who lived and learned and taught in a time, before Blair,  when hopefully was still an adverb.  Dave Hill, though, turned a blind eye to much which should have enraged him, as guilty as the perpetrators themselves.

Maybe it was their service and suffering in the war but my primary school teachers - one of them was a VC, another wounded in North Africa, another widowed - had all been, without exception, kindly, nurturing and inspiring;  these guys, my grammar school teachers, were, by comparison,  filth.

Chumley, anyway, during our first-ever Assembly, hissed and fumed at us about how, collectively, we had driven a poor music teacher,  that previous Summer, to throw himself in the Stratford-Upon-Avon canal and there drown. 

 I had never even met the deceased, never been taught by him, wasn't even at that school when it happened but no matter, we were all to blame, we children, hissed Chumley  from the stage, gowned, mortar-boarded and double-breasted up to fuck, the horrible fucking bastard; we had all made dreadful, unfounded  allegations against poor, young Mr Wotsisname, unfounded, without a shred of evidence and had ruined a promising career with our nastiness.  We had all just jolly well mind our step and not make any such categorically unfounded allegations against any other members of staff or Chumley would come down on us like a ton of bricks. Now, let us pray.  Heavenly Father, thou seest all and knoweth all.........

All dead, now, all these noncing fucking brutes.  And the worst of it is that those groomed by them, academically and carnally,  would not hear a word said against them. Never did me any harm, mr ishmael, you musta been a softy or a poof.

 I never learned any more about the music teacher, save that he was being investigated by the police and killed himself;  Chumley, therefore, logician, linguist, classicist and ponce, was wrong to claim the allegations were unfounded

 

when what they were - as with those against Sir Jimmy Savile, seen here with a fan -  was unproven.  Chastising the victims, as did Chumley, is what they do, these people, may their arses fall out and they trip over their intestines.

 Nods and winks, knowing whispers,  secret handshakes and categorical denials.

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Last week's Caption Contest

Responses Inadequate. Try Harder.

Should you wish to read of mr ishmael's exploits, be utterly disgusted by his imagined accounts of the private lives of those who rule o'er us, be entranced and educated by his Zen Marxist Presbyterian philosophy and be prepared to endure ruptures engendered by remorseless, extreme excitation of the laughter  reflex, then there are three volumes of his Collected Works, selected, edited and anthologised by mr verge, the House Filthster.  

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack  and Ishmael’s Blues 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
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.