TEARS OF RAGE. NEWLABOUR AND THE TRUE PRICE OF A GOATMEAT BALTI

I ate meat for most of my life. I stopped in my twenties for a year or two but up until recently  I have taken the TopOfTheFoodChain line, albeit with increasing reservations. AJ Grayling's maxim on speciesism - that If all the animals in the world got together and formed a religion, man would be the Devil - troubled me a lot, twenty years ago and I became a picky consumer, you know the type, Oh,  fuck me,  I won't eat this and I won't eat that, Oh, this animal had a good life, look, it's got a welfare stamp on  its flesh, so that's alright; I wouldn't eat offal or pies or sausages, it had to be the good stuff, expensive cuts; I felt, somehow, that the more I paid, the less the animal would have suffered. Eventually, it had to stop and an example of animal cruelty in Gaza, orchestrated, it must be said, by the PBC,  revolted and distressed me so much that just a passing comment, here, by mr black hole sunset, prompted me to lay down my steak knife, once and for all.

 I feel a whole lot better, in my mind, and my blood chemistry hasn't suffered;  I eat loads of dark, green stuff - kale, cabbage, leaves and bags and bags of watercress.  I'm not Earnest and Worthy Monty Don but we do grow herbs and eat loads of them;  this is as we have done for decades, just without the flesh on the plate and when the cows stick their heads over the wall or I meet the sheep in the lane I can pat their heads without guilt. But that's just me, my sentiments, the coincidences of my life and there's no moral high-grounding. Except when it comes to this shit.

If I was ever close enough I would beat this fucker to  a pulp, I would pick-up the nearest  heavy object and beat him with it until I could beat him no more, I would kick him until my foot broke, be he fucking muslim or fucking jew or any other kind of bastard stone-age lunatic, see how he likes it.

Some would point to a  dissonance, here;  I do not advocate the beating of paedophiles or sexual/sadistic killers, what's so bad about hacking a sheep to death, jeering at it, insulting it - can you insult a sheep;  why is a slaughterman any worse than Ian Brady?  Well, I suppose it's that I believe that the Bradys must, somewhere along the line, have been victimised, themselves, or felt some corrosive pressures which separated them from common Decency, torturing a child is so aberrant, something triggered it, let's find out what, and try to spare other children and let us bring Brady to an understanding of what he has done and to remorse and redemption. That is what we believe, that is what our legislature prays for, before every sitting - Father, forgive, that is the foundation stone of our civilisation, of our law, our art, our architecture, our ethics and our philosophy.

Why not, then, forgive the sheepstabbers?  I don't know, my views are discordant, I can't help it,  Brady just did what he did, he didn't weave it into some fucked-up religion, it wasn't his job, he was independently, even boldly monstrous, claiming no higher calling and it's just that  the endorsement of such cruelty as this, in the name of Allah or Jehovah, brings out my inner Crusader,  but be that as it may there is something of the hand of Jack Straw, here, in this barbarism, something of  Roy Hattersley, 
 
A bucket of lard speaks.
What, Sparkhill, my constituency, the most Northerly banana republic in the world? A judge said that? Full of crooked muslims, rigging votes? Well, I know nothing about that, I was just the MP.
I'm a fearless journalist now.  No, no, I'm only in the house of lords for the grub. And the booze.

of their importing and bribing  a block vote and calling it democracy, of their nurturing and permitting and obscuring the vile and the gross, be it the whoring of Rotherham's children or the tormenting of dumb animals, there is something of Jack and Roy and Denis McShane, 

 something which is as wicked as the crimes themselves, if not moreso. 
Hissing  Jack Torture, of course, working for KosherJehovah, lied his poxy  arse off at the UN, igniting a firestorm over the ancient, holy lands,  a firestorm from which strode Mr ISIS and his vengeful, incendiary band.

Jack Torture, hissing his self-righteous lies and distortions, doesn't give a fuck about what he's done to the world,  so he's not likely to care about a few sheep but NewLabour's cynical Islamisation of large tracts of our cities is, for native and immigrant,  a hateful abomination of which this scandal is  an  illustration; pandering to traditional Jewish or Muslim cruelty should be the refuge of the spiv,  not the parliamentarian. This  wicked practice, halal or kosher, should be proscribed.

If cruelty is part of your faith, if you must hack animals to death in order to pacify your hateful god, then fuck off to Pakistan or Jordan or Israel and practice it there;  you are not welcome in my country.

God said to Abraham: I want you to kill your son. Just to prove you love me. 
OK, boss, if you insist.

 What should we expect from the fervent adherents of Abraham, what else but cruelty and vice?

A DENIAL OF PERSPECTIVE.

So here they are, the entire catalogue of those figures that played a part in the shaping of the world in time long past - the Crusader kings of Jerusalem and the Atabegs of Mosul, the corsairs of the Mediterranean and the Norse adventurers who planted temporary roots in Dublin,  the solitary saints of Wales and the powerful princes of the Roman Church, the magnates who took up arms for Stephen and for Maud, the demon earls of the Fenlands and of Chester, who made regional hells about them for a  few months or years, the abbots and obedientaries of Cluny who played host to the pilgrims crossing Europe to the most celebrated shrines of the Western world, the Knights Hospitallers who housed the pilgrims to Jerusalem, all real, all deserving of mention.

And moving to the nearer  ground before them, closer yet smaller and more shadowy, in a denial of perspective, the humble people who might have been you or me, had we been born eight centuries earlier - the shopkeepers and artisans of Shrewsbury, the small gentry of the Shropshire manors, the pedlars, the craftsmen, the humble brothers and sisters of the monastic Orders, the villeins bound to the land, the younger men who cut out assarts from the forests, the men-at-arms, the ambivalent souls with one foot in England and one in Wales, like me, like you, the continuity of humanity inhabiting these islands, and especially this shire, I may have given them their names, within the covers of my books. I may have given them a local habitation and a history, but they existed, as surely as did the kings, then and in every age since and still exist today and will continue into future centuries.  They are you and me, and the ones who come afterwards.

 ............I feel a part of a progression which is England. I hope you may feel the same, and be glad of it, as I am glad.

Ellis Peters, from her Introduction to the Cadfael Companion by Robin Whiteman.

A  progression which is England. Not the brightest of men, David Cameron.