MPs like Philip Davies are the reason why David Cameron has had to spend so much of his 3 years as leader detoxifying the Conservative brand. I despair.  I struggle to reconcile my frustration with the number of Conservative MPs who seem to have come from some alien bubble around the top public schools with a look at some of the individuals from less rarified backgrounds.  I come to the conclusion that the posh-boys are infinitely preferable.  Mr Davies is younger than me, he does not have the excuse of being a contemporary of Tebbit and he should ask himself why so many successful, hard-working young people will never consider voting for the party which, in economic terms, should be their natural home.

Let me make it clear, Ms Trimble is astonishingly bright. It is quite normal for a team captain to “carry” the team to some extent but I’m sure her colleagues would admit that this was the case throughout the series.  And this is precisely the point.  Her colleagues and the viewers are free to make that assessment, what launched the internet bitchiness about Trimble was that she so clearly knew it herself.  From her cringe-making “oh well done” to a colleague in the second round to the flash of condescending impatience to (I think) the same person as he struggled to bring an answer to mind in the final, she finds it impossible to hide her sense of superiority.

Like most Leeds University alumni I don’t very often shout for our redbrick rival across the Pennines but I was willing the Mancs to win on Monday and was gutted when they faded at the end.  I like bright people, but it is reassuring that the British disdain for arrogance and smugness seems as strong as ever.  I refuse to see that as a sign of Broken Britain.

Update:  I really am too nice for the blogging lark.  Can’t help thinking most people would just update this post with a string of hysterical laughter that smug-arse bird had got her comeuppance.  I actually feel quite sorry for her, though it is interesting that she has refused to comment since they were disqualified.  I think the people who come out of this the best are the Manchester team, particularly their quietly attractive captain, Matt Yeo who is sanguine about the situation but acknowledges that the victory is pretty hollow and that they were soundly beaten on the night.

I stood reading my Metro at Hounslow West tube station and wondered if I had heard the word right.

“Fat people”

Now I was sure he was talking to me.  The “he” in question was a middle-aged Asian bloke with a vacant expression, scruffily dressed.

“Fat bitch taking up space”

This was embarrassing, he was standing about 10 foot away from me and, given that I could hear him easily, there were plenty of other people in earshot.  At this point I looked directly at him, he looked back and muttered “I will go in another carriage then”.

At this point the train came into the station, the man walked straight past me towards another carriage but pointedly caught me with his rucksack, causing me to step forward (a lot less scary than it would have been without a train at the platform!) and we saw no more of each other. 

Now, my dilemma is really around my reaction to this situation.  I confess that it unsettled me, I was shaking a little as I got on the train and was sufficiently distracted to forget to text my mum her usual “morning, I’m on the tube” greeting.  Like all fat birds I’m well used to the drunken catcalls of thicko Britain but this perturbed me more and I’m puzzled as to why.

I think its because I didn’t know what I was dealing with.  When I get abused of an evening, I know to go into defuse or ignore mode. Given that I’ve never actually been beaten up, my response of either a friendly smile (amazing how it can shame them) or a swift (by my standards anyway) retreat seems to have worked thus far.  This morning however, I must admit my initial reaction was that he was a nutter.  Not very PC I know but then I’m not really in the mood for niceties. I was assuming Tourettes or some similar form of mental disorder and so common decency tells me I should have just ignored him or gone into defuse mood as normal; ultimately if the fella was stood there going “aaaaagh why can’t I shut up” inside, then giving him the scary-bird stare was a bit out of order.

And yet.

Alastair Campbell suffers from a mental illness. He is also a twat and a bully.  Is it possible that my initial reaction which was to feel humiliated and then confrontational was in fact, correct.  I was the only fat person on the platform but I was also the only white person on the platform.  It’s interesting that he abused me about my weight but not my race , so whatever was making him abuse me was ensuring that he focused on a 2009-acceptable form of abuse and not anything else.  Shoving me with the bag was not the actions of someone struggling to control their outbursts but of a genuine bully. 

Of course there is a large area of non-conventional human behaviour which does not count as being mentally ill but is basically not very civilised.  Mental illness can be a convenient alibi for nasty, abusive and downright criminal behaviour.  I’m aware that being cynical about mental illness and disorders can quickly lead down a dangerous path towards scientology or the freaks who think that dyslexia doesn’t exist (0ver reported, I buy, but that’s different).   I don’t know enough about Tourettes and similar disorders to recognise the symptoms I saw today but I would bet that this man is just a nasty piece of work who went on his way chuckling about how he had humiliated a fat bird.   

Commuters do get to recognise each other and I have certainly seen him before. 

 I wonder what I should do next time.  It certainly won’t involve a smile.

It doesn’t seem that way now. While I don’t think anyone is accusing Ms Thatcher of being directly racist, it’s quite clear that she displayed thoughtless uncouth ignorance and then, when pulled up on the description, she repeated it. What unsettles me about this is the reaction of Conservatives to her sacking.  So many are accusing the Corporation of being on a mission to “get” Carol because of her surname. Leaving aside whether she would have been employed by any television company if it wasn’t for her surname, I would argue that it is the Conservatives who are jumping to Carol’s defence precisely because of who her mother is.

I’m conscious that I am referring to Conservatives when, of course, there has been no official statement from the Conservative Party, and why should there be. However a quick look at ConservativeHome, Iain Dale, the Coffee House, shows by far the majority of commentators are in full-on, mouth-foaming mode.  On the Coffee House, I made a few gentle points about how I thought my own employer (a long way from the public sector) would react to the use of such a word and I was patronised in a quite antidiluvian way.  Moderate articles by posters such as James Forsyth have been pilloried as being more appropriate to the New Statesman.  I have no doubt that many posters on these sites, often the most vocal, will not actually be Conservative Party members, but UKIP members and worse. Nonetheless I wonder if they would be moved to Carol’s defence if she had been just any ditsy, rah-ry middle-aged woman.

I think we should be very grateful that the Labour Party’s main attack dog in the blogosphere is the odious Mr Draper.  Fortunately by being such an aggressive, twisting, so-and-so, his attempts to portray the entire Conservative Party as racist have gone largely un-noticed in the real world. Too many of the correspondents of the right have, unfortunately, been presenting him with an open goal recently.

I can’t really say anything else coherent about this case, there’s lots I could say but it would descend into a swearathon and poor little Peter deserves more respect than that.  Suffice to say I hope the culprits’ fellow prisoners know exactly what the scum are inside for.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7636577.stm

It seems that BT have partnered with Russian software company Phorm in order to trawl customers’ internet browsing and email traffic with a view to targeting advertising. 

Significant trials of the technology took place last year, involving many thousands of BT’s customers, who had given no consent for the intercepts.

Now, at this point I raise an eyebrow but if I’m honest its a bit of an “am I bovvered” eyebrow.  The fact that ISPs are analysing email and web traffic for commercial purposes is not a huge shock to me. I had, in truth, assumed that something of this nature had been going on anyway though, as my husband soundly points out, its one thing to be sanguine about data privacy but would I be so relaxed if BT was tapping my phone line? 

He’s right of course. A quick look at The Register will show that there are many clever geeks working to fight Phorm on privacy grounds. 

I will leave that argument to them but below is an extract from the response of the City of London policeman, DS Barry Murray, who had been asked by an anti-Phorm campaigner to investigate BT’s breach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).  His response is unbelievable:

“The matter will not be investigated by the City of London Police as it has been decided that no Criminal Offence has been committed. One of the main reasons for this decision is the lack of Criminal Intent on behalf of BT and Phorm Inc in relation to the tests“

Sorry?  Run that by me again?  One of the main reasons for this decision is the lack of Criminal Intent?!?!?

Now, I am no more a lawyer than I am a techie and I understand that intent will make a difference if we’re deciding on murder vs. manslaughter and will impact a judge’s sentencing decision in most criminal cases but since when has “no criminal intent” been a reason not to prosecute for anything??  Did I entirely dream up the long held tenet of “ignorance of the law is no defence“?

If I had a second income and failed to declare it for tax do you think “no criminal intent” would wash?

If I was on a motorway and failed to spot a 50 limit do you think “no criminal intent” would wash?

If I was plying my 4 year old with booze and fags in the mistaken belief that it would stop him doing either later in life, do you think ”no criminal intent” would wash?

I hope my techie friends will forgive me when I say that it this comment which I find most disturbing in the whole sleazy Phorm episode.  Confirmation in black and white that there is one law for big business and another for the rest of us

Cameron started with fat people.  When beginning his narrative on moral decline, he didn’t attack violence and the fact that, when he made the speech 20 young men had already suffered violent deaths in London so far this year.  He didn’t attack people who carry knives or guns; those who choose to turn the slightest affront into a matter of life and death. No, he made the first tenet of his attack on the moral decline of the nation, a focus on obesity.  Never mind that the biggest crime most fat people have ever committed is to eat too much and not do enough exercise; he still puts us at the vanguard of what is wrong with Britain.  I don’t expect politicians to say nothing about obesity, its a worsening health issue of serious concern to all involved in running and paying for the NHS  (has Cameron stopped smoking now by the way?); my complaint is that he made his comments in a speech on the difference between right and wrong.  

When The Sun printed a picture years ago of a very bloated Peter Sutcliffe in Broadmoor, the article was written as if being a serial killer made him a bad person but being a fat serial killer really was a step too far.  I expect this sort of thing from The Sun, its aimed at people who think Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor are entertainment; but I don’t expect this sort of simplistic approach from The Leader of the Opposition.  Right and wrong, good and evil are not metaphors for thin and fat. I will blog further about the state of modern Britain, but when thinking about all the things wrong with this country, the fact that we are getting fatter is not going to be top of the list.

What a miserable old bugger Jamie Oliver has become.  All he said here about British culture should be put in context of him publicising his new show for French TV but I would be more inclined to listen to his rantings if he made half an effort to speak properly.   The same TV and celebrity obsessed British culture which Oliver lambasts is the one which has made him worth £25m.   His parents are frequently interviewed on TV and speak with fairly regular rural Essex accents, they seem down-to-earth, unaffected people and yet their son has built his whole image around being a barrow boy.

There will be much in future articles about what is wrong with Britain; you would have to have your head stuck in a Kalahari-sized bucket of sand to think things are great here.   I just feel that Jamie is trying to have it both ways and should remember that the culture which he purports to despise has put his faux-persona on a pedestal and made him a very very rich man.

Ok, cards on the table: I’m a Tory. Not a newbie “oh that Cameron seems like a decent sort of bloke and I’ve had enough of us being run by a load of Jocks” sort of Tory. No, this is someone who was voting Tory after we fell out of the ERM, through the most seedy bits of Back to Basics and even after the “turning up the volume” speech; though I admit if there’d been an election the following day that might have been the exception.

So you’re getting the picture, I’m a card-carrying capitalist.  

So why do I prefer lefties?

Maybe I spent too long in a university politics department in the early 1990s but whenever I watch a political discussion show like Question Time or the Newsnight studio debates, I find myself wanting to punch the person on the right of the argument.  They always seem so unspeakably self-satisfied and utterly disparaging of anyone who doesn’t earn £100K a year.  Now, before I get a load of furious comments saying there are plenty of obnoxious pinkos and asking me to take a look at Comment is Free, I must acknowledge that is true. Derek Draper is the personification of toothache and I don’t think Mao Tse-tung or Mick Hucknall would be top of my Christmas card list either.  But this doesn’t stop me almost always siding with a leftie.

I must be unique on the right in that when Richard Littlejohn swatted Polly Toynbee on Question Time asking if she cared about the environmental cost of cheap flights on the way to her villa in Tuscany, I knew he was right but I still wanted to thump him.  Believe me I am no fan of her Pollyness but Littlejohn is bully and a relic from a bygone age for which I don’t pine.   Likewise – an evening with Jeremy Clarkson? I’d rather turn my moggs Manx.  

My theory is that I do hate the state and loath Dawn Primo-fuckface for telling us that our third glass of wine makes us an alkie.  As a liberal I feel we should be free to drive fast, hunt foxes, smoke in people’s faces and call women “love”; but it  doesn’t stop us being twats if we choose to do so.