Le Pen Demands Respect from Beeb & Quite Right Too

I am deeply suspicious of poujadists of any nationality: it's all too easy, and often unsavoury.  Politics is about power, not protest.  What vocal-minority party ever manoeuvred its way into a sustainable national-policy-dictating position ?

Marine le Pen, however, is still an elected politician which is more than can be said for Laura Kuenssberg, Le Pen's interrogator on Newsnight yesterday.   Kuenssberg duly essayed the ill-mannered, interruptive, dumb-down style of Snow and Wark, under which legions of courteous American interviewees have suffered with restrained dignity.  Le Pen was having none of it and replied calmly but firmly:  Madame, you seem more interested in your own questions than in my replies.

Good for her: would that more politicos could find ways to put these self-important gits in their place.  It is said that Ian Katz, the recently-installed editor of Newnight, bust the budget to get Kuenssberg as a replacement for Michael Crick.  It's not a bargain.

Crick may be quirky but he actually breaks exclusive stories by actually doing *gasp* actual research.  When Crick is rude, it's because he has caught someone with their pants around their ankles.  No-one's heart will ever sink at the words "Laura Kuenssberg is in reception for you ..."

ND

The Secret Diary of Owen Jones, Aged 13¾

The Secret Diary of Owen Jones Aged 13¾

14th March 2014

Terrible news! The greatest parliamentarian of the age is dead! Wedgie Benn is gone! WoW!  His statesman like bearing and ability to get to the heart of the issue by demanding greater union representation made him a hero to everyone who ever lived a proper life. I saw him on the TV once. I think it was the Ali G show. His socialist principles really shone through. I want to emulate him in every way! Actually I want to be better than that coz he never achieved anything and did rather sell out to the Lipton's brigade..So I will be a better Benn. More radical. More uncompromising. More left wing.

And I read in the Daily Mirror that he kept a daily diary, just like ME! 
So really I am already his spiritual heir, if not his actual heir. Which is just as well as I don't want all those estates and mansions the great proletariat hero owned. He was going to give them to the people, I'm certain of that. He just didn't have time, dying so young at just 88.
I shall wear red socks for 48 hours. As a mark of respect and protest.

But there is something rather sinister about two great heroes of the left passing so recently. Bob Crow and now Tony Benn. And that's soon after Hugo Chavez who was the greatest leader who ever lived. Greater than Lenin or Mao or even Neil Kinnock. 

I bet these deaths are linked. The evil forces of the Thatcherite, NeoCon-CIA-Mossad-MI5-FBI-DVLA- E.ON - AOL special forces probably murdered them all to prevent the coming uprising of the downtrodden peoples of the world. 

 I skyped my secret best-g-friend, @PennyRed.
She has moved to America with her parents for her dad's financial work. I asked her if she must hate being in the very belly of the capitalist parasite, New York.
She said "uhh..Umm..well..I guess..Its so .. Unreactionary and immune to the plight of the working class people..But they do have good bagels."

That's weird. I heard that New Yorker's loved eating big apples. Maybe that's New Mexico. I'll have to look it up in my atlas of amazing socialist facts by Dr Eion Clarke. I got that for Christmas, which I don't celebrate as its a bourgeois, religious-oppression invention to confuse the proletariat and promote corrupting capitalism. 

But mum says its very rude to turn down a gift.

 Anyway the book is brilliant! Loads and loads of facts about everything. 
Did you know more people have died from the bedroom tax than died from the black death?

 @PennyRed was sure I was right and that there is a plot to eliminate all the left leaning leaders of the world. She even mentioned Shirley Temple's death was 'big news on the cable' whatever that means. I think she confused Shirley Williams, with Temple, but i didn't want to correct her. She can get very stroppy if you do that. Calls it 'male domination of misrembering' and that is a HATE CRIME! 
She is so hardcore! She won't be tempted by all that glitz and fake glamour. She won't sell out. 

She is one of the three founder and only, bloodbrothers, slash, sisters of the Stockport urban guerrillas popular front of
Gramsci, Internationale, Trotsky Socialists. 

PennyRed and me and the Dalai Lama. Although he never replied to my text to join our freedom fighters, I'm pretty sure that was just because the authorities took his phone charger, so he is in.

 As the upcoming leader of the Gramsci, Internationale, Trotsky Socialists, or GITS, I must take care that I am not on the hitlist of the Bildeberger assassins. 

I shall push my rubber plant across to the door and keep my Pol Pot nightlight on at all times.
And the squeaky floorboard at the top of the stairs will give me plenty of time to escape through the window should I hear the agents of  injustice creeping past the airing cupboard.

Sleepy now. I shall dream of myself, bravely alone and on the run from the forces of imperialism. Clad only in my Michael Foot donkey jacket, red protest socks and Manchester United Pj's.

 {I didn't choose them! But as I said earlier, Its very rude to refuse a Christmas gift. .. Especially one from your mum.} 


With apologies to the late Sue Townsend

The 'rich' are jumping the queue.

The 'rich'  are jumping the queue, said Petrie Hoskin on the radio earlier. 
She was referring to the NHS and this ongoing idea of charging everyone in the UK £10 a month to use it. Rich people can go private so, jumping the queue.

Two issues here. Firstly, as we discussed the other day, the £10 extra idea isn't very popular. It will be even less popular when its discovered that it doesn't raise the 60,000,000 x £10 x12,  that its promoters wish. That it won't apply to children, obviously. Or pensioners. Or people with long term health issues. Or people in prison. Or recent immigrants. Or unemployed, disabled, on benefits and every other thing under the sun that excludes someone, usually for a good reason, from paying. As P'J O'Rourke once almost wrote, "When the government says everyone will pay the new tax, they mean its just going to be you and me. And I'm going to weasel out of it on some pretext.. so its just you."

The second issue is that 'the rich' using private healthcare are not, unless you are a Miliband acolyte,  jumping the queue. They are not even in the queue. They are in a different queue. They paid for a ticket to be in the NHS queue but they decided against using it, and so bought another, more expensive ticket, to join the private healthcare queue. They weren't able to get a refund on the NHS ticket.
In fact, instead of jumping the queue , they actual left the queue and so accelerated the queue for everyone behind them. And they paid for a portion of those people's treatment, even though those people now won't be paying a penny for the 'rich person's' treatment.

But we hate the rich, which seems to be anyone earning about £40k, so when they don't take a free to use service that they are entitled to, and instead pay money that has been taxed to access a private service,  they are making the poor suffer. 

Somehow.