New police vehicles patrol Bristol

It rained here so much for the first half of May that it felt like being on the set of Blade Runner. It’s brightened up a bit in the last few days, but I need to get some bile out of my system now that may have been partly rain-induced.

One problem with living in an English speaking country is you cannot escape the political and advertising bullshit going on around you. It’s as if the Arab language suddenly became utterly clear to you, in all its nuances and you found yourself stuck in a maglis listening to an endless line of toadies singing the praises of their glorious leader, every day for the rest of your life.

A week ago Tony Blair announced his resignation date and the Gordon Brown band wagon trundled out like some fifty storey pig-iron horse on enormous splintering oak wheels. His first announcement was clearly made to counter the impression that the Labour government was a totalitarian monolith – a control freakish, media spinning monstrosity - centralizing power and removing civil liberties at any opportunity. This is what he said and I’m quoting verbatim:

"One of my first acts as prime minister would be to restore power to Parliament in order to build the trust of the British people in our democracy. Government must be more open and more accountable to Parliament - for example in decisions about peace and war, in public appointments and in a new ministerial code of conduct."

He also said:

"I want to lead a government humble enough to know its place - where I will always strive to be - and that is on people's side,"

Fine words which we can all agree on. Except that, without missing a beat, within two days his senior henchmen, the usual party lickspittles and the conservative big guns and backbench arselikains had all voted to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act and the need, for example, for details about their expenses to be made public. You had to be here to see how disgusting it all was. Only a few weeks before a handful of MPs had managed to talk this shameless bill out of the Commons. It was brought back in with unheard of speed (to the shock of all political journalists who said it was a dead duck) ahead of other more important legislation. Then hundreds of Labour and Conservatives zombie drones flooded into the usually empty chamber in a coordinated campaign from the highest levels of both parties to make sure no other troublemakers could talk it out again.

Then two days after that the government did away with the need for the usual planning permission for airports, motorways and nuclear power stations. From now on a quango will rubber stamp these kind of proposals and locals will be able to decide on the colour of the entrance gates if they are lucky. Mind you, if you want a small windfarm, you would still have to apply the usual way. This proposal was accompanied by a little provision that makes it easier for people to build house extensions so that it would be more easily swallowed by middle England.

What’s so depressing is the silence that has accompanied it all. The bill to exempt the British Parliament (not the Scottish or Welsh or N.Ireland Assembly I should add) hardly made the news at all. You had to be a bit of a political nerd to hear anything about it. Okay so I’m a bit nerdy but I don’t watch Question Time or know the names of 7/8ths of the Cabinet so I’m not that nerdy.

But the thing that really did it for me was last night watching television – there was an advert. An advert for a Golf car. The sound track? …..Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood. Cultural smash and grab of the most shameless form. Utterly depressing - and yet, follow the link below and you'll see the Guardian thinks its great!

http://media.guardian.co.uk/advertising/story/0,,2082220,00.html

Good old Guardian – can always be relied on to suck an advertiser’s crock before spitting out its progressive politics.

And the coup de grace today: MPs are coming to the aid of McDonalds who want OED to change their definition of McJob which is currently and quite correctly:

“An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.”

To something about how stimulating and worthwhile it is with marvelous career prospects.

So when you come back to have your iris scanned by the Department of Justice at Heathrow and pass eight thousand CCTV cameras to get to the countryside and find it has been bulldozed to make way for Sizewell C, D, E, F and G, a motorway service station and a teenager with a Prozac grin serving you fries at McDonalds and all the bees are dead because of mobile phone masts and mankind has only ‘five years’ (as the Bowie lyrics go) then don’t say I didn’t warn you.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/16/nbees16.xml

(check out the ad ad that goes with it is for Samsung mobile phones)