Everton, one of the self-proclaimed paupers in the Premiership complains because they can’t afford to buy new players. Southend last brought a player 2 years ago and I think we paid for him with tuppence and a bag of old rope. We struggle to pay our staff, and by staff I mean the guys earning minimum wage to flip burgers.

My point is this; there is already a massive gulf between the lower league teams and the Premiership and yet in the past couple of weeks we have had the following from them at the top;

A call to make sure the top teams (presumably Ian Ayre means teams that don’t qualify for the Champions League) get significantly more of the foreign television money than the rest.

A call by foreign owners to get rid of relegation and promotion.

The passing of the Elite Player Performance Plan

Fortunately the first two are just wishful thinking but it gives you a little window into the attitude at the top. What this says to me is that the Premiership owners and chairmen are not interested in football. They don’t care about football at all. They are not interested in sport or in a fair competition. What they see is a cash cow, one they want to milk by turning the Premiership from a competition into a Hollywood film in which Goliath always wins. They don’t want drama, they want it to be predictable, a graph that forever points skywards.

My old school had a slogan, ‘make our best better’ – I always had a problem with this slogan. Never mind the best, what about the rest? What about all the people that NEED the help, shouldn’t you be helping them?

That is what is happening with the Premiership right now, they are doing everything in their substantial power to maximise their profit margins and shit on everyone below them. This brings us nicely to the passing of the EPPP.

After our poor showing at the World Cup the FA and the Premier League did a bit of thinking and asked why, with the quality of the Premiership as it is, are we so crap when it comes to our national team? They came up with the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). Although the EPPP will affect every league club, it was drawn up by members and employees of just the Premier League. Of the Premier League only six teams were represented in discussions, with Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea among them. To call this representative of the whole football league is to call the stork representative of an apple.

Without going into the details of the EPPP, partly because I can find no publication of it on the FA’s website and partly because this post is already in danger of a TLDR tag, the two key points for lower league football fans are;

Clubs with Category 3 or lower academies are barred from working with players until they reached the age of 12. (Category 1&2 academies must have a minimum of 17 staff and will cost around 2mil a year to run)

Under the new compensation formula the selling club would simply receive a set figure for each year the player has spent in their academy. For example, when Everton signed the 16-year-old defender Luke Garbutt from Leeds United in 2009 a tribunal ordered them to pay an initial £600,000; under the new system this would have been capped at a maximum of £131,000.

Other than a few Premiership clubs no one can afford to run these category 1 and 2 academies. So how convenient is it that the EPPP gives these elite teams the pick of the players before any of the other teams get a chance. Under old rules teams were limited to players within a 90 mile radius so there was some protection but that’s been scrapped as well so now the elite can come and steal your kids no matter what part of the country you are in. There is no longer anything local about your local club but that shouldn’t bother Arsenal fans.

Should a young player slip through the dolphin unfriendly net and, heaven forbid, end up learning their trade from the bottom up then the Premier League elite have stacked the cards in their favour here as well.

Under the old system lower league clubs have been able to argue their case and receive fair compensation for their players. It isn’t unheard of for teams to claim six and seven-figure sums when the Premiership comes a poaching. No more, under the new proposals teams with a Category 3 academy will receive £12.5k per year. So Southend, who recently lost youths to Fulham and Liverpool, will go from being compensated with six-figure sums to being lucky to claim £50k.

Teams like Southend rely on receiving decent compensation for the hard work they have put in developing players. We really can’t afford to run a youth academy but we do so because when players come through the system that are good enough the money we receive helps to keep the club alive. Manchester United turnover some £300mil a year, what is it to them if they pay 50 or 500 thousand pounds for a player? Yet this money keeps our clubs alive. We are not talking about lower league clubs trying to hold Premiership clubs to ransom, we are talking about survival.

Speaking of holding clubs to ransom; in order to make sure the EPPP was passed the Premier League withheld part of its annual solidarity payment to the Football League since the summer, until the motion was passed. So in order to get their way, the rich Premier League blackmailed the lower leagues into agreeing to give away their youth team players at a massively reduced rate by withholding money they knew some clubs could not afford to survive without. The word you are looking for is scum. Total and utter scum.

These new proposals will help no one in the long run. Youth development centres will close, lower league football clubs may go under. In the end there will be less young players coming through the system and English football will suffer. Sure we will make our best better but what about the rest of us?

“Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial. Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis. The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime. There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.” A Grievous Wrong, New York Times Editorial 20th September 2011

Troy Davis was executed on the 21st September 2011; he was declared dead at 11:08 pm

Are we so arrogant to assume that our judicial system is 100% accurate? That mistakes do not happen or will not happen in the future? At least when people are wrongly convicted of crime in the UK they only lose their freedom, lets hope they never have to pay for our mistakes with their life.

On question time last night Priti Patel called for the death penalty to be reintroduced into the British justice system, she claimed this would ‘act as a deterrent’ for violent crime. I have blogged in the past about how the evidence that the death penalty as a deterrent for violent crime is thin and as the audience applauded the medieval it occurred to me that it doesn’t matter either way. It doesn’t matter if the death penalty is a deterrent for violent crime because murdering people to prevent murder is a price too high to pay.

This isn’t a issue of self defence, the culprit has been caught and subdued. No matter how you dress it, slaughtering someone in cold blood is barbaric. The actions of that individual are irrelevant. If you kill someone because of the crimes they have committed then you are committing a crime yourself. If someone cannot live peacefully in society then by all means take away their freedom but no society has the right to take a person’s life. Revenge, hate and murder are not notions that I associate with a civilised society, and I am proud to live in a country that has put this embarrassing form of justice behind us. No matter how bad the criminals get we must not fall to their level; the great and the good lead by example. Perhaps Priti Patel needs to spend some more time with fiction and less time lusting for blood.

I believe a effective punitive system should be primarily about reducing crime. Any changes to that system should be backed up with evidence that those changes will be effective at lowering crime rates.

When someone breaks the law then there should be a system in place that has the power to remove those who cannot live in harmony with society. What is sometimes forgotten and perhaps more important is that this system should also be effective in rehabilitating those that are to be released so that on their release they do not commit crime again. No system of crime and punishment should be about revenge.

I personally think that the death penalty is barbaric, be that as it may if there was evidence that the threat of the death penalty was an effective way of reducing violent crimes then I could see the argument for it. I would still hold my position but I would have to concede that this position was not based on evidence. So that is the question; does the threat of a death penalty deter violent criminals?

If I were to compare murder rates between countries then this data would arguably be unreliable. It would be open to criticism that each country has a different culture and society and so direct comparisons are unfair. The only fair comparison is to have one country that has different positions on the death penalty across its land. Fortunately such a country exits.

Below is a table of crime rates for the United States of America per State. I have ordered the States by murder rate per 100,000. Each State has its own position on the death penalty and so if this acted as a deterrent then we would expect to see all the states that abolished the death penalty at the top of the list and all those that haven’t at the bottom.

Crime Rate by State, 2007

(rate per 100,000 inhabitants)

NOTE: Violent crimes are murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Property crimes are burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Data are not included for the property crime of arson.

*These states abolished the death penalty after the crime rate statistics were compiled.

1. Includes nonnegligent manslaughter.

Of the 50 states 13 have abolished the death penalty before 2007, of these 11 appear in the bottom half of the table and 6 of those help make up the bottom 10. The average murder rate per 100,000 for States with the death penalty is 5.6 the average for those without is 2.8.

The numbers speak for themselves. The threat of the death penalty is no deterrent to violent crime. We must not allow this coming debate to be held on these terms and make it clear that the death penalty has nothing to do with reducing crime numbers; it is about revenge alone.

Data compiled from these sources

Crime rate per state: http://www.infoplease.com/us/statistics/crime-rate-state.html

States with and without death penalty: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-and-without-death-penalty

Now it’s all coming out I don’t feel vindicated at all. I don’t feel proud that I’m on the left rallying against the right-wing press. I don’t feel a sense of us and them. I just feel totally and utterly ashamed and let down. I am at that moment in a bad Hollywood film where the protagonist suddenly realises that they weren’t paranoid, that yes there is a conspiracy and they have nowhere to turn.

We can’t trust the politicians to review the press because they are up to their necks in this. We can’t trust the police to investigate News International because some of them (we don’t know who) have apparently been paid off in the past. We can’t trust the press to regulate itself because we’ve tried that and look where we are.

Everyone keeps saying ‘I don’t know’, and somehow that seems to be an OK answer. It seems perfectly reasonable for a massive organisation to print goodness knows how many stories based on information obtained from Private Investigators that were paid to hack thousands of phones without anyone knowing about it. Is that really a satisfactory state of affairs? So no one okayed what must have been numerous payments to the PIs? No one said where did that information come from? No one knew who told any of these PIs to hack phones and yet they still did it? Someone had to know something and just saying ‘I didn’t know’ isn’t good enough, it doesn’t even come close.

There is another sub-plot to all this that I think has been overlooked. We’ve had arrests in this phone hacking scandal, but when the Royal Family were hacked. Then the full uproar only happened when it was revealed that News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s phone. Prior to that we had plenty of celebrities saying their phones were hacked and everyone seemed to turn a blind eye. Since when was the seriousness of a crime based not on the nature of the crime itself but on the victim of the crime? Why should the Royal Family, Milly Dowler and her family’s privacy be any more important than Hugh Grant’s or Jude Law’s? When was it justice for some but not for others?

I understand why the nature of the victim makes a difference to the public perception of the crime and therefore the ability of the media to drum up interest in the story. These should not be the concerns of the police though. They should investigate a crime to the full extent of the law irrespective of the victim or the perpetrator. If they had done their job properly when reports of phone hacking first surfaced then we might be talking about far fewer victims of crime here. They are not just incompetent, they are partly responsible for allowing this crime to go unpunished.

I don’t mean to be down beat. I do realise that there are some gems in the rough, The Guardian and  Nick Davies, Tom Watson, to some extent Ed Miliband and a few others, but they are spread too thin. I look to our Prime Minister and I see a man who hired a former News of the World editor, I see corruption. I look to the police and I see people resigning left right and centre, I see corruption.

This is supposed to be our chance to clean up the press, dissolve the overly close relationship between the media the politicians and the police. If this is a turning point in history I’m not so sure I trust the people at the steering wheel.

For those of you that aren’t up to date on this story Johann Hari, a journalist for the Independent, after being accused of plagiarism, recently admitted to including quotes from people he was interviewing that he did not personally elicit during their interview.  He has defended his position and then subsequently admitted his error.

Following the storm of criticism on Twitter, many people have leapt to his defense. One of the main arguments is that other journalists are far worse. @Uponnothing points out that this is a silly argument and doesn’t excuse him. I completely agree but as one of the people that made the argument that other journalists are worse I would like to expand on this point slightly.

First of all I am not trying to excuse Hari’s practice. Hari has mislead the public to some extent in what he has managed to extract from an interview. Fair enough. In my opinion the worse thing this does is make people think he is a better interviewer than he is. Some are accusing him of churnalism and plagiarism but I don’t think this is the case. I also don’t think that the accuracy of the ‘intellectual profiles’ he writes can be directly criticised. As Gideon Levy, one of the people Hari admitted taking quotes from elsewhere for his article, said “I stand behind everything that was published in the interview. It was a totally accurate representation of my thoughts and words.”

I think the reason I used the argument that other journalists are worse is not just that they are worse it’s that they are using far worse methods for far more ignoble reasons. So often do we see tabloid journalists misquote, manipulate statistics, perpetuate myths and downright lie that it keeps numerous blogs ‘in business’.  We have become so desensitised to it that we rarely see a twitter storm to the extent of the past couple of days, let alone page 3 articles in The Guardian and two pieces written in response by the accused journalist.

5 Chinese Crackers has been awarding a tabloid bullshit of the month award for over half a year now. Not one hack has shown any interest in defending themselves and they carry on printing their crap as if nothing has happened. Of course these journalists don’t put themselves out there as a bastion of moral principles in the way Hari can be accused of and perhaps that’s why people have got so upset.

I agree with @uponnothing’s sentiment “You cannot demand honesty and accuracy from others if you cannot apply it to your own writing.” and I think that Hari has seen the error of his ways. As he conceded, “I’m sorry, and I’m grateful to the people who pointed out this error of judgement. I will make sure I learn from it.”

We should acknowledge that how one responds to criticism is sometimes just as important as the mistake made in the first place. Hopefully we can move on and continue to enjoy the work of a fantastic journalist.

Kevin recently revealed on Twitter that Paul Dacre’s hounds, or lawyers, whatever term you prefer, issued his internet hosting provider with a threatening letter telling them to remove an article that was written two years OK. The article “Paul Dacre Must Die” (Google Cache) is the second result on Google when you search for Paul Dacre which is probably why it got his attention. It helpfully shows what I assume is the offending line, “Paul Dacre is an absolute cunt. I hope he dies and that people queue up to shit on his grave.”

Unity at Ministry of Truth and Kevin himself have done an excellent job of describing why the original article isn’t unlawful and I suggest you read those posts since I won’t be doing that here.

This blog post is a call to arms to all the other bloggers out there. If the Daily Mail want to bully bloggers into submission then lets make sure the rest of the internet knows about it. Part of the way Google ranks results is by the amount of other pages that link to that page. The more of us that link to this blog post: Paul Dacre, Abuse and Defamation, the higher up the rankings it will go and the more people will know that although the Daily Mail and Paul Dacre preach the free speech they do not mean it. When those that have the right to speak for themselves use that right to point out the hypocrisy and failings of The Daily Mail and their editor they will use their money and power to silence them.

Update

Having discussed this issue with Martin Robbins on Twitter I want to make my position absolutely clear. You may not agree with Kevin’s tone and what he said but you should still defend his right to say it.

A bit of context here, I work in television as an Assistant Producer. While I haven’t worked on BGT or The X Factor, I know a bit about how the production process works.

The author starts by linking to a Daily Mail article and revealing how scouts ‘working for Syco’ find potential talent for BGT and The X Factor and streamline the audition process for these candidates.  There really isn’t anything shocking about this at all. It is only natural for the production company to want to ensure they get a particular caliber of candidates. Just because thousands of people apply and audition this is only a guarantee of quantity not quality. Look at it from the production team’s point of view; how much of a disaster would it be if all the contestants were rubbish? The programme is too high profile to leave this to chance so the production team will have their researchers source quality acts.

There is nothing cynical about this. It is just an insurance policy. If these acts get some sort of preferential treatment that puts them in front of the judges straight away then so what. The judges aren’t part of this early research process, the acts have been sourced because they are talented, this is a talent contest and they will be judged on their talent. Even if the judges are instructed to put a certain act through then eventually it ends up with a public vote. You might well find the whole notion of this as against the nature of a fair competition and you might well be right but remember this is a television programme first and foremost and a talent competition second.

Ronan Parke may well be one of these sourced candidates and he might even have been discovered a couple of years ago. But to offer an alternative, less damning point of view, the production team could well have felt that ten was too young to put that pressure on him, especially if he suffered from stage fright and kept his details to call back for a later series. If his earlier flirt with BGT hit the cutting room floor, again, so what?

Running a quick Nexis search I can find no mention of Ronan Parke in the media prior to April 2011 and so I can’t say either way if he was signed to Syco in 2010. Remember that Syco are the production company that makes BGT as well as the record label. The story of some kid being brought to the auditions and not being ready isn’t much of a shocker, neither is the fact that Syco got him to sign a contract with them when he entered originally. They would do this for all of the candidates that they think are good. Again you might find all this very suspicious but a talented kid being on the radar for a couple of years and then finally being ready doesn’t strike me as particularly out of place.

Then we have the ‘development’ of Ronan Parke, all this may well be true and if so then it is quite shocking. No child should be manipulated into a particular image. I would point out that this story requires that we believe his parents are naïve bystanders in all this. I’m not convinced any self-respecting parents would sit idle while their son was being manipulated to suit a certain image. As an aside he just seems like a fairly normal kid to me, not gay, not camp, not effeminate, just a kid with that silly comb over style they all go for.

Nothing so far that seems overly disingenuous other than the general tone but in there the author makes some specific claims which got me suspicious;

“As for Louis comment. “Ronan Parke.  Remember that name.  This kid’s gonna be a star!!” – that was actually fed to him from the production  gallery and I know the guy who wrote the line.  And when it comes to Ronan’s tears…well, check it out on YouTube or something.  You see Ronan crying and wiping away tears.  Only  you don’t see any actual tears, not even on close-up and on an HD tv.  Yep you guessed it, even that was choreographed, right down to the lip-biting!”

First of all, production will give loads of direction to the judges to talk up contestants. It happens in TV all the time that directors feed certain lines or ideas to people they are interviewing in order to get the material they need. This isn’t a conspiracy its just about making good TV. All the sequences with the acts are choreographed to some extent, that’s sort of the job of the production team. They aren’t making an observational documentary here they are making an ENTERTAINMENT programme. As for the rest of it, here’s the link you can see for yourself. It’s a bit weird checking a YouTube video to see if some poor 12yr old kid is crying but you can clearly see that he is and that our author is lying.

“It was also interesting to see that even before the final credits rolled on Ronan’s audition show, SYCO TV had uploaded the offical video of Ronan onto YouTube.  Today, that particular  video has been viewed over 2.5 million times and growing.  SYCO don’t do that for other contestants, so why Ronan?  The gaying-up Ronan plan slightly backfired on SYCO when lots of  negative comments were being posted on YouTube and Twitter about Ronan’s image and the supposed sexuality that represents.  Things got so bad on YouTube that the posting of  comments had to be suspended.”

Unfortunately YouTube videos are not time stamped but they do put a date on them. I don’t know what particular YouTube account the author is referring to. “SYCO TV” doesn’t have a YouTube account under that name. The Ronan Parke video that has 2.5mil views (now 2.8mil) was uploaded via the “BritiansGotTalent09” account and it was uploaded on 30^th April along with 6 other contestant videos from that show. If you look at the BGT YouTube channel you can see that they upload video for all the contestants. There was nothing special about Ronan, no preferential treatment. His video isn’t even the most popular; Michael Collings from Episode 1 currently has over 5 million views.  Posting of comments has been disabled for all BGT videos including those from previous series, there is nothing special about Ronan’s video to suggest,  “Things got so bad on YouTube that the posting of comments had to be suspended.” Again all this particular embellishment does is undermine the validity of the author’s story.

There are suggestions of some shockingly cynical manipulations of a child by SYCO and if true then there should be some pressure for Ofcom to investigate. As for the ramblings about controlling the telephone vote, the author offers no real indication of how SYCO do this other than Simon apparently saying “The public NEED to be told who to vote for.” Well so what? Isn’t every single public vote ever conducted basically a PR campaign? That doesn’t mean Simon is going to get his own way. If the author has any direct evidence that SYCO or ITV is directly affecting the phone vote they should be contacting Ofcom not writing a blog about it.

I am very doubtful of the authenticity of this article. Most of the so called ‘revelations’ sound like the rantings of someone that is working on their first production and suddenly realised that the ‘magic’ of television isn’t so magical after all.  What do you mean the production company doesn’t pay travel expenses for the thousands of people that travel to watch the show? THE HORROR!

Finally what we have to remember is that if you like talent shows or not Ronan Parke is an incredibly gifted kid. There is no doubt that he has a great voice and if the public vote for him then it will be on merit not because SYCO have supposedly written 27 tweets for him. There is nothing like a good conspiracy theory especially one backed up by an anonymous insider. For the moment I think I’ll keep my mind open about who I think is going to win BGT at the weekend.

UPDATE

Wow, thanks everyone for all the tweets and facebook plugs. A quick tip to any bloggers out there if you ever want to attract visitors to your site write about television talent shows! Who knew.

Since I posted the original article has been pulled down by SYCO lawyers, probably because its a load of old bollocks. There are still versions of it kicking about online, here is one. You would think that lawyers would have clued up to the fact that you can’t delete stuff from the internet but there you go.

Music journalist, Tim Chipping who actually has worked with SYCO posted this very reasonable rebuttal;  “Syco are very legally cautious (I worked for them last year). The idea they’d take such risks is laughable (they don’t take any). And they don’t need to. Sure the show is manipulated. Because it’s about creating stories.The winner is irrelevant, Simon knows that.But it was fun how so many wanted to believe it!”

And if you still think there is something to this please read James Ward’s excellent debunking. He tracked down the original tweet that linked to the article and discovered a rather angry young man going by the name of ukLegion who had this to say about a 12 year old boy; “By the time he’s 20, Ronan Parke ‘s ring-piece will be so badly battered, it will resemble a busted cat-flap #sogay“- It would appear that his account has now been removed.

In hindsight I wish I had more strength in my convictions that this was crap. I agree with some of the commentators below that my criticisms didn’t quite go far enough to totally debunk the story. In my defense I wanted to stick to areas that I knew about and could comment on and to merely cast doubt on the story. When I blogged the original article was going round Twitter like wildfire with very few people stopping to think if there was any truth to it. It is so easy to believe that all these shows are fixed and that the music industry is so manipulative that they would try to turn a 10 year old kid gay. Remember most people aren’t money grabbing psychopaths bent on world domination at the expense of small children no matter how many buttons of their shirt they undo.

Another Quick Update! – Just seen that you can also read the original article on the Daily Mail website (istyosty link). I doubt Syco lawyers will get this removed because lets face it when has the Daily Mail ever given a shit about being accurate? The Daily Mail website; providing a refuge for conspiracy theorists, PR dressed as articles, cancer scares, celebrity gossip and pictures of women in their underwear since 2003. They must be so proud.

Last Tuesday night, two teetotal nuns were murdered by a gang of six masked men on the Caribbean island of St Lucia. The women — aged 24 and 31 — were overpowered and subjected to a horrifying and prolonged assault. Their nightmare ordeal took place on a remote stretch of beach in the north-east of the island, where they were working on world peace and finding a cure for cancer.

No one would dream of suggesting that because they were camping on an isolated beauty spot overnight they were asking to be attacked. Six men have now been charged with murder. If convicted they can expect — and will thoroughly deserve — harsh, exemplary punishment.

But let’s imagine for a moment that one of these unfortunate women had met a man in a Tiki Bar on St Lucia, got off her head on rum punch and invited him back to her hotel room for a drunken tumble.

The following morning, laying there dead, she was consumed by self-loathing. Would she be entitled to cry ‘murder’? Most sensible men and women would probably conclude that she wouldn’t.

There’s a world of difference between a violent assault at the hands of a complete stranger, or gang of strangers, and a subsequently regretted, alcohol-induced fling with a murderer.

That’s not how the self-appointed Boadiceas of feminism see it. To them ‘murder is murder’, regardless of the circumstances, even if the woman was so sloshed she can’t remember whether or not she was asking for it. These vengeful viragos insist that ‘murder is a life sentence’ in every case. No, it isn’t. In many instances, it isn’t even murder.

But, equally, many women who have had a brief lethal encounter of which they are ashamed simply shrug it off and get on with their afterlives. They don’t scream ‘murder’, they chalk it up to experience and vow to go easy on the chardonnay in future. What man hasn’t murdered the occasional drunken girl? We all know if the victim is drunk they essentially are giving up their right to not be stabbed to death by someone they met in a bar.

The Government wants to increase the number of convictions in murder cases. Currently, only six per cent of incidents reported to police result in a guilty verdict. But there’s a good reason for that apparently derisory statistic. Juries, even those with a majority of women, are always going to be reluctant to convict in ‘He said, Shes dead’ cases, especially where the alleged victim was really drunk and probably started it by getting a bit lippy.

While the courts are only too happy to throw away the key in the case of violent serial-killers, they are also rightly wary of sending an innocent man to jail on the uncorroborated circumstantial evidence of a culpable and vindictive ‘victim’.

Back here in Britain, the criminal justice system doesn’t just fail murder victims, it also betrays those of us that accidentally kill someone when it was their fault for being drunk. That’s the real scandal.

This is obviously a parody of Richard LittleJohn’s latest column (istyosty link). However this notion is a common theme in his writing; that the type of victim changes the nature of the crime. If a murder victim happens to be a prostitute then it’s an ‘occupational hazard’(istyosty link), if the rape victim is drunk and gets raped they should ‘chalk it down to experience’, you know just one of those life lessons? Conversely if the victims are charity workers or going to discover the cure for cancer then the crime is horrific.

When I read this kind of stuff I have to remind myself that this opinion is being put forth in a mainstream newspaper by a man who is often given a place on BBC Question Time to air his views. It is odious. Please tell me that this isn’t how most people think? Do we really live in a society where someone can dismiss the life of a human being just because they are a prostitute or a bit tipsy? I should be used to this crap from Littlejohn by now, but he really does cross a line here. Thinking that a prostitute’s life is worthless or that a drunken girl can’t say no is basically the mind set of the criminal. The utter contempt Littlejohn shows for other human beings makes me wonder if he hadn’t found a job as a handsomely paid hack what he would be doing with his spare time. Would the Daily Mail afford the same license to spout hatred and contempt to women to someone like Peter Sutcliffe? Probably not*, and yet the internal reasoning he gave for his crimes can’t be that far removed from Littlejohn’s ‘occupational hazard’ mentality.

You hope that when people read this bile they see through it for what it is, but Freddy Johnson and 117 others would rather this was the sort of man that was running the country. That makes me very sad indeed.

*If it got The Daily Mail more hits on their website I really wouldn’t put it past them. Its not like his views could be that much worse than what they print already and if he used Littlejohn as a pseudonym would any of us even be able to tell the difference?

There is nothing complex about AV but the material the no2AV supporters have been sending out deliberately sets to explain a simple system in a complicated way. I came across this nice little video on YouTube that attempts to redress that balance;