who remembers Philip?

Macedonia has been celebrating its Independence Day, and I wish it and its people a very happy one and a great future.  In my visits to all (40+) European capitals with significant other over the past seven years (we finished in June this year in Montenegro) there were some delights (Helsinki, Lisbon, Dublin), some pleasant surprises (Sarajevo, Bratislava), some disappointments (Warsaw, Tallinn, Madrid) and some utter horrors (Bucharest, The Hague).  The visits were to cities not countries, but it was south-east Europe as a region that delighted us.  Especially Macedonia and Montenegro.  The former has democratic institutions to be proud of, only 17 years after emerging from Yugoslavia, and the food and wine are just great.  Oh and doesn't it have the coolest flag?

sigh - just when you thought it was...

I blogged recently that Mr Salter had woken up and said something in Australia about fishing.  Or about fishing in Australia. For some reason (couldn't be that the only publicity for his latest venture had come from yours truly, and we couldn't have THAT) this stuff has now been put on his website, which still has pictures of Reading East and the legend "Working for Reading West".  Have a website by all means.  Blog, certainly, but, months after leaving Parliament still calling yourself the MP, even with dates attached?  Very poor.  Now please do something useful or go away, and take that site down and put up a proper one.
update: as the commenter says, the Reading Chronicle has published something about this.  I do not imagine they were following the New South Wales inquiry, nor that they read the Sydney Morning Herald.  The obvious conclusion is that Mr S sent them a press release on his remarks - and the picture looks as though it was taken somewhere which is not Reading too.  So - if he is fed up with being unemployed then I can understand why he might want publicity for his activities while he looks for work.  What makes no sense is why he would want publicity in Reading.  Unless of course the informant who told me that he is going back to Reading to stand for the council, and ultimately for Parliament again, is actually correct and not talking rubbish as I assumed at the time.   

the Pope in England, first musings

I will be in England myself next weekend, for just two days, in Bristol, including the day the Pope makes an English saint.  My brother, who happens to be Warren Professor of Catholic Thought at Duke University, North Carolina, USA, and who is, unlike me, a devout Catholic, is going to be there too, in some way accompanying the Pope.  I wasn't minded to muse on this visit (though a colleague who is a Scottish Catholic tells me this morning that his father is making an 18-hour round trip to see the Pope in Scotland) until I switched on Sky News early this morning.  Not the first place I would look for theological insights.  I heard Eamonn Holmes, who I believe is a Catholic himself update: yes he is, searches for biog of anyone from Northern Ireland always tell you where they went to school, and that tells you their religion in that province refer to the Pope as "the Holy Father".  Well, I suppose if you are Catholic that is what you call the Pope and that is how you think of him.  However.  It seemed inappropriate to me.  If there was a news story about the prophet Muhammad (and there have been several in recent years have there not) would it be appropriate for a Muslim (or any other) TV presenter to say "peace be upon him" after Muhammad's name?  No.  Hein?

dirty tricks in the High Court

the Telegraph has a story about the former immigration minister, Phil Woolas MP (good man in my opinion) who represents a very marginal Oldham seat and who just held on to it at the last election against a LibDem challenge.  He appears to have intimated in his election strategy that his LibDem challenger is or was linked to "Islamic extremists" and that a vote for that person would strengthen those links, with the attendant effect on the community.  His election team allegedly wanted to make the "white Sun-reading vote" motivated to come out and vote.  I would say - what is wrong with that?  Ignore that vote at your peril.  And as for the claims about LibDem links with Islamic extremists, well I have no idea if they were ever even made, and if made if they were true, but I do say that it would not surprise me at all if they were true.  Links to the more medieval wing of the south Asian community is a great temptation for both Labour and the LibDems.  Most local parties honourably resist.  But not all do.  Mr Salter burned a book in the streets of Reading in the company of such people.  And the LibDems, not having an ideology or a political philosophy to give them anchor, shift with the wind, and have no scruples about the company they keep, in my personal experience.  A vote for the LibDems is not a vote for the nice people.  And most of the party is as racist as the BNP.  Phil Woolas is to give evidence today in the High Court.  Sour grapes, Mr LibDem.  Go away and stop bothering decent people now you have lost the election.  Go and bomb a girls' school or something.

the liberty

of Earley is the ancient name for that area of east Reading, some of which is in the borough of Reading and some in the borough of Wokingham.  It is NOT called "Erleigh", as Basher  would have us believe.  If you want to campaign on something Basher then do try to get its name right.  For credibility reasons.  I notice that the little poll on his site is not getting a huge turnout either.  Probably because it is asking the wrong question.  Namely "Should Wokingham be allowed to change catchment areas?"  Of course it should.  It is a democratically elected body.  If you want it to make a particular decision then campaign for that.  Silly boy.  Anyway, when I looked this morning there were only seven votes on each side (neck and neck, everything to play for!), and three of the "yes" votes came from me - on my home PC, my iPad and my BlackBerry.  Poor.

the right thing for the wrong reasons

often causes political wrongs for moral rights.  One example is the Iraq war - the right thing to do but widely condemned beause "Bush and Blair" were seen as the ones doing it.  Longer ago, the savage barbarisms perpetrated in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge and tolerated or apologised for by many on the Left in the same way as "Islamic" crimes against humanity such as honour killings or female genital mutilation are today, were not remedied by the West, and Cambodia has been left impoverished and isolated to this day, because it was rescued by the "wrong" people, the communist Vietnamese.  We see something similar today with the proposed Koran-burning tomorrow, which has been on, off and on again.  The wrong thing to do.  Book-burning of any sort is wrong, and as Mr Dylan sang back in 1975 "If something ain't right, it's wrong".  But not burning books because Muslims might kill people as a result is wrong too.  Should Jews have been put in camps in the UK in the 1930s because Hitler might invade otherwise?  No.  See?  The right thing to do would, perhaps, be to go to that pastor's church in Florida and stand up and denounce the act.  Anyway, for those who have not seen the Jesus and Mo strip, here the boys are on the subject:

A splendid contribution - the zombie walks again!

this is a splendid example and a splendid contribution. The picture of Mr Salter is credited to the website martinsalter.com, which does not exist. It emerges that his web presence is now different, although it still shows copyright "Martin Salter MP", is still produced by Public Impact Limited (prop. J. Howarth, remember "Your Better Off With Labour"?) and has plenty of pictures of the Reading East constituency.  Bizarre. It is not realistically possible in today's world to be politically active, or active in any other way, without any kind of cyber-presence. And Mr Salter has chosen, rather late, to go into politics in Australia. He has even been published in the Sydney Morning Herald.  A pity that in the fishing mag piece he refers to a hung parliament, when there is no such thing in Australia and when the piece itself was published after it became clear that there was to be a Labor government. Oh well, never mind, could do better - but if you want to go to work, Mr S, in Australia or anywhere else, if the delights of unemployment have now palled, you had better learn to use this newfangled cyberweb thingy. Oh and has nobody told you that sending out handwritten press releases a week in advance is likely to make you look, when events (and the fact that Julia Gillard initially had no majority should have been a clue here) were moving quite fast, a bit silly. And we don't hear from you about Mr Blunkett's remarks in the Daily Filth about your erstwhile constituency! What's that you say? They don't sell the Guardian in the kiosks of Darling Harbour? http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Blunkett, go on, you can do it if you Really Try, there's a brave little soldier, we won't let the nasty horrid interweb thingy get you.  Well, we might if we get bored.

Seriously, does anyone else think it odd that a former MP who lives on the other side of the world should be seeking a publicity presence in Reading, to the extent that serving councillors and hired thugs there have been ordered to link to his musings in Australia?