Extending the hand of antipathy and enmity across Europe...

I recently had to wipe off a mouthful tea I had just spat into the face of a close friend.

The reason for my ejaculated beverage was that, while talking about the European elections, my dampened friend had previously commented that they were completely disillusioned by all of the major political parties and that they were thinking of voting for the British National Party (BNP).

Once I had dried my friend off and apologised for any minor scalding, we then discussed their rationale in a more mannered, and ultimately drier, way. We spoke of political policies leading to the credit crunch and of the recent expenses scandal and of any number of other political SNAFUs over the last few years, we also spoke of the reactions the other parties and how this amounted to little more than white noise and bluster rather than anything substantive.

I could only concur with their assessment of the state of politics in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, but had to disagree with the conclusion that the best way forward for the British people in Europe was to vote for a legitamised state of racism, mistrust and hatred. (See Private Eye, No. 1237 “The expenses row has really put me off politics... so I’m going to vote for racism, bigotry and hatred instead”)

For the sake of our continued friendship, we agreed to disagree.

Back on my own, I felt a strange unease about this visceral reaction to my friend’s political opinion. It played on my mind, not because I had hosed-down a close friend with a mouthful of Assam, but, I thought, it was because my reaction was based on an assumption that I knew the politics of the BNP on the basis of my stereotyping of their target demographic of tattooed fuckwits with their family-pet pitbulls that grace any coverage on the news.

I consider myself a reasonably conscientious voter; I take the time to read the manifestos of the major parties, I try to at least have a passing understanding of the major issues and the stance the parties have on them, I try to understand the ‘themes’ of the party policies without simply relying on the soap-box politics of the modern media. In short, I throw down my cross from a position of, at least, a modicum of knowledge. I can consider my vote has been cast from a considered, measured and rational choice. To my understanding at least, this is the basis of a modern democracy.

In reading their manifestos, I felt I had given at least a fair crack-of-the-whip to Labour, the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Green Party and even the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Jury Team. (On the day of the vote, I realised there were a few more I hadn’t looked into (No2EU, the Christian Peoples Alliance, the Socialist Labour Party, the Scottish Socialist Party and the independent candidate Duncan Robertson) but if they haven’t done enough to even slip into my consciousness – fankly, bollocks to them!

So with this in mind, and in the spirit of equity, I decided I had to have a look at the ‘manifesto’ of the BNP. To save you the bother of looking for it (seriously, don’t bother), it amounts to a series of bullet-points basically saying (and I’ll admit I’m paraphrasing a bit here), “everything is their fault, send them home”, whether they have ever been to said ‘home’ in their life is apparently of no relevance. So exactly what I thought it would be; racist, bigotted, isolationist, protectionist, lowest-common-denominator bullshit.

Unfortunately, my feeling of unease wasn’t sated by giving myself a better knowledge of the ravings of the dumbfuck community, or even by that lovely smug feeling of being right at the beginning, I still felt the same unsettled feeling deep in my bowels.

And then I got it...

It wasn’t the fact that I didn’t understand the fucktard fraternity. It wasn’t even that someone close to me had such a lapse of judgement to consider it a good idea voting for them. It was the vote itself!

Here I am spending hours reading the sales-brochure propaganda of those professional gobshite politicians (of all flavours), making sure I understand what they stand for and what good intentions will be forgotten, watered-down and/or corrupted if they get into power, and meanwhile any dumbass, mouth-breather can make their way into a polling station and scrawl an ‘X’ on a page which, en masse, will affect every aspect of the lives of single person in the country – and more importantly, to me!. Is this what democracy is all about?

I mean, for fuck’s sake, people will even pay money to phone Sky News to register a vote of “No Opinion” – if you don’t have an opinion, save 50p and don’t fucking vote, you dumb fuck....! What chance do we have when trying to get the common prole to understand (or even give a shit about) the vagaries of economic, health or environmental policy when they can’t even yack-up an opinion on whether Jordan and Peter will get back together.

I understand the concept of universal suffrage, that everyone should be entitled to have their vote counted and treated equally. As an ideology, it sounds great. But, have a look at the common voter. Look at any city centre at about 11pm on a Saturday night and ask yourself “is giving these people the right to decide on policies affecting taxes, defence, social care, health, economy, education and so on, really the best that we can come up with in the 21st century?” By treating everybody equally under the current party politics system, we are allowing all of our lives to be dictated to by people who haven’t the faintest clue what any of the parties stand for.

People vote for all different reasons; they vote for the same party their parents voted for (possibly due to some misplaced loyalty or genomic imprinting), they vote for the person who has a nice smile, they vote for a party they heard a soundbite they agreed with (irrespective of the rest of their policies), they even vote for fucking Boris Johnson because he was unintentionally funny on “Have I Got News for You”, but how many people vote from a position of knowledge and understanding?

It’s time for a change. If we are to have a democracy at all, don’t have the shambling hoards pick a name they don’t know from a list of political parties they know nothing about, preaching a gospel they don’t understand. Give people a multiple choice exam on the political issues - and make it a hard one! If they don’t get enough correct answers, they aren’t knowledgable enough to have their opinion counted.

Don’t give me any politically correct bollocks either. People are not equal. Not because of race, sex, sexuality, belief, background, education or anything else that certain political factions might want you to believe. The new underclass simply don’t care enough to find out the issues, understand the drivers for change and the repercussions, and then to make an informed choice.

If that’s you, then, like my ill informed and tea-soaked friend, in the world according to SpiderBoz, you don’t qualify for a say.

Come the revolution...



NB: When preparing my blog entries I always try to link to any site that I feel will add to the understanding of the context of my blog or that deserves recognition in it’s own right. On this occasion however, I will not link this blog to anything remotely related to the BNP as I do not want to add, even in the smallest possible way, to the legitimacy of this collective of degenerate, neanderthal scum.

Bring on the spangly green dancer...

Every year I go over to a close friend’s house to enjoy the spectacle that is the Eurovision song contest. Every year follows a similar template. My friend lives out in the countryside, so every year I pick up another friend who lives near me and we then drive over to our mutual friend’s house where we meet with a larger party of friends and we swap pleasantries for an hour or so before the main event.

Every year my friend’s wife puts on a fabulous buffet spread and we enjoy the wonderful food, have a few drinks (non-alcoholic for me of course) and generally enjoy each other’s company before subjecting ourselves to trial by Europop.

Every year my friend’s wife very thoughtfully prints out scoring sheets from the BBC Eurovision website and warns us not to start our scoring too low at the beginning, and we all laugh knowing this to be oh-so true.

We then vaguely watch the show and laugh at the funny Europeans. We discuss how the tactical voting will go and, as expected, groan when all the neighbouring countries give each other “douze points” as we predicted. We laugh at the outfits, we laugh at the songs, we laugh at the dance routines, we laugh at the token fat one (the only one who can actually sing), we laugh at the scary one, we laugh at the Germans, we laugh, we laugh, we laugh...

All very middle-class, all very jolly, all very nice and all very pleasant.

This year followed exactly the same template as every other year and I had a nice time in nice surrounds with nice company and nice food. Nice. Nice. Nice.

However, something new happened this year. This year there was a revelation, a revelation in the unlikeliest form.

Albania.

Don’t get me wrong, the song was still shit like all the rest, the singer was a forgettable Europop singer like the rest, but the act, my god, the act was a revelation!

Now, before you read on you have to see this shit...! Seriously, watch it now...! Don’t worry I’ll wait until you get back...

Did you see what I mean! The guy in the tight green sequined body suit was wonderfully bizarre. He had absolutely nothing to do with anything, he wasn't dancing, he wasn't singing, he wasn't even co-ordinated with the others, in fact, he was just truly fucking weird!. I’m not sure if he thought he was on a green screen and was meant to be moving the set around, or in fact what the fuck he was doing there, but wow! All I could think was that he should be taken on by the rest of the TV channels.

Imagine how much more palatable the evening news would be if he was fannying around behind the newsreaders and they didn’t acknowledge his presence. Who would really care that the politicians were fucking us up the ass by having us pay for them to over-legislate, over bureaucratise, have illegal wars, allow the elderly to live in poverty, under-educate the youth, demolish our economy, and cripple the NHS – all this while still making us pay to clean out their fucking moat like the good little serfs that we are.

That spangly green guy could keep us all happy.

“Look darling, our trusted politicians and public servants have unexpectedly let us down. They have stolen our hard earned cash while systematically destroying our economy, placing all of our jobs at risk and borrowing so much money that our children’s, children’s, children will still be picking up the bill”

“True dear, but that prancing little green fucker has completely distracted me from my despair and my fear for the future with his modern improvisational dance...”

Surely, it's got to be worth a try?

Social networking saves the world...

It’s funny. Despite being the vitriol filled sod that I am, I have never really had any problem with the idea of social networking. I suppose this is mostly because it used to be so easy to ignore, it seldom crossed into mainstream media and the exceptions tended towards the exceptional - the occasional celeb crying for help while being stuck in a lift (a la Stephen Fry) or someone sharing their nervous breakdown (a la too many to list).

The tide of banality appears to have turned.

Most of us started by reinventing ourselves with a brief profile on Friends Reunited, however, this was too limited in its scope. Few of us used it to do much more than cry for the nostalgia of the past with people we knew at school or college. For me, this meant having a look to see who was continuing to shine with the promise of mediocrity that was shown ‘back in the day’. But Friends United lied to me. The people on were not my friends - separated or otherwise. If they were my friends we wouldn’t have lost touch, we would have made the effort because we wanted to be BFFs. They were an accident, they were flotsam, they were convenient acquaintances due to location and access, but mostly they were not my friends.

Although a large number of social networking sites popped up at around the same time, MySpace seemed to be de rigueur for a while. Not only did I now have access to keep up with all my old not-friends, I can chose to become “friends” with new virtual people (or “friends”) I have never heard of! This was revolutionary...

I could soon chose between a whole host of service options to enable me to not really engage with my “friends” – MySpace was joined in the list by Bebo and Facebook which really took this disengagement to a new level. I could now look at photographs of the lives of my not-friends, I could listen to their music, I could contribute comments to their musings, I could wish them belated happy birthdays and coo over their children and admire their cats, and I could feel the growing pains of their virtual angst.

But by far the most important thing was that I could do all of this whilst naked in front of my computer and in the comfort of my own home. I could still be a part of a community of real people without all that pesky physical interaction where I would have to look into their eyes, laugh with them (other than LOL and LMAO), touch them, smell their body odour, read their body language, insult them, be insulted by them and generally touch lives with them.

And then, whole new level of non interaction... I can further streamline my non- communication with all of my non-friends, I can follow people without being accused of stalking, I can even have followers (praise Lord SpiderBoz), I can tell the whole virtual world my deepest, darkest thoughts – as long as it’s done in 140 characters or less. Good god, I can Tweet...!

Twitter just makes the whole process of not communicating even easier, I barely have to think and I can tell the virtual world all about what I’m not thinking... Wow! How did I cope when I had to make an effort to try to like people, or to make an effort to love or hate people, or even to leave my house.

Bring the virtual revolution on. I can’t wait to see less of the ones I love, I can’t wait to further isolate my life whilst keeping it open to the world, I can’t wait to not meet new and interesting people and not interact with the world around me. Bring it on...

Actually, no. I'm going out. I feel the need to see someone real...