ALARMIST WHO-HAA

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SWINE FLU LOVERS will be bitterly disappointed this week in the wake of the distressing news that the alarmist hoo-haa surrounding these two momentous events in the life of the planet are nothing more than a little hot air and a cleverly-fabricated scam on the part of ailing medical giants Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, that loveable drugs producer founded in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand. When even the ineffectual Council of Europe sees its slumbering members awake from their dozing to produce a report questioning the veracity of the World Health Organization’s report on Swine Flu then we should see that the game is up, as policemen often say on television.


NOW WE KNOW THAT THE FIGURES underlying the statements made by Margaret Chan (see Sunday Morning, April 30th 2009) were “sexed up” in order to make governments panic and buy enormous quantities of useless medicines that no one is interested in having administered by injection into their fair and lily-white members. One wonders how Ban-ki “Slippery Eel” Moon feels after having stated that “at least a third” of the world would be suffering, if not dead – and thus no longer suffering, one presumes – by last October.


NOW WE HAVE THE NEWS that Nobel-winning statuesque politician Al Gore lied about the numbers and statistics behind his claims that the Arctic Circle would be as ice-free as the Mediterranean in five years. He stated yesterday, after having been “shopped” by Dr Wieslaw Maslowski, that he had made “a mistake” over his predictions. Gore’s admission leaves only two “authorities” that still defend the alarming claims made in the nineties.


ONE OF THESE IS THE IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yesterday, however, we discovered that the Chairman of this august organ, Dr Rajendra “Big Thinker” Pachauri (pictured above), far from being a “climate change expert”, whatever that is, is a former railway engineer with no background in science whatsoever. And yesterday the IPCC itself admitted that it had “exaggerated” and “speculated on” available information. Science fiction, therefore. The worst exaggeration appears to have been the panel’s statement that all the hundreds of feet thick glaciers in the Himalayas would melt “within a few years” if the temperature increases by 1ºC. These people should come to my house and help me defrost my freezer sometime.


SO WE ARE BASICALLY LEFT WITH PRINCE CHARLES; and we know what that means. Personally, I am pleased to see that the world is coming round to my sensible point of view. Over the last few years there have been few people on my side. However, I would recommend one to read Joanne Nova, on www.joannenova.com.au She describes herself as a “professional skeptic”, but I have my doubts.

THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

I CAN OFFER NO APOLOGY for my reneging on what has managed to become seen as my duties of late, but a tight schedule for getting a chapter ready for proof-reading before publication and an emergency at the college at which I am a sometime teacher, involving me having to help the Dean in his duties, managed to bog me down somewhat over this blisteringly cold yuletide season. One might also state that there has been precious little worth writing about in the field of politics of late.


ALL OF THIS SEEMS TO BE CHANGING now as the New Year starts to “kick in”. Seeing as elections in the UK are sneaking ever closer, nerves are a-starting a-jangling among our beloved leaders and honest representatives. Even the most optimistic polls published in the tidier newspapers suggest that one third to four fifths of the present occupants of the Mother of All Parliaments will be looking for alternative ways of earning a living after the suffrage. We even have scandals of a heterosexual nature emerging from Ireland, which is a pointer towards interesting developments in the future.


BUT THE BIG NEWS OF THE DAY has to be the long-awaited appearance of Alastair “I know where you live, you scumbag” Campbell before the goodly gentlemen and refined ladies who make up the panel of the Iraq Inquiry in their laughable bid to find out the “truth” behind Britain’s – and particularly Tony Blair’s – decision to go to war against Iraq on the flimsiest of details.


IF ANYONE THOUGHT THAT CAMPBELL would play the game of these effete dullards and break down in tears after a soft rating then this is because they have never been to Burnley. Campbell stood his ground, stuck to his guns and stiffed the panel up for its arrogance. Leaving them all “stymied” at best. We all know that Tony Blair went to war in Iraq in order to get his name written down as a war hero on the pages of history, and that he needed someone smart, sleek and intelligent to present and sell his image – and there was no way he would find anyone fitting this description among the elected anoraks of the Labour Party. I think today’s performance is a hats off and trebles all round day for Blair and co., and Campbell did not leave without a fairly stiff digit being pointed in the direction of the hapless Gordon Brown.

THE FUTURE NOW

I MUST FIRST ESTABLISH THE TONE FOR THE NEXT few weeks of badinage by wishing all the good people who assume themselves as being kept under some kind of umbrella term meaning my “friends” the very best for the coming year. As miserably as most of them seem to have done in 2009, unless the planet is invaded by some money-eating bug, the year 2010 ought to be better.


YET I AM AMUSED TODAY as I loll on my four-poster bed in a manor house hotel in the charming city of Évora, in southern Portugal, flipping through the TV channels, by the insight set forth by one Watts Wacker, an apparent “futurist”, no doubt from California, who is so confident about what he knows the future will be that he doesn’t have to appear even semi-respectable today.


MR WATTS WACKER has been telling the obviously face-lifted presenter of CNN Today that the “next decade” will “see us living a future that we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago”. Of course one, at a stretch, can in fact glean some intelligence out of this absurd construction, but my point is that this could have been stated at any time in history by anyone.

FUTURISTS, GOD BLESS THEM, TEND TO OVEREGG THE PUDDING in their predictions, as was made clear in the little vignette presented by CNN about how different generations in the past have imagined what life would be like in 2010. Most of these predictions have seen us dressed in bright-coloured, tight-fitting nylon suits, with no sign of genitalia or mammaries, speaking in clipped monotones, riding around through space on sparkling, dildo-shaped devices, with cute little vacuum-cleaner size robots with names like UB40 or R2FU quacking as they buzz around flashing lights while we just look out the window at the candy-floss of the universe floating by to the sound of music by Strauss, and then we have our weekly 30 seconds of sex over the phone in a little egg-shaped cubicle.


WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF THE SEX OVER THE PHONE prediction, none of this has come true. Yet we persist in our desire to predict. My own view of the future. which is obviously not as inspired as Wacker’s, is that if we continue to allow ourselves to be governed by the half-wits and outright, bare-faced robbers who have been running the USA, the UK and the soi-disant EU for the last thirty years then we will end up not with JetPacs on out backs, flitting about from penthouse to heliport, but at each other’s throats over who gets to share the last potato in the pot. In homage to all “futurists”, I leave you with a little sketch by Van Gogh which shows us Gordon Brown's Britain in 2020.

SOMETHING ROTTEN

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables, -- meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

Hamlet, Shakespeare

AS I WRITE OUR GOOD LEADERS are sitting at top table in Copenhagen, smiling, or smirking, at the gathered cameras, and so I make Shakespeare’s words my own. Never has such a collective of crooks been seated together with such unscrupulous aims and devious intent. If anyone actually believes that any of the heads of state and/or government at this “climate change” meeting had any interest whatsoever other than making sure they can feather their own nests for the next few years then they need taking out and being slapped with a wet haddock.

ONLY A FEW OF THESE PEOPLE BELIEVE in climate change, and even they do not truly care. The main concern in the minds of these villains may vary, but the underlying principle is the same: to cheat others out of money, profit, work and future. Gordon Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel and the sneaky Barroso might want China, Brazil and India to reduce their industrial outputs, but this is only to keep the European economies alive, rather than being swamped by cheap goods.

THE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES MIGHT AGREE to reduce their emissions, but this will only be in exchange for Western money, which will, as usual, soon find its merry little way into the pockets of the leaders of these less than democratic, corruption-ridden, often nabob-led hell-holes in which the idea of betterment or welfare for the common people would be enough to turn the stomachs of those in charge.

THE COMMITMENT OF THE UNITED STATES can be gauged by the fact that Barack Obama has only just turned up now (at 11 am on the last day), and has not yet gone to the sessions hall, having left all his negotiations to the boggle-eyed, crazy woman who possesses no clout whatsoever. The tables of the Plenary Session are a mass of confusion, with enough heated discussion going on to cause more than the dreaded global warming. Meanwhile, outside, it is the coldest winter for seventy years. And the news from England is no better.

PLUM DUFF AND SPORTS NEWS

LITTLE HAS BEEN HEARD FROM Carol Ann Duffy since her appointment as poet laureate, but the publication of her “Christmas poem” (sic) is proof that she hasn’t just been hanging around the house watching television for the last few months. However, a poet laureate attacking British society in a yuletide poem is somewhat off, to say the least. The decent thing would have been to reject the prize, and leave the job of destroying British society to those who know how to do it, such as Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling.


DUFFY’S APPEARANCE LAST NIGHT on The South Bank Show, hosted by the moronic Melvyn Bragg, served once again to show that those who choose our poet laureates – in theory the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister – should get out of the house more often. And in this case the House means the House of Commons. Choosing a poet simply because she is a left-wing, woman, labour party member and reputed lesbian is madness. My own nomination for the position, although, alas, I fear it may never come to pass, has to be the great versificator John Cooper Clarke. And in homage to him I will include some words I have written in his style.


The Member of the Labour Party

She’s a member of the party and so she can be arty
She won’t be called a boring farty
Girlie-girl because she lives in the
Fairy world where what matters is the
Fact of being a socialist and totally tarty



IN THE MEANTIME, I AM INTRIGUED by the events surrounding the activities of Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods, an American golfer who is one of the highest earners in the world of sports. A gentleman would naturally imagine that if one earns in the region of fifteen or sixteen million dollars per year just for hitting a ball around the countryside, one’s wife would be more than happy to allow one to do a little sport on the side, holing a few birdies without too much fuss. But apparently not. Now that Woods has been found out, his ridiculous manner of “clearing the air” between himself and his wife is to promise to have “treatment” to stop him being “addicted to sex”. I cannot for the life of me imagine what such treatment might involve, but I wish Mr Woods well on the road to his no doubt painful recovery.

RED SOCKS AND MEYER CULPA

STRAIGHT-TALKING, HIP-SHOOTING JOHN PRESCOTT, formerly of this parish, once described Sir Christopher Meyer, our former Ambassador to the United States of America, as a “red-socked fop”. This was perhaps, as was thought at the time, due to the fact that Prescott did not understand that a gentleman should wear red socks when wearing brown shoes with blue trousers, or perhaps even brown trousers, although the possibility of a gentleman wearing brown trousers other than when wearing a brown suit – in itself difficult to contemplate other than when on a visit to the Third World or making a speech at Cambridge University – may not have occurred to the then Deputy Prime Minister.

PRESCOTT’S POINT WAS THAT MEYER was a less than acceptable chap. As seen by gung-ho, punch-first-and-eat-your-pie-later Prescott, anyone who knew the rules of etiquette was a fop. This meant, in Prescott’s tatty little world, expanded as it was to a large group of politicians who saw “duffing people over”, as Prescott himself put it after “sorting out” a protester in North Wales, as acceptable, that aristocrats were “shit-bags”.

CHRISTOPHER MEYER HAS NOW BEEN CALLED UPON, as former Ambassador to Washington during the Thatcher/Clinton/Bush/Blair years, to be forthcoming as to his knowledge of events during the dark days when “the burning Blair” and “the mighty Bush” held forth in their desires to rid the world of someone – anyone – just to get their names into the record books.

AND NOW WE KNOW WHY DULLARDS LIKE PRESCOTT were against Meyer. As he has come forth with all the beans against the boy Blair, clearing the boy Bush of most of the blame, as the policy had been set out, he tells us, by the adulterer Clinton. The whole war business – “kicking the shit out of Iraq”, as Meyer described it on national TV on Tuesday – had been planned “yonks” ago. (“Yonks” is mine, but I just thought I would bring a little lumpen-speak into this text. Because, after all, the whole lot of these people are bastards, whether they wear red socks or not. And, fops or not, they do in fact deserve a little duffing over.)

THERE THERE MY DEAR

FURTHER TO MY SUMMERTIME DREAM involving my meeting with David Cameron, no doubt inspired by the sounds I heard from outside as I dozed early one morning, I have this last night had a dream in which I met Gordon Brown. Judging by the time of the morning when I experienced this nightmare, it must have been provoked by the sound of the rubbish being collected and emptied.

ONE MAY SEE SUNDAY MORNINGS PASSIM to have a fair idea of my opinion of Mr Brown and his wishy-washy approach to politics in general and running Britain in particular, but in this dream I was remarkably understanding and friendly to our Prime Minister. The situation was a lunch encounter in an upstairs room over a pub in what felt like Fleet Street. Brown and I had to walk up a narrow, spiral staircase in order to come to our table. Mr Brown made the ascent in tears, “greeting like a bairn”, I seem to recall my stating to him, as he knew he was not going to win the next election.

THE UPHOLSTERY WAS THAT SICKLY GREEN VELVETEEN that pub decorators seem to enjoy, there was hardly any room to sit down comfortably anywhere in this tiny room, and David Cameron was sitting reading The Telegraph right in front of our eyes as we came into the room, looking like something out of a Magritte painting that I imagined, in the dream, to be entitled “Man waiting for Soup”. Gordon burst into tears, rushed to a corner table and hid his face in the white tablecloth. Cameron seemed not to have noticed our ascent.

TWO LADIES, HOWEVER, HAD. They came back from the bar (I presume) carrying fully-adorned Chicago prohibition speakeasy cocktails, complete with parasols, feathers, sparklers, and cherries. They looked at the crumpled, blubbering figure of Mr Brown in horror. I explained to them that he was going through a bad period. One of the lasses, a slutty-looking, tatty-haired Mancunian chewing gum, said, “These seats are ours. So shift.” I woke up convinced it had all really happened.