More fan mail
July 16th, 2008 at 19:11

I think I must be on some sort of UKIP watch-list. I think as an unpopular, easily dislikeable, politically insignificant party, they must be going after the unpopular, easily dislikeable, politically insignificant pundits. In this case: myself.

As you probably know, considering the amount of times that I’ve mentioned it, I write a column in the Herald & Post newspaper – and last week, someone wrote in to the paper to complain about a column I wrote a few weeks back praising the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty… I think they might like me.

Well, at least it’s a bit politer than my previous piece of a fan-mail.

My first reaction is that it’s not exactly… dispelling any myths about the UKIP mindset. World War II is still ongoing, and we can’t trust the foreigns – especially the treacherous French. His authority on this matter seems to stem from the fact that he’s vaguely related to a lot of events that occured in the war. Bizarre.

My favourite bit though is the number of pull-out quotes talking about me. That’s right, even on issues as important as Europe, or, er, World War II, I’m still making myself more important:

“Mr O’Malley is an undemocratic ignoramus”

I’m also a “gaping cunt“.

“Still wet behind his ears”

“Perhaps [I] should try [being a WWII firefighter] or better still, but his brain in gear before he opens his mouth”

Because all of the best political commentators trained as World War II firefighters?

“Perhaps you should buy [me] a dictionary?”

I’m not sure what warranted this.

UKIP: Our calendars stop in 1943.

Comments(0)

Yet more proof democracy doesn’t work
February 10th, 2008 at 20:56

Hey, remember the UK Independence Party, or UKIP as they’re also known? You must remember them – they have a lurid yellow and purple pound symbol logo and have been the replacement joke-party for the Monster Raving Loony Party in recent elections. Every election cycle, they come up with a load of ludicrous joke policies, stand against the main parties, get barely a handful of votes and then lose their deposits.

Of course, there are some people who just don’t seem to get the joke, and for some unfathomable reason, treat them as an almost legitimate political party – including the leadership themselves. It would be fair to say that they have a bit of an image problem – David Cameron, of all people, said that they’re “fruitcakes, loonies and closet-racists“. Its difficult to find evidence to the contrary.

This said, I really can’t see why they have an image problem when someone who cites the Farage Youth as their homepage posts the following comment on my blog:

“Dear fuckhead,

You’re a big fat unfunny cunt and I hope you get AIDs and die.

Not only that, but being as your parents are massive whores I also hope they get infected with some horrific STD, maybe syphilis.

Your blog is so bad I believe it has given me cancer. You manage to give new meaning to the phrase ‘fat uniformed student twat’, a F.U.S.T if you will.

What a massive gaping cunt you are.”

Clearly UKIP’s hopes for the future are bright if they’ve got powerful young minds like this supporting them. It almost makes me worry what the “everyone left of far-right” opposition are going to do in the future if they’ve only got massive, gaping cunts like me supporting them. I mean, aside from ignore them as a political insignificance and pay attention to them only for a little light relief.

Comments(7)

Politics Update!
July 21st, 2007 at 18:28

The last few days has seen some major political developments. By “the last few days” I really mean “Thursday night”, but I was too lazy to blog about it at the time, so I’m going to call it “the last few days” so I don’t sound behind the times.

Politics comment #1!

Apparently no one is being charged over the Cash for Peerages thing. This is ridiculous. Selling access to the legislature to the highest bidder is one thing – but letting in rich businessmen for free is insane. Of course they should be charged – think about how much money they could raise!

Politics comment #2!

The Tories were thrashed in two by-elections. I was going to blog about this earlier, making a hilarious play on the phrase “by-election” by speculating who was the best bisexual: Simon Hughes or Captain Jack from Doctor Who/Torchwood. These two were the only two famous bisexuals I can think of, which is why this blog entry never materialised.

I was pleased with the election result though – UKIP were once again proved to be a political insignificance, being beaten by the BNP in Sedgefield. Yeah, that BNP. I guess its because people prefer an honest racist to a closet racist. In Ealing Southall, they were beaten by the Greens and Respect. Ace.

Politics comment #3!

Eight cabinet ministers have admitted to having smoked cannabis. This annoys me, as it implies that politicians are much cooler than I am. I’ve never smoked cannabis (Coke is a different story), and yet whilst I’m sitting here unemployed being a poor student, the naughty kids who took drugs are now running the country. There’s no justice.

I reckon this was all a clever political move though. Nobody cares whether these politicians smoked cannabis at university – what people do care about though is whether David Cameron has. I dare-say the Tory grass-roots would be too thrilled if their leader had taken drugs, what with them being more, er, conservative, than your average voter. Are they trying to provoke some discontent amongst the Tories? I hope so. Its a very clever plan.

Politics comment #4!

Boris is definitely running for London Mayor and is on the Tory shortlist. I wrote about this only a week ago. I don’t know how anyone can think that electing a man who was complicit in an attempt to assault a journalist is a good person to run London.

More politics: soon!

Comments(4)

All my heroes are just parasites
February 3rd, 2007 at 02:27

As I’m a witless slave to consumerism, I quite like celebrities. I don’t mean the awful kind of celebrities that you might find populating ITV’s latest reality TV failure, I mean the good kind: like Adam Hart Davis, Richard Dawkins, Peter Snow and Patrick Moore.

So basically I seem to be a fan of white-haired old men.

One thing that concerns me though is whether these people are just as cool in real life as they seem to be on screen. I mean, for all I know, when the cameras are switched off, Adam Hart Davis might bark orders at the runner like a career SS soldier before snorting cocaine off of a prostitute’s back. Whilst still in his court jester costume.

In terms of slightly more concrete evidence to celebrities being bastards in the flesh, Patrick Moore, as it turns out, is a member of one organisation I have a special segment of my brain dedicated to loathing: UKIP. I shit you not. It’s a bit depressing really that someone who you assume is cool because he likes space and that, is actually a senile old man with 19th century opinions (asked “Where did all the science programs on TV go?”, he’s said “A lot of TV is run by women these days.”)

Eccentric funny-named, asteroid-worrying, Cheeky-Girl-partnered LibDem MP Lembit Opik supports fox hunting. What the hell, Lembit? You used to be cool! You’ve changed, man.

I wonder if John Sergeant is an obnoxious, self-righteous, right-wing, big-lipped ponce who doesn’t let anyone else get a word in edge-ways?
Most of the musicians I like are probably complete and utter wankers in real life. Leftover Crack, for instance, are big fans of, er, crack. If I turned up backstage and tried to make friends with them they’d be like “that James O’Malley is such a slave to consumerism… he won’t even snort one line of cocaine, and doesn’t understand our hip New York street slang”.

Its weird- if some crack-addled tramp-a-like expressed political opinions to me in the street, I’d ignore them and get on with my life, but give that tramp an electric guitar and a sense of rhythm and I’ll be the first to absorb his opinions and claim that I’ve deeply believed whatever he’s saying for years and that I’m not just jumping on the bandwagon.

I think I have some sort of pathological desire to be friends with celebrities. Are there any celebrities reading? Do you like me? Want to go for a drink some time and discuss how I can exploit your famous connections to springboard my own career?

Comments(5)

MEP in “twunt” shocker!
February 22nd, 2006 at 16:24

Christ on a bike! I feel like a proper investigative journalist! Almost a year ago East Midlands MEP Derek Clark came to my old school to rant at us about how awful the EU was- aside from admitting he was on the EU gravy train and enjoying it, when my friends and I questioned him at the end of the “general studies” session about energy, he reacted in a rather animated way.

We asked him if he agreed with fellow UKIPper Steve Reid who reckons that wind power isn’t renewable because it “takes energy out of the earth’s atmosphere” and could “slow the rotation of the earth”. Seriously. Dezza didn’t commit entirely to this idea- but did say there’s a lot of speculation and that no-one knows for sure. He claimed wind farms are ineffective when its not windy and so on, and that if we only used renewable energy, they’d be no form of redundancy. This was wrong, of course. He also suggested that we’d have to run fossil-fuel power plants anyway, for back up measures. I wonder why he said this?

Could this be because he owns shares in Powergen and British Gas? See: here (warning: PDF link). He also seems to be collecting a pension at the same time- he is old, though.

But, Derek Clark- yes, you, Derek Roland Clark, your lack of faith in renewable energy wouldn’t have anything to do with your financial interests, would it?

Comments(7)

Euroskeptastic
April 21st, 2005 at 21:12

Today UKIP MEP Derek Clark came into school. You might be aware I’m not his biggest fan. He came into school earlier in the school year to have a bit of a rant about anything and everything that’s good in the world- me and Matt attempted to “pwn” him by challenging what he had to say. The trouble was that there wasn’t a designated time for any questions, so we had to interrupt him and try and make a point based upon what he was ranting about- as you might have guessed, he wasn’t talking about the more favourable points of the European Union, so it was very difficult to try and make a point. Everyone at school claims that I got pwned.

Today was my chance for a rematch.

Dezza, as he is “affectionately” known, started off like he knows best- a torrent of rhetoric about the “corruption” and how everyone is lying and how the news programmes are unbalanced as they don’t feature a lunatic fringe party who have somewhere around the region of zero current seats in (Westminster) Parliament.

During his tirade, he went on about the job losses at Rover and how the government should have bailed out a failing company in order to protect British jobs. He also ranted about how jobs in the coal industry should have been protected. Minor problem there Dezza, there’s no coal left! I seized the opportunity and scrapped my original question for instead, “how many jobs would be lost if Britain pulled out the EU?”, “Think of all the beaurocrats!” I cried. He claimed that they’d be “zero” job losses. I can’t remember how he justified this. I don’t think he did actually justify it.

The problem was, despite having prepared questions that would knock him to the ground, and give him a good kick in whilst he screamed for his mother and volunteered his lunch money, he just kept talking . Dundas asked him the question “What’s your policy on terrorism?”, the theory being he’d simply answer “it’s bad”, and then he’d go on to tell Derek how UKIP issued a press release saying that letter bombing MPs was somewhat justified (seriously). If there’s one thing I admire about Derek Clark is his amazing ability to dodge questions. Ask him about terrorism, and he’ll turn his answer in to a 15 minute jeremiad of the Greek justice system, and how wonderful Britain is and how awful Johnnie Foreigner is.

Unsurprisingly, we ran out of time as the bell went for lunch. As the proletariat dashed out of the hall indoctrinated and hungry, we (that is to say, myself, Dundas and Matt) stayed to ask more. This is where I think for a few minutes at least, I became a slightly politer version of Jeremy Paxman. I asked Dezza if UKIP will ever be taken seriously as a credible party if you consider that in an interview with BBC Four’s The Late Edition last month, the presenter, Marcus Brigstocke spoke to BNP leader Nick Griffin, and Griffin called UKIP “hair curlingly racist”. I also cited UKIP’s alliance in the European Parliament with the League of Polish Families- a nazi Catholic group who hate homosexuality, and have been linked with skin head groups who have attacked gay rights activists. He seemed to avoid the Nick Griffin connection, but went on to explain how the Poles were “devout Catholics”, and thus it was okay for them to be really right wing. I questioned if UKIP could morally be allied with these people, and he seemed to say “yeah, basically”. “Is this a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend?” I asked, “Not quite” he said, but he “sees my point”. Pwned.

On the way out of the hall, we followed him and pressed him on the environment. This is probably where the most unbelievable part of the interrogation happend. He reckons that renewable energy doesn’t work, and that in bad (well, good) weather, wind farms won’t work, and we’ll have no electricity. He seemed to think there wasn’t any redundancy measures and that we’d have to run fossil fueled power plants anyway, “just in case”. He was completely incapable of grasping the idea of multiple sources of power (wind, hydro, wave, solar, etc) placed all around the country.

Frighteningly, this former science teacher tried to defend fellow UKIPper Steve Reed who said “[‘Renewable resources’] are not renewable… Taking energy from winds and tides irreversibly enervates the weather system and slows the rotation of the Earth”. He claimed that wind power slows down the wind, and basically put, was very, very wrong. Dundas explained this to him. At least it wasn’t as bad as the first time he came in to school, when he cited chaos theory. Pwned, I think.

At this point, the deputy head of Sixth Form intervened, presumably to save Dezza from any further embarassment. When I saw him a few minutes later, after Dezza had left in his (proudly British built) Toyota, he said “well done”, to us, which was nice.

In summary, I think we came off better in this rematch than first time around, it’s just a shame we didn’t have more time.

Comments(1)