"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, March 29, 2012


Revenge of Trickledown Economics

EXTRACTGeorge Osborne’s budget was essentially one for the wealthy - hardly astonishing, given that over 20 cabinet members are millionaires. The basic assumption was that those at the top of society are the wealth-creators and hence need to be incentivised - lots of carrots - to encourage them to create yet more ‘wealth’ (ie, make larger profits and grow even richer). Given this grotesque premise, tax cuts - personal and corporate - are a vital necessity if we are to unleash a wave of entrepreneurship that will in turn create jobs for those languishing at the bottom.
Meanwhile, the working class and the poor find themselves at the wrong end of below-inflation increases to the minimum wage, less generous tax credits, regional differentials in public sector pay, and so on. In other words, the budget saw the unwelcome return - or revenge - of trickle-down economics. Not that it had ever gone away, of course.




Sunday, March 25, 2012

Rowan Williams Quits Before Next Great Schism Happens


Rowan Williams: hairy but no leftie

EXTRACT:  For communists the established church represents a violation of elementary democratic principles, which can only rest on the basis of secularism. By which we mean a state of fundamental equality between all faiths/denominations and non-believers: no-one should be privileged or enjoy special access to state power. Hence we in the CPGB demand the immediate disestablishment of the Church of England - the state should have no say in how it finances itself or appoints its leaders. Like trade unions or political parties, the church itself should decide who gets to be its leader - not the prime minister or any other state official or body.


Thursday, March 15, 2012



Eric Pickles Puts the Knife In

Eric Pickles: Christian values and the crown
EXTRACT: For more than a decade the bourgeois ideology of multiculturalism has acted to divide the British working class into numerous, and seemingly ever-subdividing, supplicant groups competing for the largesse and favours of central government. This required the bureaucratic machinery of tick-box multiculturalism and ‘equal opportunities’ schemes (which in some respects are a parody of what genuine equality is or should be about). In turn, this acceded a disproportionate amount of political influence to all manner of democratically unaccountable petty patriarchs and local power-brokers operating from the local community centre or church/mosque (or whatever). Such people, for the most part, were then viewed as a valuable asset by the establishment - for the ability to ‘deactivate’ local militancy.
We should hardly be surprised by such a political phenomenon, whereby the politics of top-down establishment anti-racism and multiculturalism has generated divisive communalism. After all, that was exactly the result the Thatcher government intended when it introduced the beginnings of multiculturalism as deliberate state policy in reaction to the 1980s inner-city riots.