John Walker's Electronic House

This Made Me Feel Sick

by on Dec.10, 2010, under The Rest

Nick Clegg, before the election, via Labour Uncut.

I don’t know what to do with the rage I’m feeling.

At a certain point, smashing buildings and throwing rocks is the correct response.

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34 Comments for this entry

  • Drug Crazed Dropkick

    I disagree with the throwing rocks, but *sigh*.

    On the other hand, I recognised one of the scenes from Sheffield. So, he basically littered to get in power?

    IS THERE ANYTHING THIS MAN WON’T DO!?

  • Andy Pearson

    You’re now in the rather odd position, where you (and Nick) are my most trusted advisors when it comes to politics. Whilst that doesn’t shine too well on me, as I should probably go and figure things out for myself, it is the truth and I like to think you’ve told me the things I need to know. You encouraged me to go and vote, and I encouraged all my friends to so the same (we’ll forget what happened afterwards).

    Once you do figure out what to do with all the rage, let me know, and I’ll do my best to help.

    PS. I am dreading the grammar mistakes you find in this comment…

  • Mike McQuaid

    Screw you Clegg, SNP got my vote now.

    This seems a bit fairer:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11960073

    (Awaiting NM saying that I’m basically the BNP now).

  • Drug Crazed Dropkick

    @Sam Hah. The government approval apparently is low.

    Glad to see we can pay someone to tell us what we already know

  • Drug Crazed Dropkick

    Just to add this from the Lib Dem candidate in my area Twitter: “@BevaniteEllie I was an LD candidate earlier this year. I am epically angry with my party.”

    I’m happy to continue to vote for him.

  • Erlend Grefsrud

    The state has a monopoly on violence. The only way to break that monopoly is by demonstrating that we do not respect it and will not bow to it.

    Sometimes, conflict is the only solution. Don’t believe me? Look at how the state is treating these demonstrations: As an affront to their authority, as an opportunity to exercise their power and thus reconfirm it.

    No, we’re already in a conflict and we shall lose unless we’re willing to see it for what it is. That doesn’t mean full frontal gonzo super attack, it means recognizing the situation for what it is and treating it as such.

    Decadence cannot be reasoned with.

  • Nick Mailer

    Hi Mike. I couldn’t vote for a nationalist party, because I think that nationalism is usually inherently evil. However, I can well understand your practical decision here and, hopefully, people like you will prevent the more “tartan nationalists” in the SNP from getting their xenophobic way.

  • Tom Camfield

    Couldn’t watch past the opening shots, sickening really.

  • DXN

    It makes me sick how people are still reusing the soundtrack from a film from 8 years ago.

    And also the politics. I was pretty pleased with my MP’s voting record (Lynne Featherstone, Lib Dem), but then she went and voted for this. I liked her better when the worst she’d done was buying £22,000 worth of stationery.

  • Steve Arnold

    Don’t know what was the more galling – the thought I had half way through: “I hope they clean up after themselves” – or the realisation that Nick’s been CGI’d in and so it’s all fake – or the fear that the video is probably a shopping list of future Tory cuts.

  • Gassalasca

    What I don’t get is, and feel free to call me terribly naive, what are they hoping to achieve? I mean isn’t it clear that now nobody will ever vote for them again? Is it worth it?

  • Xercies

    I don’t believe that throwing rocks and defacing statues and smashing buildings is ever the right response.

  • Iain

    The Lib Dems did not win the election. They are power-SHARING. What is so hard to understand?

  • Nick Mailer

    Xerxies: if lots of people in the third Reich had thrown rocks and defaced statues early enough, it would have been more than appropriate. Sorry to get all Godwin, but you did make a very bald statement.

  • Nick Mailer

    Iain: you are quite hard to understand. Or when you enter a coalition, do your most precious ethical jewels get flushed down the loo? You seem to think that compromise is an excuse for venal, mendacious immorality.

    To be precise: the pledge was clear about what Liberal Democrats would do in parliament, whatever its makeup. They lied.

  • Duncan

    It is slightly horrifying to think that if I were a year older I’d have voted for this party.

  • mrstrellis

    Duncan: you are privileged to have been young enough to learn a lesson early. If a politician makes you a promise, make sure you get it in writing. Oh. Umm..

  • dirk

    I voted LibDem once, a quixotic protest vote in the constituency of the impregnable Peter Tapsell. I regret even that.

  • Iain

    Nick: Read this – http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cable-denies-breaking-tuition-fees-pledge-2140032.html
    Everyone agrees signing it was a bad idea in hindsight. Shows real naivety.

  • Nick Mailer

    Yes, Iain, I am aware that Cable has been shown to be a psychopath. And no, not “everyone” agrees signing it was a bad idea in hindsight. It was a good idea, now being ravaged by bad people.

  • Nick Mailer

    Ok, Iain, I’ll deal with each quote from Cable in the article to which you referred:

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cable-denies-breaking-tuition-fees-pledge-2140032.html

    Cable: “We didn’t break a promise”.

    Your party policy, your manifesto and SPECIFIC PLEDGES promised that neither you nor any of your MPs would, under any circumstances, vote for any increase in tuition fees. You have broken that promise. There were no provisos or premeditative loopholes in that promise. Perhaps you now wish there were. But do not insult us by claiming that you haven’t broken any promise.

    Cable: “We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn’t win the election.”

    Yes, you made a commitment in your manifesto, and that commitment was recently reaffirmed by your party. IT REMAINS PARTY POLICY, against which you and your colleague now bizarrely stand! You and your colleagues also signed a specific pledge, beyond even the serious manifesto commitment, as an especial stamp of your veracity. The point of a manifesto, a policy and in particular a pledge is to emphasis a particular point of principle. It is to show that, whatever other compromises you might later endure, these are the lines over which you will not cross. If you imagine that these may be lines over which you WILL cross, THEN YOU DO NOT PLEDGE OTHERWISE! Because then, if you cross them, you will correctly and incorrigibly be labelled a LIAR.

    Cable’s current argument seems to suggest that unless a party wins a general election outright, its ethics and principles are obviously and immediately voided, as if by some capricious Jesu giving complete absolution. I hope everyone can now see the sleight of hand Cable’s attempting here: he makes the obvious point that a failure to win outright will frustrate the PRACTICAL effecting of policy, and hopes that you’ll also FALLACIOUSLY make the analogy into ethical impotency too.

    Cable: “We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it’s the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I’m trying to honour”

    Yes, you, of your own free will, entered a coalition agreement. There was no gun pointing at your head. You could have entertained a minority administration, even with the problems you believed that would have entailed. But you chose this path, and you either hadn’t the skill or perhaps hadn’t the moral backbone to ensure that this path didn’t cross those very specific, very special, democratically grooved formative lines that your party had spent decades drawing.

    A coalition can excuse some practical compromise. It cannot excuse outright immorality.

    CABLE: “We and the Conservatives separately made a whole series of commitments in our manifesto and outside it”.

    Vince, you are trying the trick of misdirection again, to get us to accept the fallacious analogy that contingent practical obstructions should be seen under the same merciful light as essential ethical nihilism.

    CABLE: “We haven’t been able to carry all of them through”

    There is a difference between not being able to “carry” something through on the one hand, and in wilfully carrying through something opposed to your professed ethics on the other. The first is a frustration of ambition; the second a negation of principle.

    CABLE: “partly because we have a coalition”

    Which you entered freely. Stop saying “we have a” as if Vishnu dumped it on your head and it’s just something with which you now have to live. You entered the coalition willingly, despite warnings, and pretended that no other choice remained possible. You then failed to establish your specific principles, and allowed yourself to be subsumed completely.

    CABLE: “and have had to make compromises”

    A com-promise is not a non-promise. Again, the point of a compromise is to take each party to the limits of its professed ethics – not to trample over those limits. You had neither the right not the mandate to abnegate the will of your electors.

    CABLE: “and partly because we’re still in the middle of this appalling financial situation.”

    You knew well the situation before you came to power. Indeed, before you were revealed as a psychopath, you were best known for being perspicacious about our economic situation. In reality, as you know and have admitted, the situation was not quite as dire as it could have been – borrowing was slightly better, and indeed Osborne had an embarrassing additional 10 billion which he didn’t need at the moment of using the deficit as the handmaiden to his slashing ideology.

    So you knew, and professed loudly, the precise problematic configuration of our economy more loudly and consistently than any other figure in the country. For you to claim that you find the financial situation in any way surprising is mendacity at its highest concentration. You knew exactly the extent of the economic clouds that shadowed your “fully costed” manifesto. Since the economy is no worse than when you wrote this manifesto and took the pledge (indeed, it’s marginally better), then the inescapable conclusion si that when you, the “Cassandra of the Credit-Crunch”, contributed to the “fully costed” manifesto, you were either:
    1) Lying that it had been fully costed
    or
    2) Were innumerate to a frighteningly incompetent degree, despite your proclamations

    There can logically be no more innocent explanations, Vince, so long as you choose to claim that the state of the economy has ANYTHING to do with the abandonment of your professed ethics.

    But of course, only the most feeble-minded observer would be fooled by this particular chaff that you fire out.

    CABLE: “I think a lot of the people who are protesting actually don’t understand what’s being proposed”

    What a horribly patronising attitude. Most of those protesting know exactly what’s being proposed, and know exactly the nasty, pernicious effect that Browne’s report will have in turning education into yet another tawdry service industry. They seem to know better than you, Mr Cable, who proposed, for example, that we should stop funding science unless it produced “immediate commercial results”. That shows a truly terrifying misunderstanding of basic research.

    CABLE: “It doesn’t actually affect them”

    This is perhaps the most truly telling comment of the whole article, and indicates your mindset beautifully. You believe that students and others who protest could only ever do so for directly selfish reasons. This is probably your mindset, Vince – you seem self-obsessed enough, to say the least; however, non-psychopaths ARE able to empathise with others, and are quite capable of protesting injustice even though they, themselves, will not be immediately or directly financially affected by that injustice.

    CABLE: “we’re talking about a system of graduate contribution that will only affect people who start going to university in a couple of years’ time”

    Again, you seem puzzled that anyone should care about future generations. Says it all, really.

  • Mike McQuaid

    Great response Nick. I’m glad you think I’d be good for the SNP. Scotland elects a far more liberal spectrum of politicians than England (we only have 1 Tory MP) so I see independence as the means to achieve a more liberal society here.

  • Xercies

    @Nick

    Smashing a few Topshops here and there can’t really be associated with fighting the Third Reich in Germany.

    And if we are going to compare them then, why didn’t they try fully to go with there thing and bloody take down the barricades of government and try to force a revolution or whatever. Defacing a few statues is misplaced anger.

    But good answer to Vince Cable, its almost like the Vince Cable of 2009 never existed to this man, Its almost when they got into power there whole personal being became wiped away and a new conservative being came in its placed.

    Actually that would make sense, we’ll find the real Liberal democrats have actually been stuffed down cellars and the Conservatives have made convincing robots that agree with everything they say like in Stepford Wives.

  • Alex

    @DXN

    The song dates back to the early Thatcher years.

  • RevStu

    “hopefully, people like you will prevent the more “tartan nationalists” in the SNP from getting their xenophobic way”

    Is it even worth pointing out what a gargantuan pile of ill-informed and ignorant pish this stupendously offensive and witless comment is? Probably not, but I’m up late.

    What a xenophobe would be doing in the multicultural, pro-Europe SNP rather than one of the dozen more natural and obvious UK political parties they could join instead is something of a mystery to any sane person, but then that rather lets dear Nick out.

  • Capt Fatbeard

    I’m sorry did I just miss something or did he say and I quote “lets break up the banks” does he have any idea how banks work and the impossibility of actually breaking a bank up and if one did break up a bank the irrevocable damage it would do to the economy and the knock on effects it would have for the rest of the economy.
    Also where he is in Sheffield they held a lovely international food festival there last year. Just to let you know.

  • Nick Mailer

    RevStu: Sorry, my mistake. You’re quite right. The SNP is made up only of sugared loveliness and it is categorically impossible that one could find even the whispiest strains of xenophobic particularism in its microfibre. After all, Nationalism by definition can only bring out the best in us – like cuddling bunnies or proffering cupcakes!

    I’m so silly for having ever thought otherwise and I can only ask that you forgive me for having had any doubts. And forgive me for having read Davidson’s “The Origins of Scottish Nationhood” and coming to my own silly conclusions. You’ll need to send me to some Highland Re-education Facility.

    Das Nationalismus fuer das schottische Folk ueber alles!

  • Nick Mailer

    “Gallagher said: “This is replacing civic nationalism with the blood-and-soil variety. I’m angry that such ideas might see the light of day. How would an English child or an internationally minded Scottish one feel on such a visit?”

    HEAR HEAR!

  • RevStu

    Oh dear. One loony jumps to absurd conclusions over Scottish history being included in the curriculum and we’re all Nazis. I suppose that must make Labour and the Tories xenophobes too, for having English schools teach about WW2 and sending pupils to Auschwitz, right? Because Germany, well – it’s full of *Germans*, innit?

    “Scottish political commentator Gerry Hassan dismissed Gallagher’s critique as “offensive and inaccurate” and said it was “tragic because Gallagher was once a respected writer and voice.”

    If someone who happens to be a member of the Labour party commits rape, does that mean there’s an underlying agenda of rape in Labour’s policies? Don’t be such a drooling fucking idiot.

  • Nick Mailer

    RevStu: I didn’t say you were all Nazis. Clearly, the great majority believe in this “civic nationalism” concoction. For now.

  • RevStu

    So, just to recap: there MAY be some individuals who happen to be SNP members who MAY have racist tendencies which MIGHT manifest themselves at some unspecified point in the future under unspecified circumstances.

    Progress, there.

  • RevStu

    http://news.scotsman.com/letters/Letter-Tuition-mistakes.6666865.jp

    “On closer inspection, I freely admit that the weight of evidence does not support my claim (Letters, 18 December) that the planned imposition of much higher tuition fees on English students is ethnic targeting.”