Over the past year or so I have contributed comments on pieces appearing in the Daily Telegraph under the monniker 'GC' (i.e. an acronym for GutClean). I merely comment and do not debate being content to take pot-luck on the state of the forum when I comment but I do generally read with interest the comments already submitted at the time and have come to recognise a worthy happy band of brothers amongst whom I thought myself a fellow-traveller.
Well not so ... writing 3 February 2009 I'm not a little peeved, on checking back, that these comments aren't appearing.
I'm jolly well not putting up with it and I'm going to archive the ones that don't here, beginning with the first I noticed not to appear and then in last-posted-first-archived order.
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GC on Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's "Let banks fail, says Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz" February 2nd 2009 (I didn't keep a copy of this one and stylistically at least it's a considerable rewrite but the underlying thought is the same):
Francis Kelly at 10:28 AM spot on I think.
In our rush to blame the banks we conveniently ignore our own culpability in the affair - what I have dubbed the McCann syndrome in other posts.
For we were very content with the situation, especially if we were home 'owners' (the quotes qualification because of course very many of us in fact were not really owners at all as we now grimly discover trying to arrange favourable remortgage terms or worse cope with the threat of repossession) when house prices were rising through the roof and into the stratosphere and then on into outer space. Every man and his dog and the prime minister's wife were in on the game and it was not edifying.
Not really, but we never for one moment paused to consider the morality of it nor even its manifest basic arithmetical absurdity - a house costing an average £200,000 then and inflating at 15% per annum would have cost our infant children a 25-year generation later well over £6,000,000 to buy.
Whatever we do now it should not be to seek to preserve the interests of the affluent few at the expense of the interests of the less affluent many but that is precisely the effect of proposals by the government revealed this weekend in The Guardian to bail out failing independent schools by offering them academy status with access to government funding providing they undertake to accept an unselected entry and teach the core National Curriculum.
Thus schools designed to serve the well-motivated and academically able (and the not so able providing they keep their noses nice and clean and don't raise a fuss learning uncritically their academically superior lessons by rote) and which in recent years have functioned essentially as kindergartens for our banking elite are to be bailed out by a system design for our poorest most underprivileged children and with necessarily enormous amounts of tax-payers' money desperately needed elsewhere and to be contributed for the most part by the many less affluent whose basic educational needs were in any case in most areas adequately, and in some cases at least better than that in their local independent sector, secured by successful state education.
The only gainers therefore are the affluent few finding themselves now unable to afford the private education they embarked on for their children and this gain moreover will be short lived as discipline standards and academic standards along with it plunge to bog standard comp levels at these new academies wholly unprepared and unsuited for the needs of their new intake and that is not fair on any of us.
We can't bail out everyone and everything and the independent schools should certainly not be. It will be painful for the affluent few but better schools will emerge as a result.
As for banks it might no doubt concentrate their minds somewhat if we hang a Damocles sword over their heads by way of a threat to let them go to the wall and indeed if they don't behave perhaps better to cut that frail unappreciated thread of government support and let the sword drop.
But whatever happens it will be our children who have to foot the bill.
For the plain unpalatable truth of it is that we all of us dined out just one soirée and some too many careless of our children's safety in bed and it will take very much more than merely raising a website and appealing for funds to sort it.
And in one significant respect of course it can't be sorted or at any rate is very unlikely to be. We may mourn and must let the grieving process take its course but sooner ot later, in the spirit of a thought in President Obama's inaugral address, we must let go and rededicate our lives and rebuild.
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Telegraph leader 27 March 2009 - "Torture claim inquiry is not in the public interest"
Conflicting views in the comments. How to judge?
Simple. That is what moral imperatives are there for and they tell us to enquire.
Nevertheless I was prepared to read the leader sympathetically given the special circumstances. But the analogy with the BAE scandal is quite inappropiate and in any case that depended on the judgement of a hopeless discredited ex-PM.
And it was disengenuous of the DT to cock a snook at Labour supporters. In reality much of the debate about human rights in the past few years has originated because of legislation enacted by the present Labour government and much of the opposition from Conservative ground.
A very poor and (echoing Donal 01:22 PM) troubling editorial.
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The current financial crisis is not a recession that can be considered as merely part of the normal business cycle. It is rather a singular once-in-a-century event caused primarily by an explosion in credit since the 1980s and was largely driven by the US credit markets and the UK is especially badly hit because it bought so much of the US's now worthless paper.
You know this very well you fucking creep. Fuck off back to the US I say. It's very unbritish of The Daily Telegraph to print your toxic tosh.
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To deal briefly with your piece the 52% who did vote for Obama (the biggest share of the popular vote since Ronald Reagan's unexpected landslide) are likely just as astute a bunch as their red-neck compatriots.
They don't I dare say go as far as to say that capitalism is dead but they do know something is up with it and that it wasn't working for them. Even John McCain accepted that casino capitalism has had its day.
They know it's going to be a long haul and they're not expecting a miracle in 100 days.
That's just you and your book.
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The current collapse in financial markets was not caused by politicians nor by central bankers nor by bankers in general nor by global currency inbalances or their consequent eras of cheap money of which there have been many in our times both recent and past which have not lead to bubbles.
Rather, just as in the last major stock market crash of 1929, it was ultimately caused by us and specifically by the not unreasonable aspiration of the middle class (i.e. all of us if you believe TB and his god thing) to improve themselves but an aspiration hopelessly perverted by a naive belief which took hold that this could be done painlessly and magically by investing in property. A householder in a property worth £200,000 could expect it to inflate in value by as much £40,000 over the course of a year i.e. by as much as the annual income required to obtain a mortgage to purchase the property in the first place so lax did our lending practices eventually become. Few if any paused to consider the pyramid-like ponzi absurdity of this state of affairs and it can fairly be said that if we did not believe money grew on trees we certainly believed it grew in houses, in the conservatory we had put in perhaps or sprouting like mushrooms in dank cellars but somewhere anyway for sure we all agreed and talked about nothing else at dinner-parties which were never ever more than mere séances we called in to invoke the spirits of materialism and mammon and their foul-mouthed television gods in the form of such as Gordon Ramsey (and the word out on the cocktails circuit is that he's bust now - well toasted and fuck you m8 who cares you're history).
Politicians know this of course and certainly do the messers McBroon and Cameroon. Their problem is that they need electing and the trouble is we're not just quite ready enough to hack it all.
But we're getting there gord (ram I mean not mac). You can see it in the occasional pronouncement from bishops newly discovered the vice of avarice and the virtue of corrective homily, from mothers newly encouraged to suggest that the nurturing of children is not a part-time pastime to be engaged winding down / chilling out with a bottle of sainsbury / home grown roll-up : and coming soon, what I suggest will be the defining moment given the nature of our times : by all of us newly discerning that life, even tv celebrity life, is a gift not to be indefinitely prolonged by judicious consumption of fish-oils and cranberry juice and that it's up to us to make something good of it to pass on to our children and forward and this timely reminder will indeed be Jade Goody's strange lasting legacy and gift to us all.
But a caveat. Our own catastrophe is indeed the direct consequence of the American one but that one, as future historians will easily eventually instruct us, was one ultimately engaged and directed by their underclass and President Obama is their triumphant champion who will indeed change things there for the better.
But not so for us (not for nothing are we so taken by Obama) but rather we remained their poodle throughout and indeed, as it so happens, their dirty little dog doing their dirty financial work by proxy in rendition as our regulators and hopefully not just our historians will eventually uncover sounding the closing bell once and for all ok on our pathetic aspiration to act as centre of global finance: that was never going to happen on terms favourable to us buddy - sorry and have a nice era.
We sold our oil and we sold our souls and if we're not mindful we're going to end up selling our kids into the bargain as well.
We need authentic politicians (and Simon not just intellectual ones - honest trust a genius on that) and so far I don't discern these emerging in the pages of The Daily Telegraph or The Spectator and when they do I'm not betting even money they will necessarily be Conservative.
In Scotland, Wales and Ireland voters can sensibly opt for their national parties. In England the only sensible and realistic present alternative must be the BNP.
But it will change. I know it will and I can feel it will and in three short prayers heart-felt and uttered from the depth of my being and not just some symbol sort thing of mine I say thank god thank god thank god.
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"But would we do our own dirty work?"
A young single person on non-contributory Job Seeker's Allowance and getting housing benefits of around £50 a week as well as his council tax paid at around £50 a month will be about £30 a week better off working on the National Minimum Wage than on welfare.
For some that small consideration is sufficient incentive genuinely to seek work and the chance to improve themselves and equally for many others is plainly not as anyone who has ever had anything to do with the business of Job Centres can readily testify.
But the real problem is not with EU individuals exercising their EU right to free movement of labour, massively augmented by successive judgements of the EU Court of Justice ruling that merely looking for work is part of that right, and motivated by their own poverty at home to accept poor wages and sub-standard accommodation, but by our own employers shipping gangs of workers across the waters to do not just our dirty work but also skilled work as well and that is a problem we need to address soon because that's nothing to do with free movement of labour but everything to do with (a two-way) exploitation of labour.
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I have yet to see a commentator remark on the irony of the US financial system being brought to its knees by its economic underclass, by the subprime underclass holding mortgages on welfare.
Fanciful of course to suggest that it was engineered by them ... but the reality is that's essentially exactly how it happened and the champion of that underclass in now in office and we may expect change, real change, in American society as a result.
All this has happened by default in the UK and not on behalf of our own underclass and no Obama has emerged to champion it.
Rather the middle-class essentially responsible for our own crisis scrambles to preserve its own and relentlessly attacks the interests of the underclass and that is our own special disaster in the making and I suggest the real reason international investor confidence in the UK is waning.
We need authentic politicians to pull us out of this mess and so far none have emerged.
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How are we to get young people into work if there is no work for them to get into short of creating the kind of public sector jobs for them so excoriated by DT columnists? 60% of the jobs in the North East so opines Boris. Well I can believe it and better not make it 100%.
1 Bankers should give back all bonuses awarded after 2005 when this crisis and the banks' vulnerability was plain enough to see 2 the remaining hedge funds will fail over the next few months - their clients will sue but we should put the managers on trial for crimes against humanity 3 the editor of the Daily Express should be hung drawn and quartered at Charing Cross as part of a National Awareness day in which the middle-class especially reflect on their role in the affair.
And then, closure achieved, our children can move on.
But not us because we're fucked, most of us and especially most of the aspiring middle-class totally and completely fucked for the rest of our lives.
And to think we were to downsize houses and gift a bit of it to the children to get them started and then spend the rest of of it globe-trotting with Kuoni when we retired.
Well our pensions might yet stretch to the weekly shop and if we got lucky we might be in social housing but most of us will be in hostels and bedsits or our children's spare room if they're charitable.
And serves us fucking well right too.
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"Are you a Cavalier or a Roundhead?"
When I was a boy it meant whether you were 'snipped' or not ...
But right I'm pretty sure I'd happily lay down my life for liberty ok - it's creeps like you who can't even register a common-garden protest at the BBC without dining out with its führer I'm not so sure about.
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Agree with all this and further one important qualification - rescuing our failing independent schools (and most of them will fail over the next few months) by offering them academy status, as is apparently contemplated by the government, is not setting them free, quite the contrary.
They should be allowed to fail. It is these schools above all who, for all their fine talk of standards, nurtured the brutish, and yes morally bankrupt, banking elite which seduced and led us into this disaster of debt we owe the world and which our children will have to pay off.
We bailed out the banks because we thought we had to. Months later they continue to distribute the taxpayers' largesse amongst themselves while meanwhile businesses, to say nothing of individuals, are going to the wall for lack of lending facilities.
Let's not make the same mistake with the failing independent schools. Let them fail and let new and better schools flourish.
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Equally the banks could demand responsibility of society.
We as a nation, as individuals and institutions, are up to our tits in debt and it will be our children who shall pay for it.
Let at least that obligation fall across all of society and in particular let's not bail out independent schools, the greater number of which will certainly fail in the forthcoming months, however that bail-out is to be spun and as The Guardian reported last weekend your government proposes.
On the whole I should have preferred it if the banks had been allowed to fail. There would at least have been real change after all the turmoil and indeed we should the quicker have returned to boringly and reassuringly normal banks run by honest bankers and which still isn't the case for all your measures.
Let's make sure the kindergartens that produced this barbarous and uncultured banking elite which led and seduced us into this disaster are not rescued in the same way. We shall certainly have better schools and a better society to show for it.
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Absolutely right and in particular failing independent schools should be allowed to fail and not be bailed out (that is to say most of them should be allowed to fail).
Indeed most of the UK's woes can ultimately be laid at the doors of our educational system and in particular our grotesque and appallingly misconceived independent sytem largely responsible for producing the banking elite which has destroyed this nation and from which we will not recover for a generation and until we educate our children properly again.
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Wonderfully scathing on the BBC (but poor old Lord R taking yet another turn - will no-one have pity?).
The simple fact of the matter is that the BBC has to be broken up and its license fee taken away. Let it live on PC I say.
I cannot fathom what the difficulty is with this or why we put up with it or for that matter it's increasingly stasi-like TV Licensing (the 'TM' now removed on advice I suspect from their lawyers concerning my own ongoing multi-million lawsuit against them and documented in the closing link below) and noted by you.
I see that TV Licensing now has the slogan "It's all in the database". I can't imagine a slogan less likely to reassure its critics and their fundamental objection to the system and in its own way profoundly discourteous.
Unfathomable.
http://www.gutclean.com/tvlicensingtm.html
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Relax Bryony - they're never going to get your Being which I will prove one today as a general consequence of my Celebrity Moleosophy theory I'd better not link here discourteously.
Be of good cheer! Authentic people have nothing to fear.
Amusing piece and very acute. We have all become celebrity stalkers now.
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Yes I agree and I thought your piece powerfully written and argued.
I have no brief for either of the Thatcher children but I do have the maturity to recognise that its source is essentially the envy I feel that they are what they are by virtue of family and not (so I judge) any special talent of theirs and that I have no real reason to suppose they are anything other than essentially decent people.
The BBC feasts off the celebrity culture and on this occasion they have simply turned on their own in one of those feeding frenzies that so characterises that culture.
It's very unattractive that the BBC feign this shock horror in this way. We 'did' golliwogs ages ago and as you say MT need not have done anything more than apologise for a remark inappropiate (so it would appear but like you I am sceptical) to the present company.
Meanwhile our sovereign is obliged to remove golliwog dolls from her estates' souvenir shops.
Lamentable and especially so as real racism creeps ever more insidiuosly into our popular discourses.
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I couldn't find the full text of the speech only secondary sources. I am constantly frustrated by the difficulty of getting primary sources and do wish journalists would provide links in full when they know of one in the public domain on the internet.
You're absolutely right I think in describing capitalism as fundamentally moral (I would describe it as a profoundly creative force for the greater good) but I demur to this extent that I think you misunderstand the evil of a perversion of it. Writing some months ago defending capitalism and attacking its regulation you said the current crisis was the result of 'mistakes'.
But what John NcCain described as 'casino capitalism' is much more than a grossly misconceived mistake and its immorality lies in much more than mere gambling. It is in fact a perversion of free will, and thus capitalism as you describe it, because its sophisticated mathematical models of chance essentially attempt to model free will, contingent on uncertainty, and thus subvert free will and therefore capitalism for private gain. But free will depends on fundamental uncertainty of a kind that can never be gainsayed and is never to be modelled by any mathematical theory or for that matter by any discourse of ours. Free means free and is not be modelled, somewhat like the theologians' conception of the a-seity of God.
Casino capitalism is quite simply the work of Satan and if that's what David Cameron was referring to at Davos then he has my vote.
And well I'm afraid, speaking strictly for myself, that I personally don't count it as a mark of the intellectually curious and thoughtful that they have read Ayn Rand. You invite ridicule to suggest it.
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Interesting piece.
I've already noticed the poison of Bishop Williamson's Holocaust denial seeping into comments in blogs such as the BBC Newsnight one whose moderators see fit to permit any amount of essentially racist spamming, sometimes entirely smothering the main purpose of the blog.
The methodology is to begin with a weasel 'perhaps': thus 'Perhaps we should pay more attention to the Pope's reinstallation of Bishop Williamson': enough to satisfy the BBC moderators' nice standards but the venom is injected anyway.
Interesting to read the background to it all and I for one shan't be satisfied until Bishop Williamson recants or Benedict excommunicates him again. Surely Benedict can insist he recants?
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Irwin, we have this system called cabinet government and prime ministers come and go and so it's alright that from time to time we have one that is unelected in much the same way as when you Americans assassinate one of your presidents or their immorality effectively does the same job it's also alright to have one unelected for a while.
In a piece ostensibly about Ken Clarke (I accept it may be a sub-editor's by-line) all you in fact have to say about one of our more successful chancellors is to stereotype him as laid-back (what we English called 'comfortable' until the drug-culture Americanism took hold).
And you mock our class-consciousness more precious and productive to us than the American buddy system presided over by an Ivy League patrician elite which none of us limeys can even begin to fathom not being American see.
So what's the word? {* deep puff of spliff paces up and down ponders worried *} oh yeah ... patronising.
I say it's patronising so why don't you just fuck off back to back there if you can't do better than this and shame on the DT for encouraging it.
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