Spontaneous Monotony

The English Skills secretary John Denham has claimed that voters are deserting Neo Labour in their droves (current poll rating is 23% - the worst EVER and 26% behind the Tories) because people are “confused about what [Labour] stand for”. In fact the problem voters have is that Labour doesn’t stand for ANYTHING any more - the Third Way has become an unprincipled stumble into whatever the spin doctors think will get Neo Labour good headlines in the Daily Mail. Most of the ‘big promises’ that people bought into in 1997 have vanished:

• “tackle the division and inequality in our society”. I think the 10p tax mess shows that Neo Labour doesn’t give a damn about poverty any more. If the Tories had suggested a slight tax cut for the moderately well off, financed by DOUBLING the tax rate paid by the poorest in society, there would have been uproar.
• “Real rights for citizens”. Yes, Labour passed the Human Rights Act which is a hugely important piece of legislation. Since 2001, however, it has set about trying to violate the human rights of people in this country in a systematic manner. 4 million CCTV cameras (which even the Labour-loving Metropolitan Police says don’t cut crime), police allowed to run amok shooting unarmed civilians, internment of people against whom there isn’t even enough evidence for a charge let alone a conviction. I could go on but I’m straining the limits of what you can legitimately put in one bullet point.
• “Ethical foreign policy”. Yeah - Iraq, Afghanistan, extraordinary rendition. They haven’t so much ripped up this promise as put it through an industrial-grade crosscut shredder.
• “We will not introduce ‘top-up’ fees and have legislated to prevent them”. We all know how that one ended. I’m just glad we now have a Scottish Parliament (one of the few Labour achievements they haven’t managed to undermine yet, though Gordon’s doing his best now that us North Britishers have voted for the Wrong Party) and that Neo Labour are no longer in charge of education in this country. Ask someone in 1945, or even in the days of John Smith, whether the Labour Party would ever stop believing in free education and they’d have thought you’d lost it.

Essentially Neo Labour has become a second Tory Party. Given the choice, people would opt for a party which is honest about its right-wing policies over one which lies and spins at every turn, trying to deceive the public. That’s why fewer than a quarter of people in the UK now identify themselves with the Labour Party, and why a mediocre Tory leader is looking more like winning the next UK election.

Still, I suppose there’s a bright side to this from a nationalist point of view: the SNP’s proposed independence referendum in 2010 would almost certainly be after the next UK election. Every time a Tory government is in power in London, support for independence in Scotland goes up, for fairly obvious reasons.

Yesterday saw the Chinese propaganda parade through London, escorted by police who behaved rather more violently than was necessary. There was the predictable parade of apologist politicians going on about “the Olympic spirit” - what they seem to forget is that the Olympic flame is not a politically neutral sporting symbol. In fact it was conceived by another dictatorial regime as a propaganda exercise in the runup to the 1936 Olympics.

If there are still those - perhaps among those who took part - who want to argue that participating in a Chinese propaganda exercise does not constitute endorsement of the Chinese regime, then that’s up to them. They wouldn’t have the right to form their own opinion in their beloved China.

For the rest of us, the simple solution is to ignore the 2008 Olympics from now on. Don’t watch any of the TV coverage, or buy any of the merchandise.

I just got an email in from Gamespy offering places in the Xbox 360 beta of Battlefield: Bad Company. It’s only open to people who have a Gamespy Founders Club or IGN Insider subscription (there were public keys, but those have been given out already), those  who meet that requirement (and have an Xbox Live Gold account obviously) can follow the link for a beta 360 experience. Unlike the Call of Duty 4 beta, there’s no waiting time (the CoD4 one was a good idea, but the errors that led to people not being sent keys turned into a fiasco) - as soon as you fill out the form, you get your key onscreen.

The beta itself starts on the 25th of March - there’s no indication as to whether this means the usual Xbox Live launch time of 9am, or 12:01 GMT, or 12:01 Pacific Time, or whatever.

PS: Sorry for the atrocious pun,  couldn’t resist

Although Wordpress 2.5 missed its release date last week, there is now a ‘release candidate’ available. For those of you who have lives aren’t familiar with software development stages, a ‘release candidate’ means that the software is considered to be in a release-worthy state, but isn’t officially released yet. Of course the practice of releasing ‘release candidate’ versions for public download over the internet means that the term is now almost as much of a joke as the ‘Google Beta’.

Wordpress 2.5 RC1 is now running on this site. Although its main visible change is in the administration interface. The new interface is - aside from the mysteriously buggered plugin upgrader which presumably is the reason why 2.5 missed its release date - very good indeed. Much easier to navigate, a fresher colour scheme, pretty much everything that I thought was wrong with the Wordpress admin interface seems (touch wood) to have been solved. There is also however a new feature for readers in that your Gravatar will now be displayed alongside your comments - if you have one. Gravatar is a service that - once you register - will allow you to associate an avatar with your email address. Whenever you leave a comment on a Gravatar-using site, it will check your email address against Gravatar’s database so that your avatar can appear. This saves you registering accounts on a billion different blogs (well, other websites too, but blogs are the main users of Gravatar) just for the purpose of having an 80px square image appear next to your name.

Anyway, if you see anything that looks screwed up then I’d appreciate it if you could drop a comment on this post - not that I’m expecting Wordpress to be buggy or anything ;P

Links

• Download Wordpress 2.5 RC1 (direct download link, 1.28Mb Zip file)
• Gravatar

The Video Appeals Committee has ruled - for the second time - that the BBFC’s decision to ban Manhunt 2 had no justification and should be reversed. It seems that the censor - which is now largely discredited - will respect the decision this time. The ‘casual, sadistic’ (their words) violence the BBFC objected to would earn a film a 15 certificate at most. Their claim was that the ‘interactivity’ of Manhunt 2 created a greater potential for harm (you see the BBFC thinks it has the right to ban ‘harmful’ things even for adults).

Let’s be clear what these sorts of games do - you sneak up on whoever you’re going to ‘kill’ and press a button combination. Then a ‘kill’ sequence of varying grisliness is played. So in essence Manhunt 2 features footage of deaths being played following the selection of the footage via control buttons. No different from a DVD with scene selection - in which the violence can be far more graphic.

It’s about time we stopped giving these Daily Mail-ingesting autocrats control over what entertainment products adults are ‘allowed’ to buy. This is a democratic country, with a legally protected right to free speech. The only legitimate limitation on whether an adult buys a DVD, or a game, or a piece of music, is whether that person has made an informed choice to do so. The PEGI rating system can provide the necessary protection for children - especially if the government makes those ratings binding on game sellers, which they aren’t at the moment - without violating our rights by preventing content being made available to adults. Let’s hope this decision is the final blow to an organisation that is long past its sell by date.