Frances Barber (ask your parents) had another of her notorious twitter meltdowns last night. What set her off on her alcohol fuelled keyboard warrior binge? Well, firstly it was London's stance on Uber, then it was the terrorist attack on London Bridge. Naturally, for someone like Barber, all roads lead to Jeremy Corbyn and the stage was set for another of her disturbing nonsensical rants.
Her feed was immediately beset with advice. Go to bed, stop drinking and seek help seemed to be the thrust of this, but Barber is not one to accept the kindness of strangers and it wasn't long before she claimed that they were all being personally sent by Aaron Bastani, or 'Asshole Bastardi' as she preferred to call him. Frances Barber needs help, but I fear she is beyond it. Her social media appears a litany of hatred and bile. Anti-Islamic, anti-Labour, anti-Scottish independance, transphobic and Pro-Zionist. She sees conspiracy theories everywhere, borne of an unhealthy fixation with Jeremy Corbyn. This is a woman who claimed that she personally knew the old Labour activist and Black British woman by the name of Margaret Cutting from Liverpool; that she was an inspiration to her when she too was a member of the Party in the early '80s. Except Cutting was conclusively proven to not exist. During the previous terrorist attack on London Bridge, Barber responded to a tweet from a Muslim who was reminding everyone that real Muslims are not terrorists with the words "Then please stop killing us". For further examples of disgust Ms Barber has for all things Muslim, look at the time she mistook Brighton Pavilion for a mosque or her contretemps with a cab driver of the Islamic faith. For Barber, it's a them and us society and the Muslim community are firmly in the 'them' camp to be treated with contempt and suspicion. This is basically racism, something Barber claims to deplore as she accuses Jeremy Corbyn and Labour of being guilty of it. Barber isn't actually Jewish herself which poses a problem for one tweet she posted last night in which she used a blatant anti-semitic trope.
She immediately claimed she was being ironic. But this really doesn't stand up too well at all. Thankfully more people realise that she is clearly deranged then those who stand by her (the usual clique of Corbyn haters; Silly Rachel Riley, Eddie Marsan, Tracy Ann Oberman etc) as evinced on Wikipedia during her meltdown last night.
The TV news wheeled out Paul Johnson (any relation?) today of the Institute to Fiscal Studies to say that Labour's manifesto pledges do not add up economically.
Except they do. At least, they do according to 163 prominent economists who have backed Labour's spending plans. And you can read about it in greater detail here. So, that's 163 say yes. And 1 who says no. You do the Maths. Asked to comment on Paul Johnson's claim that Labour's manifesto was ambitious, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said tonight that he took such a comment as a compliment. And quite right too. Compare that to the comments being bandied about regarding the Tory manifesto on its propaganda mouthpiece the BBC. The twisted mouth of Laura Kuenssberg announced it as a 'do no harm' manifesto. Do no harm? 130,000 people have died as a result of victimisation from the DWP on behalf of this Tory government. The NHS is being slashed ahead of its sale to Trump. Working families cannot cope and are surviving on food banks. Homelessness is on the increase, along with the number of homeless deaths. And Kuenssberg says it's a manifesto that will 'do no harm'. That horse has long since bolted, luv. Let's ignore the biased media and listen instead to those experts Michael Gove wants us to be tired of. Let's be ambitious. Let's not accept the breadline policies of the Tories. Let's believe that we can live fairer and more equal lives, let's believe that we deserve them. Let's vote Labour on December 12th.
I would say that today's not guilty verdict was unbelievable but, let's be honest, the fact that the establishment will always protect their own is surely inevitable.
I have nothing but sympathy for the families of the 96 tonight. I have no more words than that, but I feel this song says it all.
The deaths of two cultural behemoths were announced yesterday, Jonathan Miller and Clive James.
Miller was a true renaissance man. A qualified doctor, he embarked upon a career as a performer after shooting to international fame as part of Beyond the Fringe, alongside such brilliant talents as Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. Once described as 'the English Danny Kaye', the quicksilver like brilliance of Miller would not be satisfied with performance alone and he gradually moved behind the scenes to become the editor of Monitor and a director at the National Theatre, before moving on to become artistic director at the Old Vic and a critically lauded director of opera. Knighted in 2002 for his services to the arts, Miller's whole life was arguably a testament to the post war generation's determination to see the potential in everyone. He was responsible for my favourite adaptation of CS Lewis' Alice Adventures in Wonderland and for that I will always thank him. He died at the age of 85, following a long battle with Alzheimer's. RIP.
Clive James put paid to the myth that critics are only critics because they can't produce anything themselves. The Antipodean rose to fame as a critic of both literature and television, with columns that were wryly humourous, but he quickly showcased his skills as a broadcaster in his own right with some of the funniest, game-changing programmes to grace our screens in the '80s and '90s. I will always remember those evenings, being allowed to stay up with my dad to watch James use his clever, eloquent and pithy turns of phrase repeatedly get to the heart of the matter and make us both laugh. The notion of taking a 'sideways look' at the world may sound terribly hoary and cliched these days, but James made it an art form. Diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010, James passed away on Sunday at the age of 80. RIP.
Today, the (Tories are bad for your) Health Secretary, Matt Hancock (the cunt), took to twitter to celebrate an important anniversary. "100 years ago today," he wrote, "the first female MP, Nancy Astor, was elected to parliament. The female Conservative candidates standing in this election are exceptional and I look forward to working with them in parliament to achieve further progress on gender equality across our society" Except that's not strictly true. The first female MP elected to parliament was in fact, Constance Markievicz.
Astor was a Conservative MP and religious bigot. Yes, she was the first female MP to take her seat, but Constance Markievicz was the first to be elected. As an Irish Republican and member of Sinn Féin, she refused to take the seat she had so emphatically won. As well as a veteran of the Easter Rising, Markievicz was also a socialist and suffrage campaigner. In short everything the Tories have always been against. Given her politics, it's obvious why they would want to write her out of their history books. Hancock knows that he is wrong, but he is blatantly selling a falsehood in order to paint his party out to be the leading proponent of gender equality because they had a female MP take her seat 100 years ago. He claims she was the first, but he is wrong, and in perpetuating this falsehood, the reason for it has been laid bare for all to see.
A couple of weeks ago I received an email relating to a post I made in January about Manchester's Don Tonay. The email was from his daughter Donna and, after some back and forth, I got some answers to the questions, opinions and myths that were evident in that original post about one of Manchester's most intriguing businessmen and a key figure in the early days of Factory Records. With Donna's permission, here is the answers she provided me that shed some light on her late father.Included in this post are photographs she kindly shared with me of Don. I hope you enjoy...
I started by asking Donna just what her father's ethnic background was, given that it was the source of much confusion and conflicting opinions among the Factory set; "My Dad always said he was from Dublin. But we are not really sure" she replied. "We know he changed his name but we don't know what it was before. My Mum has a lot of theories about that. It was either during the war to avoid going back or to get away from his family. Who knows. He would never tell you" "He definitely was Irish. He knew Dublin like the back of his hand. I have had a DNA test and I have come back as 70% Irish so I think that was true. His friend, Phyllis, Phil Lynott's (Thin Lizzy) mum said they were neighbours when they were children in Dublin" I asked her about Don's life prior to owning the Russell Club, home of the Factory nights; "He opened the first blues in Moss Side called the Monton house. Engelbert Humperdinck used to try and get in every night, but he was too young so my Dad said he was throw him out most nights" "He owned property all over Moss Side and rented it out. If they didn't pay their rent he would smash the toilet so they had to move out. He said it was cheaper to buy a new toilet" "When he met my mum they travelled around the country opening illegal gambling dens, as gambling was illegal in the '60s. In their place in Bristol, Cary Grant used to come in" "It was my stepdad, who was one of the Quality Street Gang, that allegedly put the Krays back on the train (when they arrived in Manchester with an eye on taking over the city). The Thin Lizzy song, 'The Boys are Back in Town', is about them"
One thing that everyone seemed to agree upon, I said, was that Don Tonay was a handsome, tall and well-dressed gentleman. A cool man who was a world away from the blunt northern club owner stereotype played by Peter Kay in 24Hour Party People. Donna agreed and confirmed this; "My Dad was always well-dressed and well-spoken. He wore silk socks and handmade shoes. He was also 6ft 4". Saying that, he could always scruff it and get cracking with whatever needed doing in the clubs or many shops that he owned"
Returning to 24 Hour Party People, I asked if the family were consulted at all on the production; "We were not consulted. A friend of mine was friend with one of the cameramen who got me onto the set where I had an argument with Tony Wilson, as my dad had only just died of a massive heart attack on the 19th September 2000 and this was November of that year when they were filming. He (Wilson) had the good grace to apologise. You see, there would be no Factory without my dad, he bankrolled it all." Donna concluded with her belief that her mother should write a book. It's one I emphatically agree with. Hollywood film stars, music legends and gangsters, it would make for great reading!
Take a look at this tweet from Aaron Bastani. In it you will be able to compare footage from Friday night's Question Time Leaders special. In the original live footage, a woman in the audience poses a question to our alleged Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who is immediately met with jeers and laughter. In the following day's BBC News at One, the footage is edited to remove the laughter and replace it with applause. This is blatant corrupt bias. The kind of thing one would witness in dictatorships. The BBC are, as ever quick to reply, arguing that the footage was 'shortened for timing reasons'. But that is utter nonsense. We see something with our own eyes and then we are fed it back in a complete different way, with a completely different implication for the powers that be. Like I say, it's the kind of action one would expect from state television in a dictatorship. Only a week earlier, the BBC came under fire for showing footage from 2016 of Johnson laying a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday rather than the actual footage from the day before in which Johnson looked dishevelled, jumped the gun and laid the wreath upside down. I wrote about this on this very blog here. More, I complained about it to the BBC. Their reply to me was woeful, citing human error in a highly pressurised newsroom environment. That same excuse just doesn't cut it here, and I have sent a complaint specifically about this distortion of the Question Time footage. Question Time itself of course is notoriously corrupt. On the same show, Jeremy Corbyn faced questions from the audience. He came off significantly better than Johnson despite the fact that one of those questions was posed by Hull West and Hessle Conservative representative and activist Ryan Jacobsz. The South African Jacobsz initially tried some play acting as he posed his question, claiming that he wanted to believe so very much in Mr Corbyn's promises in order to fool the audience that he was impartial, before launching into a deeply aggressive hectoring rant about perceived anti-semitism. This is not the first time that Mr Jacobsz has appeared on Question Time, in fact it's his fourth; as you can see here. Is this flagrant stitch-up all over the news? No. The Tory friendly media have instead focused on the actress Kate Rutter, stare of I, Daniel Blake, being in the audience and allowed to ask Jo Swinson about austerity. But, as a Sheffield resident, Ms Rutter had more right to be there than Hull's Jacobsz. I have complained about both of these issues and I urge anyone who believes that their licence fee should be going to an impartial public service broadcaster who is beyond reproach to do the same.
