THE UGLIFICATION OF BEAUTY

On the 30th December I was walking past the National Portrait Gallery in central London and on a whim popped in to have a look at a new exhibition, The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011, and was taken aback by its obsession with portraying the human body at its most flawed, broken, diseased or infected. This was portraiture as selected by Hieronymus Bosch and styled by Joel Peter Witkins, where stumped limbs vied with pierced genitalia and diseased flesh for our attention, where deformity and perversion are celebrated over beauty and perfection. It is in fact an exhibition not of man’s beauty or even of man’s ability to overcome adversity or of inner beauty but rather it is a celebration of the ugly and the vile and the objectification of the grotesque in the name of diversity and the pursuit of equality, while beauty and the perfection of the physical, is like intelligence, brought down to its most base level.

The celebration of beauty and perfection and even of the human and the human body as an aspirational object is now fraught with danger, with every limb and sinew a minefield of politically correct catechisms. Where once the pinnacle of each race was of a body perceived to have been created in God’s image and that the best and healthiest examples of that body, if not attainable for all, were at least to be aspired to. Now we spurn such perfection as elitist and hurtful of those less fortunate or able bodied. At worst such displays of Greek and God like perfection are seen as Darwinian, fascistic, racist, or as a veiled attack on the disabled or physically handicapped and as such are increasingly taboo. 

Only in the freak show world of trash celebrity is the twisted and mercurial nature of the human body discussed, loathed or aspired to. In this world the celebrity aspirants in a gallery of ‘national portraiture’ would not be chosen for how many boxes they ticked on our ever burgeoning politically correct scales but rather for how many aspirational body segments that male or female celeb rated perfection in. Here, in a world as grotesque as its politically correct counterpart hanging on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, the human body is dissected and scrutinized for each flaw, with each imperfection celebrated as evidence of a celebrities fallibility and vulnerability. In this world scars signify surgical enhancement, large breasts a sure sign that nature has been cheated, fat, a sign of gluttony or sloth, thinness a symptom of anorexia or bulimia, while cellulite and wrinkles show that age, even in celebrity, cannot be stopped. The celebrity body is, like its atrophied counterparts in the National Portrait Gallery, a caricature to be gawked at, fawned over or examined like some exhibit in a Victorian sideshow.

The human body, like the human mind and the skin that encloses them, is being brought down to its lowest level. In picture after picture men and women are shown at their most base. Disease and wounds are nolonger hidden or concealed but in the name of diversity and inclusivity put on display. So a portrait of a couple is rendered somehow more ‘real’ for showing (genital) warts and all, and the picture of a soldier who has lost a leg is somehow made more ‘meaningful’ for showing the actual stump or a cancerous face more pitiable for us being able to see each rotting cell of flesh. 

This is our brave new world, a world in which even beauty is to be tamed and restricted in the name of ascetic egality and visual equality. It was telling that even where real beauty was on display in the Taylor Wessing exhibition in the form of a large photograph of the actress Keira Knightley that the colours had been muted and subdued to the extent that all life had been removed from the picture. This left her flesh tones neither pale and interesting or bright and cheerful but rather dead and lifeless like those of a corpse in a morgue. 

This grey-green hue seemed to pervade almost every image as if the exhibitors, not satisfied with displaying image after image of diseased, wounded and broken bodies, wanted to imbue the whole exhibition with a veneer of death and decay. If this exhibition of British photographic portraiture says anything of our nation and its people it is not, as I am sure the selectors and judges intended, one of hope over adversity or of tenacity over prejudice or sexual diversity triumphant, but rather of misery and squalor, of death over life, of ugliness and egotism, of perversion, pain and penury. This is not a celebration of human life and the human body in all its glory but of human life and the human body at its most vulnerable and miserable. It is a portrait of flesh, cast not in God’s image, but in his shadow.

It is no wonder then that as we enter 2012 and the nation prepares to embrace the Olympics and the human form at its most vigorous and athletic that the UK’s diversity obsessed establishment should have chosen as its mascot not some God-like creature 

whose physical demeanor represented these noble qualities but rather its complete opposite. The 2012 Olympic mascot is in fact the antipathy of the Olympic ideal, a atrophied, limbless, grey, anaemic one-eyed shapeless blob that represents neither the human body, sexuality, intelligence, beauty or skin colour and as such offends none of the totems of multiculturalism, nationhood, gender, religion or able-bodied over disabled. 

The Olympic mascot is the natural culmination of the Establishments quest for a non offensive human form, a shapeless blob. This too is where in a few more years The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait will end up in its striving to offend no one and to subvert beauty. Soon diseased flesh and genitals will not be enough and no doubt excrement and faeces will vie with open sores and corpses as being more real and inclusive. Until one day a one-eyed grey-skinned blob hangs on the wall and we will have achieved perfection...

Happy New Year.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

RELOCATION, RELOCATION: A MIDDLE CLASS NAME FOR 'WHITE FLIGHT'

The English, and the English middle classes in particular, are well known for their habit of saying one thing and meaning something else entirely. Racism is concealed behind a veneer of niceties and politeness, with prejudice being the hate that dares not speak its name. The liberal elites and sauvignon quaffing professionals who go out of their way to be broadminded and understanding on sexual diversity, race, religion and multiculturalism, would still be privately aghast at the idea of their son or daughter coming out, or marrying into another race, or embracing Islam. They would never say so, rather with British stoicism they would smile and carry on. Yet there is a perceptible change in the air, which since the riots is being driven by fear and a sense that our inner city populations are not the multicultural urban nirvanas that they were once thought to be, that they are in fact, an overflowing melting pot that’s been simmering for too long and is now getting ready to explode. 

The first signs of this coming explosion were August’s riots, but these should be seen not as the actual explosion but rather as the first salvo in what will effectively be a violent realigning and redrawing of English society as future outbreaks of rioting destroy and undermine the social order on which our current way of life is structured. A structure which is being eaten away and weakened by the cancerous effects of being force-fed a relentless diet of multicultural diversity for thirty or more years and is now facing the prospect of being physically attacked as well. In such a fragile state its survival is not guaranteed, and it will need to fight hard to maintain the current status quo between the state and the people, or risk losing and seeing the country slide into anarchistic barbarism or becoming some form of quasi Weimaresque democracy which constantly teeters on the brink of collapse and paving the way for a period of political or military authoritarianism. 

The middle classes know this not because there is an obvious sign but because there are little warning indications everywhere, in the papers, on the street, on the news, on the Net, in school, in colleges, in work, in the shops, and from the people they talk too. Everyday  there are little things and big things all flashing red and those warning signs are all saying that the pot is getting ready to blow.

The journalist Graham Archer writing in the Daily Telegraph this week announced that he was leaving the inner city London borough of Hackney due, in a perfect example of middle class double speak, to a lack of empathy among the ‘separate communities’ and more importantly because of the ‘repellent antisocial behaviour that marks out too many bus journeys’, and specifically he says, ‘we’re leaving because of the summer riots’. He denied that this was about race and went on to castigate and cite the ‘tram lady’, Emma West, whose mouthy and slurred tirade at the world in general and non English whites in particular has made her a hate figure worldwide, seen her children taken into care and extraordinarily imprisoned without trial until January 3rd 2012 ensuring that she spends Christmas in prison. Such is the fate of anyone who dares to get ‘mouthy’ about race or who, in a very non middle class way, speaks their mind honestly. Better for her that she had thought what she meant and spoken what she didn’t. 

Yet Emma West is also a spark, and the state’s brutal overreaction to what were in effect the drunken ramblings of a solitary woman on a tram has ensured that that spark rather than being extinguished will, like so many others, continue to burn. The police are adding their sparks as well by further talking up the doom-laden ante and demanding everything from tear gas, water cannon and new blinding laser lights to deal with future urban disorder. Those with a vested interested in portraying the riots as the cries of an underclass struggling for justice against a wicked, austerity driven world, have given future rioters the veneer of political respectability by reclassifying the rioters as protesters and in the background the silent majority says one thing, thinks another,  dreams of relocating, and carries on.

Yes people are carrying on, but are increasingly nervous, as all the while the red lights keep flashing. Unemployment is rising, crime is rising, production and manufacturing are falling, banks could go bust, Europe is imploding, interest rates will rise soon as and as they rise so will mortgage repayments, and credit, once the driving force behind our reinvented ‘never-had-it-so-good’ culture, is now too in short supply. Nothing, in fact, is as it was, and nothing seemingly, is as it seems. There is a sense as well, that on top of all this the government and the natural cohesion of the people that has held the country together is falling apart. That we are, in fact, nolonger one people and one nation. Indeed, thanks to the wonders of multiculturalism we are now many peoples and many beliefs who have little in common and even more differences.

This frightens the middle classes whose world order is now under real threat. What for them is the purpose of all that cultural diversity and the tolerating and defending of multiple faiths and religious rights if the environment in which they live could be torn apart by the very people they have been supporting? They could, of course, run away to the suburbs or the countryside and relocate like the Daily Telegraph’s Graham Archer thereby escaping the ‘repellent antisocial behaviour’ that is so rampant on the streets of our inner cities, and many, many will.

They may also stay put and continue lying to themselves and each other and pretend that everything is fine and that there is nothing to worry about, or they can heed the warning signs for what they are and take a leaf out of Emma West’s book and say what they mean for once. For multiculturalism has failed totally and rather than relocating and running away the middle classes and the establishment they support needs to say enough is enough and bring an end to this ghastly social experiment before it destroys the country. The time for staying calm and carrying on is over, now is the time for speaking the truth.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

EUROPE: SCREAMING ON THE OUTSIDE, DYING ON THE INSIDE

A few months ago the UK suffered one of the worst and most vicious spates of rioting the country has ever experienced. The level of ferocity and destruction displayed should have been a wake up call to us that things in our green and pleasant land were far from right. Instead there was much rejoicing in the columns of the Guardian and in the corridors of the BBC that the riots in Tottenham, which involved predominantly black youths, were replaced in part by white, multicultural rioters on the following Monday and Tuesday. Phew, thank goodness for that, and within a few weeks, once the shock of seeing ‘normal’ people burnt out of their homes or beaten up and robbed in the street had worn off, the mainstream media was morphing the riots into spontaneous ‘protests’ against cutbacks and the government’s austerity programs with any other causes that might hint or point to flaws in our multicultural wonderland seemingly ignored or denounced as soon as they were aired.

Then in October it was announced that the UK was now one of the most densely populated countries on earth thanks to two decades of unchecked and utterly reckless immigration which has brought the UK population up to some 62 million with a density of 246 people per square kilometer. The latest forecasts are for a population of 71 million by 2031 and 90 million by 2050. This influx of immigrants, aside from putting a catastrophic strain on our health service, the welfare state, our education system and available housing is also adding to the slow erosion of the countries culture, religious base, core values and is threatening its environment. Yet our politicians continue to do nothing, say nothing and hear nothing. Even the riots, a real scream of a warning not just of things to come but of things wrong now, have been ignored.

Instead the government announces the deregulation of our planning rules so that the rape of our countryside can continue even faster than it is already, and more cheap, concrete dwellings can be built to accommodate ever greater numbers of immigrants. The State further fudges the issues of immigration numbers by playing lip service to people’s concerns either by toying with entry requirements or tinkering with the deportation of immigrants living here illegally. While all the while our legislators nurture and feed a growing sense of entitlement among immigrants and their dependents by championing the laws of discrimination backed up by a bureaucracy that grows relentlessly.

Every week the invidious effects of our failing, post war utopian multiracial experiment can be seen in falling education standards, rising crime rates and a general decline in any sense of a national cohesion beyond the furtherance of the self. Further, our moral decline has been accompanied by the slow, inextricable and now all but inevitable transition from a predominantly white, anglo-saxon, Judeo-Christian society with pagan roots and a sense of history and culture that bound us to the land upon which we live, to a society bound together by self interest, consumerism, debt, vacuous egotism and the religion of celebrity.

Now by necessity we live cheek by jowl with people who have no interest in us, have no or little knowledge of our country, its history, culture or beliefs. Part of the state’s multicultural agenda is to denigrate and besmirch our history and culture and to embark on symbolic acts of self flagellation whenever events like the slave trade, colonialism or our Empire are mentioned so that any sense of pride in our heritage is gradually crushed. It should be no surprise that many immigrants not only fail to ‘integrate’ but have no ‘respect’ for the country in which they find themselves.

In Europe fewer and fewer people understand the causes of the last world war, or even of how Nazi Germany arose, in fact Ad Busters, the magazine that championed and created the Occupy Wall Street movement and is pushing for a radical overthrowing of the capitalist system in favour of some sort of collectivist Facebookian utopia, wrote in their August issue that the Nazis had ‘conquered’ Germany. Making the Nazis sound as if they were an invading force as opposed to a revolutionary political party elected by, and made up of, German people who happened also to follow a new, anti-semitic, violent and radical ideology.

Nationalism and a belief in the nation state has in fact been reduced to a few crass slogans and corse chants, and national pride is now an erroneous concept to be mocked or discredited by Europe’s leaders rather than championed and promoted. So too is the belief in ones race, or rather it is unacceptable to believe or champion that race if that race is white or follows a Christian religion. However if ones race or religion is indian, Jamaican, Pakistani or Islamic, Hindu, in fact any other race or religion other than white or Christian then our leaders will defend that right in law absolutely and resolutely. European indigenous culture and the races whose blood is in its very soil is being destroyed by the very people who should be defending it.

Evidence of this realignment from the indigenous to the disingenuous can be seen in everything from the stripping of national war memorials and the stealing of statues so that they can be melted down for money, to the annexation of sections of our cities by peoples and religions that are not just alien to our way of life but openly hostile to it. Such civic barbarism can only happen when a nation or nations have lost not only their self esteem but their soul. When over decades a nation mocks its customs, its values, its religion and denies and decries its history, violates its land and even sets about breeding its own people out of existence it is no wonder that those same people, along with the governments new carpetbagging friends, see no issues with desecrating our memorials.

Now as the euro teeters on the verge of becoming the 21st Century equivalent of Midas’s gold we will see banks collapse and countries default and with them the slow but inevitable re-emergence of old hatreds, political, religious, class and ethnic and in their wake, violence. Europe’s elites may then finally begin to understand the terrible seeds that they have sown by encouraging unchecked immigration and the placid usurping of nation states by alien cultures whose religions are inseparable from politics and whose followers aim is global dominance over all either by conversion or the vanquishing of those who oppose it. Even now Europe’s bureaucrats and politicians are seeking to save their currency and the european super state it feeds rather than taking steps to salvage what they can by admitting their mistakes.

Nature though, either by design or inevitability, has ways of bringing or forcing matters to a head. In the UK our indigenous creatures along with the countryside on which they live are facing extinction or extermination either, as in the case of the red squirrel, by being colonized and killed by an alien invader, namely the grey squirrel; or in the case of the hedgehog and the weasel, two quintessentially English creatures, by the loss of their environment. The luckless fox or the other hand, once championed by shrill hordes of animal liberators intent on banning its hunting by groups of horse riding aristocrats, is being systematically exterminated by armed executioners for having the temerity to survive in our cities as its own habitats are concreted over. Strangely there is not a word of protest from those who previously opposed fox hunting, perhaps mechanized killing is to their liking or now that the killing is being done by workers in the public sector defending the luckless fox has lost its cachet.

If the demise of England’s four-legged creatures is symbolic of Europe’s two-legged populations future then coming events herald not just the collapse of the Euro but of the utopian experiment that created it and which has, in one guise or another, driven Europe’s political will since 1945. Now events, good, bad and catastrophic could create the scenarios in which governments and the old order simply cannot rule and which will, inevitably, produce new orders, new politics and new powers. What they are like, and whether of the left, the right, in the middle, religious, anarchic or capitalist it is unlikely that things will ever be as they were though I hope that whatever fate decides that there is still room in the new Europe for a some of our struggling four legged friends.

RIOT: DEMOCRACY BEGINS TO BE DESTROYED FROM WITHIN.

Over four days in August 2011 the UK’s febrile multicultural and indigenous underclass rioted on a scale and with a ferocity that had never been seen before. Beginning in the borough of Tottenham on a Saturday, and culminating with widespread looting, arson, and general criminality across much of London on the following Monday, the underclass vanquished the police and evoked fear and chaos among the rest of the population. On that night Democracy was found wanting and vulnerable, while the chattering classes beloved liberalism collapsed as its champions temporarily ditched their faith in political correctness, cried out for the police and faced off hooded thugs whose rioting threatened to devalue their gentrified mansions, invaded their shops and restaurants and shoved a knife deep into their human rights. This wasn’t protest, it is was brutalism without rules; Capitalism at its most base and basic:  ‘I want what you have and I’m taking it now’. Simples...

The BBC, SKY and many in the wider media initially tried to give the rioters a veneer of respectability by calling them protesters and speculating that the riots were directly linked to cuts in social services, student grants, unemployment and the shooting dead of a young black man armed with a gun in Tottenham. This was all nonsense of course and as the violence and destruction escalated and with it footage of people being robbed or attacked in the street, of peoples homes and businesses burnt down even the most politically correct commentators reluctantly started to use the words ‘rioters’ and ‘looters’.

However there was also a palpable sense of relief among those same commentators when among the first rioters in Tottenham, a few white faces were spotted. Thank goodness! This wasn’t a ‘race riot’ in the sense that it was all black rioters, it’s a mixed, multiracial riot, so that’s alright. Politicians, police leaders, community groups, the chatterijng classes and Polly Toynbe et al, rejoiced. The riots in the 1980s “now they were ‘race’ riots”, but now thanks to our wonderful inclusive society the children of the white underclass are throwing petrol bombs and looting too. How proudly must the likes of David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Shirley Williams, Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and co looked on as their theoretical offspring brought their ‘cry of rage’ to England’s milticultural never never land. 

And because most of the rioters had their faces covered and surprisingly weren’t taking part in round table discussions on Newsnight, commentators and politicians could attribute any views they liked to them. In fact a media intent on finding the ‘right’ answers for the riots has been only too happy to attribute a conventional malaise to the riots rather than hint at a darker and more nihilistic cause. So not only, as the passing of days lessened the shock of the riots, were the chattering classes warming to the rioters and their attacks on the ‘coalition’s cuts’ or whatever appropriate cause they wished to attribute, but, safe again for now, they could also begin the process of defending and finding causes for the riots that would put them back nicely into the ills that the UK’s massive welfare depended and bloated public sector are set up to deal with. The Coalition of course, keen to be seen as tough, but caring, concurs and we are all happy again.

Of course some commentators have broken the mould and spoken outside of the box, most noticeably, historian David Starkey who dared not only to evoke the words and memory of Enoch Powell but cited black gangster culture as another possible cause of the riots. This was Heresy! Powell’s now infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, made 43 years ago in 1968, predicted a time in England when, if immigration was allowed to continue unchecked, that, “like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. and that:

“There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endevour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one to boot.

....Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial religious differences, with a view to the exercise of action and domination, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population.”

Powell’s speech, as with Starkey’s now, challenged the Establishment’s orthodox view that immigration and a multicultural society are desirable and such views when uttered by mainstream figures are not only rubbished and censured but where possible the figure that  spoke them is either destroyed, or humbled to the extend that he or she will recant their views and, like a sinner, beg forgiveness. Thereafter that person will do their best to 

reingratiate themselves with the mainstream, though like the sinner, forever tainted by their earlier utterances.

Starkey to his credit neither recanted or apologized and as such is to be ostracized by his peers and pushed to the margins of respectable society. The day after his appearance on Newsnight the Establishment reacted with fury to his words, with the Labour party leader Ed Miliband calling them “disgusting and outrageous” and that they were “racist comments”, and that “there should be condemnation from every politician and every politcial party”, the Guardian’s ghastly Dreda Say Mitchell felt that Starkey had “complete ignorance about the social dynamics of urban life in Britain” and that to understand the riots and their “causes”, we need “informed and articulate comment (even in Jamaican slang) from people who’ve lived life on the streets”. 

Even more hysterical was the reaction of 100 fellow ‘historians’ who felt that Starkey should never have been asked on to Newsnight given that he was a celebrity historian more suited to commenting on Elizabethans. Presumably there are now at least 100 historians with suitably diversity friendly views waiting in the wings should there be more riots to comment on. These historians also felt that Starkey’s views had “disgraced the academic world” and want the media to stop putting the word ‘historian’ next to his name.

This is our new Democracy at work, now any political party, politician, academic, celebrity or individual who dares to question, challenge or criticise the wisdom of a multicultural society is shunned at best, at worst they are ostracized and cast-out into the wilderness. There is no “frank discussion” or “informed and articulate comment”, there is only diversity hyberbole and multicultural zealotry where any criticism of our racially engineered utopia is crushed. In our new Democracies there is no protesting, no commenting, no discussion, no debating, no voting or any form of dissent allowed when it comes to multicuturalism and race. The State is right and everyone else is wrong.

The riots may have given pause to the multicultural zealots and a few of the chattering classes in Clapham and Camden may have doubted their beliefs momentarily. But a few soothing words from the BBC and the sight of hundreds of their fellow Cabernet Sauvignon drinking chums waving brooms around as they ‘bonded together’ to clean up the mess have reassured them. We love our culturally diverse, multicultural city and we’re going to understand why these riots happened and make sure that they don’t happened again. Hurrah! Which is great of course because if after our ‘understanding’ of the ‘causes’ the riots do happen again, and they will, then they be more violent and more destructive than anything so far and the people that bond together in future won’t need brooms to clean up their city, they’ll need guns. 

Simples.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

ON VOICEMAIL EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOUR SCREAMS

Watching the hysteria and escalating media on media clusterfuck that was surrounding News International, and inparticular its founder Rupert Murdoch and his unfeasibly Pre-Raphaelitesque and now ex-Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks, over the last few weeks has been akin to watching a kind of Inquisition style Burn the Witch frenzy, with Tom Watson MP playing the role of WitchFinder and the Guardian and other dubious high-moral tone acolytes backing him up as his Papal Tribunal. That is not to decry or mediate either the seriousness or vileness of the phone hacking of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's mobile phone or similar outrages perpetrated by the News of the World but rather to comment on the massive amount of cant, hypocrisy, sexism, agism and general ghastliness that were unleashed in its wake. In fact, what had begun as a wave of righteous outrage and moral indignation at journalism's descent into a sulphurous pit of, to quote Shakespeare, 'burning, scalding, stench, consumption', to which can now be added ' and phone-hacking', ended with few angels and many demons on display. 

I worked for a Murdoch subsidiary once, News International / Hatchet, in the mid 1980's where a magazine concept I had proposed had been taken up for development. It was in 1986 and Murdoch at that time was locked in an almost life and death struggle with the dinosaur-like luddites that made up the newspaper print unions. This was an era when newspaper print jobs were sold on, the wages and perks being so good that when a vacancy came up backhanders and money, not skill and worth, secured the position and the threatened introduction of new technology, that is computers, had made the print workers apoplectic with rage and for weeks and months Murdoch's Wapping headquarters and the location of his newspapers and print presses, had been the focus of bitter picketing and often serious violence. The miners may have failed in their clash with Margaret Thatcher's ideologically driven policies but the battle to stop Murdoch and his technologically driven capitalism would not fail or so the bastions of the old left had decried. 

I mention this as my brief six months or so working in this small outpost of Murdoch's then embryonic empire gave me some insight in the Murdoch way of doing things and how focussed he was. I had been taken out to lunch during this time with the specific purpose of being briefed and prepared for meeting Rupert Murdoch on the following Monday where, I was told, he would either like me and my magazine concept, in which case I was in, or... well there was no other option, if he didn't like it I was out. I was told that he wasn't a man to waste his time on frippery and sycophancy and that he would just be in London to sort out business issues and would be out again on the next plane. So no partying for him.

That weekend there was yet another very violent demonstration at Wapping, one of the worst, and Murdoch was said to be furious and was considering closing The Sun and pulling out of the UK for good. My meeting was cancelled and with no end in site to the dispute I was advised to take my concept title to another newspaper mogul, also expanding into magazines, his name, Robert Maxwell... And that's a whole other story!

What I did glean from this was just how close to the line Murdoch would go to win a battle and equally just how hated a man who chose to take on entrenched values and old orthodoxies could become. For Murdoch, the Wapping battle was about winning and about money, politics were secondary. For monetarists and free-marketeers Murdoch's almost pugnacious resistance to the unions was the stuff of which heroes are made and for a while Murdoch was not just the darling of the capitalist Right, but a champion, whether he liked it or not, of the Thatcherite revolution. To the Left Murdoch was an anathema and a figure to be hated and destroyed. 

It has taken a generation, but now 25 years later that old Left is taking its revenge and like any sense of wrong that has had too long to gestate it has become bitter and much of the indignation of the last few weeks has had little to do with the very real wrongs of phone-hacking and everything to do with settling old scores. A lot of those old scores came about because Murdoch eventually won his battle and introduced computers into the running of his papers, with the rest of the UK's newspaper industry following suit and introducing them as well. But in winning Murdoch defined himself as an enemy of the Left and a champion of pure, unmitigated captitalism, a capitalism that was defined by Murdoch's own prejudice's and which paradoxically are as anti-establishment and anti-Royalty as those of any Marxist driven revolutionary. 

Now two decades later Murdoch presides over a multi-state, multimedia empire with revenues and worth stretching into the billions and is courted by celebrities, politicians, the business world and by the vast multitudes that have, like fungi, sprouted and grown in the dark tributaries that feed his media organs. I have no doubt that many of the accusations of phone-hacking, deceitfulness and trickery that have been banded around over the last few weeks are true, though equally true, I am sure, are some of the denials from the Murdoch clan of culpability in them. Indeed it was exciting for a while to picture the 'flame-haired' Rebekah Brooks as some sort of Borg Queen whose News of the World minions fed her brian a constant diet of malicious gossip and tittle-tattle while her aged protector stroked her hair and whispered, over and over again, my precious, my precious...

But this is a fairy tale that has yet to reach its end, and the witch may yet become an angel and the covetous old King may end his days in peace and comfort. Yet equally the witch may be found to have used dark magic in pursuit of her dreams and be burned at the stake, the aged one and his brood may be cast out of the empire and usurped by stern-faced Inquisition types intent on upholding moral values. As a saga it is now worthy of becoming a top TV series and it is perhaps appropriate that in the midst of the scandal about News of the World, phone hackers, corrupt policemen, red-haired temptresses and the Murdoch family, that it was announced that Dallas was returning for a new series. JR is now an octogenarian patriarch trying to keep control over the Texan equivalent of the Borgias. Art imitating life or life imitating art? Who knows, but as I started with a quote from Shakespeare I'll end with one as he usually knows best: 'Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all'.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

Brutal, stupid and cruel: The rise and rise of Generation Eloi

If the Nazi leadership famously cared for animals and were conversely capable of the utmost cruelty to people, then our post war, public sector driven, welfare dependent and 

excruciatingly politically correct caring society is becoming a savage, vile and foul place for both. Day in day out the UK’s papers carry stories of children, the disabled, the old, sick or just those in the wrong place at the wrong time who have been beaten up, abused or worse by our nations burgeoning brutalligentsia. 

Even more upsetting, given mankind’s supposed elevated status at the top of nature’s evolutionary ladder, is the increasing vileness with which many people mistreat, abuse, torture, maim and kill any animal defenseless or unlucky enough to fall within their vile, bestial grasp. From poisoned cats, stabbed horses, abused dogs and shot swans, few 

species of the animal kingdom escape the attention of the sadists in our midst. 

Yet our slow, and inextricable descent into a dystopian mire is not only of our own making, but its progress and acceleration is being driven by our government and societies lack of collective will to stop it. For years our inability to punish wrong doing with any sense of vengeance, or to chastise and set parameters for children’s behavior, or for parents to accept the responsibilities that come with parenthood and to discipline their children and set guidelines of what is and isn’t acceptable have created an inflexible, amoral mindset of self-serving apathy, viciousness and worthlessness. Our collective psyches slowly nullified by the combined forces of capitalism at its most crass and welfare statism at its most soporific and stultifying. Leaving us either incapable or unwilling to accept responsibility for  our own actions at best, and at worst allowing us to shirk adulthood altogether in preference for a life lived forever young; like a kind of Chav Eloi which prefers tattoos and trainers to whites and pumps.

In fact, decades of rejoicing in stupidity, deriding competitiveness, elevating failure, rubbishing elitism and swallowing in the antics of ‘celebrities’, whose every move is fawned over, analysed and mimicked by a population desperate for something to believe in have created a society and a mindset in which the ‘self’ and self-gratification transcends all. Now the ‘I’ want, ‘I’ need and ‘I’ am is everything. Our selfish desire to consume more and more, for recognition among our friends and for a bit of our own celebrity, coupled with a sense of worth are fueled by our ‘rights’. It is our ‘right’ to play music loud, to behave badly, to shout and scream and to seemingly do anything, even commit crime yet be protected from punishment by our Human Rights. Rights that allow a serial burglar freedom from prison because of his ‘rights’ to be with his children. Children that are in turn paid for by the State because of the criminals ‘right’ to create life. Rights, more rights, and more rights, rights ad nauseam... But no Wrongs.

This slow corruption or morphing of society from one which, if not perfect, that at least still had a moral compass and enforced a sense of right and wrong to one which, devoid of virtue, has replaced basic moral values with a set of legal ‘Rights’. Rights which can, unlike morals but like goalposts, be moved and tweaked by clever lawyers and which allow wrongdoers and those whose actions have broken the old morals to not only claim the ‘moral‘ high ground again and again, but often to punish and chastise those whose views or values society once protected. Clever lawyers have made black white and white black and helped drive society towards a new barbarism where all values are only as strong or as a weak as the lawyer defending them and where wrong can often be right.

Now as a generation born into a Rights obsessed society give birth and their children reach adulthood and exercise their right to be stupid, inarticulate, illiterate and unemployable, so these Darwinian throwbacks take out their frustration and sense of worthlessness on the few creatures in our litigious society who have no rights, the animals. 

Therefore when the fifteen year old thugs that destroyed, maimed and mutilated the defenseless animals in an inner city farm in Manchester are tried, their lawyers will defend their rights over all else and ensure that they are not punished as they deserve to be. As no doubt will the lawyers defending other representatives of the UK’s burgeoning Eloi population who are responsible for so much pain and suffering among our animal kingdom. 

Perhaps soon the moral pendulum that has swung so far in favour of our Rights, will finally start to swing back in favour of our Responsibilities and begin restoring not just a sense of wrong but of punishment as well. For the people that commit these terrible crimes are truly unworthy of ‘rights’, or in fact the right to create life at all. They have no function, their life’s are pointless and we as a society should begin the process of eradicating them with the same thoroughness with which they now seem to be eradicating England’s wildlife.

Generation XXX - Born to Porn

Years ago in 1967 or 1968, when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, I found a stack of porn magazines while exploring the families rambling home in which various members of our extended tribe resided, the house had seventeen bedrooms, labyrinthine cellars and extensive grounds and had been requisitioned by the army during the second world war so finding exciting items in some abandoned corner was not that unusual, though I never found a wardrobe into Narnia or some secret passage containing hidden treasure which is what I was usually looking for. On this occasion though I had found a fencing sword and was having imagery battles in one of the older and more dilapidated parts of the cellars when I rammed the sword into an old blanket that was lying on top of a pile of coal, and with a deft flick of my wrist had hurled the blanket into the air revealing a box full of porn magazines. Treasure indeed!

I can't remember much about the magazines now and think that probably they were mainly American strong softcore titles, which meant that they would have contained full nudity, women in stockings and fetish gear and strong sex scenes but not hordcore penetration, though they certainly contained much stronger and a lot more graphic material than was readily available in the UK at the time. I remember being very excited about my 'find' and took one or two of the magazines into my Church of England Primary School the next day to show my friends. This proved to be a big mistake... 

When I got to school I showed the magazines to a few chums in the playground, the children went mad, shouting and screaming and calling their friends over and within minutes I was at the centre of a huge scrum of excited, almost hysterical boys and girls all jostling and fighting with each other to get a look at some naked flesh. Of course even in the non PC nineteen sixties a huge mêlée involving half the school was not going to be tolerated and soon a couple of our teachers waded into the throng to see what was going on and there in the middle was me, clutching a couple of, by this time, rather disheveled pictures of breasts and bottoms. I was also, I expect, smirking gleefully. 

Then all hell broke lose. I was marched to the headmasters office, canned, my mother called in, my father notified and with stern faces all round I was cross-examined as to where I had got hold of such filth and threatened with expulsion. I stuck to my story that I had found the magazines in a bin on the way to school, this still being a time when children could walk to and from school without fear, and eventually the matter was dropped. I'm sure that there was a bit more fallout but if there is it is now lost in the mists of time and I suspect too that our coal bunker only contained coal in future.

I mention this story of my childhood because over the last few days newspapers and the BBC have been full of stories regarding the readily available amount of pornography on the internet and how easily accessible that material is to children, teenagers and young adults and wanted to illustrate that up until a few years ago the exact opposite was true. The main gist of these articles is the concern many parents, psychologists and the wider society have that children's attitudes to relationships and to each other are being harmed by exposure to often pretty extreme pornography. This concern is more focused now because the wider availability of pornography began with the arrival of Web2o in the early noughties and now almost a decade later we are beginning to see children and teenagers of the Web2o decade become adults. 

This is the first generation that has grown up with pornography so readily available to them, yet they are also bombarded with warnings as to the malign, predatory and dangerous nature of sex. So in an already confusing world, sex is good and available at the click of button and bad because because every email or approach from an unknown adult is a paedophile out to do harm.

A new survey for the BBC has also shown that 8 out of 10 young men between 18 and 24 have looked at porn which is hardly surprising given that men of almost any age are thinking about sex virtually nonstop and between 15 and 30 are almost ready to explode with sexual angst so drooling over porn whilst not exactly edifying is hardly surprising. Nor is the fact that at least a third of young women have look at porn as well given that contrary to popular belief women are just as highly sexed as men if not more so, they are just a bit more circumspect in their drooling and lusting than men.

What is inconvertible though is that young people are seeing pornography at a younger and younger age and that is having an effect. The fashion for women to shave off their public hair stems from pornography, as does breast augmentation, labiaplasty and vaginoplasty. So did the demystifying of anal sex, cunnilingus and the introducing to a once fairly straight public a pornucopia of sexual proclivities covering everything from double penetration to fisting and beyond.

Many of these aspects of pornography are enlightening and for many empowering,

and, personally having fought adult censorship in the courts and having begun the legal process that legalized pornography in the UK, would not want to see the pendulum begin swinging back the other way. However it is not good that young children are accessing hardcore porn, yet the censoring of the internet is neither desirable or easily achievable unless the UK Government wishes to bring in draconian laws on a par with China or Saudi Arabia. Far better that we learn how to educate and help this new generation absorb what is going on around them and to understand, explain and reason the effects of what they are or will be seeing.

For boys this may mean explaining to them that what they see in porn does automatically equate to how they have sex with their girlfriend and that equally a girl doesn’t have to make love like a pornstar. They can and should be themselves. Most of all they need to understand that pornography needs to shock to survive, and as its audience and they themselves becomes jaded and immune through over exposure, so pornography as stimuli has to become increasing jaded in turn as unfortunately that is the nature of the beast.

Yes pornography is desensitising and should not readily be available to children, but pornography is only one aspect of a sexualized media that is bombarding children and adults alike with sexual images and messages in everything we see. From pop videos to the marketing of clothes and make-up, through to the antics of celebrities and reality TV contestants. The message being that sex is at the centre of everything and more than ever that message is 'if you've got it, flaunt it!'. 

The internet sex genie is out of the bottle and nothing short of an authoritarian or religious revolution will put in back in again. I suspect that now if a smirking ten year old brought a porn magazine to school he would find few takers and in a way that lost excitement of innocence is sad but time moves on. Now most young people will see porn as a kind of rite of passage to adulthood, they will look and then move on, some will have a problem with it, like others have problems with drink and drugs, but that is life and we cannot legislate for a minority. Far better to trust Generation XXX with being better able to handle porn and let them get on with making Generation YYY in their own natural way...

LYING, VYING AND CRYING: POLITICIANS, IMMIGRATION & THE NATION STATE

As the UK’s Coalition government edges ever closer to collapse and its politician’s snipe and jostle with each other, maneuvering themselves into the best and most favourable  positions in which to jump ship or carry favour with the UK’s increasingly volatile media, so its leaders, Nick Clegg and David Cameron, appear ever more desperate and despairing. Clegg in particular seems to be on the verge of a breakdown, bursting into tears because he has become a hate figure to students for breaking his election pledge not to raise tuition fees, or getting hysterical and girly, worrying about all the anger ‘out there’. Yet it is his, and the nation’s, ridiculous leader David Cameron whose behaviour is really bordering on the manic. Cameron bigged it up with the Egyptian’s in Tahrir Square, then dressed down ‘man-of-the-people’ style with the Ryaniar regulars with nothing more than a change of socks for hand luggage for a long weekend holiday with his wife and as soon as he got back declared war on Libya. 

Then, with hardly time to pause or breath in between making dire threats against Colonel Gaddafi, Cameron, now wrapped in the robes of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, launched into a bitter diatribe against Oxford University describing it as a disgrace for only admitting one black student in the last academic year based on her merits - the implication being that from now on Oxford should dumb down to let in more ethnically desirable types regardless of their academic qualifications.  Then within days he had ditched the cultural diversity robes and wrapped himself in a Union Jack and set about attacking the number of immigrants in the UK, saying that Labour’s ‘open door policy’ was responsible and that the number of foreigners in the UK was dangerously high. 

No doubt in the days to come Cameron will threaten to invade Syria, announce further cutbacks in the armed forces, pledge to observe Ramadan and eat only Halal meat before denouncing the failure of immigrants to integrate and threatening to follow France and ban the burka. This is Cameron desperately playing to the gallery and failing as his inconsistency and insincerity make it impossible for anyone to know what he really means and what he really intends to do about any of these soundbite pronouncements. Nothing probably.

Yet in amongst these ramblings are real concerns that have been ignored for years and which should be addressed, which makes their being spewed out by Cameron like so much political ectoplasm all the more tragic. There are too many immigrants in the UK and successive governments not only opened the door, they wedged it open and no one, even now, has had the guts to close it. Likewise, as mentioned in an earlier Cameron rant, multiculturalism has failed, failed in ways that will potentially destroy our societies as the sinister Talabanisation of London’s Tower Hamlet’s and other UK cities shows. 

Here women, even non Muslim women, are being threatened and intimidated for wearing revealing Western clothes, and advertisements on billboards and bus shelters which feature scantily clad women are being painted black.  Yet as usual the politicians and police play it down, dismissing the threats as the actions of a small minority, a ‘minority’ that will one day knock on their door as well. This sort of action has been building for years, in Bradford over five years ago prostitutes were driven out of Muslim areas and Western girls were ‘advised’ to dress conservatively walking through them and, in a sign of things to come, advertisers avoided giving ‘offense’ by not booking ads in their area that showed women in underwear or bikinis. Always appeasement, always avoiding confrontation, always defeat.

Cameron’s reason for attacking multiculturalism and immigration is cynical in that there are elections coming up and he’s trying to win back Tory voters who have drifted away by talking tough on issues they care about, yet he will do nothing. Even when in Tower Hamlets again, Muslim radicals attacked another totem of our inclusive society, gay rights, the powers that be first blamed the mysterious ‘minority’ and then, once a paper had suggested that members of the ‘far right’ had done it to stir up trouble, blamed members of the English Defense League. Of course they had done it, they or anyone other than the crazed Islamists in our midst who can do no wrong in the eyes of our weak and increasingly impotent democracy. 

Again and again we are seeing the English revert to type, not the brave, bold warriors of legend, but the craven, subservient appeasers personified by Neville Chamberlain and the little man, the health and safety politically correct busy bodies that infest our councils and local government, whose aim is to facilitate our colonization as smoothly as possible. Yet nothing is done? Newspapers, websites and forums are full of vague threats and talk of people rising up, yet nothing happens. We are like the willing victims of massacres like Babi Yar, whereby thousands of people allow themselves to be marched out of their towns and villages, to be stripped and shot by a comparatively small number of soldiers. They often knew what was coming, heard the shots as they lined up over trenches of bodies and yet did nothing accept wait for death. The executioners often thought it was because the victims knew that their fate was to die and accepted it. 

Perhaps our fate, like England’s, is to die too... 

I Saw, I Filmed, I Ran Riot - Violence as Celebrity

About 5 or 6 six years ago when I lived in London's Soho overlooking a street plagued by crackheads and drug dealers I remember hearing more shouting than usual and looked out of my window to see two junkies fighting and rolling on the ground. This wasn't an unusual sight but being early evening there were lots of people about and what was unusual, at least to my eyes at that time, was that the majority of the crowd who had stopped to watch, had taken out their mobile phones and were filming the fight. Needless to say no one intervened but thousands more would have watched the sight of these wretches rolling in the dirt as the video clips were uploaded to the net in the days to come, for violence, like sex, is something many people like to watch.

Six years on it is as if nothing is real unless it has been filmed and uploaded to YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, and yet with the reality has come an unreality as the line between film as fantasy and entertainment has increasingly crossed with film as a record of truth and real events. So it was that March 26th's anti-cuts riot had the bizarre spectacle of being both riot and entertainment, as news crews and the general public along with anarchists jostled with each other not to throw things but to get the best angle in which to film the 'action'. Equally each rioter seemed to have one eye on the police and the other on the nearest news crew so that he or she could be captured in their best revolutionary pose. 

This was unrest for a generation weened on X-Factor and Glee, not so much the children of Che Guevara but of Simon Cowell.  Every moment is captured, analysed and discussed, every pose, flame and flicker, blood and bruise is a potential front page image or Youtube sensation and another step up the blooded ladder of protest stardom. Now, as youth cults have all but been consigned to the past, and sad old punks, teddyboys, goths and skinheads look like anachronisms from Grannies attic so finally has a generation that had all but been written off as apolitical, narcissistic and obsessed with posting inanities on Facebook found itself taking the world by surprise, and creating something, that if not exactly new, then reinvented for their generation; Moral, Righteous Violence and Organised Anarchist Chic. Protest as a virtue and anger as a state of mind.

Suddenly the old mainstream Left and Right had to take notice, as first Millbank Tower and then Prince Charles and Carmilla, found themselves caught up in a wave of anger and destruction than was both unpredicted and unpredictable. For many this was a new entertainment, a new adrenaline rush that mixed violence, camaraderie and infamy into a heady brew of celebrity with a cause. If Cheryl Cole was 19 now and wanted to to get on the front page of the nation's papers what better way than to dress in black neo-Red Army Faction, radical-urban-terrorist-off-the-peg-at-Chelsea Girl Class War chic and wow the press with a bit of posing and teasing while lobbing a brick through the window of the nearest Ann Summers or Barclays. Within days every teenage boy, and quite a few girls, would have their anarchy sex symbol poster up on the wall and their heads filled with thoughts of love on the barricades. 

For the hundreds of young, black-clad, masked-up anarchy-angries racing from bank to bank, pausing only long enough to smash-up symbols of wealth like the Porsche showrooms in Mayfair on the way, their main pursers were not the police but film crews and photographers. For every black-blocer smashing a window there were between ten and twenty photographers, maybe six or seven film crews, a few 'legal observers' making sure that the niceties of rioting  were upheld and possibly the odd policemen looking self-concious and irrelevant. This was anarchy chic and riot-lite, no one gets killed and the only buildings trashed belong to the behemoths of bad capitalism, the banks and tax-avoiders. Collateral damage was limited to the odd tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time and the occasional bystander who got kettled. For everyone else this was a chance to go wild, keep the moral high-ground and watch it all on TV and your smart phone later on.

Yet so far this has generally been a very civilized, middle class kind of rioting with the police seemingly preferring the role of benevolent prefects rather than fascistic stormtrooper, and with the media literally interviewing plummy-voiced rioters as they smashed in windows and hurled bricks at the police it has so far been a very jolly affair all round. Virtually all the arrests made on the 26th March consisted of UK Uncut unfortunates who had peacefully occupied Fortnam and Masons and then 'surrendered' only to be arrested en masse by a police force desperate to be seen doing something other than getting hit by paint bombs and arriving outside wrecked banks long after the wreckers had moved on. The other arrests amounted to less than fifty in total and are unlikely to deter anyone from turning up again apart from the police who might decide they would be more effective if they stayed away.

Yet this is now, riot and protest, as with films, sex and violence, lose their edge when you've seen the same theme repeated again and again, sooner or later you have to raise the ante and that is particularly true of protest as adrenaline rush. Shortly those clips of black-blocers smashing windows or black-clad anarchists pontificating and posting pretentious drivel as to why they've targeted this or that store will just sound like so much self-centred waffle. People will escalate the violence and the state will escalate its response and then hopefully the reality and fantasy of what we watch on screen will separate and people will realise that protest at this level is both real and dangerous and that actions have consequences. 

I have no doubt that our new generation will make mistakes and for myself would wish that the philosophy and motivation behind the protests had a more libertarian, right wing direction, but while capitalism's bloated banks continue to hold out their cosseted and profligate hands for ever bigger helpings of the States money to bail them out and save them from their mistakes, that can never be. In fact when the leading trends magazine, The Trends Journal, and its outspoken publisher Gerald Celente, begin predicting the virtual collapse of Western society due to its mismanagement by our current rulers, then perhaps it is probably time to stop watching and start doing and we all take to the streets.

"When the money stops flowing to mainstreet, the blood starts flowing on the street"

Gerald Celente.

Muscles in Search of a Tussle

Cameron and Obama having been caught like a rabbits in a cars headlights during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt now seem determined to show the world that not only are they on the side of protest but that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the rebels in Libya. That they are, verbally at least, ready to fight and shed blood to topple the dreaded Gaddafi. Cameron in particularly seems to have been pumping himself full of testosterone and watching old Jean-Claude Van Damme movies with the result that he seems to be issuing blood-curdling threats against Gaddafi's regime on a daily basis. 

Issuing threats is fine of course if one can back them up, playing to the world's gallery and saying that you're going to bomb Lybia, or send in troops or unilaterally enforce a no fly zone, when the UK's armed forces are so depleted that they'd now be hard-pushed enforcing a no-fly zone over the Isle of Wight let alone Libya is just crass. In fact all Cameron has done is draw attention to the UK's military weakness, his own volatility and capacity for decision making by petulance.    

Obama too, along with his coterie of diversity experts and human rights advisers, has been falling over himself to look at one with Libya's rebel fighters and cool and caring to the rest of the world. Image and how that plays out on YouTube and Twitter rather than realpolitik now seem to obsess the West's leaders with Obama now so cautious not to be seen putting a foot wrong that he made himself look shallow and vacuous during Egypt 's uprising and then overzealous trying to compensate for past errors when Libya's protests escalated into civil  war. 

This is sound bite politics with foreign policy now being dictated by how it plays out on Twitter, with solutions wanted in days and alliances that were built up over decades now

abandoned with a click of the delete button. In France, President Sarkozy, who like Obama had been all over the place during Tunisia's and Egypt's uprisings, has gone even further in his attempts to be 'in' with Libya's rebels First France recognized them as Libya's rightful leaders and then sending in France's jets to bomb Libya within seconds of securing UN support for a no fly zone. No doubt we will soon see Sarkozy and Carli wearing matching Keffiyeh scarfs. Tres Cool.

Yet who are the rebels that Obama and company are so keen to be associated with? Are they really the ernest young Facebook, pro democracy crusaders so beloved of the West's media  or are they Islamist fanatics who will replace Gaddafi's dictatorship with one of their own? The West has no idea. Certainly not the CIA whose director was reduced to watching Al Jezeera and CNN to find out what was happening during Mubarack's final days or the UK's Foreign Secretary Willaim Hague,  whose overseeing and involvement in the sending of a 'small diplomatic team' to Libya which was then captured by Libya's rebel forces along with an SAS squad sent to rescue them made Hague and the UK look ridiculous. 

More riduculous still is the West's rush to recognize, endorse and interfere in Middle East affairs at a stage where existing order is still in a state of flux and new rulers and governments have yet to emerge. In both Tunisia and Egypt it is very unclear who or what grouping will end up in control though in both countries the radical forces of Islam are increasingly showing their hand with many symbols of Western and Christian culture being attacked, closed or abolished. Yet within days of Mubarack's forced exit Britain's monarchial leader David Cameron was in Egypt shaking every hand presented to him without the faintest idea of who they were and what they represented. What mattered was that he was there first, in the flesh and on TV with the Tahrir Square celebs. 

Yemen and Syria are now subject to daily protests and violent state put downs and in Bahrain protest has been virtually crushed thanks to nearby Saudi Arabia loaning tanks and soldiers to Bahrain's ruling royal family. Yet in Libya, where nature was taking its course and Gaddafi's forces were on the verge of winning their internal civil war against the rebels, the West has seen fit to interfere militarily, enforcing a no fly zone and bombing Gaffafi's troops into oblivion.

The result has been a reversal in the rebels forces fortunes, with the rebels recapturing cities thanks to Nato air support meaning that the country could end up split in two or, possibly, depending on how much Nato wants to big it up, the use of ground forces to ensure Gaddafi's demise and defeat.  Whatever happens what would have been a violent but quick ending is now in all probability going to be a long drawn out, inconclusive mess with the West faffing around trying to maintain the moral high-ground while the Libya people continue suffering.

Yet this new liberal-left moral jingoism is also totally selective, with no help for Bahrain's Shia rebels who were being mowed down by the King's forces or the slaughtered in Yemen being offered. It is also ill conceived  with the West's might seemingly being committed on an emotional whim rather than national or strategic interests and with no planned exits or long term goal other than being seen to have been good in righting a selective, morally approved, wrong. 

That the move into Libya's affairs was orchestrated by France's vainglorious Sarkozy and backed by a reluctant US President should have been warning enough that this was probably not the best move. That it wasn't was obvious after Obama's brazen attempts to distance the US within days of the first bombings. That, and the emerging news that many of the rebels are sympathetic to, or supporters of, Al Qaeda show that far from Cameron bigging up our foreign policy he's actually dumbing it down.