Stamping on the pricks

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This is an old boot. It replaces the graphic photograph of a woman who sought to bring down a man who has shown how corrupt governments can be.

Originally the photograph was of Anna Ardin, one of Julian Assange's accusers, breaking in a pair of shoes which had phallic heels, and thus spoke volumes about her character. Of course, as with the incriminating texts, she deleted this picture shortly after she posted it. Whether the decision to remove it was on the instruction of her legal team or her own initiative is not known. I made the decision to remove the copy made available to me because after due consideration and advice do not want to leave behind a permanent reminder of one moment of indiscretion.

However, she should never have tried to bring down Julian Assange. It is because of her actions that his life has been ruined. Perhaps she will reflect one day on the damage she has done in the pursuit of a little personal publicity. As she is already a hate-figure of her own creation there is nothing can be done to bring her character down further. Nothing she can do, nothing this blog can do.

Thanks to those who made the original reproduction possible (you know who you are).

Stick up for the NHS

Follow @JohnPlatinumG 12 months ago this very day I was drinking copious amounts of water to replace blood loss from a triple heart bypass. What a wonderful thing the human body is and how well it recovers from trauma. I am not back to peak fitness yet but I'm getting there. As the warmer weather arrives I hope to be doing more and more cycling but mostly in recent months I've been jogging, and stopping when I get tired. It's not Usain Bolt but I can manage a hundred yards in about 20 seconds, which is not bad for a 67 year old.

What this post is about is our NHS. It is the best in the world. The BBC and other MSM outlets dish out the opprobrium whenever there is a problem with the NHS. So for the past few weeks we have been hearing about problems with Stafford General Hospital, and the media have dragged this story out ad nauseum. It only needs one blip at one hospital and they make it sound like the NHS overall is in terminal decline. That is what they want us to think so they can get private companies creaming off one of the success stories of the last century, one of the success stories of socialism.

Privatisation attracts doctors and nurses, whose first priority is how much they can earn. Then there are shareholders to pay all of which helps push up the cost of healthcare so that ordinary people who cannot afford insurance cannot afford to be ill. No services are ever better in private hands. You only have to look at Gas, Electricity and Water and the way year on year costs escalate to pay the greedy shareholders out of stagnant wages. Privatisation of the NHS is coming unless we all do something to oppose private healthcare when it replaces NHS services. Make sure they never take away a pillar of society once described as the 'best in the world'.

The NHS has never been safe in Tory hands, but since the Labour Party (New Labour) was turned into another rich person's party it is not safe in their hands either. Be proud of the NHS. It is there for all of us. Fight for it!

What the W stands for

Follow @JohnPlatinumG For this article in today's News Junkie Post I finish with the paragraph:

Keen observers will have been watching the large letter W which God, in his wisdom, has etched into Tony Blair’s forehead. It is becoming more evident as the years progress. For all his money there is little that can be done short of a “forehead job” to hide this branding. But in fairness, when you are a warmonger your forehead ought to be etched with the letter “W” so that everyone knows how you made your riches on earth. George W. Bush’s branding is in his name. Well, this is my interpretation of what the “W” stands for, although I am aware that others might have different ideas about its meaning. 

For those who missed Blair's 'confession' on BBC Newsnight last night, here is a photograph of the former prime minister being interviewed by Kirsty Wark.

Of course we cannot help how we look but we can help how we act. Nearly all heads of state in their university days belonged to clubs, sometimes dining-clubs sometimes more sinister and secret organisations. David Cameron belonged to the infamous Bullingdon Club (dining) to which George Osborne and Boris Johnson also belonged, George W. Bush belonged to the Skull and Bones (sinister) and Tony Blair belonged to the Oxford University Archery Dining Club. As to youthful indiscretions we probably all did silly things when young, though not many of us have matured into taking a country, which once had a passable reputation abroad, into an illegal war. There is one photograph Tony Blair has reportedly said he would not care if he never saw again. But that is not fair to those who have never seen it. So here it is. It was taken at a gathering of Oxford University Archery Dining Club undergraduates. Blair is the long-haired student centre back making a rude gesture.

Enough said!

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Follow @JohnPlatinumG  I have started a petition.

Yesterday Michael Gove agreed not to take Mary Seacole off the national curriculum. I signed this petition because I believe that black English history, and those who figure in it, is as important as all other history. I am so pleased with the result but it started me thinking. There is a figure in the history of the working-class movement who left behind a priceless gem of literature. "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" was rejected by three publishers and its author was buried in a pauper's grave without seeing it in print.

Robert Tressell was a highly-skilled painter and decorator. His real name was Noonan and he took his pen-name from the painters' tressel (more commonly spelled trestle). He was a working-man concerned with working conditions and the way workers were exploited just after the turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. During a period of industrial decline he was sacked from his job because he would not rush the detailed work. He was influenced by the emerging Socialist movement and without a job he sat down and wrote a piece of literature that is sure to stand the test of time.

Noonan's wife had been unfaithful in South Africa where Robert had found work as a painter, and after his divorce the author was granted custody of his daughter, Kathleen. They came back to England, and latterly suffered much in not being able to find work, eventually ending in Liverpool where Noonan died of consumption. Without Kathleen Noonan this classic would never have come to light. She hawked it round until in 1914 Grant Richards published it three years after the author's death.

The novel itself, probably because of its political content, has never appeared on any syllabus at secondary level as far as I have been able to discover. Despite that it has been widely read and when the BBC ran its "Big Read" poll looking for the "nation's best-loved novel" it came a creditable 72nd.That's not bad for a book that has not been taught in secondary colleges, and finished above novels like "Bleak House", "Cold Comfort Farm" and "A Woman in White".

Please sign the petition to include it on the 'A' level syllabus.

An old story from a great English novelist

Follow @JohnPlatinumG Robert Bage died 1 September 1801. He left behind six novels. He was a novelist of ideas and in that respect has been compared to Aldhous Huxley. As a progressive writer he took on many issues of his day: human rights, slavery, the futility of war, the futility of duelling, the lack of provision for education for the poor and the lack of women's rights being among these causes. It is a wonder that most people have not heard of him but the truth is, even though he was one of the best-selling novelists on William Lane's list, he was almost forgotten fifty years after his death.

He wrote at a time of world transition, from 1782 to 1796, and his novels spanned two revolutions. Bage rarely missed an opportunity to use in his works illustrative stories usually with a moral. This link tells the story of Carthage and the Hesperides. It is short and comes from his first novel Mount Henneth (1782). Its purpose was to draw a comparison between England's mistreatment of its colonies, particularly its mistreatment of America, and a fictional plundering of the Hesperides by Carthage, though perhaps not so fictional after all, since before the Punic Wars the Carthaginian Empire covered most of Mediterranean Africa and the city in Libya now called Benghazi was once called Hesperides after the heavenly gardens and those who tended them. It was a city renowned for its beauty.

Today Benghazi is having to fight off another imperialist intrusion into its country. Sadly the culprits are NATO countries defending neo-colonialist oil-magnates. After wars created specifically for the purpose the UK and USA have invested heavily in the theft of oil from north Africa and the Middle East, and spent huge sums of money in defending their ill-gotten gains through private military armies run by evil mercenaries whose personal histories are without a vestige of morality. Bage finishes his short story on Carthage and the Hesperides by writing that "Carthage sent out fleets and armies, and spent as much of her own money in five years, as she had expected to get of her colonies in one hundred."

The plagiarism of names

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Sarehole Mill Yard

The Hungry Hobbit calls itself a sandwich bar but is really a small cafe serving all-day breakfasts and other meals. It is no more than 300 yards from where J R R. Tolkien lived in his childhood years and perhaps 200 yards from Sarehole Mill. Sarehole is thought to be the village on which Hobbiton is based in Tolkien's novels. You might think there is some justification for this small local enterprise taking its name from a fictional Hobbit straight out of the young imagination of a local boy. This article is dedicated to small businesses and concerns which face up to the Goliaths of this modern world.

Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) is a large enterprise specialising in turning good novels into good films. Its big successes are One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus and The English Patient. It buys up exclusive rights to literary fiction, turns them into films, then brand-names the title, characters, places and other aspects of the novel, before charging any other company that it claims infringes its intellectual property rights. It will only allow other companies to use a name it claims to own under licence. This is what it is trying to do with the Hungry Hobbit on Sarehole roundabout. However brand name laws can vary from country to country and from industry to industry.  In the academic world using fictional names, fictional placenames and texts that belong to another author is considered plagiarism if the source is not acknowledged. What SRZ is doing is akin to buying a degree belonging to another author.


Apparently Saul Zaentz Company bought from United Artists the rights which United Artists purchased from the Tolkien family estate. But it is Warner Brothers that the Tolkien family are pursuing through the courts for extending ownership rights to electronic goods. SZC is a subsidiary of Warner Brothers.

Recently SZC - no laughing now - registered the brand name 'The Shire'. I do not know how long we will have to wait before Birmingham City Council are sued by SZC, unless of course they are already using our money to pay a licence fee to them. If they are not paying a fee I'm really looking forward to this battle. Bring it on.

The cost of maintaining the Falklands

Follow @JohnPlatinumG This article of mine was published on Saturday in News Junkie Post, though it might have been early Sunday morning here in the UK. It alarmed me to learn how much we are paying in taxes to defend the few families who live on the Falkland Islands. One Falkland Islander took the trouble to put his/her case against the article and I can see where that person is coming from.

I am a Falkland Islander and I would like to respond to some of the points of this article.

Firstly, the Falkland Islands is not a colony, lets make that completely clear. We have our own democracy and civil service. We are self-governing, meaning we set our own budgets, policies, taxes etc, however Britain helps us with defence and foreign affairs. This neatly leads us on to the nature of the article, quite a misleading one.

The Falklands is hugely appreciative of our defence and we will never forget the people who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom in 1982. But lets make it completely clear (are you reading this Fernando?) the defence is there because of a very real threat. Just under 31 years ago an aggressive nation invaded our islands and forced an administration upon the islanders that was alien and unwanted. That is why the islands need military defence. It is not a conspiracy of Britain trying to invade South America, (which Argentina alludes to), it is not to force us Islanders to be British and it is not to maintain the Falklands, it is purely for our defence (30 years is not a long time and my family lived through the war).

The Falklands and its people would love nothing more to live in peace and not require a military defence, but it is Argentina’s fault for why we have one. Argentina continues to threaten us, maybe not through military means (even though the Argentine Defence Minister did admit that the current British military presence was the only thing that was preventing Argentina moving in) but through economic and diplomatic. Argentina is trying to destroy our economy and force us to hand our home to them.

The Falkland Islanders have human rights, just like anyone else on the planet. We can determine our political, economic, cultural and social future, and we do that now. Under Argentine control, we would not be given the same rights. The Islands would be controlled remotely from Buenos Aries and not by democratically elected individuals like we enjoy now.

Our defence is costly, but we are British citizens facing a very real threat, just because we are only 3,000 strong and live 8,000 miles away means we are not entitled to have our human rights and freedom guaranteed?

I would be the last to deny anybody their human rights, especially with recent abuses in the west, and agree that Falkland Islanders are as much entitled to theirs as we are to ours. Having lived on an island, the Isle of Man, I suspect that the above comment is based in ignorance of the unknown. The Isle of Man has one of the oldest parliaments in Europe, Tynwald, but nobody speaks Norwegian there any more. What's more the last Manx-speaking resident died some years back. Manx is a kind of Gaelic which is still on the school curriculum. For historians it is useful but unlikely to replace English in the short term. When I lived on the Isle of Man anybody who was not born there was called a 'comeover'. It wasn't really racist, more a kind of friendly banter, though you always got some who took it to an extreme.

If residents of an insular island community have only ever known one way of life and only ever spoken one language on a day-to-day basis the unknown looks foreboding, whereas cities like London, or Birmingham, or Buenos Aires are cosmopolitan and places where people of all races and backgrounds have had to get along. I would like to see the Falkland Islands reach a negotiated settlement with the UK and Argentina, to continue to have its own administration, which includes representation from all parties with an interest. My vision is for the Falklands to be a bit like the Channel Islands, where French and English are spoken, except where tax-exiles are not allowed to reside.

However, the whole process of settlement gets off on the wrong foot if Falkland Islanders, Argentinians or British, begin by apportioning blame, as the person who left the above comment does. Any islander in the 20 to 30 age group, that is, the generation on whom the immediate future depends, will have no knowledge of what happened in 1982, except from what older residents have told them. It is a good time to negotiate a peaceful settlement that does not include long-term expenditure from the UK taxpayer and satisfies the needs of Falkland Islanders and Argentinians alike. The Argentinians too should spend their money on improving the infrastructure of the islands if they wish to jointly inhabit them. We in the UK have needs of our own. A negotiated settlement is the only way forward in the long term. I would like to ask the Falkland Islander two questions. Is a negotiated settlement a reasonable proposition? Is it reasonable to ask the UK taxpayer to continue to fund Falkland households to the tune of £90,000 every year?