Britain First was formerly known as N9S, an out and out Nazi group.

Just out of curiosity, what was the email? Was he joking about the groups views and/or very existence? Or was it a serious "these guys are good lads" type email?

Full blown support.

Edit: Cheers for the explanation Merzbow. I didn't really have the time or space to do a search about them before.

Backing up the stereotype then of these kinds of people not being too smart by the looks of it. Who, in this day & age, would CC an email supporting a far right political party around their work colleagues?

Well, big mickey?

I've seen his name crop up on the EverythingEDL timeline on Twitter, he is still a bell. Literally.

A sample big mickey tweet:-

Sadly, that is a genuine one.

Special.

On a slightly more positive note, if (or rather, when) Obama wins the next election, surely it can't be as bad as the last four years? Second term presidents are nutoriously more risk taking in their policies, so it's likely that Obama, with nothing to lose will actually try to get some Democratic, left wing policies up and running.

On a more depressing note, here's an article about the British economy:

Britain has moved closer to its second recession in three years after official figures showed the UK economy contracted by 0.2% in the last three months of 2011.

A severe drop in manufacturing output in the last quarter dented hopes that the UK could avoid joining much of Europe in a slump that is expected to push up unemployment and see thousands of companies go bankrupt.

Capital Economics, a leading firm of economic analysts, said it was likely the UK was already in recession.

Britain's industrial sector suffered a tough quarter, with the Office for National Statistics reporting that factory output dropped by 0.9%. Activity in the construction industry also fell, by 0.5%, while the UK's dominant services sector was flat.

The figures are likely to reinforce expectations the Bank of England will inject more stimulus into the economy next month after governor Mervyn King warned of an arduous recovery ahead.

George Osborne said the government would not change its fiscal plans, adding that the fall in GDP was partly caused by the eurozone debt crisis.

"I think we've got the right plan, we've got to stick to it, but we've got to accept that Britain's economic problems – difficult as they are, build up as they have been over the last 10 years – have been made worse by the situation in the eurozone and by the crisis on our doorstep," the chancellor said.

The Treasury has faced a barrage of criticism from opposition MPs that it has failed to put forward a growth strategy to support businesses and keep the economy from falling back into recession. A recession follows two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Lord Oakeshott, a former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman in the upper house, said the government needed to act to spur lending to small and medium-sized businesses.

He said without a plan to reverse the decline in lending the economy would continue to suffer.

"Our economy won't grow while our biggest bank, RBS, won't lend. Starving sound small businesses of vital working capital is a recipe for recession," he said.

Osborne conceded the recovery would be bumpy and would include periods of negative growth. But he is expected to come under intense pressure in parliament this week to explain how he intends to foster confidence in the business community and kickstart growth.

A spate of shop closures after Christmas and a collapse in consumer confidence over the winter months is expected to propel unemployment to new heights in the spring.


A stalling economy

The 0.2% fall in gross domestic product during came after the economy grew by 0.6% in the third quarter of 2011 – worse than economists' forecasts for a 0.1% contraction.

The decline is also slightly bigger than that expected by the Bank and the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which assesses whether the government's fiscal plans are sustainable.

Economists are generally split as to whether Britain's economy will continue to contract in early 2012, but all stress that any decline will be modest compared to the record 7.1% fall in output in Britain's last recession in 2008-09.

Ian Kernohan, economist at Royal London Asset Management, said: "The UK economy seems close to stall speed, although during any fragile recovery from a major financial crisis, this is not a huge surprise."

For 2011 as a whole, GDP expanded by 0.9%, less than half the pace recorded in 2010.

On the year, fourth-quarter output was 0.8% higher, flattered by a sharp fall in output in the year-ago quarter due to heavy snow.

The fourth-quarter contraction in output follows a 0.25% decline in German GDP. Spain has already entered recession, according to the country's finance minister and several other EU nations are expected to follow suit.

A slowdown in continental economies and the continued de-leveraging by businesses and households as they pay back their debts will increase the chance that the Bank of England will approve a further £50bn of quantitative easing in February, once the current £75bn of purchases started in October are complete.

King said on Tuesday that the central bank had scope to give the economy another cash boost if needed as inflation is falling and Britain faces an "arduous, long and uneven" economic recovery.

Wednesday's data showed that manufacturing, electricity and gas, and distribution, hotels and restaurants were the main contributors to the fall in output, each subtracting 0.1% from GDP.

Manufacturing output fell 0.9% on the quarter, its biggest drop since the third quarter of 2009. Utilities output was down 4.1%, its biggest fall since the start of 2011 as mild weather reduced demand.

Output in the services sector, which accounts for three quarters of GDP, was flat on the quarter, its weakest outturn since the final quarter of 2010. The effect of a 0.4% rise in government and other services was cancelled out by a 0.5% decline in the distribution, hotels and restaurants sector, which includes retail.


Particulary telling was Osbourne's refusal to change the economic plan. Staggering lack of incompetence. I remember the Royal Wedding consistantly being touted by Osbourne as bringing up a lot of money for the economy, then once the results were published, he blamed the poor results on....yep, you've guessed it, the Royal Wedding.

Depends how Congress goes. If the Republicans hold either house, there's a good chance that their right wing/Tea Party brigade will go "hey, we only lost because we picked a rubbish moderate like Romney, so now it's time to block *everything*."

Yes, I guess one has to put their faith in the American public to realise that the Republicans have been hampering the economy for their own political gains for the last four years. The fact that the Republican front runner is a man who left his wife with cancer for a younger, healthier woman, along with preaching for the "sanctity of marriage" whilst asking for an open relationship, is worrying to say the least.

He is a vile human being. What's really unnerving is that he's seemingly managed to counteract that in the eyes of the Republican base by playing the right-wing-victim-of-the-media card and by coming out with absurdly offensive stuff like "blacks should demand pay cheques instead of food stamps" and "Andrew Jackson knew how to deal with his enemies." And it's been especially beneficial for him ahead of a Southern primary. It really shows have far to the right the Republican base has swung, if not US politics generally.

If you were scared about the prospect of him becoming the Republican candidate before, Vice, wait until you read this article from the Guardian's Chris McGreal:

With Obama, though, it is different to any other president. The undercurrent is not only that Obama does not know his own country but that he is not a real American.

The attempts to claim that the president was not born in the US - led by bits of Fox News, right wing radio talk show hosts and an East European immigrant dentist in California - have largely been put to rest.

But the implication of otherness – that Obama is African American, and is also not really of America – is ever present at Gingrich rallies.

"By the time ex-president Obama lands in Chicago," he said, imagining the first day of a Gingrich presidency, "we will have dismantled about 40% of his administration".

In response, some in the crowd started chanting "Kenya, Kenya" - saying that Obama should go back to where his father, and some say he, was born.

Others took up the chant.

"I love this guy," said Morgandee Flannery, 35, a speech pathologist in her own "brain injury rehab" business. "He's very motivating. He seems like a very strong powerful leader. I think that's what we need in America. Someone who's strong, unapologetic for our country."

Gingrich thrives on the fired up crowd, sucking up the cheers and letting loose a fresh blast of invective. His dependency on the adulation came through at Monday night's Republican debate when the audience was barred from clapping or cheering. Gingrich turned in a relatively low key performance. The next day he said he would not attend another debate if the crowd is not allowed to cheer him.

There's no such problem in the hangar.

Gingrich's brazeness is audacious. He rages against the millions of dollars behind Romney, which funded the attack adverts that did so much damage to Gingrich in the Iowa campaign.

"People power will beat money power," Gingrich declared.

Another roar from a crowd apparently oblivious or uncaring of the fact that an extremely wealthy casino baron, with close ties to Israel, pumped $5m in to attack adverts on Gingrich's behalf in South Carolina and his wife has given another $5m to back him in Florida.

It's not long before Gingrich has fallen back on his stock phrase "as a historian" – he has a PhD from Tulane University and taught at West Georgia College in the 1970s – as he launches in to the first of repeated references to Ronald Reagan.

In Gingrich's version of history, he helped put Reagan in to the White House, worked with him to oversee the 80's economic boom and even had a hand in bringing down the Soviet Union.

The crowd loves Reagan, the last true Republican president in their minds after the two Bush presidencies betrayed the core conservative ethos by expanding government and increasing spending. Reagan did too, but that's forgotten because he still talked the talk.

Gingrich's critics portray him as erratic and volatile, constantly throwing out ideas but rarely following through on them. He rages against government spending but then proposes vast projects such as establishing mines on the moon, which few can imagine possible without government money. But the torrent of ideas is appealing to Gingrich's supporters. It reinforces the perception that he is a revolutionary of a kind.

Gingrich has also said that as president he would defy supreme court rulings he doesn't agree with – particularly on legalising abortion and that accused foreign terrorists have rights. Such blatant disregard for America's constitutional separation of powers might damage some other candidate, but Gingrich's supporters lap it up.

All this has Romney's campaign so worried that one of his surrogates arrives at the rally to persuade reporters to take a closer look at Gingrich's record of his ethical violations in Congress and his lobbying on behalf of the mortgage lender, Freddie Mac, which had to be bailed out by the government. Left unspoken is Gingrich's marriage record, but it hovers over the question of his fitness to be the Republican candidate.

Gingrich is the only speaker of the House of Representatives convicted of ethics violations, over the use of political funds for private use and for misleading Congress about it. He was fined $300,000 and eventually pushed out as speaker by his own party. At the time he was also leading the charge against Bill Clinton over his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. What wasn't public at the time was that Gingrich was having an affair with the woman who became his third wife.

Gingrich has since said that he was not pursuing Clinton over the morality of his behaviour but for lying under oath about Lewinsky. But behind the scenes at the time, Gingrich was railing against the president's behaviour as disgraceful. In the end, the assault backfired on Gingrich after he tried to make Clinton's affair an issue in Congressional elections. But the voters were tired of it and the focus on Clinton's personal life called in to question Gingrich's judgement within his party.

Then there is Gingrich's own behaviour. Three marriages. At least two affairs. Allegations from one former wife that he asked for a divorce while she was seriously ill and from another that he wanted an open marriage so he could carry on an affair with the women who in the end became his third wife. Mitt Romney struggled to draw the crowds in Tampa. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images The Romney campaign believes all this should matter to the voters, and for some at the rally it does.

"We have some grave concerns about Newt," said John Hosford, who brought along four of his six young children. "This is Newt's third wife. We have a family where you try to teach values – if you get married, it's forever, for good or bad. It's not what his ex–wife said; more troubling is that he has an ex-wife, and he's on his third wife.

"That part of Newt in troublesome, because how can you go preach family values when you're cheating on your wife and getting divorced?"
Flannery says she is a "big values voter", but she is prepared to put aside Gingrich's long history of infidelities, serial marriages and ethical failings.

"I do believe in second chances. And I do believe in forgiveness. He has been very open about making mistakes. He's been very open about wanting to make it right," she said.

There's another factor.

"Mitt Romney's Mormon. I mean, I like Mormons. I have a lot of Mormon friends, actually. But I would rather see a Christian as a leader of the free world, leader of America," said Flannery.

But even where concerns about Gingrich's past strike home, they don't necessarily translate into support for Romney.

"From an establishment standpoint, this country needs drastic changes, said Hosford. "If Romney gets in, is he just going to stop the bleeding but not treat the ailments? I think Newt's going to make substantial changes. From a policy standpoint, we really don't like a lot of stuff Obama does so the candidate who says he's going to do just the opposite resonates with us."

That's all that matters to Bonnie Gauthier, an insurance agent from Connecticut who retired to Florida for the sun.

"I've watched Newt for years and years. For me, he has enough age, enough experience. He's got his vision. He's telling his story. And I really think it's going to resonate not just with Republicans but people that really are sick of what's happening to our country," she said.

"I think there's a big swing to Gingrich. When Sarah Palin said 'If I was a South Carolinian I'd vote for Newt Gingrich', it went past the roof. God bless Sarah Palin. She almost endorsed him. She's staying out of the fray but she's got more power than the liberal media every want to know. People listen to her."

Not everyone is so enthralled. Julie London has a stall at the back end of the hangar selling paintings and portraits. A painting imagining all the Republican presidents in history playing poker goes for $250.

London says she is a registered Democrat. She has a "Newt 2012" badge clipped to her waist but says she voted for Obama four years ago. She's not sure how she'll vote in November, but it won't be for Gingrich. She smiles rather than explain why.

Business is not so good, she says. No one has snapped up the pictures of the elder President Bush or President Franklin D Roosevelt.

But FDR was a Democrat, and a liberal, big-spending one at that.
London looks alarmed at the news.

"Really? My husband said he was a Republican," she said. "No wonder they haven't been buying."

At which point she snatched the picture and stuck it under the stall.

Did anyone here every play that Evil X* game "The Politically Incorrect Adventures of Newt Gingrich"? It was fun. I remember one level was all about clubbing as many seals as you could.


* the guys who made Ganja Farmer

Bring him on. He may appeal to the crazed Republican right, but his utterly insane policies and racist stumps will put the swaying voters right off, and they're the people who decide who's President.

Yeah can't see him getting in. When the debates come around, the cool, well spoken forward thinking President will wipe the floor with the nutter.

I hate Gingrich. He's one of those guys for whom the ends always justify the means, just like Dick Cheney.

Oh, Rod Liddle

"I'm amazed that Rod Liddle is still being published. I thought he slunk off in shame when he realised the role of Jeremy Clarkson was taken."



Seriously though what slime but it's hardly suprising coming from The Scum.

everyone should pay their fair share unless your an Obama aid

So, Abu Qatada.

He's getting let out

As shit as it is that this guy is being released, it's the right thing to do. If they actually had anything substantial on him then they needed to produce it in court. They clearly don't. We're not a country that detains its citizens indefinitely, habeus corpus is a fundamental of our legal system. So he has to be released.

Yep. From what I'm given to understand, the Government has around three months to get some form of guarantee from Jordan that he won't be tortured if he's deported and that torture-derived information won't be used against him. If they don't then he can't be deported and his bail conditions over here will have passed, making him a free man. They'd better get to work.

As a side issue, isn't it odd that a Jordanian gets to appeal to the European Court to overturn the decision of the UK authorities? I'm sure UKIP and co will have fun with that one.

It's not that odd, he's in Europe, so he'll be dealt with under european law.

My Brother was thumping his chest over this earlier and like I told him if the government wanted Abu Qatada out of the country that bad he would be long gone by now regardless of what the EU courts had to say.

I think the judge said he would "relax" the bail conditions after 3 months. I'm sure that means he'd still be under whatever they're calling control orders now. Curfew, very limited communication, heavily monitored.

Did anyone see Newsnight last night? There was a good discussion about the whole PIP implants fiasco. Naomi Wolf totally shredded Anne Milton, the health minister, showing her up as either a liar or completely out of her depth. Actually, it's probably both. Katie Price was quite interesting on it too.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen/tv/episode/b01by5cl/

A blast from the past for context's sake:


I think my other half might have met Yoghurt or one of his friends.

She's working away from home and has had to take an Eton boy with her as her underling. She wasn't looking forward to having to socialise with him as he's something of a spoilt cock. (I've met him at their annual BBQ and she tells me I thought he was a cunt, but I thought that about most of them there so can't place which one in particular he is.)

Well, he's been keeping up appearances. She emailed me overnight with the following lines: "My assistant is driving me mad. He spent all of dinner telling me how much he'd enjoyed his secondment to the insolvency department and how it was much more exciting than audit because he "got to make people redundant"! He couldn't grasp at all why I thought that might not be a very nice thing to do!"

How lovely to read that firms brought in to run failing businesses are filled with overpaid sociopaths who take pleasure in making people lose their jobs. I must try to remember this when I have to socialise with him again this year. Smug fucker.

Milton had that "sent to jump on the Grenade" look about her and I almost felt sorry for her.

And Jeremy Paxman is so fucking shit I'm amazed he still gets work and on that subject here is an old video of The Pax getting ruined by some guy from Plaid Cymru.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gy7f8vP2QY

Balls, Paxo is great!

He was great, now he's just rude and lazy. He never bothers to listens to people's arguments, just sits there waiting to get his next zinger in as soon as he can.

Bit like you on here then,

ZING!

Naomi Wolf really did the job there that Paxman should be doing and used to do. He's pretty weak now in terms of holding politicians to account, forcing answers out of them or questioning their competence.

Good article on the "austerity v borrowing" debate:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsi...000/9694710.stm

This is from the Daily Mail, I shit you not:

Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study.
Conservative politics work almost as a 'gateway' into prejudice against others, say the Canadian academics.
The paper analysed large UK studies which compared childhood intelligence with political views in adulthood across more than 15,000 people.

The authors claim that people with low intelligence gravitate towards right-wing views because they make them feel safe.
Crucially, people's educational level is not what determines whether they are racist or not - it's innate intelligence, according to the academics.

Social status also appears to play no part.

The study, published in Psychological Science, claims that right-wing ideology forms a 'pathway' for people with low reasoning ability to become prejudiced against groups such as other races and gay people.
'Cognitive abilities are critical in forming impressions of other people and in being open minded,' say the researchers.

'Individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate towards more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that maintain the status quo.

'It provides a sense of order.'
The study, by academics at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, used information from two UK studies from 1958 and 1970 , where several thousand children were assessed for intelligence at age 10 and 11, and then asked political questions aged 33.
The 1958 National Child Development involved 4,267 men and 4,537 women born in 1958.
The British Cohort Study involved 3,412 men and 3,658 women born in 1970.
It's the first time the data from these studies has been used in this way.

In adulthood, the children were asked whether they agreed with statements such as, 'I wouldn't mind working with people from other races,' and 'I wouldn't mind if a family of a different race moved next door.'
They were also asked whether they agreed with statements about typically right-wing and socially conservative politics such as, 'Give law breakers stiffer sentences,' and 'Schools should teach children to obey authority.'
The researchers also compared their results against a 1986 American study which included tests of cognitive ability and questions assessing prejudice against homosexuals.

The authors claim that there is a strong correlation between low intelligence both as a child and an adult, and right-wing politics.

The authors also claim that conservative politics is part of a complex relationship that leads people to become prejudices.

'Conservative ideology represents a critical pathway through which childhood intelligence predicts racism in adulthood,' says the paper.
'In psychological terms, the relation between intelligence and prejudice may stem from the propensity of individuals with lower cognitive ability to endorse more right wing conservative ideologies because such ideologies offer a psychological sense of stability and order.'

'Clearly, however, all socially conservative people are not prejudiced, and all prejudiced persons are not conservative.'

Well that's just a conspiracy of the liberal academic-media hegemony. They want us all to be black disabled transgendered lesbians.

Seriously, though, without reading the actual report, there is a stack of questions emerging from that article. How is the "intelligence" measured? Talking about "innate intelligence" is dubious at the best of times, but particularly ridonkulous when it's not even measured until the kid has already completed its primary education. Where are the controls for educational status/style/opportunity, or for employment status/opportunity? What about media/cultural conditioning? After all, the Sun is one of the most rabidly right wing newspapers in this country but is written for eight year olds and is the most explicitly populist paper going too. What about parental politics? I would think many (if not most) people's politics are heavily influenced by their parents, whether it's being broadly similar (as in most cases) or through over-identification (the union leader's son who becomes an armed revolutionary to prove himself to the old man) or through deliberate rejection (the Tory minister's daughter who goes off to live on kibbutz). The article itself doesn't define "right wing" either. I imagine the report does, but even then, the automatic equation of conservative social policy and bigotry is troublesome.

Naomi Wolf is great there, as expected.

I've mostly given up on Newsnight, though. If I have time, I'll watch maybe one segment if it's on a topic I find really interesting. For me, taking Newsnight's place is Democracy Now, which is US-based and looks at global matters too, but it's sharper, more critical and delves much deeper into issues like drugs, crime, corruption and war, offering dissenting views. Basically, they cut through the bullshit. If you're a lefty, you'll adore it. Catch it on http://www.democracynow.org/ or on Sky Channel 200 at 6pm.

Around the world, it's been a very interesting few weeks:

- In America, the culture war is back. Obama wanted employers to provide workers with contraceptives as part of their healthcare coverage. Rick Santorum attacked this, calling it an assault on Catholics, as Catholic-affiliated organizations obviously fell within that. This breathed new life into Santorum's campaign and he's now become the frontrunner in the race to become the Republican nominee for the Presidential election. The Obama administration have compromised on the plans.

- The Haditha massacre trial ended in no jail time for any of the US marines charged. 24 Iraqi civilians were killed in their homes.

- Obama defended drone attacks, saying they're precise strikes and don't result in huge civilian casualties.

- It's come out that the NYPD aired an anti-Muslim propaganda film to over a thousand officers. They also spied on the Muslim community. They NYPD have also been accused of targeting Latinos, and there's been outrage over their fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen.

- Apple are coming under increasing fire for their brutal labor practices in China, namely at Foxconn, where thousands of employees live in cramped apartments and work the entire day performing one tiny task over and over again. After a string of suicides, Foxconn put nets outside the building.

- In the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, their first democratically-elected leader, was ousted at gunpoint by the remnants of the old regime. The US initially supported the 'new' regime, but now seem to more hesitant, the last I looked into it.

- In Spain, Baltasar Garzon, the judge who ordered the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998 and opened investigations into Bush's use of torture, has been disbarred for 11 years. He was convicted for wiretapping. He also faces another charge of 'exceeding his authoirty' by wanting to investigate the deaths and disappearances of thousands under the Franco era.

Thoughts on these?

On that last point, if you're going to fight corruption then it's a very good idea to not be corrupt.

Another example of the fucking insanity of a person's healthcare being linked to their employment.

There's a bit more to it than that, Kenny. He was working with in a very corrupt system, with a lot of people with vested interests around him not so keen on the work he was doing.

His story is a complex and interesting one from what I know of it, and I'd certainly like to read more about him and his work.

Must say that I almost bust a gut when I read that unelected EU Puppet Prime Minister Lucas Papademos said that there is no room for violence in Democracy following yet more violence in Greece.

Anyone following the situation in the Maldives? Nasheed, the democratically elected President ousted at gunpoint by the previous dictatorship, is now holding press conferences and calling for elections to be held, despite the very real possibility of being imprisoned and tortured, as he was when the now-ruling regime were in power previously. If climate change doesn't put the Maldives under water, the sheer weight of Nasheed's balls will.

I want to know when we're going to invade Greece. It's a failed state with an unelected leader imposed by hostile foreign powers.

It's a very worrying situation isn't it?

They need to default, as soon as possible. Fuck Germany. Greece should be looking to Argentina, who defaulted and have managed their way out of a similarly horrific financial situation into a booming economy.

The demands of the leaders of the Euro zone on Greece are uttely self-defeating. Not only will it destroy a country for at least a generation if not more, it won't solve the crisis at all.

Yep. And for what? To keep the Greeks using a particular currency, the consequences of which are that they have surrendered the option of using monetary policy to tackle the problems of their economy.

And Greece WILL default. It's inevitable, the only people who can't see that are the Germans and the Greek politicians.

Not as booming as you think. Inflation is skyrocketting, they are being sued for defaults on loans and the government is activly trying to prevent people reporting on anything that goes against their official stance.

Interesting shit I was talking about with a friend the other day - if the republicans go with Romney, he has absolutely alienated and bored their base of nutcases, and the turnout will therefore be lower, raising the chance of the democrats taking control of the two chambers, and not having the situation they have right now, of power that they are being prevented from using. If they end up with Crazy Rick Santorum, there is no hope whatsoever of them winning, but the rank and file might secure their base in senate/congress. Therefore, the best bet for the dems might be to face the more difficult Romney challenge, knowing that it's not quite the done deal that Santorum would be, but that it would pay off better in the end.

GDP growth of 9.5% in 2011. Not too shabby. Inflation IS high though. I hadn't heard about them being sued, I thought they'd actually re-started payment of defaulted loans in the last few years?